Killer7 SINdicate

[Jack]

Are you a fan of a game that you know is objectively great but for some reason it has a terrible reputation amongst gamers and the internet community as a whole? This is the thread where you set the record straight and let it be known, that these games are good and were always good. Dat ass just doesn't know yet coz the English-based internet is generally populated with one type of gamer.
Lets be honest, 'internet community' just means a bunch of nerdy self-proclaimed 'Liberal' White guys from reddit. I recall that I was on a crusade to restore The Great Antonio Inoki's reputation coz so many nerdy goofy White guys kept talking trash & spreading false rumors about him (Gee this group of pretentious nerds sure love spreading unfounded rumors about those they hate! It even happened to me, lol.), not realizing how legendary of a figure that he actually is. They pretend that Inoki going nearly bankrupt once in his life, somehow defines his entire life when The BIG CHIN Inoki is rich enough to buy off entire islands from Fidel Castro.

Inoki is on Beat Takeshi's lvl imo, and possibly even grander considering everything that Inoki has accomplished in his life. I am thankful, that I am seeing more & more people praising Inokism these days.



His popularity never waned anywhere else in the world but the USA, coz the USA is populated by fucking retards.
I only bring up Inoki as a defining example of a legendary figure, who's completely shat on by English-based internet, to illustrate the point if it can happen to a man as famous, relevant & legendary as he is, then it can easily happen with video games. The two games that I'm starting this thread off with, have never had legendary status and were always hated ever since their inception.
One of the problems is that they're both beat em ups, which has a fanbase populated by retards who think that the only beat em ups that exist are Streets of Rage & Ninja Turtles, lol.


Anyway I'll start off this thread with two misunderstood classics that are vehemently hated by everybody for some reason, when I constantly play them and find them to be madly addictive.
GOLDEN AXE 3 and DOUBLE DRAGON 4

It's a really sad shame that DD4 is so hated on, coz I feel that DD4 respects (both in terms of gameplay & story.) DD's legacy far more than Streets of Rage 4 ever did. (Sor4 has fanatical fans who only like SOR2 & 4, then diss the entire genre.)
SOR4 is a great game and could easily be placed in the top 20 or maybe even top 10 brawlers of all time, but it did so at the expense of what SOR was, which was a martial arts game vs gangsters. SOR4 is some weird internet nerd meme bullshit where everyone including Max happens to know how to do Superhero superpowers.
SOR4 just so happens to be a good game underneath all of the retarded memes & White boi nerdiness. (I specify the race coz it doesn't feel like a Japanese game. Jap games rarely ever feel like nerdy collegehumor inside jokes. SOR4 has this aura of Self-Aware Irony all over it that you just wouldn't see from a typical Jap game. Japanese games are zany yes, but they wouldn't be 'ironic' about it. Jap games own their insanity!)

DD4 never forgot its roots (Some would argue that this is DD4's main issue judging from the way it looks lol.) DD4's depicts the Dragon twins winning over the Okada sisters (who are Gangsters) by showing them mercy & showing through example what the Dragon Twin's martial arts philosophy can accomplish. This is a large part as to why I love the entire Karate Kid/Cobra Kai series so far. They pay so much respect to ancient ass traditions, and portray them as a way of life, rather than as a tool for power.

A comment I wrote at a video that I recently saw about Import only Genesis games. I'll link to the vid later within this post. He said that Golden Axe 3 is just more of the same from GA2 & GA1, which is odd to me coz GA3 plays nothing like the first two games.

How is Golden Axe 3 more of the same when it's actually one of the more complex beat em ups with fighting game style move inputs and even an actual block button? I just don't understand beat em up fans. It's like they forget that beat em ups started off complex like with Double Dragon & Double Dragon 2, but everyone seems to think that all beat em ups are supposed to play like Final Fight & Streets of Rage. Even Golden Axe 1 & 2 were slower & tactical like DD & GA3 took that concept & expanded upon it.

I just don't get it, Golden Axe 3 has an actual combo system, fighting game special moves and a fucking block button. It still gets labeled as just more of the same when GA3 actually plays nothing like GA1 & GA2, lol.
Streets of Rage 1 plays more like GA1 & 2 did GA3 ever did. I can't think of a single beat em up on the Genesis that even plays anything like Golden Axe 3. The only 16bit game that even comes close is Return of Double Dragon. (Yes I specify the Jap version coz the Western Super Double Dragon is slow unplayable shit for some reason.) What Golden Axe 3 & Return of Double Dragon have in common are huge move sets which aren't performed with a generic special button or tap forward motion like how it is in Streets of Rage 2.

RODD's move notations are position based, relative to your enemies' current stance as it always has been since DD1. GA3 as I mentioned before, using Street Fighter style move notations where you have to input motion based commands as you tap the action button around the same time that you finish your move-input motion.
Both RODD & GA3 have a block button, but RODD lets you perform even more special moves & a counter attack after a successful block.
Both games have fairly smart enemy ai. You can't just spam special attacks, because they actually block or move out of the way. (LOL something that modern beat em ups such as Koei's musou-shit have always failed to do. Koei-game enemies know how to block, they just never block or know how react successfully after a block.)
Both games have enemy ai who will actually try to use the background against you, either by baiting you off of cliffs or hitting you with environmental damage such as the boxing bag from RODD.

To sum it up, Golden Axe 3 & the Double Dragon series, are the thinking mans' beat em up. Ironic really since it was Double Dragon who started the beat em up craze to begin with, but it rarely ever receives the reputation for it. Most beat em up fans only know of Final Fight but the only beat em up they truly love is Streets of Rage 2.
Which to be fair is one of my fave games of all time, but as I've said countless times, SOR2 is good due to its level design. Not it's actual combat. SOR2's combat is just an even more arcady & simplified version of Final Fight, but like FF1 before it, SOR2 & FF are saved by the level design rather than the actual combat mechanics.

Speaking of Double Dragon, I just bought the Double Dragon & Kunio Kun retro brawler pack (I bought it mostly for Super Dodgeball tho, lol.) and alongside it, I got me Double Dragon 4 since I remember loving the hell out of that game back when I had it on the PS4. Here's a copy & paste of what I said about DD4 at the other forum.

(I ain't linking to the old site coz fuck it. I only get 4 likes. Krizz gets 3 likes, and Xed has a whopping 21 likes for his posts? The fuck, I'm the one who wrote damn near all of the content at the site. Fuck the GHM fanbase I swear. Fucking gay ass trannies who claim to be inclusive but are actually far more myopic, close-minded & bigoted than the average person.)

DW is like the 3d equivalent of a Wayforward game, the music & art design is cool but everything else sucks. In both cases, people only like the games for the waifus (Shantae the Half Genie) & the music. Although the gameplay that's there has potential, the problem with both development houses is that they don't know a damn thing about how to do proper level design, & enemy placement. In regards to Wayforward this is most explicitly expressed by Double Dragon Neon vs Double Dragon 4.
Since most gamers are retards and seem to only care about art & music, most would prefer Neon. The problem with Neon is that the gameplay isn't that good. The ai is fairly brainless and the enemy encounter design is similar to Dynasty Warriors, they just swarm at random.


