Street Hassle
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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In Street Hassle you play a high school teacher pushed too far , or the former punk rocker and current martial artist Duke Dunnegan (Bad street Brawler) aternatively the wrestler Gorgeous George (Bop N' Rumble) who finds he is the only one in the position to clean the mean streets from various thugs and loonies.

Gameplay involves walking through the streets and taking out any enemies that get in the way. Kicks and punches are your basic moves at first, but as the game progresses, new moves and attacks become available, and new enemy types to beat up as well.

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Street Hassle, being the respectable brother to its mirror games Bop 'n Rumble/Bad Street Brawler (you can tell by our protagonist's neat hair compared to his alternate hair metal self), is all about protecting the streets from the terrors of.... blind people and old ladies and whatever other dangers that makes no sense, which our hero has to deal with. Like... uh, gorillas? Basketball players? Dogs? 

I'm starting to wonder whether the creators of this game had some issues they needed to work out, and thought this game might be the platform to do it. 

Again, your opponents are old ladies with purses and blind people, which brings SO many questions to the table. But make no mistake about it: in this game, they are vicious, particularly when you get to later stages. Blind people will attack you on sight with their walking canes, and old ladies will throw their purses at you and call you a brute if you fight back. The game does ease you into it, with all your opponents having regular attacks at first, but their move range definitely ups the ante when you reach the sixth stage, which returns you to the beginning of your five stage move loop. Blind people start wielding their canes like samurai swords and go completely ape crazy, while the gorillas start throwing bananas at you, and yes, you fight gorillas in this game. What they're doing in the streets is anybody's guess, but just go with it. I mean... at least I can understand the basketball players and bikers, and maybe also the wrestler enemies, but... also, fat lumberjacks? 

To make matters more hilarious... er, I mean... weird, your character usually come with four moves, two of which gets swapped around for each stage. The regulars are a spinning kick and some sort of crouching petting thing that will trip up anything, but is mostly meant for the dog, because your character will say "good boy" to dogs while he's... petting them to death? The remaining two are, as mentioned, switched around between levels, but most of them look like wrestling moves, both cartoonish and... mildly less cartoonish. You swing your opponent around as if you're dancing. You lift them over your head and twirl them around until their energy's depleted, after which you throw them off screen. You... uh, twist their ears until they fall over? (Complete with twisty-eared sound effects?) You even lift someone up and ram them into the ground like some kind of pole. 

Street Hassle isn't a particularly good-looking game, but it's not really bad-looking either. It looks kind of raw and chunky, and I suspect the character sprites have been stretched vertically to make them taller, but unlike in the European Street Fighter game, the cartoonish style of Street Hassle actually makes it work somehow anyway. The backgrounds do carry some detail, but are mostly made in shades of gray, with some green in the level taking place in the park. It's a conundrum of design that manages to look both detailed and drab, which is fascinating on its own. When you get down to it, the game wins because the backgrounds, while dull, are clear and detailed, and the characters never really feel lost in the scenery, so from a game design standpoint, this game wins. 

The game also plays rather well. Your character might be limited to four moves per stage, instead cycling through two of them on a five-stage rotation to create a sense of variation. This works well enough, though the moves tend to vary in usefulness, particularly as you're usually forced to deal with two enemies at a time, which makes the "constant damage until enemy defeat" moves more of a liability. To make matters more challenging, after your first stage rotation, the regular kick -- I.E. the vanilla crowd handler -- is taken away, forcing you to use the remaining two, maybe even relying on the low grope to immobilize one of them from time to time. Thankfully, the controls are responsive enough to negate any problems with multiple enemies... most of the time, but that still makes the unbalanced move selection its biggest challenge, particularly the one where the two changable moves are basically holds of sorts. And the game takes away the kick when things really start to get serious too, which will make it borderline unfair at times. One major downside is unfortunately that the game give you a very hard time if you need to immediately turn around and attack, mostly due to the fact that attacks are made by holding down the button and moving the joystick in a direction. 

On a more interesting note, the game also seems to recognize the possibility that, since you're only fighting two opponents at a time, you might as well just run all the way to the end of the stage instead. After all, that was the one really stupid downside to Renegade III and its constantly respawning enemies. And since opponents here will slap your ass if you try to walk past them, you'd just jump instead, right? Well, you can do that... for a little bit, but the game will actually punish you by slowly and temporarily remove your jump height. It shows that the creators of this game has actually looked into how their game works and adjusted things to make people play the game as was intended instead of just taking advantage of bugs or other weaknesses. 

Of course, there's no denying that the game's main draw is its bizarre presentation. Again, we're talking about a game where you beat up grannies and blind people. And gorillas. And basketball players. And fat lumberjacks who will crush you down if you try any lifting moves with them. And you do this with moves like "twisting their ears until they collapse" or "lifting them over your head and twirling them around like a cartoonish dust cloud before throwing them away". If you can accept this wanton cruelty that's only lessened because... well, those suckers are mean... then it's certainly possible to have fun with this game.


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