The Tower of Retro-Babble: Technos

Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the creator of Double Dragon and Renegade, recently passed away. Guess which arcade game publisher just got pushed to the top of my review queue?

(image from Logopedia)

It's hard to overestimate the significance of Double Dragon in 1987. Technos had already pioneered the beat 'em up genre with Data East's Karate Champ, and the side-scrolling beat 'em up with Renegade, but Double Dragon further upped the ante with a grittier setting, two player gameplay, and a deep combat system. As butch martial artists Jimmy and Billy Lee, players could punch thugs, grab them by the shoulders as they're stunned from the opening blows, then either fling them away or hammer their skulls with repeated strikes from an outstretched knee.

It's not quite mortal combat, but Double Dragon is definitely brutal combat. Enemies don't fly off the screen with a single kick like in Kung Fu Master, and there's no referee to stop the fights... these rumbles are for keeps. Even weapons are not out of bounds... hurl a barrel at a knife-wielding Williams, or snatch the whip from a kinkily dressed Linda and give her a taste of her own medicine!

Spike and Hammer...? Who the
heck came up with that, anyway?
It's like how Ralf and Clark from Ikari
Warriors were renamed Paul and Vince
for some reason.
(image from ToyArk)

Double Dragon was big business for Technos, with home ports for every major late 1980s game console (NES, Master System, and Atari 7800!) and a wide range of merchandise. There were comics, cartoons, toys, even a film! The runaway success of Double Dragon convinced Technos to publish its own games in America, starting with the beloved River City Ransom. 

The game (along with the rest of the Kunio-Kun series) was a lighthearted, kid-friendly bookend to Double Dragon, with squat high school toughs smacking each other around with chubby limbs and bicycle chains. The Double Dragon and River City series have had crossovers, prompting squeals of delight from nerdy young gamers years before Marvel vs. Capcom or Super Smash Bros.

Technos games have a distinct feel, with weighty characters who fully invest those pounds into each strike. When someone takes a punch (or a dodge ball) to the face, they reel from the impact... and if they've taken too much damage, they gasp for breath to warn the player of their impending demise. The deep grappling system and "heavy" feel of Technos games lent itself especially well to wrestling, with Technos releasing Mat Mania in 1985, and the wonderfully flashy WWF Wrestlefest arriving six years later.

Here now are reviews of the Technos games that popped up in local arcades... and they popped up a lot in the Malt Shop, the almost legendary college arcade in Mount Pleasant. A handful of these Technos titles were discovered in truck stops, gas stations, and laundromats throughout Michigan.

The Combatribes

Technos fans like to think of this as the real Double Dragon 3, and who can blame them? The game charitably titled Double Dragon 3 was a hot mess. However, it's probably more accurate to call The Combatribes a spiritual successor to Renegade. Each "act" isn't a fully realized level with a starting point and a destination, but an enclosed arena, with enemies pouring in from the edges of the playfield. So many enemies. So many freaking enemies.

Even for a beat 'em up, The Combatribes is astonishingly repetitive. You'll battle an unholy number of copies of the same two goons in each act, followed by a boss that could take a direct hit from a nuclear missile and walk away with light bruising. Your energy meter, displayed at the top of the screen as a number, quickly drops, forcing you to drop in fistfuls of coins to keep the action going. It's not as exploitative as the micro-transaction filled Double Dragon 3, but it's still pretty quarter-thirsty. You're not going to finish this one with skill alone, unless rapidly tapping the insert coin button is considered a skill.

Yeesh. This just makes me want to
go to "Tone-it-down Land" instead.

On the plus side, The Combatribes feels like a genuine Technos game, with the same heavy handling and brutal attacks, but vibrant settings like theme parks replacing the sepia-toned apocalyptic wastelands of Double Dragon. The characters are appropriately detailed and beefy, and their attacks are even more vicious than the ones in Double Dragon, with the skulls of thugs getting smacked together and driven into the pavement. It's not a bad time with three players, but The Combatribes lacks the variety and technique to stand on even ground with real classics like Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Double Dragon

Double Dragon not only pioneered the side-scrolling beat 'em up, but was the undisputed king of that genre for several years, eventually getting toppled by Capcom's gorgeous Final Fight in 1989. It's not just that Double Dragon looks great for its time, with brawny, exquisitely detailed sprites battling against hauntingly dreary urban landscapes, or that it feels as good as it looks, with sure-footed character control and strikes that land cleanly on solid opponents. It's the technique in Double Dragon that makes all the difference. 