Neon's combat is so floaty and for some reason it completely lacks DD's position based combat engine where you do a different move depending on the stun state of the enemy. Neon just plays like a basic beat em up modeled after Streets of Rage rather than DD. The music & character design are nice though, which is why so many people love Neon even though it fucking sucks.

Contrast that to Double Dragon 4 which feels like a 2d Urban Reign. DD4 has butt ugly NES gfx, catchy music but most of all the combat is good because you're actually forced to use your entire arsenal. DD4 never feels repetitive (in story mode at least.) because you need to constantly adjust your strategy according to the different enemy types who horde around you.
Tower mode sucks, but I'm only showing this vid because he's actually discussing tactics which you also need to use in the main game.



Unlike Neon, DD4 isn't meant to be played like a button masher.

DD4 feels as deep as a fighter but unfortunately most people who play it, treat it like a button masher which is why DD4 is considered worse than Neon, and Neon being labeled as a good game, even though it's not.
The gamer populace only seem to care about graphics & low effort gameplay. DD4 is shit if you just button mash, but that's because you're not meant to button mash. You're supposed to treat it like an old school FPS back in the day when each gun had a specific use. That's what Double Dragon 4 was like, but instead of guns you did different kung fu moves that helped you depending on the context of the situation.

DD4 was widely considered as shit, but that was due to the beat em up genre being extremely dumbed down by Final Fight (a beat em up that only has one attack button.) with Dynasty Warriors kind of taking up that mantle even though it has more in common with Streets of Rage's combat.

For some reason the rest of the beat em up genre followed Final Fight's example even though Double Dragon was the grand daddy of the genre. Only Capcom's God Hand plays anything like Double Dragon, but even that game is similarly misunderstood as Double Dragon itself.
Well Rockstar's The Warriors also plays like Double Dragon but the combat doesn't feel as smooth due to Rockstar being a bunch of retards who have never designed a game that actually controlled well. (They have good level design though which is why Cockstar games usually sell regardless of how horrible their control schemes are.)

SOR gets a lot of love, but most people who love that game don't even understand why it's good. SOR2 is a masterpiece precisely due to the well thought out level design which gets progressively harder because you eventually fight harder & harder enemies who hit harder, & fight smarter.
Most other beat em ups including Dynasty Warriors do nothing but increase the enemie's strenth & lifebar so that you die in one hit. Dying in one hit doesn't feel satisfying though because you have to hit the enemy over 100s of times before they die. This stupid shit originated with Final Fight.
Dynasty Warriors is some weird bastard child that has Streets of Rage 3's battle system but it's stuck in a game that's designed like Final Fight.
Final Fight 1 is actually a good game despite its flaws because the dumb shit that FF introduced to the genre was really only meant to be balanced around & used within Final fight which is why none of Capcom's other beat em ups play anything like Final Fight. Alien vs Predator, Punisher etc. they all play more like fighting games.
DW plays like a fighting game, but it's missing the one crucial element that defines fighting games. DW's ai doesn't fucking fight back at all. Humorously the series stopped selling by the millions after they added in this 'feature' of brainless a.i. that just stands there doing nothing. I'm guessing that these games sell like gangbusters in China which is why they keep this 'feature' that nobody asked for. lol

I knew I loved DD4, but I had no idea that I praised it that highly. I still love DD4, and imo it could've easily been the best of the franchise, but NES DD2 & SFamicom Return of Double Dragon still has far more polish. DD4 feels like an overglorified fangame like Streets of Rage Remake, but that isn't a bad thing. That's why DD4 is so fucking great. You can play through the entire game as Abobo, lol. It's just that the actual combat mechanics feel too loose and not as precise as earlier games.
BTW, I'm one of those people who think that the Arcade original Double Dragon games are all trash. That's why the mostly arcade accurate Genesis versions of Double Dragon are all terrible, they're fairly accurate renditions of the arcade games. Too bad Genesis DD3 is missing Nude Cleopatra, the only saving point of Japanese version of DD3.

The reason why DD3 is so bad is because the creator of Double Dragon 1 & 2, didn't work on DD3. He made CombatTribes instead which is like Renegade/Renegade-Kunio Kun but on fucking steroids. The final boss is a bangable 7ft tall woman, which sounds gigantic until you realize that she's short when compared to the Blonde main guy that you play as, lol. Combat Tribes is basically Urban Reign before there ever was an Urban Reign.
The only decent version of DD3 is the NES DD3, which yeah it's hard as fuck but at least the combat is good, and it actually works. Unlike with the arcade originals & the Genesis version where the combat feels broken & unresponsive half of the time.
The only thing that's better about the arcade version (besides naked Cleopatra who honestly looks much more of a badass villainess than clothed Cleo.) is that you get more characters to play as like the Arnold/Dolph Lungdren lookalike. (Which is a mute point now since DD4 lets you play as everyone and they all have complete movesets.)
The NES version of DD3 was kinda racist and it only let you play as the Asians, lol. (If I recall, the Lees are meant to be mixed asian like me, lol. Although sometimes they're White like in the Cartoon. Even in the live action movie they were part Asian kek.)


This thread started coz I commented about Golden Axe at this vid I was watching, since it's constantly in my recommends and right away I noticed.

(I'm still subbed to him, since he has interesting subjects. Even though I disagree with nearly all of his opinions.)
This dude seems to be slow-witted. He says so much stupid shit in the video. He honestly doesn't understand what the english translation for Gleylancer is for, and I'm like, how could you fucking ignore that Gleylancer has Ninja Gaiden style cutscenes? AYY LMAO! He does this throughout the entire video, he makes really stupid observations. Bro, ya better off just showing the games coz your opinions reek of a hobbyist who just plays a game for 5 minutes and then moves on. That's why his opinions come off as surface-value & shallow at best.

What really pissed me off is when he completely shitted on Golden Axe 3 by claiming that it's just more of the same.
I'm like really? GA3 plays nothing like GA1 or 2. It doesn't even play like Streets of Rage 3 (which has combat engined that copied Capcom style fighters such as Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, Captain Commando, & Battle Circuit. Similar to how SOR2 & 1 copied Final Fight.)

I'm actually shocked that he likes Battle Mania 2, since from what I saw earlier in the video, he really doesn't like shmups. He seems to be a casual player who likes a game more based off of how it looks, rather than how it plays. Games with much more realistic artstyles such as Golden Axe, Dahna, & Devil Hunter Yohko, he'll straight up call them crap. (He even claims that Dahna plays like a platformer version of Golden Axe? WHAT?) If its cartoony like Pulseman, Cotton, Asha Monster World 4, he'll praise them as the holy grail. Which to be fair, they are great games.
The difference with me, is that I'm grading these games based off its actual combat mechanics.
He doesn't even tell you what his scoring criteria is, but the commonality I've seen is that he judges a game based off of its overall look, and by how easy it is. Battle Mania is hard as fuck, but since that game has high production values & feels like an anime or cartoon, he grants it a high score.

