Most of my reviews tend to be about me exercising my wit or at least what I like to think of as my wit. I don't try to write the most descriptive or helpful review possible as much as simply try to think of something that makes the game funny and then try to work off that joke's momentum until I've filled up a good amount of space with something entertaining to read. All of my writings so far have been of old games and so this style of writing has worked, in fact it seems to be the natural way to write about the subject of old games. It's hard to find a retro gaming site out there that doesn't have at least a pixel of humour to it. This review is of a remake of an old game and while the old game itself was certainly something that could be playfully mocked, a remake is usually an attempt to impress the player, not tickle them. Nintendo's Metroid: Zero Mission showed us gamers that a remake could and should be more than just a graphical update and that with enough of the right kind of effort, you can do a lot to impress the player no matter how familiar they were with the original game. River City Ransom EX is an other remake that tries to put forth this same effort. Because of this I don't find a humourous tone to be the easiest way to approach the concept of reviewing it. That or I've just run out of the funny, but I'll leave that distinction in your capable and cynical hands.

Remakes have always been a strange fascination of mine and quite often I find myself thinking of possible games that could be revamped, rethought and then released on a new system - usually a handheld - in a stunning manner that would really awe us with its level of reinvisionment. The first time that I played Harvest Moon on the Super Nintendo, I thought it would make a really cool, thoroughly involving and addictive game if its cute graphics and deceivingly fresh gameplay were ported to the Gameboy. A year later sure enough, Natsume did release a portable version and even a number of sequels. But usually the unholy gods of the gaming industry do not indulge me in this maner no matter how many Sega CDs and Sega 32Xs I sacrifice to them. Developers stick to making their licensed sports titles and clones of whatever the popular genre of the year happens to be at the time. River City Ransom EX however, is an other one of these few remakes I ponder about that actually got made. My idea for it was to somehow meld all or at least the majority of the Nekketsu series into one game. That is, create a game that had River City Ransom as its base, but that allowed you to partake in the many sports games of the series through story events or by allowing the player to visit sporting and fighting arenas. Atlus and Million have taken a slightly less kick-ass if you'll allow me to say so, approach to bringing Kunio and the boys back to the eyes and thumbs of the gaming public. Their plan on how they will or if they will release the rest of the series is not well known, but what information has managed to creep onto the web suggests that if RCR EX sells well enough, Million plans to develop and release more of the series. They specifically seem to want to release those games which never made it to North American shores the first time around. This is comforting news to those who still seek the Ark of the Covenant that is the US prototype of Crash and the Boys: Ice Challenge. But back to the game at hand.

Despite not being the end all and be all amalgamation of the Nekketsu series that I dreamed about, RCR EX is still a mighty amalgamation in its own right. It is the child of pretty much every version of River City ransom made before it. It does not include everything, the unnecessarily tacked on extra map areas and schools of the MSX version of the classic brawler are thankfully absent. But EX uses pretty much all the other improvements these earlier remakes made to the basic formula as its inspiration. The game has a lot of extra story line that was stripped from the original American version. Your actions in the streets can now actually affect your future interactions with the other characters in the adventure. Wail on haplessly comatose gang members with a chain every time you manage to catch them at a disadvantage and the local gang leaders won't take kindly to your presence on their turf no matter what affiliation they previously held with you. Former allies will desert you if you prove more merciless than your enemies and some will resort to confronting you physically even if you are trying to free their bimbo of a girlfriend. Something that I really wanted to see, Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki dayo Zenin Shuugou's (that's the samurai one) teammate system has been cleverly implemented and expanded allowing you to have a small Japanese street-tough posse of your own as you strive to rid the streets of Nekketsu's hot-headed high school population. Show that your intentions are honourable enough and that you are truly unwilling to quit until you've made the mysterious Slick himself barf and even Reihou's own Kings of Heaven will join you in your plight. It all goes a long way to flesh out River City Ransom's mythos and backstory, a part of the series that has always interested me. I would have liked it if Million had gone further and added the biker gang and Yurigaoka's tomboyish she-devils with their bitchy, chain wielding leader to the cast, but they seem to have stuck with the original game's basic cast with only a few new faces here and there.