Double Dragons! Double Williamses
and Lopars, too!

You're not swatting away an endless procession of cardboard ninjas (looking at you, Bad Dudes...), but getting into protracted rumbles, first punching your opponent to soften him up, then moving in for the kill with a few knees to the skull and an overhead throw. Weapons and environmental hazards add to the variety, and the player's enjoyment. Rob a thug of his knife, then give it back to him blade-first for big damage and a splash of red at the point of impact. See an oil drum? Pick it up, then hurl it at a massive Abobo to cut him down to size. Chasms and waterways are also handy ways to dispatch goons... just don't fall into them yourself!

Double Dragon is a fantastic experience, marred by two issues. The first is that it's running on hardware that can't handle it, resulting in an obscene amount of slowdown in a game with an already relaxed pace. Things get downright painful at the end of the factory stage, where the crowd of enemies and the rolling conveyor belt leave the CPU struggling to keep up. The other beef is that Double Dragon insists on saddling the player with platforming challenges that don't work well in the context of a beat 'em up. The final stage with its bricks that burst out of the walls is infuriating... if there's a way to get through this without getting ragdolled around the screen by stone pillars, I have yet to find it.

Despite all that, Double Dragon is a great game... and the best way to play it is on the Game Boy Advance. Double Dragon Advance is a remake from Technos successors Million that takes stages from the first two arcade games, strips away the bothersome slowdown, and adds even more technique to the combat. There are now blocks and parries! You can sit on a thug's chest and pound him in the face until he begs to blink away into oblivion! You get a sweet pair of nunchucks, and you don't even have to pay an extra quarter for them like you did in Double Dragon 3! 

Double Dragon Advance is one satisfyingly savage beat 'em up, and represents Double Dragon at its absolute peak. The series has never been better, and it will never be better than this.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge 

This is one of those times where the console version eclipses its arcade counterpart in popularity. Double Dragon II was a blockbuster release for the NES, promising true two player action while the previous game offered a weaksauce versus mode. The colors were brighter, the new set pieces were more creative (how's about a battle aboard a helicopter with a loose airlock?), and the new spinning roundhouse kick makes short work of any nearby Shadow Warriors... if you've got the reflexes to pull off this advanced technique!

Been there, done that. Although
last time, I wasn't fighting an
obese Terminator. You'd better cut
down on the pasta la vista, baby!

Then there's Double Dragon II in arcades. It's got the same bi-directional combat as Renegade, with a left and right attack button along with a jump. However, the levels are either weirdly iterative of the first game (hey, there's that shipping warehouse with the conveyor belt again!) or creatively strained. I'm fighting in front of an active wheat thresher, because apparently Billy and Jimmy Lee don't have the common sense to walk around it. The new characters are slight redesigns of the old ones, and the new weapons aren't particularly exciting... shovels and hay bales, really?

Double Dragon II is playable, even fun when the CPU can keep the action at full speed. (It usually can't.) It just feels like an oversaturated repeat of the first game, while Double Dragon II on the NES goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from its own predecessor. It feels like a legitimate sequel; bigger, bolder, and more inventive than before. Double Dragon II in arcades is just more of the same, disguised with a beard and an eyepatch.

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

On the corner of woeful game design and cynical consumer exploitation, you'll find Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone. This game was outsourced to lesser known (and just plain lesser) developers East Technology, and the difference in feel from the last two games is distressingly obvious. Gaunt versions of Bimmy ow, okay, BILLY and Jimmy stiffly hobble around the world, beating up each country's hoods with attacks that never seem to connect. It looks like an overreaching Master System arcade port in motion, and players expected better from the third installment of one of the biggest arcade hits of the late 1980s. 

But wait, there's more! Each stage typically starts at a Weapons Shop. You're invited to come on in, take a look around, and spend REAL MONEY on extra fighters, extra weapons, and extra health. This isn't such a big deal now that emulation lets you credit-feed to your heart's content, but in 1990, no arcade-hopping teenager on a tight allowance was going to spend real money on in-game digital content. Any fool who did part with their money was "rewarded" with lame partner characters and weapons that were freely strewn throughout the streets in the first two games.

Roney? Really? With a name like that,
he'd better have muscles.

