Beat-em-Ups |
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| The much maligned beat-em-up genre, the usual criticisms towards games which fall into this genre are predictability, unoriginality and repetitiveness, so for this feature I am going to try to concentrate on games that stand out more from the crowd, as well as including the important pioneers of the genre. |
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Alien Storm |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - Mega Drive |
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Alien Storm has a solid engine, with a nice set of moves and controls, add to this some minor resource management forcing you to be careful with how much enery you exert, nice gun game style shooting levels and action packed chase after the bad guys levels and you get a game with a bit more variety than the average beat-em-up. |
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Battletoads |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - NES, Mega Drive |
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The Battletoads may have started out as Turtles clones but Rare managed to bring their own brand of personality to the characters with their over the top expressions and attacks, There's a lot of ideas here too, each level has it's own thing going on and the game never became monotonous. The difficulty is always brutal though, even with the much easier Megadrive version. |
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Battletoads - Battlemaniacs |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - SNES |
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Fans of the first game couldn't be disapointed with this, the last home version game of the series (I really wish the arcade one had got home ports), everything from the original is revisited and built upon, as well as a whole host of new extremely nasty bits to kill you over and over. I wonder if the series would've gotten more recognition if the difficulty curve had been fairer. |
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Captain America and the Avengers |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - Mega Drive |
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I remember spending some time with this in the arcades as a kid, the Megadrive version isn't quite as good but is still leagues ahead of the terrible SNES port. The game has all the usual beat-em-up features along with a fire button (press two buttons at once) funny "Engrish" style translation and some nice shoot-em-up levels. |
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Captain Commando |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - SNES |
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One of the more influential games in the genre, Captain Commando had a very well implemented run feature which still allowed for a lot of maneuverability, you notice it's easier to change direction during a run, run vertically, and do running air attacks, The game also has a nice B movie style theme throughout. |
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Double Dragon |
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2 Player (MD) 1 Player (NES) |
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Stand out versions - Mega Drive, NES |
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This has to of been one of the most important releases for the genre, virtually all later beat-em-ups took from this classic in one way or another. Unfortunately there were no perfect home ports, be it the NES' mucked about moves list and 1 player support to the Master System's awful collision detection and poor fighting engine to the cheap AI and general buggyness of the Megadrive version, all had their problems. The MD version is probably the best and plays closest to the original but is so expensive that I'd say most people would be better off settling for the NES version. |
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Double Dragon II |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - NES |
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Technos really did a turn around for the second Double Dragon on the NES, they sorted out all the problems the first game had and did a tremendous job, this time it was two players, had a great fighting engine resurrected from Renegade and pretty high presentation throughout. |
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Dungeons and Dragons Collection |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - Saturn |
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The superlative D&D Beat-em-ups Shadow over Mystara and Tower of Doom were released together for the Sega Saturn under the "collection" title, The games truelly have some of the most beautiful graphics seen in a beat-em-up and the extensive RPG elements mean that the longevity of these games is far greater than the average game from the genre, any Saturn owning beat-em-up fan owes it to himself to import this from japan. |
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Final Fight |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - Mega CD |
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Another milestone release for the genre, Final Fight influenced pretty much every beat-em-up released after it. The Japanese release of the Mega CD version was the best of the lot as releases out side of Japan usually had minor censoring. |
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Final Fight 3 |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - SNES |
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For the 3rd game in their acclaimed series Capcom decided to merge FF with their highly popular Street Fighter series, adding the quarter turn style super moves to the normal roster as well as Captain Commando's running style, which helped to liven the game up a lot. |
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Golden Axe |
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2 Player |
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Stand out versions - Mega Drive |
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One of the first really stand-out Beat-em-ups and a flagship title for showing the Megadrive's superior power when it originally came out, riding the dragons in the game was a brilliant too. |
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