Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 2

BEAT is handling playing and writing duties today. Please enjoy some words from our favorite skeleton man while Goggle Bob sits back and talks about himself in the third person.

Jet Set Radio 3, huh?

A few years ago, before I even knew Bomb Rush Cyberfunk would be a thing, I tweeted on my now dead old twitter account a brief list of the things I would like in a theoretical 3rd Jet Set Radio. They were:

• Ride around on a skateboard
• Do some vandalism
• Kick a cop in the face

Well, what do you fucking know?

But to go past that extremely surface level wish list that TOTALLY CAME TRUE OH MY GOD, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk very much feels like what the theoretical Jet Set Radio 3 should have been. Everything on display here feels like the obvious next evolution of what we saw in Jet Set Radio or Jet Set Radio Future. The level sizes have been expanded upon, but they never feel large to the point where they become a pain in the ass to get across. The skate combo system has been improved upon, but it never goes into intensive balance-based challenges like you’d see in a Tony Hawk or Skate game. The graffiti system feels like a solid midpoint between Jet Set Radio’s complicated direction inputs and Future’s “just hold the fucking button down whatever” approaches. This legally distinct pretender is, for all intents and purposes, the real deal.

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN?!

I’ll be very blunt when I say most fan-based revivals of old genres or more specifically old singular games that the developers have made into a religion are not appealing to me. The example that immediately comes to my mind is Mother Russia Bleeds. It’s a decent game that I understand gets EXTREMELY HOMOPHOBIC a few levels in, which is probably why I never played past the first stage. Doesn’t matter. My point here is that if you want the perfect Mother Russia Bleeds experience, you should just play Streets of Rage 2. Because that’s all Mother Russia Bleeds wants to be, and it gets about 85% of the way there.

I meant that last sentence as a devastating insult.

So many of these throwback revival games treat the original like it’s some sort of perfect creation that we can only strive to approach, but never iterate on. Mother Russia Bleeds cannot imagine being anything better than Streets of Rage 2, and so it never could be. Compare to Streets of Rage 4, which absolutely recognized the ways it could go beyond its predecessor and did so in incredible fashion.

And Bomb Rush Cyberfunk managed to pull off the same trick, despite being a project by rabid Jet Set Radio fans.

I’m just glad it happened.

Even Worse Streams Presents Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Night 2

Random Notes:

• VIBES BASED GAMING: I love this game for a shitload of reasons, but one of them is just how NICE it feels to exist in the game’s environments. Those low-poly, sparsely populated Dreamcast-esque cityscapes have this beautiful feeling to them that’s difficult for me to put into words. It’s not a quantifiable aspect of game design that you can put points into. It’s just a feeling.
• VANDALISM IS BEAUTIFUL: I have a deep love of street art and graffiti that I can tie directly back to Jet Set Radio. That’s an extremely embarrassing and nerdy thing to admit but IDGAF. There is something so beautiful and raw about risking arrest just to make something where you’re not supposed to.
• THIS GAME IS SET IN NEW AMSTERDAM: During the FOUR FUCKING MONTHS I had to write this shit, I went to the actual Amsterdam and visited STRAAT, Amsterdam’s museum for street art and graffiti in a former NDSM shipyard. It was amazing and I loved it. I don’t really have a way to tie that back to talking about video games. I just wanted to tell you all about something that rules.

OH RIGHT THERE’S USUALLY SOME MINUTES ON THE VIDEO UPLOAD SHIT OKAY OKAY.

