Retro City Rampage XBLA review.

A Game By:Vblank Entertainment
Price:800MSP

Aaaah the good old days! As you get older and more decrepit, you start to think more and more about your mortality, and start wishing you were younger. I always wish that we’d had the kind of amazing tech we have today back when I was a kid playing on my £2.99 Casio Calculator watch, or playing 16 Kilobyte games on my black and white TV! How did we get by without it?!! I’ll tell you what though, I’m so glad I’m an old fart, because it means that I was there to experience the great days of early video gaming, and I can play those old classics now and revel in the nostalgic glow that these young whippersnappers simply can’t experience because they weren’t there the first time round! Perhaps they have their games that they will look back on warmly in years to come like Call Of Duty 2 or Half Life, or Gears, but I have it all baby!!! So there!! Thank-you mummy for bothering to conceive me back in 76!

Retro City Rampage is a tongue in cheek parody of open world action games, and is presented in a retro style as though it was pulled straight from those heady days of which I speak.

The idea for this one man project was initially conceived back in 2002. Brian Provinciano decided he would try and re-create Grand Theft Auto III on the 8-bit Nes console. He called it Grand Theftendo.

The project grew and evolved as he began adding references and testimonies to his favourite characters from video games and movies, and it eventually became a full time project. Retro City Rampage eventually became the beast it is today, and is available on many formats from Playstation 3 and PsVita to ios and the Steam platform.

So, is Retro City Rampage worthy of gracing XBLA?? Well, let’s see!!



Retro City Rampage plays like a top down hybrid of Grand Theft Auto 3 and the original Grand Theft Auto which was, of course, a top down game itself. Mr Provinciano has crammed tonnes and tonnes of classic game and film references and throwbacks into the game, and as you play the game's 60 odd story missions and 40 challenge missions, or simply wander the city causing random havoc, you’ll stumble across these constantly.

The game casts you as a slick looking leather clad henchman simply named “Player”. Proceedings start off at a crazy pace, and before you know it you are stranded in another time after a run in with some of the movie screen's best loved time travellers. Then, before you can blink, you are robbing a bank and being the getaway driver for “The Jester”, a super villain. From here you proceed to rob, steal, kill, maim and smash through the game's many missions in typical GTA style. I didn’t know what day it was for the first hour of play. I was playing Commando one minute, Contra the next, and before you can say, “Cowabunga“, I think I was in the Ninja Turtles NES game for a few seconds, but I’m not sure because a millisecond later, I was jumping on enemy heads as though I was Mario.



Eventually, I managed to stop and take stock for a minute and just grab a car and drive round the city, seeing how many nostalgic gems I could find on the shop fascias. Every store in Theftopolis is branded with some reference or other. The “Skate or Buy” store is a reference to EA’s first release Skate or Die. Here you can buy a skateboard that enables you to tear round the city for a while. Then, I stumbled across, Nolan’s Arcade; A reference to Atari’s Nolan Bushnell. Here, I lost an hour sampling a couple of the game’s many mini game diversions. I opted for “Virtual Meat Boy”, which is an into the screen runner where you have to collect all the plasters and avoid being ground to bits! The incentive for completing this mini adventure, is the chance to play as Meat Boy himself in the RCR’s free roaming mode. As a nice touch, you can even play Virtual Meat Boy in 3D which is nice. Other mini games available, include a send up of the classic Bit Trip runner. Eventually, I left the arcade and continued on my quest, but it didn’t take me long to find another diversion from continuing the story quests. If I wasn’t entering stores, looking at all the customisations available for “Player”, I was probably legging it from the Po Po! You see, in typical GTA style, you’ll find yourself in deep trouble within thirty seconds usually! There are so many pedestrians and vehicles around Theftopolis, that if you opt to drive, you are probably gonna collide with someone within seconds, either by accident, or simply because it’s so bleedin’ tempting!! It’s great fun going on a mad killing spree in your car of choice, and these can go on for quite a while as the police are rather pedestrian until your wanted level gets up to max and the heavy duty tanks appear! Not to worry though, as tanks are easily stolen, and once you grab one of those bad boys, you are gonna be causing some serious damage for quite some time as you are nigh on invincible.



The physics and controls are typically straight forward, from driving to shooting to legging it about! One nice feature is that there are two control systems available for driving and gunplay. You can use the left stick to control direction and speed, or you can opt to use the triggers for throttle and brake, with the stick controlling direction. When it comes to on-foot gun-play and melee, you can either hold X to “Lock on” which enables you to move around while shooting, or you can switch to a twin stick style system. This is a great idea when you consider that some of the games that are parodied feel more authentic when using the different control schemes!!

Retro City Rampage looks really good in it’s own way. It’s trying to mimic an old 8-bit NES game, and in that it succeeds amazingly with it's very small colour palette etc. It really does look like one of Konami’s games of that era. At the same time, there is that added bit of depth that modern console power provides, with the charm and sheer numbers of NPCs and vehicles milling about being far more than the NES could have handled. Sound is also really authentic, with some really good examples of chip tunes and some typical bleepy sound effects that many a parent of the eighties would have had nightmares about. You can even apply a number of overlays to the display that mimic various retro memories. You can play with a monochrome display that mimics the original gameboy, or you can even play with an old style portable TV framing proceedings....Complete with scan lines!!

The game play, is gonna be the real opinion divider here!!! RCR either intentionally or otherwise, plays a lot like old 8-bit games in many ways. It has a lot of fairly severe difficulty spikes. There is quite a lot of variety in the missions, but there are a few stinkers that will leave you frustrated for a while, and it’s usually the missions in which you die often, that have the really badly designed check points that throw you miles back to the start. These kinds of foibles are ones that a lot of modern gamers wont tolerate or simply aren’t used to. There are some missions that just seem unfair, and, couple that with the game’s reliance on nostalgia and you can deduce that this is not a game for everyone.

I really enjoyed RCR. A lot of love has gone into the game. There are masses of retro references. There’s a great variety of weapons and upgrades, missions, side quests, mini games, and challenges to keep you going and it’s all very loveable and unique. There are some frustrating parts, but I sort of look past those because it makes it all the more authentic. Despite the checkpoint flaws et al, it’s still a lot more modern in the user friendliness stakes than the real games of the eighties, let me tell you!! YOU try playing a game that you can’t save progress in at all you young whippersnappers!!!!!! Having said all that, there will be many to whom this game will be of absolutely no interest whatsoever. RCR does rely heavily on retro nostalgia for a lot of it’s kicks, and if you are not a child of the eighties, or aren’t used to games the way they used to be, then I realize that you may find this game a completely un-entertaining experience, with no incentive to play past the first ten minutes. In that respect, it is difficult to score! I almost feel like giving it two different ratings! Having read many reviews on the Internet, I have seen a real contrast of opinions and scores for RCR. Some gave it a disapproving 4/10, while others gave it a resounding 8. I expected no less.

After some of my recent arguments about entertainment reviewers needing to be subjective in their reviews, summarizing this game subjectively is quite a challenge, but hopefully I have achieved that. I personally feel that Retro City Rampage was ace, but I love all things retro. If you’re like me, I’m pretty sure you’ll agree it’s well worth a.........