River City Ransom

This was, for a while, my favorite game to play after a bad day at work. Because all you do in this game is beat the ever-loving snot out of people.

Now, they have it coming--they're all punk-ass gang members. Not quite as hardcore as, say, the Bloods or Crips, but certainly as angry and lethal as the ones in West Side Story, but, sadly, without all the dancing and catchy tunes.

The whole plot here is you control some dude who has to save his girlfriend and fight his way to the high school through hordes of different gangs. And I do mean hordes. By sheer numbers alone, you would have to assume that the city's entire male youth population is taken up by gang membership.

As you go through the game, you can either punch your opponents and take any weapons they have, or you can sometimes find them just laying around on the ground. You have a choice of 2x4s, lead pipes, brass knuckles, crates, trash cans, and chains.

The chain was always my favorite, because it's the closest thing the game has to a projectile weapon. Some punk-ass comes running at you, and you can just whip the chain and whack him in the head before he even comes close to you. And these guys will always say something. Sometimes it's "Mommy!", and sometimes it's the more cryptic "Barf!"

This is also the only game I have every played where, among the various items you can use to restore your life energy, CDs work. You go to the malls--which are teeming with what must be the girlfriends of all these gang members, but they don't care that you're the only guy running around there--buy a CD, somehow listen to it in the heat of battle, and find your energy restored.

Once soothed by the sounds of classical/rock/R&B/country music, you can go back to whipping the shit out people with the awesome, fantastic chain.