Whereas he'll completely shit on a game like Fire Pro Wrestling because it has a realistic artstyle and the combat is far too complex for his peasized brain to handle. You can tell that he likes Gley Lancer coz it's actually one of the easier shmups. As he said, it also does have one of the greatest OSTs of all time. That's the type of gamer he is, he judges the art & aural design as a the game, rather than the actual game mechanics. The art assets do matter, but I think the scoring of a game should be weighted with the actual gameplay being of most importance.
This tard even claimed that Golden Axe was always bad. Like wtf? JEEEZZUZ

Tekken & Virtua Fighter are equally deep fighting games (Tekken is deeper now, because Tekken still exists and has been allowed to evolve far more than VF which hasn't had a new game in over 15 years.) but most of us would correctly label Tekken as the better fighter, simply due to how Tekken has much better art & aural design. With the exception of the first two VF games, VF has always been rather mediocre or just serviceable at best when it came to art & aural design. About the only thing that saved VF games from their terrible art were the high technical graphic fidelity that VF games had during its time of release. VF5 may look like some shitty PS3 game now, but back in 2006, VF5 was one of the most lifelike games that you could've ever saw during that era. 2006 was when most of us were still on the PS2, lol.

____
Resident Evil 6 kinda falls into the Bad Reputation, Gud Gaem category but I won't go to bat for it since I think it does enough bad to be deserving of its bad reputation. RE6 is a case of a good combat engine, stuck inside of an unbearably bad game. My god the campaigns are such garbage. It feels like it wasn't even designed by people who play games, since you're not actually playing the game during the campaign. You're just running from setpiece to setpiece.

[CENSORED]

I'm gonna go slightly off topic already but that's mostly because the "bad" games I like, usually deserve that reputation lol. Weird shit like the Drakengard series that I specifically like because it's weird, I would never actually defend as quality videogames.

I could make an argument that the ps2 game Shadow of Rome is underrated because I never actually heard anyone discuss the subtleties of the scoring system my entire life, to the point where I'm probably the best player of that game just through virtue of the fact that noone else played it nearly as much. God Hand got a bunch of bad reviews but it's generally considered a cult classic. MGSV was also unfairly maligned in my opinion but that's mostly a minority of very vocal fans that were upset the story did not play out the way they wanted lol. The same is true for Kingdom Hearts 3.

What I really wanted to ask was, I always wanted to get into 2d beat 'em ups but that's a genre I never really delved into as much as I would have liked. No particular reason, I just never happened to. Would you mind giving me a list of recommendations? For example, I'd start from double dragon but there's so many versions of each game, I don't really know which ones are good or not. Your comments on DD3 make me realize you probably went through the entire franchise lol.

[Jack]

Beat em Ups are basically
"Bad (or wrong) Reputation, Gud Genre"
Wrong reputation in the sense that most of the genre's so-called fans love beatemups, for being brainless, but fun games. Double Dragon is not brainless at all. Neither is Final Fight or Streets of Rage (on Maniac). FF1 is hard by default. You do a lot of thinking & managing in trying to not get hit which is a lot harder than it sounds.
There's that one nintendo faggot on youtube who calls himself "Beat Em Ups" but he actually knows nothing about beat em ups beyond the surface level. He's actually what your avg Beat em up fan is like, they only play TMNT & Streets of rage and act as if that were the entire genre lol.

I'll just list the evolutionary-trajectory that beat em ups went in.
The most recent version of Streets of Rage Remake (which you can download for free.) is prolly the best place to start as a Beat em up noob. It's basically Fight N Rage but with SOR characters. Fight N Rage is better but SORR is cooler by virtue of being SOR.

The 1st Trajectory of Beat em ups, which initially started out as quasi fighters where you had one button for punching & kicking.
This was Double Dragon/Kunio Kun
In Double Dragon, you perform different moves depending on your position in relation to your opponents, and the animation frame of your previous move. DD basically had a prototype 3d fighter game engine which functions similarly to Tekken. In DD, you can do an uppercut by instantly pressing the punch button after a jump which should be right after your ducking animation when you land from a jump. It's the attack button, pressed after the ducking animation which activates the uppercut. This is similar to Kazuya or Julia's uppercuts from Tekken, where you need to duck first, go to neutral for a second and then press the attack button before your character stands up. This is the meat & potatoes of Double Dragon's combat system. Even the shitty ones like DD3.

Most NES beat em ups follow the Double Dragon formula, probably due to a necessity of the platform since I've never seen a NES beat em up, fit in more than 4-5 characters on screen at a time. 2 of those sprites would be you & the 2nd player, so you're fighting against 3 enemies at most. I didn't pay attention much to horde numbers back in the day though, coz NES beat em ups were hard, filled with enemies who want to fucking murder you like how they murdered Marian.

The SNES was much the same way in regards to sprite limits, but SNES beat em ups felt brain dead in comparison due to how they're based off of the Final Fight ruleset which just doesn't work without the increased enemy count. (SNES FF1 is garbage and does not live up to the arcade original at all.) Final Fight 3 could've easily been a classic had it been made on Genesis which can handle multiple sprite sizes at the same time. FF3 was still beholden to the same sprite limit count of the Nes. Weird, coz I've heard that SNES can actually show 100s more sprites on screen than Genesis can, yet I've never actually seen a single SNES beat em up do it.

Snese beat em ups completely lacked the difficulty of NES beat em ups which were structured around Double Dragon's ruleset where enemies actually try to kill you, instead of just standing there waiting to get punched in the face lol.
Easily the most iconic beat em ups from the NES era were Double Dragon, Battletoads & Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Notice how both DD & BT are known for being insane hard. (and they still live up to that reputation.)
I actually really like the NES TMNT games, and think they're way better than the 16bit & Arcade counterparts. I'll explain why in a bit. Final Fight Mighty is on nes, and it's fucking boring due to the 2 enemies on screen limit. Final Fight is just too damn simple when there isn't enough enemies on screen to pose a challenge.

Double Dragon/Kunio Kun could be said to be the prototype Yakuza games since they were the ones that originated RPG shops & staples into brawlers way back in the early 90s.





The 2nd Trajectory of Beat em ups, and most Iconic
Final Fight was even more popular than Double Dragon, and that game only had one attack button but the combat felt faster & much more intense due to the simplified gameplay. The simplified ruleset allowed for Capcom to concentrate more on level design & enemy encounters which have never been that complex in Double Dragon. DD never needed that though, since DD has always had a fairly deep position-based combat engine where each opponent could easily be your last. That's where Final Fight differs, because in FF you feel like a superhero who can take on hordes one handed. Despite that, FF1 is still an insane hard game due to how the hordes constantly surround you and they will all use their own fighting patterns to break through your guard.
FF1 introduced the special move, that deplete some of your life concept, to combat against hordes who break through your guard. Double Dragon has never imitated this concept, because they prefer to reward your knowledge of the game's ruleset by allowing you to spam as many special moves as you wish. So long as you know the inputs & motions for such.

A common misconception that everyone has about Capcom beat em ups & Final Fight in general is that they assume all these games are clones when the only Capcom beat em ups that play similar to each other is Final Fight 1 & 2. Captain Commando was actually the 2nd beat em up that Capcom ever made and that game drastically changed up the ruleset to the point that every Capcom beat em up (except Final Fight 2) that came after Captain Commando have all used a revised or updated version of Captain Commando's ruleset and it's generally the same base that most later beat em ups from non-Capcom companies utilize such as Sengoku 3, Streets of Rage 3, Denjin Makai series, Undercover Cops, Battletoads Arcade game, etc.
The Openbor community also mostly base their games off of the rulesets that Capcom developed during the mid 90s with their post Captain Commando games. Funny enough, Cap Commando itself isn't that popular of a game. I actually prefer Final Fight 1. It wasn't until The Punisher that the Captain Commando ruleset was finally done justice. Captain Commando was a good game, it just felt like a step down from FF1 coz the enemy encounters are nowhere near as intense. You truly felt like you were fighting to escape out of a ghetto in FF1.

