Vaguely Homoerotic Fun with Rival Turf!

If there’s one important lesson that I learned from the 1992 SNES game Rival Turf!, it’s that I probably shouldn’t have spent money on the 1992 SNES game Rival Turf! But the other important lesson I learned is that nothing says justice quite like the cop from The Village People wrapping himself in hundreds of strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups and punching the heck out of tactless criminals across two continents. 

After the success of fist-fueled fiestas like Double Dragon and the original Final Fight in the late 1980s, side scrolling beat ‘em ups flooded the arcade and home markets, slugging it out for everyone’s fighting dollars. The craze spawned a few truly memorable titles like Sega’s Streets of Rage trilogy for the Genesis/Mega Drive, and plenty of other games destined to be reviled and forgotten, like Burning Fight, Guardians of the ‘Hood, and David Robinson’s Supreme Court.

Rival Turf! is one of those games in the latter category that so bad it’s still bad, but at least it serves that function in a bland and uninteresting way. What it does add to the genre, however, are vaguely homoerotic undertones, which make any video game worth playing.

The ambiguously gay fun begins when our two fashion unconscious heroes, Oozie Nelson and Jack Flak, decide to clean up the streets of Los Angeles by pounding the crap out of everyone from the local biker population, sans-motorcycles, to the glam rockers that live in the local Rival Turf! homeless shelters. You might be thinking that these are the kind of people the police are supposed to be helping, but Nelson and Flak have it all figured out: Everyone knows that to make an omelet, you’ve got to break a few eggs – or in the case of Rival Turf!, assault hundreds of down-on-their-luck thugs while wearing a red leather police officer outfit. And this game certainly makes a lot of omelets.

At least there are no women in Rival Turf! to get in the way of the undertones. Err, action. I meant action. Wait, no, I mean... Never mind.

There’s not much about Jack Flak that separates him from Axel, Cody, David Robinson or any other regular Joe found in these kinds of games, except that his jacket kind of makes him look like Marty McFly from Back to the Future 2 or perhaps even Aries from Final Fantasy VII. It’s the unfortunately named Oozie Nelson, the Mexican wrestler turned male stripper/cop, who takes center stage. An enigma: If Nelson is supposed to be Latino, why does he look African American in the character select screen and morph into a white guy in the ending? The world may never know.

These character designs are totally rad!

You know how real gangs have specific colors and styles that they wear to show that they’re gang members? You’ll see none of that tripe in Rival Turf! I learned a long time ago from games like this that for gang members in the early ‘90s, anything went as far as fashion. You want to wear a motorcycle helmet and a pair of MC Hammer pants? Go for it! An eye patch, bicycle, shorts and wrestling boots? Sure! A Saran wrap t-shirt, a cockring, and a hat made of breadsticks? Hell yeah! Not one to break from tradition, Rival Turf! dives right on to the “randomly dressed from Hot Topic and grandma’s attic” bandwagon.

The game itself is was pretty standard punch and kick fare. The first few levels offer action that was stale even when Rival Turf! was released and it really didn’t age well from there. But after lots of uncomfortable grabbing and an end-of-level celebration that got a little out of hand, I came across these two guys trying to hide their, um, activities behind a barrel.

Ooookay.

I’m not sure why, but Nelson flew into Angry Mode at that point and savagely suplexed both men’s backs into Jell-o. Maybe he knew them somehow and didn’t approve of their behavior.

I guess I should explain Angry Mode, which sounds like what happened to all the children who paid $50 for this game when it was new. Angry Mode makes your character invincible for a short amount of time, as indicated by his flashing white, like this:

Note: Angry Mode does NOT affect your gloves.

Later on I found this guy, who looked like he was more into fighting the demons in his head than our two flamboyant officers. But I had a duty to uphold the peace, so I dragged him out of his hiding spot and bludgeoned him to death with a rusty steal pipe. There was also this dude who was out for a stroll with this most triumphant boombox in the local car garage at 4 a.m. So of course, Nelson and Flak pummeled him mercilessly.

Then it was off to South America after hitching a ride on a nearby enemy military chopper for three more rounds of… rounds! Did you know that gangs in Brazil are basically the same as the gangs in America, only with more green in their wardrobes? Forget social studies; why aren’t children all across the world playing Rival Turf! in school to drink deeply of its vast educational value?

After fighting my way through some kind of factory instead of just walking around it to get to the final stage, the gang leader, Big Al, decided I had slaughtered enough of his poorly dressed, unarmed henchmen and attempted to kill me by wearing white after Labor Day. Of course, this threw Nelson into Angry Mode and you can guess what happened from there. Then I watched the credits, secure in the knowledge that not one of the billions of gang members that I ruthlessly executed was smart enough to bring a gun to the battle and put and end to Nelson and Flak’s brutal love and/or friendship.

So remember kids, crime doesn’t pay. The next time you decide to steal some candy or cigarettes or kill a man, think about this: When the cops catch you, the last thing you’re likely to see before blinking out of existence is the heavy, possibly gay but maybe not, boots of justice stomping you and your friends’ skulls into a fine powder.

Batman Forever: Soulless Silicon

I could have baited you with a catchy opening sentence questioning whether Acclaim did justice to the Batman Forever license with this game but I’m not going to lie to you or waste your time. The Batman Forever video game for Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) and Super Nintendo just plain sucks.

