Time Commando and Perfect Weapon opted for a slightly different take on scrolling combat, though they also failed to spawn a permanent, mass-repeated solution to the formula. SEGA’s own Die Hard Arcade was a hit, and made for a fun, if short lived, offshoot of the genre – continuing, but ultimately, dying, with games like Dynamite Cop and Zombie Revenge.
The beat ‘em up genre somewhat stunted in the mid to late ’90s, with developers trying to reestablish the formula of walking right and punching that seemed to work so well in two dimensions. Established franchises that made the jump from 2D to 3D did so with varying degrees of success. While 3D gaming had been experimented with for years, the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64 pushed it into the mainstream.
The move from 16-bit to 32-bit was a rough one. With Lizardcube’s excellent looking Streets of Rage 4 on the horizon, now is the perfect time to look back on Bomber Games’ pure distillation of side scrolling combat, as dictated by fans. It is the best game in the series, and one of (if not the) best 2D beat ‘em up of all time. Developed over the course of nearly a decade by independent studio Bomber Games, SORR is more than a fan project. None, however, had quite the impact of Streets of Rage Remake (SORR). From Senile Team‘s Beats of Rage to Matt Drury’s seven volume fan-fiction, Streets of Rage fans were as serious about their craft as they were about their fandom. Fans went from missing Streets of Rage to taking matters into their own hands. Games, game engines, art and volumes of fan fiction were made in the wake of silence that lasted from 1995 until 2019.
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Mechanically sound, visually striking and with a breathtaking soundtrack, the Streets of Rage series saw the Genesis from its heyday to its sunset years. The opening screen, panning over the city’s waterfront to Yuzo Koshiro’s solemn score set the tone for a darker game, the narrative somehow weaved into the orchestra of violence by a few sparse words at the game’s beginning and end. Streets of Rage was for SEGA fans alone, truly fulfilling the Genesis’ promise of arcade gameplay at home.Īn interactive pantomime, its story carried sense of urgency and sadness not often seen in the genre. Unlike its side-scrolling beat ‘em up brethren, Streets of Rage was not born in the arcades it was born on the Genesis.