Final Fight style games started off simplified, but they eventually became as complex as Double Dragon, but with their own ruleset. If Double Dragon functions as a prototype for Virtua Fighter & Tekken style 3d fighting rules, than you guessed it, Final Fight is basically Street Fighter within a 2d beat em up ruleset.
More specifically, Capcom beat em ups play like DarkStalkers & the Street Fighter Alpha series, especially Alpha 3.
Capcom beat em ups eventually gained chain combos (where one attack can hit multiple times), super moves, special attacks, etc. to the point that they played like an Anime Fighter (Guilty Gear) more than a beat em up.


Caddilacs & Dinosaurs would've been the legendary beat em up that everyone raves on about instead of Streets of Rage 2, if 16bit systems could've handled it. (It can't. Look at how terrible the Genesis version of The Punisher is.)

This (Post Captain Commando Capcom beat em ups) imo is the standard of what beat em ups currently are amongst aficionados.

Which is why you see such a large divide between Fight N Rage & Streets of Rage 4. Fight N Rage is made by the same cloth as those that came before it. It's made by a random Mexican (Or Brazillian?) dude who loved beat em ups so much, he made his own.
You can tell he loves the genre by virtue of how it plays.
The contrast is easily evident with how Streets of Rage 4 plays, which acts as if beat em ups have never progressed passed SOR2, lol.

A lot of people claim that Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, God of War, Ninja Gaiden (NG itself originated as an arcade beat em up, similar to Double Dragon.) etc. are the 3d iteration of Beat em ups but I don't really agree.
If so, how come those type of games bore the fuck out of me? While I still enjoy 2d brawlers?
I think Falcom's Ys feels way more like a beat em up than Character Action games do, which imo just feel like Single player fighting games, and they're (DMC,Bayonetta, etc.) just as boring as they fucking sound. Have fun juggle comboing the hell out of that dumbass ai you fucking retard!


I think that Koei's Musou Warriors series feels more like an evolved Streets of rage/Final Fight but they're not any good since they completely lack game design. They could be good though if Koei weren't such lazy & greedy motherfuckers (All of their non-Nintendo games cost $100+ just for the whole game), and actually took the time to make real levels & enemy encounter design for once.





The Common Mis-Perception of Beat Em Ups, which spawned from the 2nd Trajectory:
These are basically just the carbon copy cookie cutter beat em ups which completely polluted the arcade & 16bit markets back in the day.

The most iconic of these types of beat em ups were made by Konami & SNK. Although SNK eventually made a beat em up that was more in the style of a Post Captain Commando beat em up (larger moveset & combos, a run and dash, a vertical-based evasion move.)
When most people think of beat em ups, they usually think of brainless button mashers which is what most of Konami's beat em up lineup is. Just copy & pasted licensed games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Ironically, the TMNT beat em ups on the NES, actually played a bit more like Double Dragon. You still have the same simplified Final Fight controls but the enemy ai is much more vicious & will punish your mistakes in the NES Arcade game and its sequel.

I don't really like Konami beat em ups, coz they literally were just button mashers where you'd mindlessly mash buttons. Sure you could try to play them more tactically, but there's no point to it. It just doesn't have the system or rulesets necessary to play like a prototype 3d fighter which are the Double Dragons of the world, or an Anime 2d fighter like the Capcom Beat em ups of the world.

Amusingly, Shredder's Revenge looks great coz it looks far more inspired by Streets of Rage & Street Fighter Alpha 3 than anything else lol.

Tha new TMNT looks to be the best beat em up since
Fight N Rage.

If you only click on one video from this post. Das dat vid! FnR's gameplay is fucking insane.



The 3rd Trajectory is Streets of Rage
SOR is basically just Final Fight, which started out like a more simplified Final Fight until it became its own thing with Streets of Rage 2, where you were given two health-degenerating moves, one for defense, another for offense. Plus a tap forward twice move as well as a bit more normal attacks.
Streets of Rage 2 is basically the genre since most of the genre's fans only like SOR2 for some reason.
SOR2 is one of my fave games of all time and my actually be my fave beat em up.

The problem is, the casual fans who only play SOR2, and then come away with this assumption that beat em ups are supposed to be easy, casual games which require no brains to play. When that's not at all how I would describe SOR2. Yes Sor2 can be enjoyed by your grandma or 2 year old, but not a single one of them is lasting one minute in Mania mode. Mania mode was basically Final Fight on steroids in that the enemies hordes are both numerous but with Double Dragon-like fairly intelligent ai who will punish you for your mistakes & openings.

Keep a note of how he's playing. He's always jumping behind his opponents & pressing back after he jumps over them so he can instantly jump grapple & knee them. SOR2 was filled with tricks & secrets like this, which SOR4 also has coz the game engine is basically a carbon copy of SOR2. They even try to keep the animation frames & counts mostly the same.

SOR is in this weird place where it is a legit good brawler that aficionados of the genre love, but it's also filled with fairweather fans who prob only love SOR for the music & character designs. which are really just sexified versions of Final Fight characters. Kinda funny how they genderswapped Guy into a hotbabe Blaze Fielding though. Even Fight N Rage parodies that by making a Blaze look-alike, but naming her Gal.
Guy is an actual Japanese name and Guy is Japanese, but the Jap name is normally spelled as Gai.


A lot of people who are fans of SOR, believe that beat em ups have never evolved past SOR2, which is why they love SOR4 so much, lol. You'll see a lot of these fans at the Steam forum. I've even argued with some who had accounts at this forum. (He called me a virgin or something. Seems to be a popular insult, for simply disagreeing with games. He has a family and kids too, but he sucks ass at arguing AYY LMAO!)
These types of fans think that Streets of Rage 3 was a mis-step and are glad that SOR4 completely ignores it.
Not realizing that SOR3 was just Sega's attempt at making a brawler that implemented more of a Cadillacs & DInosaurs ruleset.
Now sure, SOR3 is kinda boring but it's not due to the combat engine which still has the best fighting out of the entire series. (Not hard when your follow up is fucking SOR4 which plays exactly like SOR2, lol.)
SOR3 suffered from bad level design. It basically tried to be more of a console experience, like the NES Double Dragon games, but it took every bad thing from the Double Dragon NES games and none of the good, lol.
Oh yeah that sounds great, lets make a game with even harder AI than Double Dragon 3, a game many people hated coz it was too damn hard. OOOH, let also insert more platforming bullshit where you die from falling.
Oh you know what sounds great? That labyrinth Dojo stage from Revenge of Shinobi, that sure won't annoy SOR fans, lol.

