Sunset Riders (Super NES, 1993)

 

Kind of a butt-ugly box art here, and I don't think I ever saw it in stores. This is a SNES port of an arcade game that was quite popular at the time, but unfortunately I think this is a game that probably worked much better in arcades.

This is the game that I always mix up with Wild Guns, and I thought I'd already played it. Turns out that wasn't the case, so I gave it a go. Unfortunately, I wasn't missing anything because after one run, I loathe this game. Wait, what? But...it's Konami. Probably my favorite developer ever besides Fromsoft and maybe Square-Enix. How can this be?

Pretty damn nice title screen. Much nicer than the box. I should have put this image up top instead for this one. If this had been the box art, I bet it would have sold a lot better.

We meet our characters. There's Steve! He's...a guy in a hat.

We've also got...Billy! Another guy in a hat, who is indistinguishable from Steve.

Then there's...Bob! Were they going for the least-memorable names possible? At least this one isn't wearing a hat, so I can tell him apart.

Finally, there's the Mexican sensation, CORMANO.

Los hombres de los Cormanos!

Character select...is all guys. So we can say that the main way to tell the difference between this and Wild Guns is that Wild Guns is the one with Annie the blonde.

I go with CORMANO, because he's the only one that actually kind of stands out. I wouldn't be able to pick the other three out of a lineup.

At the beginning of every level, they show you who the boss is, and they all have Carmen Sandiego-esque charicatures of names.

And...here's the game. It's sorta like Contra, you run/jump/shoot as foes pile onto the screen. One problem stands out right away: Your character moves SLOW compared to most action games.

Moments after starting the game, I get stuck. There's a wall here and you can't get over it. I jumped around for a few minutes trying all kinds of button combinations until I discovered that pressing Up+Jump together does a super high jump. This super high jump also seems to make you invulnerable for a second, so it's pretty useful. Still, would have been cool to get some kind of clue here instead of immediately getting stuck two screens into the game.

Duck into this building, and your hero pops back out with a lady in tow! What were they doing in there?

He got a full powerup from whatever just happened, and now fires fully-powered spread shots. Weapon powerups drop frequently and make your gun fire faster / have more spread, but you lose ALL of them and reset to zero if you get hit. Which is insanely annoying, because the zero level weapon doesn't even have rapid fire and puts you at a huge disadvantage.

Next, our hero runs across a charging line of bulls! Ole!

Mr. Greedwell is the first boss and he's a real asshole! Minions pop out of the windows, and in this game it's completely crucial to focus on taking out the minions/adds before they pile up on you and turn the screen into bullet hell. The other key here is to destroy the barrels he's hiding behind.

When you beat the bosses, they always have some quip before they keel over.

The next boss is Triple H: Hawkeye Hank Hatfield.

We see the powered-up spread shot in action, as our hero chases down a wagon. We're two levels in and it's already getting into Battletoads territory by having the wagon drop various lumber onto the ground that you have to leap over with almost no notice.

Finally, I catch up to the front of the train that the bad guy is on. I'll say this, the game LOOKS really good.

Next boss ducks behind crates while adds swarm onto the screen. All of the barriers that bosses hide behind are destructible (though the first boss plays a nasty trick by having the barrels fall right on your head after you take them out).

Every couple levels there's this minigame where you move a cursor around and shoot foes that pop up for about one minute. You get a bunch of extra lives here, which helps a bit.

Aside from jumping and shooting, occasionally you also climb across ropes!

Next boss is this psychopath on a horse. Not only do the sprites look good, the animation is good too. 

The only issue with this game is how damn hard it is. Wonder if the Konami code works? Not that it would matter much because you can give yourself 5 lives and 5 continues on the options menu. ...which basically means you can only get hit 25 times over the course of the game, which is kinda nuts. Run out of lives and you start the current stage over, too, so it isn't like continues put you right back where you were. The saving grace of this game even being beatable is how short it is.

We know this game isn't Bebe's Kids because the next boss is not one, but two Beavis.

Michael Cole: "Hurry! Hurry!"

This is the first point in the game that, to say the least, completely sucks. Ths boss throws these giant grenades that don't follow any pattern, can't be led, and track your movements so well that it almost seems like total luck whether you get out of the way or not.

