STREETS OF RAGE

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Cats

Cats

Deceased
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 17, 2020
Anyone here into Streets? or beat 'em ups in general? One of my favorite series and one of the few types of games that I still play. kinda lost interest in videogames that aren't 90's arcade titles or castlevanias. Anyway one day last year I found out about Streets of Rage Remake (SORR). Remake is gold and I will never not shill it. It is a fan-created hybrid of all three original games combined into one perfect singular game with upgraded sprites, story elements, stages, sounds, everything. It is the utimate SOR experience. I love Streets of Rage 4 for what it is but in my opinion everything is just done better in Remake...aside from Blaze's animations of course which are the best thing in Streets 4.

oh yeah...and you gotta play it with an arcade stick. that is mandatory

This thread will probably only appeal to a small group of peeps but I was curious how kiwi thought of the Streets games or if he played the masterpiece that is Remake. Final Fight 3 is rad too. I would kill for an arcade-graphic quality update to that game.
 
Just played through an english patched Bare Knuckle 3 version, it's amazing all the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor when it was brought to America. The story begins different, for starters, and then there Ash. Gameplay still holds up almost 30 years later. It's frantic and leaves little room for error, especially in the higher dificulties. The different endings have also changed a little.

edit: The tricks to play as Roo and Shiva still work.
 
Not sure if Castle Crashers counts, but I played the hell out of that back in the day. I also enjoy River City Ransom and Double Dragon when I'm feeling retro emulation. What would you recommend for a starting point in the series?
 
Wintersun said:
Not sure if Castle Crashers counts, but I played the hell out of that back in the day. I also enjoy River City Ransom and Double Dragon when I'm feeling retro emulation. What would you recommend for a starting point in the series?
Click to expand...
RCR is fantastic, hands down the best beat'em up of its era. I'ts the only game i have seen where an opponent can throw a garbage can at you, and you can jump and kick it back at them, catch it out of mid-air when it bounces off his head and then beat the crap out of a second mofo with it. It's insane.

There's a proper sequel for the super famicom, Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, it's been fully patched in English. It's a great sequel but some of the RPG elements are gone. The combat is less "twitchy" and frantic. Still good for a weekend though.
 
Stornoway said:
There's a proper sequel for the super famicom, Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, it's been fully patched in English. It's a great sequel but some of the RPG elements are gone. The combat is less "twitchy" and frantic. Still good for a weekend though.
Click to expand...
I played it on an emulator way before it was translated and I barely understand Japanese.

That makes it more fun IMO. Wondering why all these Japanese salarymen decide to just beat you up while you're trying to walk down the subway.
 
Stornoway said:
RCR is fantastic, hands down the best beat'em up of its era. I'ts the only game i have seen where an opponent can throw a garbage can at you, and you can jump and kick it back at them, catch it out of mid-air when it bounces off his head and then beat the crap out of a second mofo with it. It's insane.

There's a proper sequel for the super famicom, Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, it's been fully patched in English. It's a great sequel but some of the RPG elements are gone. The combat is less "twitchy" and frantic. Still good for a weekend though.
Click to expand...
Alternatively, get Grand Slam and start knocking enemies over, then beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker at warp speed. Randy and Andy ain't shit when you use one to give the other a concussion.
 
Stornoway said:
Just played through an english patched Bare Knuckle 3 version, it's amazing all the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor when it was brought to America. The story begins different, for starters, and then there Ash. Gameplay still holds up almost 30 years later. It's frantic and leaves little room for error, especially in the higher dificulties. The different endings have also changed a little.

edit: The tricks to play as Roo and Shiva still work.
Click to expand...

I have never been too into games so I never went looking for cool obscure hard to find stuff and I stay out of the loop on things like that (so I missed out on all the import saturn games back in the day which was basically all the good ones) and I am often surprised with info about old games I never knew, but I do remember hearing the japanese version of SOR3 was way better. Very cool that there is an english language patch. I think if I could go back in time and secure one import it would have been the turbografx16 CD and Rondo of Blood...it has become one of my fav games now that I can emulate it. What a masterpiece. I try and 100% it at least once every few months.

I was a huge arcade fan as a kid and loved Final Fight. Final Fight was actually my introduction to the concept of trolling in a way, because "friendly fire" was always on in most of the versions, you could walk up to someone playing the machine and put your money in and instead of beating up the bad guys with them you could attack them and completely ruin their fun. And you did this while standing right next to them, so it was extra sweet. Arcade fistfights were definitely a thing and since it was the 90s there were never any adults around :}
 
Loved them when I was a youngster, now they're not really on my radar. I was pretty crazy about The Simpsons and TMNT ones. Golden Axe was cool.

