violent storm is amazing. you have multiple throws, there’s a vocal soundtrack, there are piglets that turn into american footballs when you pick them up.
on the subject of boss fighters, there’s also metamoquester and gunmaster that might be of interest. and the secret dramatic battle mode in street fighter alpha 3
using flashpoint and joytokey, i’ve had a little look at a “game” called through the wars. it’s got two modes. one of them appears to just be the capcom arcade game tenchi wo kurau 2, while the other is a semi-original mini game made up of various stolen bits. it’s got a background from snk’s mutation nation, and you fight off an unending hoard of zombies, dogs, and crows, all ripped from jill’s summon attacks in marvel vs. capcom 2. there’s two playable characters from the start: alfred from real bout fatal fury special, and a female character who i think might be an original character (though traced over the animations of another fighting game character. not sure who, though)
apparently, the water margin/shui hu feng yun zhuan got a ps4 release a couple of months ago, with an absolutely hideous smoothing filter on it
crazy that anyone can now legally and easily buy one of the first games ever covered on lunatic obscurity with no trouble at all, though
Ooh! Okay, so yeah it looks like the PS4 version, “The Tale of Clouds and Winds (QUByte Classics)”
is heavily filtered
And I guess you’re saying there’s no way to turn that off? Bleh. Budget publishers taking us back to PS3 era ports! ; P [Assumption corrected by meauxdal below.]
Anyway though, it’s also available on Steam as “Water Margin - The Tale of Cloud and Winds”
and on GOG by the same name
Those two versions are published developed by Kingtec Information and published by Piko Interactive. Now, I can’t vouch for the GOG version, but I bought the Steam version, which is listed at $9.99 but for some reason it sold to me at $3.99. (Oh, now that I refresh the Steam page it’s showing a sale, maybe that kicked in in the few minutes between my loading the page in my browser and buying it in the Steam app. ^ _^)
And, precisely as described in this review on Steam Steam Community :: june gloom :: Review for Water Margin - The Tale of Clouds and Wind
As it turns out it’s literally just Mednafen running a ROM. It’s a decent game, but a lot of the technical issues people are complaining about can be solved by stripping the ROM and throwing it into an emulator that doesn’t suck, unlike whatever jank-ass copy of Mednafen the game ships with. Go into the game folder, then the ‘res’ subfolder, and look for a file named “game” – no extension. Slap a .md extension on it and load it up in Retroarch or whatever and you’re good to go! And yes, you can move diagonally if you do this.
So I did that using Mednafen, and it works. : )
Hurrah! As other reviews constantly state, it feels highly derivative of Golden Axe, and Capcom’s Knights of the Round (er oh that’s because the Taiwanese team that made the bootleg did stuff like copying and modifying sprites from those games Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan | BootlegGames Wiki | Fandom ). And it’s based on a Chinese historical novel, like Capcom’s Warriors of Fate. But maybe okay? I dunno, haven’t played through yet.
Since I don’t have a review, here’s Loki’s ^ _^:
Sounds like I’ll have to play it! : )
actually i have no idea, but all the screenshots i saw were filtered.
there is a setting for “Sharp” in the options
looks OK like that
there’s a CRT filter too, but it looks a bit garish imo
click through, see Piko Interactive, close tab
Piko has a couple other arcadey beat-em-ups, the not-too-flashy-VFX one I’ve just tried is Gourmet Warriors
although their translated title screen has it as “Gourmet Squad.” Installing gives you the “game” file in the “res” folder which is a SNES rom, it runs fine in Mesen.
People vibrate a bit more than I’d like when you punch them, and it’s probably a bit more repetitive than it should be, and the boss I ran into so far was an unbelievable pushover, but the graphics and sound are decent and the punching isn’t terrible. It’s going for some kind of Choaniki + cooking vibe; some of the weirdness is actually kind of cute. The female playable character is more fan-servicey than I want to play, the guys seem okay though. You get a powerup that gives you a CPU clone partner, friendly fire in full effect. ; )
The Super Famicom original was Gourmet Sentai Barayarō by Winds
Heehee so Water Margin only lets you play about halfway through on the easy (“Grunt”) difficulty. ;_; = P I wasn’t using the magic because the FX are too flashy. ; )
It’s a long game! Also quite tough, I kinda suspect I won’t be getting through it on Medium without save scumming–or using magic?–and I don’t really want to do that. Actually, with this game I DON’T feel like I just want to get through it, it’s actually just fun to play moment to moment–at least as the female character, Hu Sanniang. The enemies are mean keep you constantly on your toes.