SOR3 had multiple endings & paths though. Similar to Golden Axe 3 & Fight N Rage. The only other beat em ups from that era to do that were Guardian Heroes & The Peace Keepers. (You can play Peace Keepers & Brawl Brothers on NSO. Both games are good, but I would've preferred Final Fight 3. None of the SNES beat em ups are as good as Streets of Rage & Golden Axe imo.)
Sor3 had a much better battle engine than 2&4, but hardcore SOR2 & 4 fans don't want to hear any of it and they 'know' they're right since SOR2 & SOR4 sold the most copies. At least with SOR2, that was the closest we could get to the Final Fight 1 experience at home, and in many ways SOR2 was actually better than FF1.
With SOR4? That game is basically banking off of SOR's name brand value that Sega still wants nothing to do with.
Sega didnt even bother to advertise SOR4 until it became popular. I think Nintendo actually did more advertising for a fucking Sega product than Sega themselves, KEK


As you've noticed by now, Street of Rage isn't really a 3rd trajectory. It's more of a devolution.

Although I do consider it, it's own trajectory of evolution because it directly led to Streets of Rage 4 which plays like no other beat em up on the market. What makes me laugh though is how people get insanely stuck up over SOR4 combos when all you're doing is pressing the same damn button over & over, the special button lol.

Look at that 'impressive' looking Blaze Fielding combo they did 12 seconds into that vid? She did three flip kicks then comboed into a flying kick, followed by a knee.
That looks impressive until you realize that all he did is press the special button three times then jumped in the air to press the special button again. The other player just tapped twice to do a flying kneee.
WOW, such gameplay skill! This would've been impressive in a fighting game due to fighting game move notations where you're actually testing your reflexes instead of just pressing one single fucking button like it was Smash Bros, AYY LMAO!

In Double Dragon, you're constantly managing your position and looking for openings based off of everybody's relative positioning. In a Capcom Brawler like Battle Circuit, you're actually pressing 2d fighter style move notations to do the advanced combos, and pressing down or up to initiate different animation frames & moves.
IN SOR4, you just spam the special move button. WOW, Such SKILL!

The amusing thing is, SOR4's scoring system does require skills because it functions like a shmup where you drop everything you've earned if you so much as get sneezed at by a random mook. SOR4's combat system is so easy that you literally can just spam the special move throughout the entire game, so long as you do enough normals to refill your life bad.
SOR4 is a good game. A fucking bad beat em up but at the same time what genre is this fucking game?
The ruleset feels more like some bullet hell shooter without the fucking bullets lol. A game only needs to be fun and it is, despite all of its fucking bad game design. SOR4 is a really hard game to gauge, coz it's even worthy of a 8 or 9 out of 10 score, even though it does nearly everything wrong from a gameplay perspective.
This is why I consider Streets of Rage as its own evolution trajectory.
It spawned a game that plays so damn differently from everything before it that I don't even know how to grade it.


That's the nature of the gaming market, only games that reward the braindead are considered god tier.
I like SOR4 and it may even be in the top 20 beat em ups of all time but it's also a game that rewards you by simply spamming the special attack button. It looks fucking cool though when you combo all those specials togeter. Granted, Capcom beat em ups already had something similar way back in the 90s with their SF Alpha 3 inspired combat.

EDIT: I just remembered that there was actually a beat em up that predated Double Dragon.
The Kung Fu era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung-Fu_M ... ideo_game)
That's before my time though and the only experience I've had with that type of game is the Ninja Warriors. Which is easily in the top 10 beat em ups imo.

They basically play like Capcom brawlers, in that it feels like a 2d fighting game but against hordes instead of 1v1.
EDIT Again: I forgot about Capcom's Xmen & Marvel Super Hero games for the SNES which were made in the same style as Ninja Warriors Again. They're nowhere near as good as Ninja Warriors though. Xmen is about a 4 out of 5 but Marvel Super Heros is kinda trash. The music is shit and the stages are shit. It wasn't like Xmen where the stages actually matched the characters' personalities.

My Top 10 in no order. (Not including Streets of Rage Remake, or Openbor games.)
Denjin Makai 2
Fight N Rage
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs
Streets of Rage 2
Final Fight 1
Ninja Warriors Again/Ninja Savoirs
CombatTribes
Return of Double Dragon
Alien Vs Predator and The Punisher (I can't decide, but they're basically the same game.)
Golden Axe 3 (It's way better than Revenge of Death Adder & GA2, and those were good games. GA3 gets shit on for some reason, when it has a huge moveset, as big as a Double Dragon moveset.)

Double Dragon 4 could easily be top 5 imo, if it weren't so fucking dated with so many annoying ass platforming sections (DD2 NES would be top 3 easily if you got rid of the platforming bullshit.), and didn't look like a damn Nes game. They were trying to go for that Megaman 9 but the problem is that most of us Double Dragon fans aren't fucking nerds. We don't care about "so cool RETRO NOstalgia gfx!" DD4's gameplay is solid though and you can unlock everyone from the entire game. Unlike Guardian Heroes & Fight N Rage, every single enemy has a full moveset.

Battle Circuit, Double Dragon 4 and DD2 nes almost made it in and would be, if Fight N Rage didn't exist. Had FnR been made by Japs (or had a Jap bran name like SOR/BK), I think damn near everybody would label it a classic.
I feel as though Double Dragon games should be placed in their own category since they play so differently from the rest of the genre.
I think all of the good DDs are A-class games which deserve to be ranked as highly as something like a Cadilacs ^ Dinosaurs. It's just the gameplay is so different. My top 5 are all adrenaline junkie type of games while Double Dragon games are much more cerebral with only the GameboyAdvance DD playing someone like an adrenaline-junky game.

Most of my top 20 would just be Capcom games and some Sega games like Streets of Rage 3 which like Golden Axe 3 it gets a bad rap when it's not bad at all. It's just not as good as SOR2. Some people have even said that SOR2 is overrated and I can understand that especially when you see its maniacal fans.

I could make an argument that the ps2 game Shadow of Rome is underrated because I never actually heard anyone discuss the subtleties of the scoring system my entire life, to the point where I'm probably the best player of that game just through virtue of the fact that noone else played it nearly as much.

That game was badass, ruined by the boring ass stealth sections which completely slow the game down.
I would want a sequel, but I already know that Crapcum would gay it up when the main reason why I liked it was coz it was so fantastical. Just change the time period to feudal Japan, boom problem solved. (Although it's funny coz women had even less rights in that than they did ancient Rome. Everyone seems to think that female warrios were everywhere in Japan due to anime & vidya gaems.)
Even back then Westerners kept crying about how sexist that game was, coz there's girl gladiators in thongs who piss & shit their thongs who scream "Don't kill me!" & you can Mortal Kombat the shit out of them. (Guro & Ryona is one of the most popular hentai genres in Japan for some reason.)

That's the only game I know of where you can beat someone to death with their own arms, lol.
I mean sure there's Mortal Kombat but MK sucks, it's just a glorified scene. Throwing decapitated heads at people was a legit strategy in Shadow of Rome. SOR basically suffered the same fate as Urban Reign. Damn near all of those 3d action Japanese games from the late PS2 era got unfairly shat on by Western gayming journalists who just wanted to brainlessly button mash like in God of War.
I like God of War, but mostly because it's a spectacle. Lame how it got turned into a Dark Souls lite.
I even see fucking retards claim that Ys, yes Ys from Falcom, of all games 'should get a Dark Souls lite' makeover.
I was like, are you even a fan of Ys? (Then again this dude had pronouns in his profile. "He, him, his" I bet he looks like a fag where you have to be reminded that he has dickenballs lol)
Ys's appeal is that the combat is fastpaced & frantic.
Who fucking cares about appealing to more people with shitty ass Dark Souls combat? I hate how game fans always speak like marketers rather than as fans of gaming.

