Let's talk about beat'em ups.

People keep telling me Double Dragon Neon is good, but I looked at some videos of it... I'll just quote what someone on a forum said about it:

"Game is more funny than fun. I like WayForward, but the fact that it's in 3D and fights move at a snails pace really hurt what could've been a true Double Dragon revival. Instead, the game is more occupied in making fun of the 80s and DD."

I heard there's also a lot of grinding in this game, which looks really tedious.

edited 1st Apr '15 12:41:33 PM by Psychopulse

Don't Press Your Luck too many times in life. You'll just get whammied.

Hmm. I love that soundtrack.

But man... There's gotta be some Indie we're all overlooking... I know Croixleur Sigma was short on content but pretty decent, but wasn't a Belt Scroll. And Dungeons And Dragons is on it but that's a re-release.

Unfortunately the Beat 'em Up tag on steam includes fighting games, platformers and stuff that doesn't even have combos in it. Taking the genre too literally there guys.

edited 1st Apr '15 2:46:09 PM by ShirowShirow

I just purchased Castle Crashers on the Steam sale. I'll give it a spin later.

Don't Press Your Luck too many times in life. You'll just get whammied.

Calling a fighting game a beat em up is an immediate indicator that you don't play either genre much. Reviewers who do it drive me nuts.

Bumping it back up...

So last year I bought Double Dragon Neon on sale for $0.99 during a winter sale. It was pretty meh.

Don't Press Your Luck too many times in life. You'll just get whammied.

I mean, there can be cross-genre examples. Castlevania Rondo of Blood had more advanced moves and a lot of combat more than usual in Classicvanias with the introduction of Item Crashes, so that kind of counts. Freedom Planet also has combos, especially for Lilac who's got a full and nuanced moveset. It's fast, but still a lot of beating up to do.

A more traditional one though? Sadly not so much. I feel the same with run and gun games, two great formulas that really need indie revivals. People only seem to want to make 8 bit, cheaply hard platformers, maybe throw in some internet memes and call it a day.

Bumping since I don't think either of the games I'm about to bring up have/need their own threads (feel free to point me at a relevant thread though).

Double Dragon IV was just released on PS 4 and Steam. It's a retro-styled new entry (as in, it actually continues the plots from the other games) by Arc System Works that plays just like the old NES titles. So very much unlike Neon (which I love, but I always felt like it was meant to be a Violent Storm remake instead). New features include a Duel Mode with multiple characters, and a post-game Tower Mode, which I don't know much about at the moment (I'm assuming it's just waves of random enemies though).

The other game is River City Ransom: Underground, which started as a fan game but was officially licensed by ASW. It just released the launch trailer and should be out at the end of the month, after apparently over three years of work.^note I guess the game was slowly, slowly being developed until AWS assisted. It seems to mark more of a return of the River City gameplay (compared to the 3DS Tokyo Rumble game) meshed with more fluid spritework (like Scott Pilgrim) and four-player multiplayer, which includes a battle mode.

The game's Youtube channel can be found here, which has a few more trailers that they released over the past few months showing a bit more gameplay. This seems to be a labor of love, so I'm really looking forward to it (hence my current sig). I didn't get into the franchise until recently, when I was trying to figure out if there were other games like the Scott Pilgrim one (at the time, I didn't know that Scott Pilgrim based its gameplay on River City Ransom). I bought the original River City Ransom on my 3DS and might get Tokyo Rumble later on.

edited 2nd Feb '17 10:15:33 AM by Customer

Been looking forward to River City Undeground for a long, long while. Haven't had anything new and good enough to scratch my beat 'em up itch since Streets of Rage Remake. Hoping the RPG elements don't make things too easy the way they did in Scott Pilgrim, but that game was a bit of a rush job so I suppose things like that are to be expected.

Double Dragon IV looks really mediocre, to be honest. The enemies are slow and vegetative, the grafx are rough (not because they're 8-bits, but because of the often ugly and mismatched assets) and it's almost the Final Fight 2 of DD in how slavishly it adheres to the previous games

oh well, it's 8 bucks

edited 3rd Feb '17 3:33:20 PM by Glowsquid

Speaking of rush jobs....

Got my hands on River City Ransom Underground and boy

this is not a good game. It's not terrible, but the over reliance on RPG elements, tedious game design, and nonsense like running into walls potentially killing you at low health has made this more frustrating than anything else.

And you have to grind a lot to get all your special moves - all you have at the start are a basic punch, a basic kick, and a tiny handful of character specific stuff that's not as flashy or fun as what you can get with money. There's a lot more wrong with it too - evidently it's buggy and in some places patently incomplete - so I'd stay away from it if you were playing to pick it up any time soon, at least until they fix these things. But even if they do, it's just not that great a game. Not worth its 20 dollar price tag for sure.

I'd rather play the better DD sequel, aka Neon. A better modern revival that doesn't suck.

Despite my massive love for Neon, I'll never get over the fact that it's almost more of a Violent Storm game than a Double Dragon one.

It still has the best credits sequence I've seen in a video game though. I really want to see a follow-up to that incarnation of Double Dragon.

Yeah I kind of agree with a lot of that, as I have very mixed feelings about Underground. Though in all honesty, it plays just as I expected it to, and still feels more like an indie "throwback/nostalgia trip" type game that doesn't really stray far from its inspiration, despite ASW's support.

...Which honestly adds to my disappointment since I've been playing Digimon World -next 0rder-, another game with Early Game Hell that served as a "modernization" of an older game that actually updated and streamlined the more frustrating parts of the original.

