10. Retro City Rampage

(Vblank Entertainment)
Original US Release: October 9th, 2012

“Provinciano is to be applauded for the amount of detail he has managed to pack into this experience: Players in the know will find mock-up versions of Mario, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, the A Team and Saved By the Bell as well as a slew of others. There are literally hundreds of references to be found in main missions, in story dialogue, or even in the names of stores found while exploring (a few which went over my head). Truly, any player that visits all spots on the map will have a nearly complete education of pop-culture references experienced by those of us fortunate enough to have grown up in the 1980s.”

– From the original review of Retro City Rampage by Callabrantus

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/50884145#[/vimeo]

RCR features a whole lot of cut-scenes through which you can fast-forward that sort of worked against itself in that it reminded you it wasn’t really all that important. But once the game opens up, it is a bona fide arcade action title with a huge and detailed world to explore and within which to cause mucho mayhem. Think Grand Theft Auto set in a theme park of your 80’s pop fever dream.

The amount of side-quests and self-contained mini games (from fully functioning versions of a Super Meatboy redux, bit.trip Runner de-make and even Paperboy) is nothing short of astonishing, but belies the fact that Provinciano invested five years into this game. Clearly that time wasn’t spent learning how to code so much as lovingly adding more and more content to his Magnum Opus. Once you get the hang of things and get past the introductory material, there is a lot of fun to be had here.

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