The classic title I’ll be reviewing is the SNES classic Rival Turf! by Jaleco.

This game was known in Japan as Rushing Beat and it was released in 1992. The market was flooded by beat’em ups at that time, so what would make this game stand out from the crowd? Not much really.

What attracted me to this title was the rather cheesy box art.

Yep…straight up gangsta yo!

But that was not the reason why I like this game. This game was released around the same time Final Fight was released on SNES. Is it better than Final Fight? No. But it had something that the SNES version of Final Fight didn’t have. A two-player mode! So that was a plus at the time.

The plot is pretty straight forward. You play as either Jack Flak or Oozie Nelson. (Or if you are playing the Japanese version, The names would be Rick Norton and Douglas Bild respectively. Why the names were changed I’ll never know…) You are to put an end to the crime syndicate ran by Big Al. That’s pretty much all that I could gather as the game’s plot was pretty much lost in the translation…

So, lets talk game play. I thought the controls were decent, though a little stiff but they are simple and don’t take long to figure out. The Hit detection is spotty at best, but you’ll get used to it.
Like in other games of this nature, you walk to the right side of the screen and beat up thugs, pick up food recovery items to restore health, pick up weapons and fight a boss at the end of each stage.
There are 6 stages total. You can also turn on something called an “Angry mode” in the options menu that allows your character to, after taking several hits, flash and do more damage and be invincible for a short time.
Another thing that made this game fun was a trick that would let you change all the characters names(at the high score screen, type in your name as “CHRCONF”). That gave our sick immature minds a good laugh! :P

The graphics paled in comparison to other games at the time, like final fight. But they were pretty colorful and get the job done.

The sound was pretty standard for a game of it’s type but it worked with the punches landing and the swishing noises. There are small voice samples when the characters die and performed jumping attacks.
The soundtrack was pretty up beat and catchy. It fit with the game fairly well.

 

Overall, It was a fun game for it’s time. Do I think of it as a cheap knock-off of Final Fight…yeah. But I had fun playing this game as a kid with friends so it gave me a lot of good memories.
It had two sequals, Brawl Brothers(Rushing beat RAN FUKUSEI TOSHI in Japan) and The Peace keepers(Rushing Beat Syura). Why they couldn’t have called them Rival Turf 2 and 3 is something I’ll never figure out. They were also fun.
If you can find this game, Go ahead and pick it up. It shouldn’t cost you to much these days with prices going for less than $10.

So I would give this game a 7/10.