Publisher: Renovation
Developer: Data East
Port: Wolf Team
Released: 1993
One thing the Sega CD was fantastic for was reviving old-school laserdisc arcade games, especially a collection of animated Japanese games that I was completely unfamiliar with back in the early nineties. The most memorable of these has to be Road Avenger.
Released as Road Blaster by Data East in 1985, the game tells the story of a vigilante in a red supercar out for revenge against the gang responsible for the death of his wife. Everyone in the world does battle or two or four wheels for the most part. It really feels like Mad Max set in urban and rural america pre-apocalypse.
Road Avenger’s game director Yoshihisa Kishimoto was also the director of Cobra Command, which was the first of these classic Japanese LD games to appear on the Sega CD in North America. He’s much better known, though, as the director of Nekketsu Kunio-kun (aka Renegade) and Double Dragon for Techos Japan, which essentially makes him the father of the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre. Eagle-eyed gamers will notice that the car sitting in the garage at the start of Double Dragon is actually the same car featured in Road Avenger.
The Sega CD version of Road Avenger features all of the levels found in the arcade but it’s not an exact port of the game. While the video does cover a rather large amount of screen real estate for a Sega CD game, it’s still not full-screen in Road Avenger. And of course the colors of the video have taken the expected hit, although I still think the game looks pretty nice overall.
The biggest difference here lies in the controls. While the Sega CD port still gives the player control over steering, braking and boosting, it leaves out the arcade game’s targeting reticle. In the arcade, most of the time when the player was asked to hit the boost button a target area would appear on-screen. The player not only had to hit that button, but move the reticle over the target area in order to complete the command. The subsequent Saturn and PlayStation ports of Road Avenger brought this back, and I have to say that it makes the game slightly less enjoyable. Removing it for the Sega CD was the right thing to do.
The intro song in Road Avenger is iconic. The Sega CD version was performed by Japanese band Jaywalk, and as far as I know is not in any other version of the game. Unfortunately due to the fact that it’s playing as part of a Sega CD video vile the sound quality is low, and combined with the fact that the singer appears to be a native Japanese speaker singing in English, I don’t know that anyone is 100% sure what the lyrics actually are. This has led to some pretty hilarious fan interpretations. In 2019 The Gaming Muso famously released his own cover of the tune, and it is awesome.
In fact nearly the entire soundtrack has been reworked for the Sega CD game. There’s nothing really special about this one compared to the original soundtrack in the arcade game. I do prefer it, but mostly due to the fact that my entire history with Road Avenger is on the Sega CD hardware. The original, 1985 soundtrack has a very 80s anime vibe to it. Every time I hear it I can’t help thinking of the original Macross soundtrack.
Road Avenger is FMV comfort food. It’s a pretty unique premise for a game like this, and totally speaks to my interests. Really, all of the japanese FMV arcade ports on the system are worth playing, but Road Avenger definitely sits atop the pile.