For example, I'd start from double dragon but there's so many versions of each game, I don't really know which ones are good or not.

The two best ones to start with are the Gameboy Advance game which plays way better than the arcade games

and Return of Double Dragon (The Japanese version of Super Double Dragon.)

Super Double Dragon sucks, because it's slow as hell for some reason and you have much less moves.
As you can see from the vid I linked to, you can pull of some crazy shit in Return of Double Dragon and it actually looks much more interesting than Gameboy Advance DD.
Gameboy Advance would probably be a better starting point though since it's less hard.

NES DD1 is still really fun, and it plays a lot better than the Arcade version. Kinda like how Golden Axe 1 was way better on the Genesis than it was in Arcades. Also for some reason, Tyris wears a thong in the genesis version but she wore granny panties in the arcade lol.
DD1 & DD2 NES are both classics, but the problem they both have are retarded platforming sections where you die in one hit if you fall. Even worse is there's no continues. NES DD is really something that only worked during the NES era, considering that DD4 is a direct continuation of DD2, even down to the annoying ass platforming and that game flopped hard.

DD4's combat is really good though and easily some of the best in the genre. It also feels like a direct follow up to DD2 where the stakes have gotten higher and you're now facing off against mobs of Ninja & Yakuza led by female Zaibatasu Yakuza I guess? lol, I honestly don't believe that such a thing exists in real life but yeah the final bosses in DD4 are female Yakuza twins, who cheat & gun you down with some snubnose looking guns.

I guess it's just easier to list the DD games worth playing down a hierarchy.

1st tier:
Double Dragon Advance
Return of Double Dragon
Double Dragon 1 + Double Dragon 2 + Double Dragon 3 NES
Double Dragon 4
CombatTribes (The real Double Dragon 3, made by the same guy who did DD1,2, & 4)
River City Ransom/Downtown Nekketsu (Any version they're all good but the Gameboy advance version is prob the best one.) Yeah sure RCR is a Kunio game, but you fight the Double Dragon in that game.

2nd tier:
Double Dragon SNK fighting game based off of the live action movie
Rage of the Dragons, also a SNK fighting game and way better than the first fighting game (both are good),
Battletoads & Double Dragon crossover (It plays more like Battletoads and most DD fans hate it, but I think it's a really good game. It's just not a masterpiece DD or BT.)

Rage of the Dragons should really be 1st tier but it plays so differently from a DD game to the point that it doesn't feel essential.

3rd tier:
The original arcade of DD1 & 2 (great during their era, but like Arcade Contra it shows its age through the countless slowdown, etc.,
Renegade (it's a Kunio kun game, but it uses DD2's fighting system.)


Trash:
Double Dragon V fighting game based off the cartoon
Double Dragon Neon (This game has plenty of fans, but how many of them are real DD fans?
It plays nothing like Double Dragon, and feels like a generic beat em up that's parodying the 80s.)

Don't know:
The PC engine version of the DD games which seem good.
DD2 in particular looks way better than the arcade version and looks even more fun than the NES games.


Double Dragon 2 Wander of the Dragons
Never played it, can't play it either since it's a digital only Xbox 3shitty game that's no longer sold. It looks like shit though.


Secretly Top Tier:
Openbor games
Double Dragon Reloaded, like the arcade game but with no slowdown and more enemies
Double Dragon Plus

Now this looks really good. It actually looks like a much more polished DD4. It may actually be the best DD, lol. I mean sure there will be those who will prefer Return of DD & GB Advance over all else since they feel the most authentic to the series roots, but there's also a lot of DD fans who only like the NES games

Openbor games are fanmade, but a lot of them are made by hardcore fans who truly love the genre.
Especially the Final Fight games.


It plays like Final Fight, in the sense that the hordes are strategically placed in a way that forces you to constantly think about what the most optimal move to use would be. It also adds in a lot of gameplay elements from later Capcom games like Alien vs Predator & Cadillacs & Dinosaurs such as the dodging & rolling systems as well as chain combos & custom combos from Street Fighter Alpha 3. (Which is my opinion is the funnest SF game.)

Your comments on DD3 make me realize you probably went through the entire franchise lol.

I have never beat DD3 in my life. That game is too fucking hard, but the NES version is strangely fun anyway despite how fucking hard it is. Before you get into any Double Dragon game, you should look up a movelist somewhere coz even the NES games have a fairly large moveset. It's what sets the DD games above most of the genre. Beat em ups are weird in that they actually regressed due to the popularity of Final Fight but then they became more complex again, but their complexity is modeled after the Final Fight style of gameplay such as the Streets of Rage series & my personal fave Denjin Makai.

The problem with DD3 aside for the monetized pay2win gameplay where you have to constantly insert coins to increase your life, and gain new characters. Is that the game (the non-Nes versions) just plays like shit.
There's barely any animation, the controls aren't responsive at all. It feels really stiff and when you get your ass kicked. It doesn't feel fair coz the bosses have far too much hit priority.
Bosses always have way more hit priority than you in beat em ups games, but you often feel weak & helpless in DD3.

The real DD3 is actually CombatTribes which feels like 2d Urban Reign and is actually a symbolic sequel to Renegade which in itself was the precursor to the Double Dragon games and it even uses the same exact combat system as Double Dragon 2.

I'd link to the arcade version but most arcade videos I've seen were made by tool assisted cheating faggots who don't even mention that they're tool assisted. You can tell they are coz they just spam the same moves over & over & still win, whereas this Nintendo guy actually plays the game and you'll see him constantly changing his strategy around and using all sorts of crazy ass moves.


Yeah that's the secret a lot of people don't really know about beat em ups. We (and even I) will often claim that Double Dragon originated the genre, but the real father of the genre was actually Kunio Kun. Renegade was a Kunio game, it's just that most of his games got Westernized back in the 80s & early 90s to the point that they're unrecognizeable.

What I really wanted to ask was, I always wanted to get into 2d beat 'em ups but that's a genre I never really delved into as much as I would have liked. No particular reason, I just never happened to. Would you mind giving me a list of recommendations?

Beat em ups were all over in USA & Jap arcades.

I wrote two detailed posts about Beatem ups at the nintendo thread but this is the only one I could find coz this site's search engine sucks ass. It won't let me search beatem ups, Final fight or streets of rage coz that's too 'generic'.
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8&p=1049&hilit=the+takeover#p1049
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=23&p=1825&hilit=takeover#p1825
I had another one where I posted the differences between konami & capcom beat em ups (capcom beat em ups are generally the deepest in the genre, but for some reason everyone thinks that Capcom beatemups play like Final Fight clones.) and how nobody cares that Double Dragon 3 had a different battle system, coz that game fucking sucks.

I still agree with this statement.