Power Rangers had surprisingly good ones on SNES, good music and it sprinkled in more platforming than most others did. I appreciated the linear movement too, avoiding the issue of weird hit detection suffered by most of the genre.
 
Of all video game genre's, beat em ups are the girl that, while old age has not been kind to her and she don't fuck near as good as she did, I still see her once in awhile when I'm lonely. Best arcade memories still revolve around them. So some bullet points on em.

Streets of Rage 2x is the go-to if you want pure beat em up mechanical joy and pound for pound the best beat em up game I know currently.

Streets of REmake is where you go for the sheer truckload of content and variation, just a bit behind 2x for mechanics.

SoR 4 didn't quite set the world on fire for me as much as REmake and 2x did, but it's still a fun time and I do like that it brought some more attention to the franchise.

The Takedown is a good little tribute game to it, plus it actually integrates guns in a way that doesn't break it.

Mother Russia Bleeds WOULD be my alltime favorite even over SoR, since it has just about every style element I could want in a video game period, but the actual brawling is way behind. Not to say it's bad, but 2x, Remake and 4 did everything much better.

I still need to get back into River City Underground. I did a playthough as the boxer character, but now need to try the post game content.

Before Streets of Rage, my top dog was Vendetta. It's not quite as enthralling anymore, but still a blast on couch co-op.

Though it hasn't aged well, AT ALL, Crime Fighters did one thing I've never seen any other brawler match; sound design. That bass-y thumb and crunch when you hit people....MMMMM...

Bonesjones said:
I'm more of a Streets of Fire kind of guy, who doesn't love William Defoe in a leather suit of overalls and no shirt fighting with sledge hammers?
Click to expand...
Favorite movie of all time, and deserves a beat em up translation. Though personally it was McCoy that captured my heart in that. Been a Amy Madigan fanboy ever since I saw it.
Wintersun said:
Not sure if Castle Crashers counts
Click to expand...
It does. My only contention is that I'm not much into cutesy art style, but as a brawler it actually is really good.
 
SoR4 is one of the best modern beat-'em-ups in my opinion. Basic bitch enough that anyone with a layman's grasp of the genre could pick it up and play it comfortably enough, but has a high enough skill ceiling that it necessitates a degree of fighting game competency in order to rack up insane hit counters and basically shit on everything the game throws at you in the flashiest manner possible. Fantastic OST as well.

SoRR is also really damn great and I'd like to get back to playing it someday, but I hear it's been difficult to find downloads for it? Maybe I'm years out of date on that info. I just remember something about Bombergames getting hit with the Sega DMCA at some point, and/or something about his shitty Brazilian hosting site being infested with malware after a point.
 
The D&D side-scrollers (Tower of Doom, Shadow Over Mystara) were damned fun and surprisingly well-crafted, with art styles that looked like they'd jumped right off the pages of the books.

The SOR Remake is slick, and it's practically a gold standard for side-scrollers. Double Dragon Neon looks like some kid's half-assed Flash project in comparison.
 
Great games, really liked the remake but goddamn it gets really hard. 2 is probably my favorite mostly because I was able to beat it and I grew up with it, played 1 and beat 4 a couple of times. The music has always been one of my favorite parts of the franchise, even if Yuzo Koshiro lifted elements from popular house songs the guy is really great at making game music.
 
SSj_Ness said:
Loved them when I was a youngster, now they're not really on my radar. I was pretty crazy about The Simpsons and TMNT ones. Golden Axe was cool.

Power Rangers had surprisingly good ones on SNES, good music and it sprinkled in more platforming than most others did. I appreciated the linear movement too, avoiding the issue of weird hit detection suffered by most of the genre.
Click to expand...

yes the Konami 4 player arcade beat em ups were golden. I still kick on an emulated Turts in Time every so often. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was a great capcom one along with the mech series I forget the name that had Jin from Marvel vs. Capcom and his giant mech. The first game was a beat em up the second game was a 1v1 fighter. Name is on the tip of my tongue but I just can't remember. I just played thru the first one last month on Retroarch. Cyberbots or something.

