[typing] [music: "180 Steps" by DKSTR]
I've been wanting to talk about this ever since hearing about it back in June of this year,
when developer Brian Provinciano sent me a pre-release build to check out.
Yes, this is Retro City Rampage,
the same game released for modern PCs and consoles back in 2012.
Only this time it's a native MS-DOS game that runs not only on emulators like DOSBox
but on original PC hardware.
And it gets better.
Retro City Rampage 486 was also released in a limited edition actual physical box,
complete with a cloth map,
a full-color physical manual,
secret decoder glasses,
a key for the Steam release,
and a 3½" high-density floppy disk for maximum authenticity! Ha ha!
This right here is seriously the coolest thing I've seen in a long time,
at least as a DOS gaming geek who can't get enough outdated media in his collection.
It even has an authentic-looking system requirements area on the box
which appears to closely mimic the Microprose releases of the mid-to-late-'80s.
In fact, the size of the box itself is closer to those than, say, the mid-'90s box era,
which I was kinda hoping it would go for instead.
But I can see why they went with this.
Even though it doesn't proudly proclaim it,
this box was made by the Indiebox,
a service I've covered in the past here on LGR.
Retro City Rampage 486 uses the same smaller form-factor box that Indiebox started out with.
Though I wish they'd gone with the boxes that are more recent releases which are bigger and better and ugh...
But still, it comes on a freakin' floppy disk,
which features the entire game in less than 1.44 MB,
which is just wild.
Now you may be thinking,
"Dude, I know you're a DOS freak, but what's the point?
You can already play this on a PC and you have a better experience that way."
And yes, that is totally true.
But here's the thing: have you ever heard the phrase that goes something like
"if it has a CPU, someone will figure out how to run DOOM on it?"
Sure, you can play DOOM in any number of ways to get the full experience and enjoy it thoroughly,
but there comes a time where you just want to run it on a Sinclair Spectrum
or a Texas Instruments calculator,
not because it's the best, but because you can.
And that's why I love downgraded games like this on occasion.
The sheer nerdiness is beautiful, artistic even.
Here you have a game that's like 90 percent feature complete,
yet it'll run on a 33 MHz 486 DX CPU and 4 MB of RAM.
It'll even run on a 386, as long as you have a 387 math co-processor installed,
though it won't even start up without it, so don't bother.
The number of features packed into this is impressive, considering it's one floppy disk,
including all those cool graphical filters from the full game,
which make even more sense here, seeing as you can enable imitation CGA, EGA and MDA modes.
It even had support for gameport joysticks
and it works great with everything I threw at it.
Yes, even the Gravis Gamepad for which it is particularly optimized and makes full use of its buttons.
And it runs extremely well at a smooth 60 FPS if you have around 100 MHz Pentium or higher,
but even on 33 MHz 486, it's totally playable at a lower frame rate.
The one thing that's missing though that I wish was here is sound card support.
Retro City Rampage 486 uses the internal PC speaker for sound,
which is authentic in an independent DOS game kind of way,
but I'd still love to have seen AdLib support at the very least.
[PC speaker sounds]
However, there is a clear reason for this.
The developer made this as a programming exercise more than anything
and he set some very clear limitations on what he wanted to do with this.
For instance, he was adamant about it fitting on a single high-density 3½" disk.
This meant proper sound effects didn't make the cut,
and neither did the mini-games featured in the full game.
There are a lot of interesting corners cut all throughout this version
and it's impressive how little of it is truly missed, at least by me.
Things like font variations and certain menu graphics are removed and homogenized
in order to use every kilobyte of memory, so if you're interested in this kind of stuff,
I'd recommend taking a look at the information Brian has put out there online.
And get this:
he's also put together a prototype Windows 3.1 version
which nearly blows my mind even more.
It's far less playable than the DOS conversion,
but it's also not complete and it's freakin' 3.1!
You take what you can get in many cases.
Now as for the gameplay itself,
well, it's still Retro City Rampage,
both the original and DX versions,
and if you've seen my previous video on the original game,
then you know that I'm not the biggest fan.
It plays like a pared-down version of the first Grand Theft Auto games
with a top-down perspective and plenty of open-world mayhem.
But I found many of the missions too irritating
and the overall gameplay to be more suited quick bursts of fun
which never really compelled me to sit down and finish the whole thing.
And it just bombards you with such a glut of pop culture references at once
that I find it lacks its own identity in a way,
instead relying on you to know exactly what it's talking about in order to be amusing.
But that was the original game and this is the DOS version,
and it makes more sense in this case.
Chances are if you're wanting to play this game on a real DOS computer with real floppy disks,
you're probably of the correct age to understand most of the references,
and you also might not give too much a crap about the content itself
because, hey, it's a new game being released for MS-DOS!
And those are harder to come across than hen's penises.
Or wait, is that teeth? Hen's teeth? Ah, whatever.
Anyway, the point is Retro City Rampage 486 is an awesome feat of old school optimization.
And the fact that the developer cared enough to make it work so well on real hardware
and stick it on a floppy disk makes me stand up and applaud.
I can only hope to see more projects like this for the PC
because while the retro homebrew scene is thriving for systems like the NES and whatnot,
DOS, and Windows 3 in particular, are left out in the cold as usual.
But not in 2015, thanks to RCR 486.
Oh, did I mention this version is completely free if you own the game on PC or Mac?
If you have those versions, you already have a copy,
so just go check for the files and give it a shot in DOSBox at least.
Maybe you won't appreciate it as much as I do,
but trust me, this is crazy cool,
and I love the fact that it exists.
And if you love the fact that this video exists and would like to see some more,
there are lots of other videos on very similar topics,
DOS games and otherwise, and new videos coming every Monday and Friday,
so subscribing is a thing.
There's also Twitter and Facebook and Patreon
if you'd like to do social stuff and support the show monetarily.
And thank you for Mr. Provinciano sending me a copy of this to take a look at.
And thank you very much for watching.