I’ve played many, many games over the years and I often find myself attracted to 2 main types, the good old platformer and Beat Em Ups. I’ve recently been referring to Beat Em Ups as "Brawlers" as I’ve never really liked their genre definition. “Fighting game” doesn’t fit, as something like Virtua Fighter, DOA and Street fighter all fit into that mix and are very different. A few years ago I was introduced to the term “Belt scrollers” which is just a stupid term; people defended it as the characters often travelled along the screen as if they were on a conveyor belt and they had the ability to move left/right and up down in the playing field. Yeh? Well guess what, Zaxxon does that, 1942 too, it's just a vertical conveyor belt, Paperboy, the list goes on and on. Essentially it doesn’t describe the game play at all, just the movement of the screen and therefore something like Kung-Fu master nor Altered Beast fit in that classification.
So here I will refer to them as Brawlers, as I think it fits well indicating the often chaotic nature of their gameplay and the fact that you can often punch more than one enemy at a time.
Firstly though, I have to remind myself about the brawlers I have played over the years. I am sure I am missing some, but after scrolling through a few lists, these are the ones I have played enough to be confident I have a pretty solid idea of what is going on in them:
1. The list would be way too long.2. For my purposes it is unneeded, because if a particular version is in my top 10, I will state so.3. I probably can't remember them all.
So, due to popular demand (heh) here I am with a nice little list of my top 10 Brawlers on various platforms that I have played over the years.