The larger problem is that Double Dragon 3 doesn't deserve the player's first quarter, let alone the bucketful it's expecting from players. It sucks. The unappealing characters shamble across the screen like corpses, collision detection is squirrely and imprecise, and the fist-to-face impact of the previous games has been pared down to an unenthusiastic finger flick to the forehead. As threequels go, Double Dragon 3 is every bit the flaming disaster Jaws 3 and Godfather 3 were in theaters.

It's worth pointing out that there was an overhauled NES version of Double Dragon 3, with a game engine actually designed by Technos. That at least makes it feel like a legitimate Double Dragon game, but it's not one of the better ones. The difficulty is almost comically high, and combat isn't as satisfying as it was in earlier games. It's like the designers desperately didn't want to make this, and punished the players for its existence. Sorry kids, but if we have to suffer, you have to suffer along with us.

Mat Mania

Technos provided the button-mashing blueprint for wrestling games with Mat Mania. As the up and coming wrestler, "You," you'll tangle with such made-up superstars as Insane Warrior! Karate Fighter! And Coco Savege! Er, SAVAGE! Tenderize their steroid-packed muscles with punches and kicks, then lock up for a grapple and let loose with a devastating piledriver. Get your opponent weak enough and you can finish the match with a pin, announced with scratchy enthusiasm by the referee. "One! Twoooo! THWEEE!"

I don't like where this
is going...

It's telling that pretty much every wrestling game in the 1980s played just like Mat Mania. You start each fight with simple punches and kicks, wearing the opponent down and working your way up to the crowd-pleasing finishers. Double taps of the joystick send you (and You) running into the ropes to set up a clothesline or a diving pin. Climbing a turnbuckle is as simple as walking up to it. It's all easy to understand, but deceptively deep. Mat Mania was a solid foundation for future wrestling games, and there's not much to the design that needed to be changed or improved.

As for the graphics? It's 1985, so the characters lean toward the small and comical. Mat Mania is about on par with Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu visually, although it does capture some of the glitz of mid-1980s professional wrestling, with hot-headed announcer Cory introducing each match, and the wrestling network's broadcast flickering off into a dead grey screen if you've been beaten. You'll just have to drop in another coin to restart your wrestling career. Talk about Pay-Per-View!

Renegade

Say what you will about Renegade, but it's an important step forward in the evolution of the beat 'em up. It pioneered the elevated side-view perspective that practically all side-scrolling beat 'em ups use, and there's a sense of brutality in the fighting that's missing from contemporaries like Kung Fu Master or Yie Ar Kung Fu. In a typical fight, Mr. K first flattens a thug's face with a few punches, grabs him by the collar, kicks him in the groin a few times, then hurls him over his shoulder, possibly into the ocean or off the edge of a thirty foot high subway platform.

These guys don't come off their
bikes until you KICK them off their
bikes. Aw, you just got tire marks
on my brand new leather jacket!

Renegade is a mean, gritty game, especially in the kid-friendly arcades of 1986, and especially when it was brought to America with all new graphics. Instead of high school delinquents, you'll go mano-a-mano with greasy thugs, biker gangs (sometimes jump kicking the gang members off the bikes as they're riding them!), and prostitutes. If you lose, they'll rub salt in the wound with a digitized insult. If you win, it'll be by the skin of your teeth. Renegade is tough, giving the player a single life and no continues. (Advice? Tweak the DIP switch settings to give yourself another life and tone down the difficulty to a somewhat manageable level.)

There's one other thing worth mentioning about Renegade... it uses a bi-directional combat system, with one button attacking to the left and another attacking to the right. Pressing the left attack button while facing left makes Mr. K punch, while pressing the right attack button while facing left makes him kick in the opposite direction. The idea was to let the player defend themselves from two angles, but Renegade's bi-directional melee combat isn't as handy or intuitive as the omni-directional firing in Robotron: 2084 or Smash TV. It was worth a shot, I guess. (Probably wasn't worth revisiting in Double Dragon II, though.)

Super Dodge Ball

The game you dreaded most in gym class comes to arcades, without the bruising and hard feelings. As a high school dodge ball team, you rise up the ranks by beating the other teams... to death. Team members don't just walk off the court when they're tagged with the ball... you'll have to pummel them repeatedly, draining their health bar until they leave the arena and this plane of existence as angels. (And you thought Blades of Steel's fist fights were hardcore.)

