Shooting giant cats have never been so much fun!
Riot is a 1992 Run-and-Gun arcade game made by NMK.
A terrorist group called the Magic Tigers (!!!) have revived an evil sorcerer defeated centuries in the past, intending to use the sorcerer as means of taking over the world (what else?). With magic and monsters at their disposal, it's up to your character (an unnamed soldier resembling a blond Schwarzenegger) to stop the Tigers.
Riot contain examples of:
- Airborne Mooks: Mooks on helicopters and Hover Bikes in outdoor levels serves this role.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: The Final Boss, the sorcerer, who heralds the start of the final battle by summoning the giant head of a dragon taking up the entire screen. The sorcerer spends the entire battle atop the head as the dragon attacks on it's master's behalf.
- Auto-Scrolling Level: The stage atop a moving train, and another where you're in a helicopter fending off mooks from all sides.
- Background Boss: All the bosses alternates between facing you foreground of the arena, or moving to the background (which you can't follow) to sic ranged projectiles on you. The sorcerer himself is a more straightforward example, spending the fight in the background on his dragon who does all the attacking for him.
- Blow Gun: As you're shooting your way through hordes and hordes of assorted enemies, sometimes the game will throw random Hollywood Natives enemies in the foreground - guys wearing feathers in their hair and shooting darts at you with their blowpipes.
- Close-Range Combatant: Enemies who wield curved blades appears throughout on a regular basis starting from the second stage, despite the availability of guns and rockets.
- Construction Vehicle Rampage: A wrecking ball crane shows up as a Mini-Boss; you must shoot the vehicle while avoiding the dropping ball.
- Doppelgänger Spin: A Dual Boss near the end are a pair of hooded wizards who transforms into somewhere between eight to twelve copies of themselves, two which are real and the rest being illusions. The copies don't have the ability to attack, but for most of the battle you'll need to spot the real bosses and shoot them as they prepare to blast you from afar.
- Everything Breaks: You can destroy everything in the foreground and background.
- Evil Wizard: The Evil Sorcerer revived by the terrorists who serves as the game's Final Boss.
- Flunky Boss: All the bosses have the ability to summon mooks into the arena. The goblin sorcerer summons mud golems, the Norse god lookalike have hostile birdmen as his backup, while the Giant Cat Colonel have wolves.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The first boss already counts under this; after fighting your way through a compound filled with armed soldiers, you then fight a goblin sorcerer (looking a lot like Yoda) who can summon golems into battle. Later on you fight an evil Norse God, a Colonel who transforms into a Cat Demon, and the Final Boss who sics a Dragon on you.
- Killer Gorilla: Every now and then, the game will throw a giant gorilla as a Recurring Mini-Boss who will jump up and down attempting to crush you, or swat you with its fists. The gorilla may or may not have other mooks flanking him, and in one occasion you fight two of them at the same time.
- Long Neck: Adding to the weirdness of the bosses, the Giant Cat Colonel in cat form can extend his neck to bite at you from the background.
- The Magic Versus Technology War: The game pits a magic-using terrorist group against an unnamed soldier with a gun.
- The Mall: The second stage is inexplicably set in a shopping mall, when the rest of the levels are military or jungle-themed, or otherwise set outdoors like in a valley, an army train or in some desert ruins.
- Mega Neko: The third boss, who seemingly appears to be a regular man in a military uniform. But as soon as you enter, he teleports you to the boss dimension, transforms into a giant cat flanked by wolves, cue boss battle.
- No Name Given: Your muscular, bare-chested, machine-gun totting hero isn't given a name at any point in the game, and neither are any of the bosses (not even the main villain, the sorcerer).
- One-Man Army: It's you against an entire army of soldiers, and later against demons, giant gorillas, and assorted monsters.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The Final Boss is a dragon summoned by the sorcerer, one so large it's head takes up the entire screen. It lacks the common dragon ability to breathe fire, instead using Eye Beams to fry you (which you retaliate by shooting it's eyes out).
- Phantom Zone: Each and every boss fight is set in one of these, where as soon as you confront them the boss will teleport you into a black, featureless void with limitless surrounding space. You get to return to the normal plane of living once the boss is killed.
- Railing Kill: Enemies in the background behind balconies, high windows and railings will inevitably fall to their deaths when shot.
- Soft Water: Taken to the extreme, with several stages having you falling from aircrafts or rooftops to escape enemies, dropping several hundreds of meters through building awnings or through clouds... before landing in shallow, knee-high pools of water. You then get up looking none the worse for wear, picks up your machine-gun and continues kicking all sorts of ass.
- Spread Shot: One of the classic arcade weapons shows up in this one too, which splits your shots into a three-bullet arc.
- Squishy Wizard: Once the Sorcerer's powerful summoned dragon has both its eyes shot out, which disables the magic barrier protecting him, all it takes is one bullet to put him down.
- Stripped to the Bone: The sorcerer and main villain of the game, upon defeat, turns into a robed skeleton in the following cutscene. Before the bones fade to dust turning into Empty Piles of Clothing. Roll credits.
- Traintop Battle: The second stage have you fending off enemies while atop a train, with mooks either on helicopters or climbing up the train's edges. At one point another train carrying extra mooks will pull up, and their occupants will leap from their traintop to yours.
- Uniqueness Decay: The first stage have a single red-clad, blade-wielding mook you encounter right before the first boss battle, amidst the dozens and dozens of soldiers armed with guns. From the second stage onwards blade-using enemies started appearing regularly.