That Taiwanese crew made a really fun unlicensed Mega Drive game! I guess this is my favorite beat-em-up on the system–not that I’ve played a ton of them. Most of them look pretty ropey.
off the top of my head, mega drive has
s: streets of rage 2, bare knuckle 3
a: water margin, golden axe, alien storm, mazin saga, splatterhouse 2
b: golden axe 2, mystical fighter, sailor moon, altered beast, yang warrior family, splatterhouse 3
c: golden axe 3, captain america AND THE AVENNNNNGERRRRRS, two crude dudes
Thanks for the list! Mazin Saga was the one I hadn’t looked up–the one screenshot I’d happened to see made it look like a janky fighting game, but apparently that’s just boss fights–and I don’t think I’d heard of Yang Warrior Family, I suppose because it’s another unlicensed game.
another beat em up that i wrote the first english review of is getting a western release! but only on a system i don’t own lol
i’ll buy it in your honor
Incredible.
nekketsu kouha kunio-kun: bangai rantouhen is a very basic beat em up to have been released in 1991, but there’s still something about it that keeps me coming back. i can’t think of any better beat em ups on the original game boy, and even on game boy color i think the only rivals are pirate originals. another thing it has some of the best of on the original game boy are backgrounds. they’re all really detailed and look great. they do save some cartridge space in one way that’s charmingly obvious: the game is about going to different areas and beating up the gangs there and the local leaders as the bosses. so they reuse the “departing train station” “on the train” and “arriving train station” backgrounds every couple of stages.
Released in the West as Double Dragon II after a DD art makeover. That one’s really good too. ^ _^
Blade Master, Kung Fu Master, Ninja Spirit, Undercover Cops, and Vigilante (along with other Irem arcade games, 18 total–including beat-em-up-adjacent games Hammerin’ Harry, Legend of Hero Tonma) are available in the Irem Arcade Hits collection.
The collection runs in a horrible DotEmu emulator job. However, the ROMs can be extracted from the trial version (http://games1.gamefools.com/downloads/installers/IremArcadeHitsInstaller.exe) or the retail version ($2.99 from GameFools, but automatically enlisted me in monthly $14.99 charges for their game service thing until I canceled, so I’m not going to link to it; I ended up doing my extraction from the trial version rather than the retail one–although I think they’re actually the same self-installing .exe, it’s just that when you get the retail one they insert your user name and unlock code into the filename ; D) per the directions here (for Windows, they require installing and running Windows Subsystem for Linux, aka WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install): Irem Arcade Hits · farmerbb/RED-Project Wiki · GitHub
Note: when I tried following the guide for Windows, step 3, downloading the script, failed due to some kind of write permission for the Irem Arcade Hits game rom folder. So I copied it to a separate directory and continued from there.
I couldn’t get the extracted roms to run in current MAME, version 0.253. Most of them did run from the command line of MAME 0.119, from 2007 (the last non-64-bit MAME); I ran them with something like the following:
mame [rom name] -video gdi -waitvsync -volume -10
Vigilante didn’t run in MAME 0.119, but did run in MAME 0.78 (2003 :P; I jumped back there from 0.100, which didn’t run it, so there could be something more recent in between that does) once I renamed it from vigilantbl to vigilant.
12 of the games scanned successfully in the latest release FinalBurn Neo: Blade Master, Cosmic Cop, Dragon Breed (named dbreedm72), Gun Force II, Gunforce, Hammerin’ Harry, In The Hunt, Mystic Riders, Ninja Spirit, R-Type Leo, Superior Soldiers, and Undercover Cops.
I made a quick’n’dirty icon image for Undercover Cops to apply to my MAME shortcut for it : P :
(From The Arcade Flyer Archive - Video Game Flyers: Undercover Cops, Irem
)(I just pop the images into https://www.icoconverter.com/ these days to make my icons. ; ^))
a massive twitter thread containing a ton of boss tricks for various beat em ups. some fair, some not so fair, like manipulating streets of rage 2 so the robot bosses can’t inflict damage, and so on.
