YMMV / Sunset Riders

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The way Billy idles around in back, blushing during the saloon girls' dance while all the other characters cheer on, front row center. Does he have a thing for one, or all of them and is too bashful to stick around? Has he already got a steady back home? Or is he not attracted to them at all?
  • Bob's tendency to spit out the booze he finds in doorways suggests that he Can't Hold His Liquor, but it may also be because he's used to drinking better stuff and he just can't stand the taste of what he finds.
  • El Greco tossing Cormano his charro hat. Camaraderie with a fellow Mexican/non-white, or an apology for the "die, gringo" insult from the start of the fight, which was inaccurate in Cormano's case?
• Breather Boss: Paco Loco (along with his stage), especially when compared to Chief Scalpem and El Greco. Being a Stationary Boss after the lightning-fast Scalpem, his bullets ridiculously easy to dodge with the sliding move, and that there's a blind spot right underneath his fence which you can use to dodge most of his attacks allows players a moment to catch their breath before facing the far more difficult Final Boss.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cormano for being somewhat unique among the playable characters, being a Mexican bandito with a cool sombrero who downs whole bottles of tequila and then smashes them over his own head. Cormano also wields a Shotgun, which is extremely effective, especially when the player equips the dual weapons power up!
• Ethnic Scrappy: Native American players would probably not take kindly to Chief Scalpem for being a cartoonishly stereotypical Indian warrior with a name that screams savage native. It also doesn't help that he's one of the hardest bosses in the game.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Bury me with my money." This phrase was made into a website. And a fake movie!
  • "RUN TO AVOID GETTING KILLED." Besides being a bit of Narm, the weird poses used when running made it one of the most recognizable parts of the game.
• Nintendo Hard: Despite the lighter overall look, this will kick the players' butt just as hard as Contra does.
• Polished Port: The Super Nintendo port is, aside from a lack of scaling effects, two player co-op instead of four, and a sizeable amount of censorship, fairly faithful to the original arcade game all things considered, if slightly easier because of less obstacles on-screen at once. The Sega Genesis version by comparison is more of a reformulated port that, while carrying a number of core elements, works out to be drastically different in due part to the far smaller cartridge size.
• Spiritual Successor: The game is one to Konami's earlier western-themed shooter Iron Horse. It also received two in particular. Mystic Warriors was made by the same team and even features a cameo by Steve, while Konami's arcade game version of Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa is a very similar western-themed side-scroller.
• That One Boss:
  • "Hawkeye" Hank Hatfield spends most of his fight jumping around and hiding behind crates while shooting at you. Not only that, he’s one of the few bosses to openly try to avoid your shots, making hitting him difficult. He’s only easy near the end of his fight when he stops using cover and just goes for it. He’s undoubtedly the hardest boss in the first half of the game.
  • El Greco will empty your pockets if you're not quick on your feet. You'll spend a lot more time repositioning yourself away from his whip range than you will actually shooting him. The fact he blocks your bullets with a door hatch also means he's hard enough to hit when he's standing still. The only time you can really hit him is when he’s jumping.
  • Chief Scalpem. He can block bullets with a pair of knives, throw four at a time while jumping, and cut you down with them if you get too close. He's the least predictable boss in the game and is guaranteed to take more than a few lives from you unless you have lightning fast reflexes. Those knives also have unpredictable hitboxes.
  • Sir Richard Rose. When he's taking cover in his balcony, he can aim at you no matter where you are, and his bullets are quick. Add in all the henchmen who keep showing up from all sides and filling the screen with shots, and you're guaranteed to be caught off-guard many times. Once Richard's cover is destroyed, he jumps down from it and begins to leap all over the screen while you try to chase him down with your bullets and dodge everyone's gunfire, which is an incredibly difficult task to pull off. Oh, and did we mention that once you beat Richard for the first time, he Turns Red? He lies there for a while, making you think you're done with the game, then stands up, laughs at you, and throws off a now broken steel plate he was wearing under his suit. Now you have to kill him all over again.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While the Genesis version is still considered a good game in its own right, it was bound to be hit with this trope as it had a lot of stuff changed as a result of technical limitations. Common complaints include the removal of some of the bosses and the removal of two of the playable characters.
• Values Dissonance: Chief Scalpem. Even his name is an uncomfortable stereotype of Native Americans. The SNES port and the Arcade Archives re-release attempted to alleviate this by renaming him to "Chief Wigwam", and in all the versions that he appears in, he is explicitly spared to make the fight less uncomfortable, though YMMV on how much of an improvement it is.
• Woolseyism: The SNES version of Chief Scalpem's level replaces the Amerindian Warriors other than Scalpem himself into normal bandits, to avoid Unfortunate Implications of massacring natives. This ends up fixing a bit of Fridge Logic after the Boss Battle when Scalpem's sister shows up — Why wouldn't she have spoken up when the rest of their tribe was getting blown away?

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