I’m going to buy this and hate it and dump several dozen hours bending it to my will
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You don’t have to do that
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counterpoint: yes he does
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This is no second-tier badgameman we’re talking about after all.
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and
More The King of Dragons! Might be my new favorite Capcom beat 'em up–just a super-fun game! Clearly became a prototype for Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom two years later, but much faster-paced and more colorful. Straight up swiped stuff from Golden Axe from two years earlier. ; )
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Data East, 1993
Ikari III is where the Ikari Warriors series changes to become the popular genre of the time, the roaming brawler. There are two versions, the eight way stick version and te rotary joystick version where your character keeps facing in one direction and changes facing based on twisting the joystick, the way that the first two Ikari games did it.
The standard joystick version is good for conversion of existing cabinets I guess but Ikari Warriors is pretty much defined by those rotary sticks so that’s what I’d prefer. It makes spin kicks a physical joy to perform since it uses the motion of spinning the joysitck to do. And you’ll be doing it a lot to keep enemies off of you.
Game is practically built around spinning during attack animations to hit more than the tiny hitboxes will tag otherwise, so with the 8-way tying facing to movement you’re gonna be dancing around a lot every time you kick or punch and it gets hard to connect. If you don’t wan to to use the rotary stick go play SNK’s other military belt scroller, POW instead, I guess.
The weapon variety is surprisingly limited for a military themed beat em up; just knives, grenades, and the coveted rifle.
The time limit is brutal, the military theme is kinda off putting, and the armored vehicle bosses are not that exciting outside of the big ending. Overall it’s an enjoyable game that had potential to have been iterated into a better one, but the demands of quarter munching make it a little bit less enjoyable than it could have been. Kinda like Crime Fighters by Konami.
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Ikari III is included in the somewhat recent and slightly buggy SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on modern systems. : ) You can simulate the rotary joystick using dual analog, of course, but with my arcade fetish I found it more fun simply to spin my arcade stick with abandon while hitting the buttons, which causes fists and feet to flail out in all directions. ^ _^
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River City Girls 2
you may have heard the game runs bad
it doesn’t
they just made it look and feel like it’s running bad
if they make it so it’s not like that, it’s good*
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It felt like there was a whole console generation where I was exclusively playing Kunio games and now I’m so far behind on them.
I can’t believe of all the games I’ve been looking forward to and scooping up that have come out in the past few months that RCG2 is the one I would sit down and actually finish with a voracious hunger
it’s unfortunate because, objectively, as a game, as the game part separate from the rest of the product, it’s good. they built on the very light combat mechanics of the original and have succumbed to giving the game a fully featured dumb as hell juggle system (they are maybe at like, a .7 Sengoku 3 rating) and that makes up for getting rid of some of the stupider tech of the first game (no instant jump cancels on some moves, no infinite wall climb) and also giving all the moves you can train value. also assists actually 100% work 100% of the time and now that you can have two of them, you have a lot of options for silly crowd control and juggles
and then they piss over all of it by making the game look and sometimes feel like it’s running like hot garbage. I don’t know if this was a deliberate choice someone made, if some change in the codebase necessitated it, if it’s something that crept in to help support online play or if something was fucked up but a producer said “ship it” (which, hey, Arcsys dated this game for Japan months ago but the global release date was dropped a week before it came out, so), but it really drags down the whole thing. just the biggest bummer.
as it stands now, Shredder’s Revenge is the worse game but it’s the better buy by virtue of actually doing the run good thing (you can tell they understand what kind of game they were ultimately making because online play is a hilarious mess of desyncs sometimes but it always feels responsive, even when 5 other players are doing all kinds of stupid bullshit)
I do give them credit for having some 30-40 combo descriptors (this is how you know they have been infected by the Sengoku 3 mind virus)
edit: also, oh god, I know the first game had load times on every screen transition but holy shit, they made them longer, where the only upside is they brought back the loading icon of Misako and Kyoko punching each other in the faces. the game might burn the words “Please wait” into your display
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This River City talks makes me wonder if anyone played the Three Kingdoms one? Was it any good?
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- A new Arcade mode is here: Custom Game! Just like an actual arcade machine: customize your game experience using DIP switches: free play, old-school Super Attacks, faster enemies, no more taunts, and many more! You can see the customization in the lobbies of Custom Games. Achievements’ progression and unlocking is disabled in Custom Games.
- Taunt now only fills up the first Ninja Power bar.
- Doing a throw now grants the player invulnerability.
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oh my god they’re fixing River City Girls 2 (not on Switch, sorry losers)
you can even check out the fix in beta form on PC right now
game is now officially Good
now we get to have the conversation of “is it worth forty bucks”
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Arcade Archives Crime Fighters (PS4; original 1989 Konami)
After my first play-through
, I didn’t like the game, and felt the two-hour play-through was a horrible slog. But something prevented me from deleting it; I had a feeling that maybe there was fun to be had here somehow. After this second play-through, I think it’s probably, in terms of gameplay, the most technically advanced beat-em-up I’ve ever played; its depth and challenge are pretty much unsurpassed. In short: it’s REALLY good! = o
The first impression of Crime Fighters isn’t great: tiny, weirdly colored sprites, pale backgrounds, fairly limited, non-flashy moves, unrelenting mobs of enemies, and really bad hit detection.
On the second play-through, though, I realized that the hit detection isn’t bad: it’s extremely precise! You have to AIM in this game.
