urban reign is videogames
In the doldrums of anhedonia, when even some beautiful work of art cannot shift the gloopy sludge water of indifference pumping through my shell, I hack a device. Not so much in the console cowboy "I'm in" kinda way, that'd be actually cool. No, it's more just following contradictory YouTube videos until my eyes crust over and hoping I haven't bricked my Wii. The latest victim of my dry-eyed monomania was my girlfriends PS2, in which the modification was even more underwhelming than usual: the purchase of two memory cards, one that would let me load programs in the form of .elf files, the other that would accept a MicroSD card to put ISOs onto. The result- a newfound access to a library of games (plus the ones my girlfriend owns physically) for a console I never owned, all running on original hardware on a CRT (incidentally, feel free to suggest other games via email, the guestbook or on BlueSky!).
decadence
— cathode ray tubetop (@nightelectricity.com) February 5, 2025 at 3:13 PM
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The main impetus was wanting to play Burnout 3, which fucking rocks, but the game I've played most so far is far less famous- Urban Reign, a vaguely Tekken adjacent 3D Namco brawler in which you beat up endless-but-individually-named gang members with a mix of martial arts in scummy little dollhouse worlds to chugging nu-metal instrumentals, and it really fucking rocks. After the fun but extremely bloated triple-A pomp of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, its so refreshing to play a capital-V Videogame. There's some vague set-up somewhere between The Warriors and Escape from LA but it might as well be an arcade machine attract mode, because you're here for the one-hundred individual missions, with objectives as varied as "beat up that one guy", "beat up all those guys", "beat up one guy from that group" or any one of those with a time limit. If you've played the excellent, brutal and occassionally horseshit God Hand, it's kind of like if the excellent, brutal and often horseshit arena was a full game. Each of the hundred missions are only a handful of minutes long (the game helpfully keeps track of the 1:1 completion percentage for some reason), but they're pretty fucking mean, with enemies able to do everything you can do, and more in the boss fights. So while you could beat it in an afternoon, you'll have to get good at it first, which is a tall order when nothing else I've played feels like it.
The controls are very straight forward- square is dodge, triangle is grapple, circle is strike, but every button can be modified by a tilt of left analogue stick. A simple dodge becomes a reversal, a grapple becomes a clothesline from hell (or a million other things), and your simple strike can be targeted at your opponents head, chest, or legs, which all have individual toughness on top of their healthbar. It's a lot, and the game is constantly teaching you new things and giving you new stuff to play with. Triangle and Circle is your special, and the starting spin kick is incredibly useful, but when you beat special one-on-one boss fights you gain access to whatever signature move they were previously caving your head in with. Oh, and the X button makes you run, and if you press it while grappling you can accelerate the grapple, and you can use it run up walls, and then you can do a dive attack...
Urban Reign is a game of ands, an excited child telling you what their cool new Action Man can do and how it combines with all the other toys they have, it's both limited in scope but imaginatively deep. Which is why it reviewed averagely at the tail end of the PS2's life, lacking any cinematic ambitions or the stylistic panache of Devil May Cry. Boring protagonist, great combat, one hundred levels, off you go. It would never be my first recommendation from what is arguably the best console library of all time, but Urban Reign's lack of fussy bullshit and laser focus instantly commanded my attention and blasted away my anhedonia, and until I get the urge to futz with another device (my GameBoy Color is next) I'm happy to chip away at its hundred levels of increasingly cruel bullshit.
Because sometimes videogames are cool, and Urban Reign is videogames.