Of course written text is not the only way for video game characters to express their personalities to us, especially not in brawler no matter how many RPGish elements it may contain. As well as fleshing out the story and dialogue of the characters in the game, Million has made each boss character a lot more distinctive. In the original River City Ransom, besides Ivan's soviet headbutt and the Dragon Twins' glitchy looking spin kicks and brilliantly stolen theme music, not much separated bosses from one another other than the arrangement of pixels on their faces and how long it took for them to finally give up the ghost. This time around however you will be hard pressed to come to blows with a boss that doesn't have an arsenal of special moves and his own distinctive fighting style. Even with allies to absorb some of the warp punches and acro circuses, everyone's a lot meaner this time around and a lot more likely to team up against you if you prove to be too powerful for them to take alone. It all goes a long way to making the characters seem more important and distinctive, something that the NES version failed to do. When a game like River City Ransom already has great gameplay, turning up the story knob really helps make what was fun game, a great game. But even if you hate RCR's dumb, manga-like highschooler setting and just want to look cool while you destroy AI deficient punk after punk in a Kill Bill Volume 1 esque climax, Million has you covered there too. With the purchase of somewhat pricey but not completely unattainable scrolls from Merlin's Mystery Shoppe you can customize and train you character to be virtually any kind of chubby, high school uniformed ruffian you want. When it was mentioned that this remake would include character customization I was really hoping for something in the same vein as my above fantasy of the perfect Kunio game. I wanted to see every outfit from the series available to you once you had beaten enough of the game. But even though the customization screen limits you to the standard Japanese outfit - without the option to unbutton it and wrap your torso in a bandage I must sorrowfully add - it still provides you with a lot of creativity fostering options. You are given over one hundred face types to choose from and just as many hairstyles. There's nothing too wacky, but everything from the characters in the game is there and a whole lot more. Some of the colours you are offered are somewhat goofy, but I'm not about to complain about being given a surplus of choice.

The basic gameplay is much the same as it has always been which is a given since River City Ransom's excellent and novel play mechanics were what drew attention to it in the first place and are what have fueled the fandom that pushed Atlus to release this new title. There are some changes and while I don't agree with all of them, the vast majority of them increase the complexity and enjoyability of the fighting system and are thus alterations I welcome with arms wide open. After all, RCR wasn't perfect. What? It wasn't! Kunio or whatever deformed glam rocker you turn him into for kicks with the customization features, has a lot of new moves at his disposal for dealing with other annoyingly aggressive teenagers. Most of the new moves don't even have to be purchased and can be preformed with what at first seems like a complicated and foreign system to grizzled RCR veterans such as myself, but are really quite easy to pull off once you get the hang of the new vibe the controls have been programmed with. Double punches, Liu Kang style shadow kicks, Rising uppercuts, once they all come together in your mind they make gang fighting a lot less sloppy and a lot more complex for those who like mastering these sorts of things. You can still run through the game with a chain in one hand and a tuft of bloody hair in the other, smacking everyone in the face like you're Riki-o with little regard for strategy. But timing your blows just right and responding to stunned opponents with flashy combo kicks will lead to a much smoother gaming experience and a lot less of the endless wars of atrittion that resulted when you ran into some of the high difficulty gangs in the original game who refused to stop blocking your attacks. The honour meter which determines how friendly and neutral characters will react to meeting you and how many last breaths hostile characters will fight you with, is also a great addition to the already brilliant idea of the sidekick system. Some sort of bar or some other type of indicator would have been nice, but I guess the specters of the samurai ancestors of the devteam at Million stressed to them how one can only have a sense of honour and not a clear meter.

It's all still River City Ransom though, every hilarious, exciting and addictive byte of it. The graphics may be more detailed, the animations smoother, Merv's Burger Joint and Hack's Chicken Shack may have been bought out buy some faceless franchise causing the smiles to now cost an additional fifty cents and seventy-five cents if you want to see some teeth, but it's still the same classic game at its core. Of course this time through I can play as an aging Mc Hammer with the late Brandon Lee as my back up.

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