This sporty off-shoot of the Kunio-Kun series is most fondly remembered on the NES, and frankly, it's a better game there. The characters are smaller and less detailed, sure, but they're also faster and control more tightly, making it more fun to play whether you're gunning for the championship in single player mode or hurling rock-hard dodge balls at your friends. There's even a free-for-all mode that erases the court divider, letting you get up close and personal with those dodge ball strikes.

There's no question that the NES version of Super Dodge Ball is the better game, but at least the arcade version looks nice. Each country's court is adorned with famous landmarks in the background, and every team has its own super sized captain, who can take more damage than his puny teammates and also possesses the Power Shot. Race across the court and throw the ball as you approach the divider and it streaks toward the opponent at mach speed, three times stronger than usual and just as tough to catch. The Power Shot play mechanic works better on the NES, like pretty much everything else about this game, but at least it's there.

WWF Superstars 

WWF Superstars is a perfectly adequate wrestling game that suffers next to its amped-up sequel. It's better than the NES Wrestlemania game for sure, and better than most wrestling games available at the time, but it's light on content, as well as the flair fans expect from the WWF brand. There are six wrestlers available, and while they're recognizable as Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, and... uh... Honkey Tonk Man, they're kind of shrimpy and plainly drawn. And while the game plays well enough, it doesn't go out of its way to impress the player.

Even the cut scenes are lacking next
to the ones in WWF Wrestlefest. Gene
Okerlund looks like a constipated
Joe Polito.

Like Galaxian and the original Streets of Rage, WWF Superstars is a competent game doomed to languish in the shadow of its follow-up. Why pay for the dress rehearsal when you can have the full performance?

WWF Wrestlefest

Compared to the relatively timid WWF Superstars, WWF Wrestlefest goes way over the top in its presentation. Wrestling superstars like Jake the Snake Roberts and the Big Boss Man have never been bigger, there's driving music and color commentary from an unseen announcer, and the action is peppered with gorgeously drawn cut scenes featuring the Legion of Doom and Mean Gene Okerlund. If you know who any of these people are, you'll be thrilled. Even if you don't, just drink in the sights and sounds, because they're some of Technos' best work.

Wrestlefest offers two play styles... the Royal Rumble, where every wrestler piles into the ring and the last man to remain inside wins, and Saturday Night Main Event, a standard tag team mode. Like a real WWF match, wrestlers don't stay on the sidelines even if they're tagged out, running interference if their teammate is pinned. It keeps the bouts tense and exciting... even if you've made a pin with one wrestler, you'll have to use the other one to keep it.

That's a whole lotta ugly dudes.

Fundamentally, WWF Wrestlefest isn't much different from Mat Mania, but it's the spectacle that makes it so memorable. There's an avalanche of digitized voice, the characters are even larger and more detailed than the ones in Street Fighter II, and the artwork captures the essence of each real-life wrestler beautifully, with Hogan cupping an ear to hear the cheers of the crowd and Earthquake bouncing around the ring before landing elbow first on his opponent. In the world of arcade wrestling games, WWF Wrestlefest is top-card talent, as legendary in its own ring as its wrestlers are in theirs.

Xain'd Sleena

Technos goes off the beat 'em up path with Xain'd Sleena, a side-scrolling science-fiction platformer that takes place on a half-dozen different planets. Xain (who looks like a 1980s version of Halo's Master Chief) is armed with a wimpy hand blaster and a jet pack, which isn't strong enough to let him fly freely, but does provide enough power to let him double jump. His goal is to infiltrate enemy territory on each planet, plant a bomb on their headquarters, and escape into space before the explosion leaves a crater where the enemy base used to be.

Hey, Empire! You're about to get Xain'd!

Xain'd Sleena is an aggravatingly fidgety game, with power up capsules offering weapons (none impressive, and some laughably weak) at random and enemies delivering inconsistent damage. Sometimes you'll just get a scratch from an enemy encounter, but sometimes the attacker will put you on life support. The larger aliens will ignore your "gage" completely and just stomp you into orange marmalade on contact. The especially annoying shooter segments between planets dispose of the health bar entirely, ensuring that every collision with the unrelenting swarms of ships is fatal. 

It's a nice looking game for sure,
especially for the mid 1980s.

So it's not a great game overall, but Xain'd Sleena gets by on presentation alone. Each planet you'll visit is distinct, and the science-fiction artwork is some of the best you'll see in a 1986 video game, with rocky outposts set against a sea of stars and alien rainforests teeming with the deadliest wildlife in the galaxy. The artists on this project get an A for their work, while everyone else on staff just gets an "Eh."