Ignoring the warning label that many bad video games have – the Acclaim logo – I recently took Batman Forever out of my stack of Genesis games, dusted it off, and plugged it into my system. After being greeted with a lackluster title screen, hearing Two-Face annoyingly exclaim, “If the Bat wants to play, we’ll play!” and skimming over a confusing weapon select screen, someone who looks kind of like Batman appears, surrounded by brown, grainy bricks, ugly gray columns and the occasional steel door. With him is another guy dressed like Robin, but he looks more like your eccentric neighbor wearing his ballet tights. Suddenly, an Arkham Asylum inmate shambles over and, after doing his victory pose a few times, eventually gets around to attacking! Sensing danger, “Robin” pulls out his staff, just like he never did in the film, and whacks the now flipping and kicking villain. But the Dynamic Duo isn’t out of the woods yet! A door to one of the other cells explodes open (huh?) and out pops the same guy Robin just floored. I guess crazy acrobatic ninja inmates never learn!

Wave after wave of the same few digitized villains battle our heroes’ stunt doubles, performing the same few attacks over and over. Acclaim/Probe didn’t even have the decency to change their pallets, so the only difference between enemies of the same type is their woefully dim-witted names. (My favorites are a guy named “Bad Gazz” and a clown named “Bio-Man.”) There are only five normal enemies and four boss-like characters, so the player is likely to grow bored of his or her competition at light speed.

Try as I may, I can’t remember a single tune from this game. I’m holding the box in my hands right now touching it, smelling it and practically begging it to jog my memory – but the only song that comes to mind is from Phantasy Star II. That’s not to say Batman Forever’s music is bad, it just proves that it’s entirely forgettable. (And that Phantasy Star II had some wicked tuneage, but I digress.) Don’t worry, you’ll be able to remember the melodies by the end of the game, because later levels reuse themes from the earlier ones. If that doesn’t say “rush job,” I don’t know what does.

Every time your character grabs one of the Riddler’s question marks, you’re subjected to a tooth grinding “Riddle me this, riddle me that” sound clip. The enemies’ comments aren’t much better: “Forgeddabout it!” yells the stereotypical mobster in a not-so-stereotypical yellow suit. Yet, the player never hears a peep out of the Caped Crusader or the Boy Wonder, aside from a generic “I got knocked over” grunt that every character shares. Throw in a few nonspecific punching noises, and you’ve got the Batman Forever soundtrack.

Holy unresponsive D-pad, Batman! These controls stink! Seeing as how Batman Forever passed through both Acclaim and Probe’s inept hands, it’s not surprising that this game plays a lot like Mortal Kombat. Actually, let me rephrase: This game wants to BE Mortal Kombat. With high and low punches and kicks, a block button, foot sweeps and even the trademark MK uppercut, Batman Forever is the video equivalent of a kid who tries to emulate his older, cooler sibling and fails miserably. Punches and kicks come off without a hitch, but using the grappling hook is a chore and I’m still not sure how to make my character jump down a level. Jump and tap up on the controller and Batman will float across the screen on leather wings. Robin kind of sticks his bum out and starts levitating, though I’ve never quite been able to get that to work in real life. Both moves work about 50 percent of the time and are occasionally paramount to progressing through the game. The result? Lots of senseless falling and backtracking.

Hey, remember that awesome part in the movie where Batman and Robin had to jump over all those exciting crates? Yeah, neither do I, but it’s in this game. There are eight tough stages to slog through, but each one has little to do with the movie. Levels begin in one nondescript location and end in another, so good luck trying to figure out what triggers the onset of the next stage.

Even on easy mode, the game is unforgiving. Locating and disarming a bomb in the circus stage is a confusing process, with enemies appearing randomly and a quick-moving timer working against you. If you’re not lucky, the bomb explodes and you lose a much-need life. (Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb, I guess.) There are some ridiculous jumps in the fifth level an you’ll often find yourself running all the way back to the spot where you fell, only to fall again. So, what’s your reward for sticking out this entire hard, frustrating game? Let me save you some time: “Congratulations! Game complete.”

All of this could have been overlooked if Batman Forever had managed to be fun, but it’s not: The gameplay isn’t just laughable, it’s this game’s killing joke. To be fair, any game where you get to beat up clowns can’t be all bad, and uppercutting and roundhouse kicking your enemies can be fun, especially when you knock them into some sort of environmental trap or off the side of a building. Yet you never feel like you’re doing much damage. Even a bone-shattering blast of Robin’s stealthy staff steals but a fragment of the foe’s life gauge.

To help remedy the monotony of the limited combat system, the programmers added plenty of special weapons to the fighting formula. However, it’s always easier to just kick and punch your adversaries into submission, because trying to use a bat-gadget will get you bat-killed. There are 20 of the little buggers in all, but most of them just freeze enemies for a few seconds. Each gadget is activated with a Street Fighter-like button combination, but the player shouldn’t have to do a Yoga Flame motion to fling a weak gimmick weapon at some schmoe across the screen.

You can drag someone else along with you into this lunacy, but why would you? The controls are so broken in the main game that you’ll find yourself explaining to the other player how to use the grappling hook more often than pounding on the bad guys. It’s a shame too, because there was some real potential for fun here. Instead, it’s just as frustrating – if not more so – as the rest of the game. The versus mode fares better though, because it allows two players to choose any character in the game and mix it up mano a mano. It kind of plays like a crippled Mortal Kombat and offers players a respite from the tedium of the main game.

Some games seem to have a soul – a soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless. This is not one of them. Batman Forever has tried my patience, and the only reason it didn’t receive a lower score is because the game can actually be completed if the player can deal with the masses of uninteresting villains and the tiresome gameplay. Avoid Batman Forever if you come across it, but if you simply must see what all the fuss is about, don’t spend more than $2 on it. Save yourself three hours of aggravation and watch the lackluster movie instead; at least when that starts to suck, you can go to sleep and when you wake up, it’ll be over. Better still, dig up some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series for your Dark Knight fix – the worst installment of that show is at least twice as good as this piece of garbage.

I am vengence! I am the night! The Batman Forever game stinks!