Description of Sunset Riders ROM - MAME

Sunset Riders are a wonderful western themed side scrolling shooter, in which you take the role of one of the four wild-west bounty hunters, Steve, Billy, Bob and Cormano, whose lifestyle is pretty much as tense and action packed as one would expect from a bounty hunter.

The game is split into several levels (interlaid with ‘bonus stage’ minigames, triggered by reaching a certain amount of points). Each level represents a particular manhunt, with the subject of the bounty waiting for you at the end of it as a boss you have to defeat.

Now, this all sounds easy, and at the beginning it is. But as you play along, the game steps it up. And sooner or later you’ll start losing lives faster than your trusty old revolver can shoot. Well, not really, not with the power-ups increasing its fire rate, anyway. But you will die. And dying costs you coins; Sunset Riders do not feature a limited number of lives, as long as you pop-in some more money into the machine, you can die as often as you want to.

But the bright side is, you don’t have to die alone. In fact, depending on the version of the game you’re playing, up to 4 players can play simultaneously on a single machine (note: ROM archive available here is the 4 player version). When the game boots up, a character selection screen pops-up, and here you’re friends can join.

Yet, if you are playing alone, it’s also the point where you can get lost. Because, you see, Sunset Riders do not feature a traditional character selection as we know it today, but take a rather different approach instead: four coin slots and four sets of controls, one for each character. To chose a character, all you have to do is to pop up a coin into the appropriate slot and press a button on the appropriate set of controls.

And that’s pretty straightforward on the real deal arcade, but it’s a rather retarded solution in MAME. Because either you don’t have these sets of controls set-up correctly in your MAME installation, or you don’t know their exact layout like me.

So, either way, you have to bring up the MAME controls tab and  either look up the corresponding controls or—provided you’re playing alone—setup your gamepad for the particular character you want to play at the moment (P1–Steve, P2–Billy, P3–Bob and P4–Cormano).

But that’s merely a part of the risk that comes with the business, so to say, and by no means is the game itself at fault here. Quite to the contrary.

First released on JAMMA (Japanese Amusement Machine and Marketing Association) arcade machines in 1991, Sunset Riders were successfully ported also to SNES and Sega Genesis console platforms, and proved to be yet another Konami’s successful title. And quite rightfully so.

For the audio-visual aspect of the game is nothing short of excellent for its time. The gameplay is fun and fast, and the naive, lighthearted humor (don’t worry you’ll know what I mean soon enough ☺) is merely the final soft touch to the overall atmosphere of the game, which is indeed a highly enjoyable experience.

CONTROLS:

• 8-way joystick
• MAME button 1 = ‘fire’
• MAME button 2 = ‘jump’

To jump onto (and from) the ledges, platforms and balconies unreachable by a regular jump, move joystick up/down while pressing the jump button at the same time.

[veo]