I love this game! Renegade started life as an arcade game, but the first time I experienced it was when I given a copy to play on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k many moons ago. It's a lot like Double Dragon, Final Fight and games like that, with quite similar storyline, in as much as it's about a guy having to fight bad guys in order to save his girlfriend but it's very playable and very addictive. If you've played these kinds of fighters before, you'll recognize the early simplicity in this one.
You're stuck to one screen that scrolls a little on each edge.
You control a vigilante, in the NES version of the game he's named Mr K, but in the Spectrum version of the game you don't get to find out his name. It could be said that Renegade was a rather more brutal game than others of its genre, and even allowed the player to keep attacking a downed enemy. It was also possible to pick up fallen enemies and throw them at oncoming fighters. Doesn't sound much by today's standards but back in the day that was really quite something! The game is set over 5 stages, starting off in a subway station and ending up in a biker gang's
hideout. From memory, one of the coolest parts of this game is when the gang comes at you on their motorcycles and you have to do flying kicks to knock them off their bikes. Very cool! The game's graphics are also worth a mention. They're not without their limitations (all the characters wear the same trousers to save memory, for example), but for their time they were detailed and perfectly animated.
The game gets progressively harder the further you get into it, which is how games should be! The knife throwers are a particular pain in the bum and the final boss you have to face wields a gun and is very tricky to defeat.
The sequels to the game, of which I think there were a few, never really lived up to the magic of the original and I think the sequels were actually made by Ocean Software instead of Technos Japan who made the original version of the game. Renegade's combination of gritty violence and tactics make it a classic of 8-bit gaming, and still worth playing twenty years on.
