There are few things that I enjoy more than a good retro games collection. Sure, emulation exists and it’s not going anywhere any time soon, but as someone who creates for a living, I do like the idea of supporting other creators by actually buying their creations.
In the retro space, however, that’s an increasingly pricey prospect, not helped in the least by the “collecting” types who prefer their games entombed in slabs and seen as “investments”. Let the poor games breathe and BE GAMES, people… but I digress.
Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics is the latest compilation from Arc System Works, the company that now owns the rights to the Technos Japan library of games.
Mention Technos to most fans of old-school gaming and the title that will spring to mind as being the biggest and most important is of course Double Dragon… but to quickly clarify, Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics is an entirely Double Dragon free zone. Arc System Works has other plans for Double Dragon, not that it’s been shy in either emulating or licensing out that property in recent years.
Instead, what you get is a really mixed bag of Technos titles, including, as the name suggests, a number of titles featuring Technos’ other effectively best-known character, Kunio-Kun. If you ever played River City Ransom back in the day on a NES, that was Kunio-Kun with his Japanese identity not-so-subtly shaved away.
So what’s on offer here? It’s a small library of just 12 games, comprising 7 Super Famicom titles and five arcade games:
River City Renegade (Super Famicom)
Kunio’s Dodgeball Time, C’mon Guys! (Super Famicom)
Downtown River City Baseball Story ~Play Ball, Kunio!~ (Super Famicom)
Kunio’s Oden (Super Famicom)
THE COMBATRIBES (Super Famicom)
SugoroQuest++ –DICENICS- (Super Famicom)
DunQuest (Super Famicom)
Super Dodge Ball (Arcade / NEOGEO)
XAIN’D SLEENA: SOLDIER OF LIGHT (Arcade)
CHINA GATE (Arcade)
THE COMBATRIBES (Arcade)
SHADOW FORCE (Arcade)
You might have noticed that THE COMBATRIBES (yes, it’s really always been in caps like that) is listed twice, so that’s really only 11 experiences, but realistically it’s actually more like 10 because Super Dodge Ball and Kunio’s Dodgeball Time, C’mon Guys! are fairly similar dodgeball-centric games.
There’s another trap here for non-Japanese audiences, because Arc System Works is happy to take your money for this collection, but it wasn’t entirely willing to do a lot of work to get these games to a wider worldwide audience.
SugoroQuest++ –DICENICS- and DunQuest were originally Japan-only titles back in the day, and while they’re both present, they’re both also only available in Japanese, which is going to be problematic if you’re not relatively fluent.
For what it’s worth, SugoroQuest++ –DICENICS- is an interesting board game – Japan loved and loves digital board console games – while DunQuest is an action RPG title. If fans can be bothered to translate these kinds of games for free, why can’t Arc System Works if it wants our money for them? For most gamers then, we’re down from 12 titles to 8 actually differentiated titles.
It’s always tricky evaluating retro collections like this because I can’t account for anyone’s particular nostalgia. I can say that I played a little COMBATRIBES in the arcade back in the day, and while its brash visuals were fancier than Double Dragon, it was always a slightly less satisfying game, perhaps because so many of its combat animations were rather laborious to go through, rather than feeling properly meaty. It’s not something that we as humans should perhaps be proud of, but there’s something satisfying about a game that gets skull cracking just right. It’s kind of neat having the Super Famicom version included for comparative purposes, but any old school COMBATRIBES players will inevitably bounce to the arcade version.
Of what’s left, the arcade games are the standouts, whether it’s the Journey To The West-inspired CHINA GATE, the run-and-gun action of XAIN’D SLEENA: SOLDIER OF LIGHT, or the sidescrolling brawling of SHADOW FORCE. I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of dodgeball games per se, but Super Dodge Ball does have some charm, if only for the quite out there character designs.
I will go to my grave defending the Super Famicom as the greatest game system of all time (and I’m right!), but the 16-bit sections of Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics are a little less compelling. River City Renegade is the 16-bit version of River City Ransom (strictly speaking Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari), but it’s a slightly slower and less dynamic version, which means it hasn’t really aged well unless you are nostalgically attached to it. Despite having the most fun title in the collection, the same is broadly true of Kunio’s Dodgeball Time, C’mon Guys!
Downtown River City Baseball Story ~Play Ball, Kunio!~ is a baseball game as the name suggests, and it does try something that some older sports games used to, mixing in closeups of the action with a full field view, though again I found it slightly less than engaging, and I suspect old-school baseball fans might be better served by something a little more directly sports-centric.
Kunio’s Oden is a bit of a hidden gem, even though it’s actually just a classic dropping and matching puzzle game, this time based around food. What makes it stand out is that it’s nicely customisable, with options for how many matches you want and game speed giving it a decent level of challenge.
You do get the by-now-standard niceties of modern emulation, so you can create multiple save states for each game, add scan lines or adjust screen ratios if you’re some kind of 4:3 hating philistine and so on.
The problem is.. that’s pretty much all you can do, and that kind of detail is really rather table stakes by now. The bar has been raised on what a retro compilation can be by titles such as Atari 50, and in that context having a collection that includes untranslated games and the bare minimum of emulation options can’t help but feel just that little bit cynical.
I like my retro gaming to be bathed more in rosy nostalgia and details about what made a game great or a company significant, not drenched in cynicism. Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics isn’t awful by any stretch, but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it is something of a cynical cash grab first and foremost. Do better, Arc System Works!