The Takeover= 7 out of 10
Streets of Rage 4= 8.5 out of 10
Fight N Rage= 9 out of 10
Although on Switch you can clearly see that I played SOR4 the most since I have over 70 hours in it and I'm still not bored.
I only have 20 hours in Fight N Rage.
5 hours in The Takeover. SOR4 has online mp & PVP which is why I played it the most. Fight N Rage only has couch co-op and it does have an arena mode similar to Guardian heroes. There's a ton of content to unlock in FNR, but SOR4 wins out for me coz it actually has online play. I have at least 10 people in my friends list that I met through SOR4. I also used to be in the top 20 of the SOR4 scoreboard when it first came out. (I was no. 17.)

Fight N Rage is the best designed game of the three, but only SOR4 allows me to show off my skills and play against other people in a death match.
The Takeover is the most accurate to the SOR lore & tone, but the game play is just merely good. The Takeover could easily be a 9 though if it didn't have to compete against Fight N Rage & SOR4.

SOR4 with DLC has moved it to the same tier as Fight N Rage, but SOR4 still plays & feels so differently from anything else in the beat em up genre that it feels like it's own thing.
SOR4 is a beat em up, made by people who don't fucking understand beat em ups, lol.
Strangely though, they came up with a battle system that's actually interesting (It has a ruleset that's similar to a Shmup for some reason, but it works!) so even though I don't really think it's a good example of the beat em up genre.

SOR4 is an original enough experience to where it's good enough to recommend.
I do generally agree with that 1st post though. (LOL at how everyone hates on him, coz he did the usual and sang Fight N Rage's praises which is what you would do, if you actually loved the beat em up genre. Unlike most of these SORfake fans of the genre who only love SOR2 & 4)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/985890/d ... 344290571/
The steam community are fucking annoying, it seems like they just bully everyone into liking SOR4 for some reason. They'll even try to bully you at gamefags, where gamefags kinda like SOR4 but they're not fanatical about it like the Steam fags. In fact a lot of Gamefags insult the game, even if like me they can see its qualities.

It's a hard game to grade coz it really is good, but it feels more like a happy accident rather than an act of genius game design. This is prob why the dev's (Lizardcube) next game isn't a beat em up at all and they're trying to move away from the genre as fast as they can lol.

Fight N Rage is currently the best of the new crop of beat em ups. For some reason Streets of Rage 4 fags constantly hate on it, but I often find that Streets of Rage fags actually hate beat em ups and only like SOR2 & SOR4 for some reason.
Fight N Rage plays like a Caddilacs & DInosaurs style beat em up but with multiple endings, multiple branching paths & ai controlled buddies who fight along side you like a Kingdom Hearts game.


To elaborate on why I call SOR2/4 fans, fake fans. A lot of them think that beat em ups haven't progressed past SOR2 & 4 for some reason, and they will even throw SOR3 under the bus as though it were a legit bad game when it actually plays like a home consolized version of a Capcom brawler from that era.
Capcom beat em ups starting from Captain Commando actually had larger movesets, the ability to run and to dodge between planes. SOR3 had all of that but SOR4 fans are so maniacal that they actually prefer the retarded way that SOR4 plays where there's no run button and the entire game acts as if no beat em ups have existed since SOR2. Which is prob the only you'll be able to enjoy SOR4's archaicness and its refusal to get with the times, if you just willfully ignore that the beat em up genre moved on a long fucking time ago. I fucking hate SOR fans coz they have such a low opinion of beat em ups, despite claiming to be hardcore SOR2 fans.
It's weird coz SOR2 really is good, but it has one of the most plebeian band-wagoning fanbases.

[anthony]

Many of my favourite games, many that I've greatly enjoyed. Most recently FarCry1.



I was just discussing a moronic video essay on this game with Rake.



Nobody has any idea how to talk about a game in which you have a gun and the perspective is "first person" because gamers are a bunch of morons who turn everything they hear into a totemic and complete concept bound to whatever it's associated with forever, or until another youtube video essay gives them a new one to overwrite this.

Wrong is the word I want to use for how people see FarCry1. I do believe that there is no accounting for taste. But I don't just disagree with these people. The way they look at the thing is so off and retarded that taste doesn't even come into it. The game's sequels (especially 3) going on to be so influential is definitely a factor here. People see the game as a kind of defective FarCry3, even though it was made by different people with different intentions, and handles so utterly differently that it should be obvious to any thinking person that beyond the name and some tech these aren't related works.

Reading Farcry 1 as an "FPS" doesn't really convey the point. I think we can talk about one, and it's even good as one, but gamers have such fixed notions of what "FPS" is and does that it gets rated poorly on that front by idiots who can't handle lateral thought. It's also not an "Open World Game". That marketing term has gotten so out of hand that normal people are now rendered helpless when they attempt to think about open space. They just can't handle it. Any representation of virtual space more complex and less structured than Super Mario Bros is now "open world game" and gets judged as a more or less defective FarCry3. The first true "Open World Game" in the modern western AAA sense. The Map With Chores as I've come to think of it.


Farcry1 does not have a map that looks like this. Maybe they didn't know better back then.

So I have a lot of thoughts on what FarCry1 isn't. As for what it is. I'd call it one of the last and greatest Intermediate FPS games. If early FPS is about novelty and simple experiments in rendering pseudo-3D space. Doom to Build Engine we might say. I would say the intermediate era is when we achieved good working 3D and weren't really sure what to do with it yet. There was no real standard. Quake I would say started this, but was also not too interesting as more than a foundation. People still play DOOM .wads, but nobody's playing new Quake maps all the time. Doom is a kind of complete and sufficient form and experience. Quake was progress to be surpassed.


Progress.

The games that succeeded Quake I associate with heavy three dimensional physicality, a constant pursuit of technical novelty, and awkward attempts at making the presentation cool in imitation of Hollywood movies. Trying to one up each other in things they could make work. Character behaviours, technical detail and fidelity, realism (remember that word?), an interesting time when an "fps" was a bunch of cool interested stuff playing out in 3D space. You moved around and shot things from a first person POV because that's the video game thing to do, but this generally was subordinate to the 3D physicality. A point I consider essential to these old games is that the player character's behaviour made sense if observed from another perspective. They were a coherent 3D object in a 3D world which behaved like everything else. This I consider to be the essential trait of the era. Games about 3D space. And this is how I understand FarCry1. One of the biggest, flashiest, and coolest 3D space games.

I consider this a beautiful era for "FPS" and easily its peak. But nobody knows what to make of it. There was no prestige attached to any of these games at the time, except for Halo. Which was so big and so successful that it overwhelmed everybody. Fans of the older "FPS" games were completely helpless to explain its appeal and resorted to this cheap and absurd meme, which they actually forced quite successfully for a while because the internet is full of insecure people who respond well to attack.



To hear people who pretend to enjoy Quake 3 put it, this whole era was just a pointless, lame interlude between Quake 3 and Ultrakill. Because the point of a video game is to be as inaccessible a contrived challenge as possible. So that you can showoff to other retards on the internet how good you are at wasting your own time on something which means as much to you as a more expensive sudoku puzzle. "Gameplay". "Difficulty". Etc.



But just look at this. Does this look like it's trying to be an easier Quake level?



Does this look like easy Quake?