This game DESPERATELY needed either a dodge roll or a slide. Your character is too big and slow to really avoid things like this, or the copious amounts of bullets onscreen.

After totally wearing out the Rewind button (for the first time all game) I eventually GIVE UP on the fight and just stand under him blasting away while my lives get whittled down. I finished him before I ran out and had to continue. WTF is this game? It's clearly meant to be played in an arcade where you can just keep pumping quarters into it ad infinitum.

We get a bunch of dancing women to come out on stage and dance to and fro for the amusement of our hero.

Next is level...I don't even know what we're on now. It's another train, as I rebuild my extra life stock and collect more weapon powerups.

Next boss is...this guy with a shield as a chestplate. "With this, I'll definitely be able to defeat Bill Goldberg!" he says. ...and he's wearing pink. Coincidence?

Now comes the WORST fight in the game, worse even than grenade guy. This Native American dude is basically impossible, and even with a Rewind feature on emulator he's harder than any boss in Dark Souls.

He leaps around the screen throwing these trios of knives, and dodging between them is a crapshoot with your big, slow, ponderous character.

I had to remind myself that Konami made this game because the difficulty is so unbalanced and uneven. I've never played a Konami game I didn't like... until now. Well, now I have a least-favorite Konami game, by a mile.

I don't give up, though, and after about 20 minutes of shooting, rewinding, shooting, rewinding, incrementally damaging the boss in-between dying...

...I eke out a win, and we find out the guy meant well-a all along! Konami doesn't have the guts to kill the game's sole Native American.

Well that's great that he meant well-a all along, but maybe he could have just not pelted me with knives for the past 20 minutes.

Next up is Paco Loco, which means... "Crazy Paco".

Weird thing is that a few years later, Paco Loco was one of the many jobbers created for WCW Vs NWO: World Tour.

Paco Loco is a total charicature of...a hippopotamus who speaks Spanish?

HE'S GOT A DAMN MINIGUN!

...yeah, pretty much a Terminator 2 reference all around. I guess this guy didn't mean well-a like the previous boss did. Also, this fight was easy, and over in like 15 seconds. What is with the difficulty rollercoaster in this game? Aside from the firebomb boss and the Native American boss both being trainwrecks of fights, the rest waffles between smooth sailing and medium difficulty.

Finally, we've got the big boss, a nefarious British guy.

Side Note: The Boston Tea Party happened because people were tired of being overtaxed by Britain. That overtaxing? 2%. That's right, the people revolted over paying 2% income tax.

There was zero income tax for a long time after that, right up until around the creation of the Federal Reserve. And we got by just fine, had libraries/fire departments/schools/road work. Turns out if you don't waste copious amounts of money, you don't actually need to garnish large chunks of wages from your citizens who work 40 hours a week and can barely pay their bills. You also don't need to get rid of schools or libraries, as those were fine without the IRS.

Not sure what my point is, time to resume this shitty game.

The last level has our hero climbing a giant diagonal wall, with foes that just run right into your shots and no real hazards. It's super easy. I don't get this game.

The British guy shows up! He kinda looks like Narcis Prince from Super Punch-Out.

He's got a bunch of adds that spawn endlessly in the four corners of the screen and do their best to turn this into a bullet hell fight. I did my best to dodge and weave, and it quickly turned out to be nearly impossible.

There's a trick here though. Do the high jump to land on the balcony, then jump down from it, and you're invulnerable during both somersaults. So I just spammed this over and over, firing willy-nilly into the ether and hoping for the best, and.... it worked?

Eventually he comes down for the second phase of the fight and battles you on foot (while minions continue to pour in). I just went attrition war at this point and burned him down, losing lives in the process. Whatever.

Glad that game is over, that was horrible. And the crazy thing is, I was playing it on EASY.

I'm guessing this was a lot of fun in the arcades with multiple players and quarters to dump into the machine, but as an at-home console game with limited lives/continues, it absolutely sucks without some sort of emulator rewind. And even then, it isn't exactly fun to play.

Unpopular opinion: Game has its fans, but this one gets a significant thumbs-down from me. If I made a list of "games most people seemed to like but I couldn't stand" this would be near the top of it. It's possible, as always, that I "did it wrong".

Sunset Riders? We'd all rather be ridden by Aerith. I wonder if this woman is in any noteworthy games.

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