Fetch Quest

About once per year, I'll fire up the NES classic, River City Ransom (RCR). The game is an exceedingly cool blend of platformer, beat'em up, and RPG, and is the right combination of quick and fun that makes it something you can replay fairly often without it ever feeling dull. Each time I go through the game, I might play it a little differently. One run, I'll try to blaze though stages, getting to the end as fast as possible. Next time, I'll try to amass a small fortune so I can purchase all the insanely expensive (if not a touch unnecessary) abilities. However, no matter what plan of attack I bring into a RCR playthough, I always start each game the exact same way: beat up enough random baddies to earn the $26.95 necessary to purchase Dragon Feet from the book shop.

I'm far from an expert on the subject of RCR, but from my point of view, Dragon Feet turn the game from a pretty tough challenge to something fairly manageable for your average gamer. Here's the deal: normally, when you press the kick button, your character kicks. Duh, right? The thing is, the kick is kind of slow, and there's a short delay afterwards when you can't kick again. It's tiny, maybe a half a second at best, but that can be enough time to muck things up for you when you're surrounded by three members of the Frat Boys gang. The solution? Dragon Feet, of course. This magical gift changes the kick button, so rather than one relatively slow swipe of your leg, you fire off three lightning quick kicks, with no difference in the overall time the attack takes. In other words, the power of your kick button effectively triples.

This is great for so many reasons. Obviously, tripling attack power in any game is a good thing. An extra bonus here is that three kicks will just about always knock your foe to the ground, giving you time to plan your next move, or shift focus to another enemy harassing you from behind. A single kick offers no such advantage; an opponent very quickly recovers after one blow. It totally changes how you play the game. You go from just trying to survive each screen without losing too much life to an enemy-killing machine, mowing down everything in your path. Okay, so maybe not forever; enemies do get tougher, and soon enough Dragon Feet is downgraded from "lethal" to a more modest " very useful". Still, for an item you can get at the very first town in the game, that's not so bad, is it?