Switch Funday - River City Ransom - My First Time

Welcome to Switch Funday!

For many years i've heard countless people on websites, podcasts, YouTube, etc talk positively about River City Ransom and it's series of games. i've never owned any of them nor played any of them but when i was browsing the Nintendo Switch Online platform apps i saw it. so i decided to play River City Ransom for the first time via the NES version.

All i knew going in, from what i had heard over the years, was that the music and graphics were great and that it played well. after playing it, i can say that they were right. the music was fun and a couple of tunes sounded familiar. the story was simple, to the point,  but  perhaps a tad light. tho i admit i didn't complete the game so there could be more to it. but what was there was enough to explain what we were doing and to get me to move forward.

the typical side scroller issue of not being in the correct row as your opponent was frustrating, but much newer games have also failed to completely fix this so i didn't hold it against River City Ransom but i felt that it's worth mentioning. the game's checkpointing, tho, is worth talking about as it's one of the reasons i stopped a little earlier than planned. when i was fighting close to the shops, it putting me back to the last of the shops made sense. but as i moved further and further away, it kept bringing me back to the shops which meant a longer and longer walk/run to where i was. and with enemies respawning, there was no save area. at the end, i just ran and avoided all of them.

River City Ransom being on this service means that i could rewind gameplay to before i died. and whilst that's certainly an option, the lack of recovery, or seeming lack of it, whilst i was away from the shops also was frustrating. i didn't use the rewind feature because there was no point. if there was no way to get more health, then rewinding was pointless as i was just going to die anyway. i thought that it would be quicker to just dies and respawn than try to rewind my way through the game.

I don't know if was about to reach a new respawn point, and yes the game is old and the first of it's series, so whilst what i said above did become frustrating, it didn't break the game for me. i happily created a suspend point and i intend on coming back to the game in the future. if you have this game as part of Nintendo Switch Online, then i do agree with what people have being saying for a long time now, it's well worth playing and i did enjoy myself.