Some of my other all-time favs of course are Capcom's Alien Vs. Predator and the extra bloody japanese rom of Night Slashers - as a horror fan finding this in the arcade was a golden treasure for me and I think I only ever saw one uncensored cabinet as a kid. This game was also great because it wasn't a complete quarter thief...it was really piss easy so you put your 50 cents in and basically got way more than your money's worth of time smashing zombies and werewolves and monsters into bloody piles of goo.

I know I said before that Final Fight 3 was good, and since we never got a cabinet that I would love an arcade graphics updated version but I would seriously drop some real money on getting that done as an actual project and I'm not even kidding. Make it look like it came straight out of a 90's Dave N Busters: extra colors in the palette, frames of animation, moving backgrounds, storyboard splash screens. It would be a somewhat easy port all things considered but I don't know any developers. That game is really special, it has a special feel to it. I think FF3 is the SNES game I put the most hours into even more so than the RPGS.

Capsaicin Addict said:
The D&D side-scrollers (Tower of Doom, Shadow Over Mystara) were damned fun and surprisingly well-crafted, with art styles that looked like they'd jumped right off the pages of the books.

The SOR Remake is slick, and it's practically a gold standard for side-scrollers. Double Dragon Neon looks like some kid's half-assed Flash project in comparison.
Click to expand...

Hell yeah. Almost forgot about those. DND games rocked tho they always seemed to be scarce for me and I did not see them often in the 90s. Now that I have the emus I play em now and then. Also the newer Golden Axe with the centaur chick was a great one. All the Golden Axes are good.
 
SOR 2 > SOR 1 > SOR 3

Plus, the Streets of Rage franchise is the perfect example of video game art done right:

42247073-DD6E-43F4-9486-2B58BB2D270D.jpeg 489B0DE9-66BF-440D-9EDB-DD5A2F60A94F.jpeg 469D8491-19B7-47DD-A379-65C983227AB4.jpeg
 
Gravemind said:
SoR4 is one of the best modern beat-'em-ups in my opinion. Basic bitch enough that anyone with a layman's grasp of the genre could pick it up and play it comfortably enough, but has a high enough skill ceiling that it necessitates a degree of fighting game competency in order to rack up insane hit counters and basically shit on everything the game throws at you in the flashiest manner possible. Fantastic OST as well.

SoRR is also really damn great and I'd like to get back to playing it someday, but I hear it's been difficult to find downloads for it? Maybe I'm years out of date on that info. I just remember something about Bombergames getting hit with the Sega DMCA at some point, and/or something about his shitty Brazilian hosting site being infested with malware after a point.
Click to expand...
Yea, Sega really smacked Bomber hard. It pops up every once in awhile, so grab it and the fan-levels while you can.

In the meantime, SoR2x is still out there, and it's also an excellent time.

Cats said:
Night Slashers - as a horror fan finding this in the arcade was a golden treasure for me and I think I only ever saw one uncensored cabinet as a kid. This game was also great because it wasn't a complete quarter thief...it was really piss easy so you put your 50 cents in and basically got way more than your money's worth of time smashing zombies and werewolves and monsters into bloody piles of goo.
Click to expand...
Thank me later
https://www.mediafire.com/file/cf7u6f4uomgvqa0/NightSlashersXRebalance_Ver1.31.zip/file

And a version with Ash Williams as a playable
https://www.freegameplanet.com/night-slashers-x-download-game/
 
Last edited:
I love Streets of Rage 2 and 3. Yes, 3 just avoid the American version that changes more than just censoring the sprites and removing the gay biker boss. 4 was very good, more so after the DLC. Hope we get a 5 but I'm just glad we got a 4. I think the best is Streets of Rage Remake because it takes everything that worked in the trilogy and expands upon it.

When it comes to Beat 'em Ups I have to confess that Capcom made the absolute best ones and all of them are licensed.

IMHO the best Beat 'em Up ever made is right here:


And then there's The Punisher.


Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.


The much more obscure Battle Circuit.


And that's not even mentioning Final Fight or the Dungeons and Dragons games. Capcom just dominated this genre at it's peak even the lesser ones like Captain Commando and Knights of the Round are still good albeit more generic while not innovating much.

But there's one offs that are great like Vendetta by Konami (again, check out the Jap version):


And Night Slashers which is a MUST if you're into horror:


Then there's Violent Storm and I mention that one because aesthetically it came the closest to resembling a Saturday Morning Cartoon. That and Boogerman and Earthworm Jim 1 and 2.


Not to mention all of the TMNT games Konami put out. The X-Men Arcade game is fine albeit mindless. The Simpsons Arcade game is great too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom