Features

It's a place where The Dark Knight dukes it out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; where Back To The Future meets Mr T; where parody runs riot through every street and alleyway - welcome then to Theftropolis, the bustling locale at the heart of Retro City Rampage for the Xbox LIVE on Xbox 360.

An 8-bit ode to everything 80s and 90s, RCR is an imaginative reworking of the original Grand Theft Auto formula - you are The Player, a lowly goon for hire who's turned up in the city to make his fortune. Your job? To carjack, murder, maim, execute, burn, stab, explode, run down, race and, erm, time travel in this 2D topdown open world - all presented in glorious lo-fi NES-style graphics. With over eighty missions, 40 vehicles and a bank vault load of weapons and power-ups, RCR is more packed than the last train home.

And if you can think of a 80s or 90s film, TV show, videogame or pop culture reference, you can be guaranteed that RCR will have found a way to riff on it - Nintendo's ill-fated Virtual Boy? It's in there. Classic arcade coin-op Paperboy? There's a mini-game for that, only you're delivering (ahem) adult mags instead of The Guardian. Or how about being chased by the cast of US sitcom Who's The Boss? Yes, really, it's that random.

And that's the beauty of this mentalist creation from developer Brian Provinciano, who we can only assume has spent the last ten years glued to his VHS player and back issues of Crash! magazine, creating a game so soaked through with retro references, it makes those dreary pop culture compilation shows look even more lethargic and cynical.

In between such riff-tastic stuff, there's a whole city to explore packed with arcade games, side missions and other silliness. And if you get bored of the visuals themselves, then you can tweak 'em using a variety of ingame filters that emulate the graphical look of the ZX Spectrum, DOS, 'See64' and more.

For world-weary gamers then, this is a (rocket launcher-propelled) blast down memory lane, grabbing the 80s and 90s by the throat and stuffing them into a blender, creating the perfect Molotov cocktail of a modern retro game. Hic.