Each enemy type has a different attack pattern; different combinations of enemies create unique challenges–the game will often throw mobs of five or six (or more!) enemies at you, but even a two-enemy combo can be extremely challenging, depending on how their attacks overlap; they are all very good at double-teaming you! A play-through is nearly two hours long, but the ever-unfolding new enemies and enemy combinations mean there’s a new challenge every step of the way.
Not to mention the many bosses! Each has their own attack patterns, AND each can be hit most effectively by a certain pattern of movement and attack by you the player. Hit detection and timing is VERY tight, and you probably WILL get hit plenty–but you feel that maybe you could’ve avoided taking that last hit if you’d only launched your last attack a pixel closer in, or a fraction of a second later.
Some of the boss patterns are pretty unique, too; for instance, one of them can hammer you with extremely rapid-fire, fairly short-range punches–so you may think you want to keep your distance, but in fact its at extremely short range where you can hit him and he can’t hit you, so you have to stay right on TOP of him, matching his quick footwork; if he manages to dodge back a step ahead of you, you’re in for a barrage of hits!
But I came to realize that it isn’t just the bosses who challenge you to find a fresh attack pattern to counter their moves: against even the weakest rank-and-file enemies, if you switch up punches and kicks to match their movements and hit reactions, you can take them down in a single extended combination of hits, instead of taking several knock-downs to KO them: the game lets you invent intuitive custom combos crafted to each character, on the fly! I’ve never found an attack system this in-depth and natural in any other beat-em-up; it was fairly mind-blowing when I found it, near the end of the two hour run.
And I don’t think any beat-em-up has a mass onslaught quite like the boss rush of the “good” ending in Crime Fighters. ^ _^
What a game. What a game. It looks like some barely-NES-level discount board at first, but it might actually be the best.
(At least in Two-Player, International cabinet mode. I haven’t tried the health-constantly-ticking-down-Gauntlet-style, probably friendly-fire-heavy four-player cabinet mode
, and only briefly tried the cheap back-kick, unlimited-gun-ammo attacks of the JP cabinet modes.)
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no, this is balance
there’s a reason why people who play Konami arcade games seriously gravitate to the JPN rom sets
sane scoring
controllable moves
they’re video games as opposed to glorified money furnaces
on the other hand, perhaps there are issues if I can 1- and 2-loop JPN versions of some Konami games
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Yeah, that’s the thing–you can blindside the AI with the back-kick, like the elbow in Double Dragon, to the point where it’s a waste to use the other attacks; just turn your back the opponent and do your little unstoppable backwards hit, every time! Granted, I didn’t play through the whole game in that mode so I dunno, maybe it doesn’t work on a lot of later enemies for all I know; but those first guys I tried it on where it definitely did work way too well appear throughout the game.
I didn’t get to the point of getting the unlimited ammo gun, but I read several reviews of the game saying it was too easy because you can just shoot everyone with the gun, bosses and small-fry alike, and keep it between levels.
I can believe that because in the 2P International cab mode, the pistol totally dominates while the ammo lasts.
Anyway once you get the hang of how to take on each opponent type without back-kick and unlimited ammunition, it feels like a remarkably fair beat-em-up; you take some hits, but they don’t feel like cheap hits.
arcade-history.com lists three games in the “series”: Crime Fighters, Crime Fighters 2 / Vendetta, and Violent Storm. Haven’t played Violent Storm, but aside from having the same buttons and being able to kick downed opponents, Crime Fighters and Crime Fighters 2 / Vendetta don’t feel particularly similar; going by the credits listed on arcade-history.com, the games all had different dev teams, too:
- Crime Fighters , Arcade Video game by Konami Industry Co., Ltd. (1989)
- Crime Fighters 2 , Arcade Video game by Konami Industry Co., Ltd. (1991)
- Violent Storm , Arcade Video game by Konami Co., Ltd. (1993)
Ah, except that Masahiro Inoue
although having strictly creative credit only in Crime Fighters among those three, does have credits in all of them: “Software designer” in Crime Fighters (1989), “Special Thanks” in Crime Fighters 2 / Vendetta (1991), and “Producer” in Violent Storm (1993).
According to that site and MobyGames Masahiro Inoue - MobyGames , among other genres, Inoue also has credits in the following other beat-em-ups
1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Special Thanks
1991 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time - Special Thanks
1991 The Simpsons - Special Thanks
1993 Metamorphic Force - Executive Producer
1993 Gaiapolis - Special Thanks
and a couple fighting games
1993 Martial Champion - Salamander (voice)
1995 Dragoon Might - Producer
Oh, and, according to MobyGames,
1993 Monster Maulers - Producer
Monster Maulers is a fighting vs bosses thing, or maybe you could call it a boss rush fighter, or monster fighter–like Capcom’s Red Earth / Warzard (that’s how it’s spelled in the menu for Capcom Fighting Collection https://youtu.be/X820R35o_9M?t=2535 ) three years later (1996). So kind of a fighting game / beat-em-up hybrid, in a way.
Those were all with Konami’s arcade division.
The first post in this thread features both Metamorphic Force and Monster Maulers:
Violent Storm is Konami going “let’s not be weird for 5 minutes” and making a belt scroller that’s almost literally Final Fight instead of whatever madness they were chasing in all their other games
surprise, it’s good and it’s probably their best of the genre
Metamorphic Force was also fucked with in the US set with health that drains constantly so you stop being a furry and turn back into a wussy
casual reminder that arcade TiT is an abomination and the SNES version is the good game
all games can’t be perfect like Knights of the Round. or DD Crew.
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