Target Renegade wastes no time in upping the ante from the beat-’em-up action of its recent predecessor Renegade. Its lead character starts off plunked into a multi-storey car park, and the first thing that happens is that a hoodlum on a motorbike comes speeding towards you across the screen. Try to punch his bike and you just end up in a heap on the ground. Execute Renegade’s signature move, the flying kick – as demonstrated by the otherwise unrelated martial artist on the Target Renegade box art – and you can leap above the bike and take out its rider. Smarts, speed and timing can beat an opponent armed with a powerful vehicle. It’s a lesson which the development of Target Renegade also demonstrates.
In 1988, the biggest thing in arcade beat-’em-ups was Double Dragon. As a child without much interest in the genre even I’d heard of it, which says something of its fame. The licence to convert Double Dragon for Western home computers, potentially print money, etc., went to Melbourne House. Ocean subsidiary Imagine missed out. But they had a way past that. Renegade was Imagine’s conversion of an older game, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, by Double Dragon’s Japanese creators Technos. Its star Kunio-kun went on to appear in many more games including dodgeball, football games and all sorts, but rather than Imagine remaking those, their licence to make Renegade included the rights to create their own, self-contained Renegade sequels. So while Kunio-Kun was off playing dodgeball, his Western counterpart could quickly go on beating people up with no need to worry about what the original was up to. And for Target Renegade, that meant quickly executing everything that made Double Dragon succeed.
First, you can now play in a two player mode, adding much extra capacity for chaos, co-operation and conflict. On top of that and the newly mounted enemies, possibilities are further increased by the ability to make enemies drop their weapons and pick them up yourself. There’s enough of a complication to the difference in timings to strike with the weapons rather than a fist that it’s not quite just a straightforward power-up but a further added dimension. More importantly, the satisfaction of swinging a sledgehammer at the guy who was doing the same to you a moment earlier is considerable.
Less Double Dragon-indebted additions work well too. The music (at least on the 128k version for more advanced Spectrums) is the best I’ve heard in Super Chart Island so far. Its twinkling melancholy is an excellent counterpoint to the action and helps prevent the grittiness of the setting becoming as cartoonish as its naming as ‘Scumville’ suggests. The little animations between levels aren’t much, but the opening multi-storey car park stage really benefits from showing the main character disappearing into a lift between levels, visible in the background so you can see the final escape of the ground floor getting gradually closer. As well-executed as it was quickly put out, it’s no surprise that Target Renegade ended up outdoing the conversion of Double Dragon all round.
