Tuesday 27 August 2024

Beat 'em Ups; A top 10


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:

Alien StormNinja Combat NEOGEO
Alien VS PredatorPuliRuLa
Altered BeastRed Heat
Bad Dudes VS Dragon NinjaSailor Moon (arcade game)
Cadillacs and DinosaursSpiderman: The Video Game
Capt America and the avengersStreets of rage 1,2,3,4
Capt CommandoTarget Renegade
Comix Zone (on reflection, this doesn't fit)Tenchi WO Karau II (Warriors of Fate)
D&D 1,2The Combat Tribes
Die hard ArcadeThe Crow
Double Dragon C64The Crows, Battle action
Double Dragon II (NES)The Ninja Warriors (+ Again)
Dynamite DUx (C64)The Punisher
Final fight 1,2,3The Simpsons
Golden Axe 1,2,3TMNT arcade 1
GA Revenge Of Death AdderTMNT Hyperstone Heist
Guardian HeroesTMNT Shredders revenge
**I'm sure I've missed some**TMNT Turtles in time
King of DragonsTwo Crude Dudes (CrudeBusters)
Knights of the RoundUnder cover cops
Mighty Final FightVendetta (Arcade Game)
Nekketsu OyakoXmen (konami arcade game)

A lot of the games above I've probably played on multiple formats, such as Double Dragon, Final Fight and even Golden Axe, so I have tried to avoid doing that because:
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.