(BEAT has provided notes as well as Goggle Bob this week. If it is not immediately obvious who is noting what, they have been color-coded for your enjoyment)

• Ladies and gentlemen, fanboymaster walked a mile through 90-degree weather for burrito. Think about what he would do for you! We’ve also got Cassandralyn, myself, and BEAT steering the ship. Want to hear about extremely local politics?
• “That taxi is downright outlandish.”
• God, The Crazy Taxi Movie was too perfect an idea to actually exist. I feel I was correct in saying that Snoop Dogg and Johnny Knoxville should have been B.D. Joe and Axel respectively.
• Nobody but us remembers Gameboy Advance video. NOBODY!!!
• Riptor is my Killer Instinct main, and we include an extensive discussion of Killer Instinct canon to explain why she isn’t always around.
• I guess I’ll take this opportunity to talk about how areas in this game are gated off by rep amounts. They’re never so high as to be a serious impediment to progress, but they’re always exactly high enough to encourage you to explore the area enough to get a decent mental map. Flawless design. They should have sent a poet.
• Millennium Mall is one of my favorite locations in the game, but 8-Bit is undeniably my favorite rival gang in the game. I fuckin love those robot B-Boys IDGAF.
• Cass finally unpacked her personal game collection. She should make an excel spreadsheet to inventory them! I am not a crank!
• A broad conversation about Mario RPGs of all stripes follows a brief mention of Chibi-Robo.
• Fanboy goes off on the Mario RPGs. I’ll admit I don’t have any strong feelings on them beyond “Bowser’s Inside Story was pretty rad”, so I’ll default to saying he’s probably right about everything. Fuck Persona though. Fuckin hate Persona.
• God, the high five robot challenge in this level is such a bitch though. It’s 30 minutes before I finally just accept I’m not getting it.
• Every gang in this game is great, but my Absolute favorite gang is DOT EXE. I just love their CRT monitor heads and B-Boy Tracksuits. Fuckin perfect.
• “CAN’T BE BAD AT GAMES ANYMORE. BECAUSE OF WOKE.”
• A single button should allow you to pause any game at all times. Particularly if your oven is on fire.
• I fuckin love my oven fire Xenoblade Chronicles 2 pause story I’m not even kidding. Perfect stupid anecdote for discussing bad videos game design and/or household emergencies.
• “The intro to Devil May Cry 3 is unironically one of the greatest pieces of film ever.” I stand by that. DMC3 is fucking perfect.
• At some point the conversation shifts to Eva. Fuck Eva. Eva sucks.
• “Fuck you, they’re big robots. They have a dead god in them or something? Who cares.” “Your dead mom is in there.”
• Ample Vigour joins to explain the torments of being a child born after the fall of the Japanese empire/Otaku no Video.
• Then the conversation shifts to Otaku no Video. I’ve never watched that one so I assume AV and fanboy are correct about everything.
• After a literal fucking hour I FINALLY got all 11 robot high fives.
• End of Eva is a terrible fucking movie and should not be watched by anyone.
• Oh nooo 9 Ball.
• Right around when we hit another dream sequence, we wind up with a discussion of Princess Mononoke. Would you believe this is due to BEAT’s old Spanish Teacher showing an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion?
• The dream sequences are some of my favorite parts of this game.
• PLOT TWIST: It turns out there was an actual human head inside of Red’s Cyberhead. Damn.
• Caliscrub joins just after Red gets a head(wound).
• ROLE PLAYING: I stated as much in the video but I always rush though this mission because some part of my lizard brain won’t let me waste time because “oh no I have to save my little digital man.” It’s dumb, but I feel like if you managed to make me actually change what I was doing to make sure my little polygon man is okay you’re doing something right.
• I still love the fact that the Franks are led by a little white boy named “The Flesh Prince.”
• Remember being in college for the first time and realizing that people did things while you were previously at school all day? Whatever. Let’s examine defunct musical formats.
• At the hour and a half mark the video is basically over, but I spent the last 30 minutes just tooling around and recruiting new gang members. Rave is cool. Mesh is cool. Every character in this game is cool.
• “What’s left of our news networks are not covering people passing out blankets.”
• I really like Oldhead Classic’s perspective on getting a cyberhead. Like he’s fully aware that the person he used to be is dead, and he’s at peace with it. It’s a surprisingly nuanced take on transhumanism.
• Happy 9th of July! Be careful with fireworks, kids!
• And we close with a brief discussion of Dril and outdoor cats.
• The stream ends with me just sitting and watching the Bomb Rush Crew doing a breakdance cypher. See you all next week!

Next time on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Seaside shreddin’.