While I watch my character walking slowly towards the sunrise at the end of Valiant Hearts: The Great War, I take a look back at the road that has brought me here. Considering that for the most part it lead through the battlefields of World War I, the journey was surprisingly rich in variety, and it entailed even some nice memories besides all the horror. Yet it has been exactly those contrasts, these emotional ups and downs, which make these sensations so intense. Its beginning seems almost a bit unreal now, but soon the story will come to an end, and I cannot remember when I had such a feeling of accomplishment at the end of a computer game.
Retro City Rampage calls itself a parody. Putting the likely legal reasons for this badge aside, there are (broadly speaking) two kinds of parodies: biting satires and warmly affectionate ones. RCR clearly falls into the latter category. It is a tour de force crammed full of references to (mainly) 1980s pop culture, both in style and contents.
The protagonist, simply called "The Player" is a minor henchman in the gang of a mad criminal called "The Jester" operating in said decade. After a bank robbery disastrously gone wrong and a subsequent run-in with Bill & Ted, the Player is transported forward in time, into our present (called the year "20XX"). Uprooted, he enlists the help of a certain "Doc Choc" who has built a time machine into a suspiciously DeLorean-looking sports car. Before the Player can travel back to his own time, he has to find various replacement parts so that the Doc, who is charmingly naive and ignorant about the Player's criminal activities, can fix the phone booth, though. In the process, the good-evil Player uncovers several big conspiracies and fights even badder guys than himself while, of course, permanently having the evil-good law enforcement agencies on his back.
In the old, golden days, video games where thematically almost exclusively catering for a single target audience: male adolescents. Logically, some fantasy themes were recurrent: saving the earth and all of humanity or even the whole universe. Those were the goals and challenges of tomorrow's family men. Gaming having grown up, yesterday's youths are now confronted with reality. Those old dreams have been tainted as childish and the games industry now also delivers realism into the formerly well kept play rooms of today. One way of doing this apparently involves simulating every single job, no matter how absurd, and also every single every day activity, no matter how trivial, in a game. Resulting in increasingly obscure products in which the original ideas can hardly be recognized anymomre. Though even in the good old days, us heroes had to take a couple of collateral damage hits and, for example, resign ourselves to the role of a simple taxi driver. The implication being boring drives from A to B, where the highlight of the day is exchanging some gossip with the passengers. Unless, of course, it was Space Taxi.