E-Mail This Article to a Friend In the City The Warriors busts a few heads along the way BY AARON SOLOMON
	The Warriors For Xbox and PS2 | Rated "M" for Mature | Developed by Rockstar Toronto | Published by Rockstar Games

Listen up, suckas. There’s a new gang on the streets. They’re a red-hot gang of Warriors, see, and they’re scratching their way back to Coney Island. But the journey won’t be easy, as the major leaguers are hot on their tail, and any hope of a safe return lies in your hands, brothers. Can you dig it?

The Warriors is the latest triumph for Rockstar, purveyors of youth corruption worldwide. This time, they’ve set their sites on reimagining a cult classic, and though the game falls short of perfect, it oozes with enough retro badness to be a worthy companion to Walter Hill’s film.

You start with the opening shot, the Coney Island Wonder Wheel, then move on to an almost shot-for-digitized-shot remake of the train sequence and a somewhat truncated speech by Cyrus. The man gets wasted, Luther frames the Warriors, and the bopping back to Brooklyn begins. But if the game concentrated solely on the Warriors’ trip, it wouldn’t distinguish itself from other straight-up movie adaptations. Instead, much of the gameplay takes place months before Cyrus’s meeting, and it serves to flesh out the characters from the film.

Your first mission, a much-needed tutorial, is as a newly recruited Rembrandt — the little guy with the big ’fro and the spray can — in which you learn all the moves of the game at the expense of a few thirsty bums. The action commands are pretty basic, with a light attack and a heavy attack as well as a grapple option. At later levels, when the action becomes heavier, you may feel the urge to pound away at those buttons, but you’ll do better to be patient when fighting your enemies — though the finicky camera and the sometimes hard-to-shake Aim projectile may make this difficult.

Most of the time you run around in a War Party. Some Warriors are better skilled at certain tasks than others (and Ajax is hoping to pick up some tail along the way), and the mission goals determine which Warrior is the Warchief, whether it’s running around "burning" over other gang’s tags or simply going out for a good old-fashioned rumble. The Warchief also has a set of six commands he can issue the other Warriors; you access this by first pressing on the Left toggle stick and then choosing your command via the Right toggle. When the fighting gets heavy, this sequence can hamper the gameplay, but it’s still a handy feature.

The action is deep, with more than 20 hours of playable mission content. Two people can play as a team or in the free-for-all rumble mode, which is also available in single-player mode. Various abilities and levels are available as unlockable content and can be accessed through the Warriors’ hideout.

The world of The Warriors, though not as wide open as GTA, has so much detail — pretty much all you see, from cars to windows to Whack-a-Mole mallets are fair game — that it’s easy to overlook the occasionally sloppy controls and camera movement. But that doesn’t mean they’re forgivable offenses.

And yes, just like their cinematic incarnations, the Baseball Furies are wimps.