Original content in games is hard to create, but lots of games are decidedly derivative of more famed titles that came before it. There were lots of “follow-the-leader” efforts in the wake of Doom and Half-Life, but these led to some dang good games like Star Wars: Dark Forces and Red Faction. This is common with any given genre, including side-scrolling beat-em-ups from the mid-eighties and throughout the nineties. The game in this field most emulated was Final Fight, which in itself was even influenced from Double Dragon, where two players team up to get back one of the character’s girlfriend by whomping on punks in an urban cityscape. Nevertheless, Final Fight led to multiple clones based on its atmosphere and gameplay, and we got some great games out of this hence. The most famed clone was Sega’s Streets of Rage, which was clearly akin to FF but nobody cared because it was awesome. Sega produced another arcade-exclusive brawler called D.D. Crew, but it sucked royally compared to Streets of Rage and was best left forgotten. However, they also teamed up with Westone, their second-party development crew best known for the Wonder Boy anthology, and produced a little known game called Riot City. It is, without any doubt, one of the most severely blatant Final Fight-inspired games of all time (perhaps more so than Jaleco’s first Rushing Beat/Rival Turf!) and careens full tilt into “ripoff” territory. But if imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery as per a familiar idiom, how flattering does Riot City feel beneath its parent? The short answer: Okay, not great.
The game is about two narcotics detectives, the dashing Paul and the bulky Bobby, determined to stop the Mad Gears… erm, the drug syndicate “MID.” Their resolve is hastened tenfold when Paul’s girlfriend, Catherine, is kidnapped by MID agents and the two cops storm the baddies’ hideout on Riot Island. Naturally, despite being talented police officers, Paul and Bobby choose to dress like a gym trainer and a street dancer respectively. Unsurprisingly, Paul bears incredible semblance to Cody from Final Fight, what with the jeans and the white shirt and the fabulous blond hair, but Bobby at least looks like no one from FF. As with any good beat-em-up, you can team up with a friend to wreak two-player havoc on the forces of MID. The two guys actually have very slightly different stats, where Paul is faster and Bobby is slower but stronger, although these differences are ultimately negligible. However, if you’re not playing with a buddy, be Bobby. The absolute best thing about Riot City is Bobby’s absolutely loopy walking animation, where he dance-stomps around the screen as if he was MC Hammering-it-up in an attempt to confuse the enemies. Paul’s perpetually grinning strut is also pretty amusing and exaggerated, but it’s got nothing on Bobby’s bombastic bump-a-thump walk.
Anyway, once you get to Riot City or Island or whatever it’s called, it’s time to start bashing up punks. You know the drill: You have a standard combo string that knocks down enemies at the end, jump attacks which instantly knock down but don’t do too much damage, and a “get-offa-me” attack done by pressing both the attack and jump button together at a slight cost of your lifebar. Unfortunately, there are absolutely no spare weapons to be found (not even throwing knives), so this is basically all you get for offense. The enemies come in a fair blend: Kung fu fighters, standard surfer punks, fat cowboys, football players, tall mustache guys in tank tops, toughs aping Mr. T’s style, Saddam Hussein-looking commandos with knives and eyepatches, and the most obnoxious being truckers who slide and seem to have an easy time punching you out of the air. While this is a good mix of baddies to fight, the problem is you literally fight all of these schmucks in the first level and you have to deal with them for the rest of the game. Beat-em-ups often have the common problem of showing off all their cards too early, but at least Final Fight waited until the second level to plague you with Andore. If nothing else, the bosses breathe some variety into the fold, such as a rather cocky Thai boxer, the obligatory Bruce Lee homage (the second boss of D.D. Crew was also a Bruce Lee clone, oddly enough), an insane doctor who chops at you with a cleaver, a masked wrestler who puts his horns to good use, an even bigger wrestler who may be a homage to Heart from Hokuto no Ken, and the final boss greatly resembling Geese Howard from Fatal Fury and uses a sword to unfairly slice off your lifebar. Except for the final one, they’re not incredibly cheap and provide some necessary variety from the conventional dreck.
There’s really not a lot to Riot City; you just sock it to street scum for five increasingly difficult rounds and that’s all there is to it. It’s not an unplayable game, but it’s really only interesting for how much like Final Fight it is, like how you see a map of the city before and after each round, how you start on street slums and end up in a lavish palace by the final round, and how much Paul resembles Cody. The big fat cherry to top it off is how bosses spaz out and jerk around for several seconds before dying, instead of just straight plopping onto the ground. While these are all relatively small touches, it’s hard not to think of how Final Fight didn’t massively inspire these details. It doesn’t look quite as pristine as FF, with the graphics being serviceable but nothing special, and most of the environments coming off as a bit drab (though the casino in stage 4 looks pretty neat, at least). Character sprites aren’t as large or animated as in FF either. The music’s pretty good, handled by Jin Watanabe of Monster World IV fame, but all the same, it’s nothing that will get stuck in your head for any extended period of time. Not a lot else needs to be said about Riot City, as it’s really just as straightforward a beat-em-up of which you can think. You could do much worse with an hour, but with more outlandish brawlers like Metamorphic Force and Battle Circuit, Riot City is significantly overshadowed.
For as vanilla as it is, Riot City somehow landed a console port on the unlikely Turbografx-CD format, but Sega technically owned the rights to the name Riot City and its associated characters. Thus, Westone joined with Hudson Soft to rework all of the character graphics and bring “Riot Zone” to the home theater. While it is mostly the same game at its base, a few notable changes were made, most noticeably to all the character sprites. Paul is now “Hawk,” who still looks very similar but has even simpler clothes which make him resemble Cody even MORE, and Bobby has been changed into a mohawk dude named “Tony.” The enemies have been completely changed around, such as the sliding truckers now looking like Shaolin monks and the knife commandos being ninjas, but their behaviors are still akin to Riot City’s bads. Most of the villains look less ridiculous than their arcade counterparts, and you even deal with female punks this time around. There’s even an all-new final boss, a totally ridiculous samurai warlord that’s almost out of place with the rest of the cast. The backgrounds look mostly the same, though it’s worth noting that the order of the first two levels were switched around for reasons unknown. Perhaps the biggest enhancement is new redbook audio full of awesome cheesy nineties synth rock tracks. It’s nothing too catchy like the original arcade, but it’s a solid soundtrack that fits the game well. Riot Zone may seem like an overall improvement were it not for two caveats: The action is slower than the arcade (though some may prefer the slower pace), and the port completely lacks two-player support. Both Riot City and Riot Zone have their good points, but at the end of the day, whether arcade or TGCD, it’s an alright-at-best beat-em-up outclassed by its peers.