I'm using Halo and Farcry screenshots interchangeably because I believe them to be spiritual kin and more similar to each other than either of their sequels are to themselves. Halo and FarCry1 both started out life as completely different projects driven heavily if not primarily by a tech-side drive to push the limits of what was possible, before eventually making decisions to frame their work within "FPS" to best show it off and realise the experiences they thought were possible within their creations.

So, the sun was shining, with the lens flare, and Steve sort of stopped the demo right there and said: “Yeah, but you know, at Pixar, we can render dozens of suns.” Jason’s immediate reply to him was: “Yeah, but can you do it in real time?” There was this pregnant pause and Steve’s says: “Okay, you’re in.” And he picked up his Fudgsicle and walked back into his office, and that was it. So that’s how we got in, a little bit of chutzpah and an OpenGL tech demo running on what was soon to be the Mac.

Bungie talking about their decision to make the game first person well into development. 46:10 if the timestamp isn't cooperating. Many important things said here. Probably the key, "It's more fun".

Crytek developed a game engine called CryEngine for Far Cry. Reportedly, the game was born out of a technology demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island made by Crytek to showcase the capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 3.[2]

FarCry is a far simpler story. They made an amazingly powerful tech demonstration, then they built a game into it because they had the functioning parts there. An interesting thought perhaps for another post is the thematic similarities between Halo and FarCry, and how they both kind of went for stock story options and themes and gravitated in the same direction. And in my opinion both created extremely memorable and effective works for it.

I'll actually talk about FarCry1 itself now.



Look at this beautiful, jagged ground. You will not find anything that looks like this 3 onwards. In 1 the ground has to be jagged because everything physical follows rules. They can't create perfect curves which your physical character body can perfectly move over, the game is constructed using crude tools (to a very high standard), so the physicality creates quirks like this. Stiff character movement, rigid physical world. But it works better than practically any "FPS" made since. See that funny jagged hill? If it looks like you should be able to climb it based on your experiences with every other similar physical surface in the game, you can. Even by FarCry2 (another game I love) they turned on this principle with invisible walls. But in FarCry1 anything goes. The devotion to physicality is key. It's a flash and power game. It's a luxury game. It doesn't care if it "breaks or unbalances the gameplay". You can avoid half of a level by climbing over a mountain to avoid paths and enemies on patrol if you care to. You bought the game, the selling point was massive well realised physical space, why wouldn't you be allowed to?



Jarek the Gaming Dragon calls this an "open world game" (all three words are necessary every time) because he has video essay brain damage. It's very much a game with "levels". Or we could also say "maps" in the old sense. An "open world" is a setting full of discrete tasks and chores you can do to cross out your completion list. A level is a physical space full of stuff that will react according to certain rules and scripts, with one or more fixed goals between a start and an ending. I emphasise the difference because I actually believe that "levels" tended to create more meaningful "freedom" in games than "open worlds".

FarCry3 is a game of small goals, in small spaces, which are dispersed within large ones. But there is no large experience of space in that game. Or really any "open world games" as a rule. The 'Open World Game' mostly functions as something like a rhetorical trick. It simultaneously tells gamers that things are getting bigger and more impressive and flatters them over their bold engagement with scale and bleeding edge ideas, while in practice being a reactionary regression in the actual experiences offered by video games.



This is how half of the levels in FarCry1 open.



Much of the game also looks like this.

Something FarCry1 does exceptionally well is balancing space and density. Concepts which are never thought about in western gaming which have characterised massive essential changes in trends and experiences offered. A memorable feature of many older games that attempted to give us space and scale is massive more or less completely flat and barely detailed planes of terrain representing grassy fields, open bare expanses, fields, etc.





One way to look at these scenes is to call them unfinished. Another is to call them open. What's important is that at one point the effect was incidental, people could leverage it, as Nintendo did in Ocarina of time, but also games which just wanted to be big had to be open since only so much could be rendered at once, as in Body Harvest. Why I bring this up is that by the time FarCry was being made, for PC Hardware, this was becoming a choice. To show off all that they could do FarCry1 sends you through a variety of environments and scenarios, ranging from hopping between sparse islands, to creeping through dense jungles, to fighting in cramped, awkwardly lit industrial scenes. The constant succession of environments, regularity of huge open spaces, and meaningful use of that space (you can be attacked from hundreds of meters away, and you can also miss a guy right next to you due to density of foliage and lack of non-diagetic detection tools) made this game feel like some of the most thoroughly and vividly realised virtual space I'd ever seen in an "FPS". And I played this game for the first time in 2023. When you play this game you are playing a "level" rather than an "open world", but you play the whole level. Compare that to the sometimes physical sometimes conceptual fencing in that you're constantly subjected to in "open world game". Every time you touch a new chore or activity you're assigned something to do in a fifty square meter space. Farcry1. Every level, you're playing with something more like kilometers, and it's all open.



It's all open, and not just for you. This game has some of the best "AI" I've ever seen in a video game. Two kinds, which are trying to kill each other, in addition to you. The game goes from an idyll inhabited by danger which you're infiltrating, to a warzone you're surviving and traversing. Sort of like the Half Life thing, only in my opinion far better executed here. Frankly I believe that this game does Half Life better than Half Life and FEAR better than FEAR.



Again, I consider this whole era of games misunderstood and poorly appreciated. With FarCry1 being the peak both of the idiosyncrasies of the time and the resultant confused reception.



This game does an exceptional amount of things well. Several of which we do not have words for yet. Meaning nobody has the confidence to call it good.

[ArhumMK51]

Phantasy Star III.


(Art by Masaki Segawa I believe)

I recently binged through the mainline Phantasy Star series and I gotta say 3 is nowhere near as bad as many make it to be. In fact, I'd put it above 2 for being an actually playable game that isn't filled to the brim with poor design decisions like the soul-crushing unfair difficulty; terrible XP and Money drops leading to hours of grinding, fucking nonsensical labyrinth dungeon designs, party members who show up at random parts of the game and have no relevance to the story (half of them are also useless). The story is also mostly boring compared to the first game. I never understood 2's praise, as it felt like a half-assed sequel only remembered fondly because of nostalgia.


(Boss characters have disproportionately large but detailed sprites lol)

PSIII had a shaky development as the main development team were busy with other projects, but Sega wanted to push a game out during that window so it was handed to a group of mostly new developers leading to a quite different and unique feel to the game. It had a unique generational system which was interesting on paper but the execution was poor due to cartridge storage limitations of the time. It all boiled down to choosing which chick you wanted to marry at the end of an arc, which would lead you to playing as their son 18 years in the future, repeat. All of the issues about 2 I mentioned above were all ironed out and progression is much faster leading to a far more enjoyable experience.


(PSIII's key artwork is also my favourite in the series and of the 16-bit era JRPGs in general. By Masaki Segawa)

It was followed by Phantasy Star IV which is pretty much one of THE best RPGs of the era, it was a sequel to 2's story but I'm glad it honors 3's existence by integrating it's events into the plot and having one of the starring characters from 3 as a party member. It sucks we never got another Phantasy Star on the Genesis/CD/32X, as Sega during the competitive 16-bit era produced excellent games like Shining Force and Beyond Oasis.

I would nominate Deus Ex: Invisible War and Daikatana to this list, but technical issues are partly responsible for its reputation. Still, I highly dislike the idea of skipping entries in a series just because some talking heads on the internet deem it "bad".