I think the main problem with Underground is that it's too focused on being like the original game, gameplay-wise, including being needlessly vague on certain aspects (like what level you need to be to buy a new move, as well as not explaining or giving a hint as to what kind of move it is before you buy it) and I don't feel it works too well with the sequel. Even the Scott Pilgrim game mitigated most of the more annoying features of River City Ransom in its adaptation of the gameplay.

To make a list of my gripes so far:

• Having every character start with only the most basic moves, especially after the tutorial that gives Alex and Ryan more to work with even before they get their actual special moves. This makes every character feel very similar, and considering the amount of grinding you have to do to even purchase simple combo extenders (i.e. add a second punch/kick to your basic punch/kick), it makes trying to invest in more than one character at a time a pain. At the moment, it feels better to just start a new file with a different character instead of switching around.
• Speaking of that, every character is a separate entity and there's no sharing money or exp between them. This wouldn't bother me that much, but considering the story isn't tied to a character, and that enemies seem to become more powerful as you progress through it (at least from what I've observed; beating Pink Bee appeared to have given most of the mooks new attack patterns, like the Luchas suddenly gaining an M. Bison-like Psycho Crusher move), it just makes switching even more of a hassle.
• The lack of initial character diversity seems to hurt the grappler characters the most, because none of them seem to start with any sort of grappling attacks to give you an idea as to how they play (or how they're different from each other). And for that matter, every character lacks a grab attack of any sort, so grabbing any mook is likely just going to get you punished till you get one.
• There are swarms of enemies everywhere. So much so that moving around is tough and you're liable to get killed just trying to rush through the crowds of mooks. It's even worse if you trigger the police to show up, who not only add to the numbers, but also don't drop money at all so there's almost no reason to fight them.
• As Hashil said, you're expected to grind for money in order to get your moves, because the mooks barely drop good amounts of cash. Worse still, you're liable to get yourself killed in the process of grinding, making you lose half your cash, extending the process.
• Like the first game, there are no item/food/move descriptions prior to purchasing them, so you end up playing a guessing game trying to figure out what does what. When you're already strapped for cash... well, you can see where I'm going with this. This doesn't really bother me as much, since it was like this in the original game (so was taking damage from running into walls, though I don't think it killed you in the original game).
• A minor one, but tutorial prompts fly in instantly with no real warning, and any button press with get rid of them, so if they pop up in the middle of a fight (they're context-sensitive), you're pretty likely to end up skipping it.

...I mean, there are things I do like about the game, and I enjoyed playing with my brothers so much that I didn't really take in any of negatives till much later, but right now, I feel like it's difficult to recommend it to anyone other than people who really liked the original River City Ransom. I'm really hoping that they touch up the game some more with updates/patches, because right now I'm more annoyed at the squandered potential than I am at the game's current form.

fuck, that's like, how not to make a game fun 101.

I remember someone saying shovel knight worked because it borrowed liberally from its era of inspiration and touched them all up til they were polished, rather than try to emulate any one of these invariably flawed games entirely.

RCRU is trying so hard to be a straight up sequel to a 30 year old game, as if it were still the late 80s and not 2017. Absolutely nothing from modern game design is in here except the bits and pieces we hate, like tutorial pop ups.

So it's basically just more of the same, including tons of recycled 8 bit sprites. The whole thing feels lazy.

There's also FP which does for Sega run and guns/action games and Sonic what SK did for Castlevania, Duck Tales, and Mega Man. Speedy setpieces aside, combat's a heavy focus and enemies are tough, but there's almost no bottomless pits or Collision Damage so it feels fair.

Carol and Neera especially are more brawler types, so you can play it as a platformer with heavy action.

Also speaking of Castlevania, Order of Eclesia ditched a lot of the Metroidvania trappings and focused more on tightly-designed, compact separate stages with Shanoa unable to take as many hits as the typical series protagonist, combined with thoughtful enemy placement and her combos, reminded me of the genre.

Well no, the sprites are actually one of the better points the game has, and was one of the reasons I was interested in it in the first place. Although the style is similar to RCR, the animations are fluid, like the Scott Pilgrim game's sprite animations. Even the sprites in the tutorial, which places you at the end of the original game and has every character in the tutorial look as they did in the past, have more animations to them compared to the original.

There've been a couple of patches already, which is good, especially since it seems like the game is more of a mess at launch than I had thought (apparently the online aspects are horrible; you can't even save properly in online multiplayer). I still think some of the more annoying gameplay features (the police, the blind moveset purchases, the goddamn random bystanders that seem to purposely wander into your brawls and trigger the police) need to be addressed to make the game more accessible and not feel like an Obvious Beta.

Edited by ironcommando on Jul 28th 2019 at 2:36:40 AM

...eheh

Bumping this thread because I got the (in?)famous Saturn beat'em up Nekketsu Oyako today and I felt like writing about it.

It’s a really Weird game and not “ahahahah you fight octopuses in a whales belly” kind of weird (though there’s plenty of that too).

-The engine (at least on the Saturn version) has tons of cancelling and that results in super broken (and AWESOME) combos. Stuff like taking half of the first boss’s health by cancelling Rando’s dragon punch into another dragon punch and then following that with his up-down-forward attack (which can also cancel into itself).

-The difficulty balance is odd: enemies are passive and never pose too much of a threat (beside the “Colonel” types) but your health doesn’t get replenished and extends are few and far in-between.

-Your default punch punch punch string is basically useless. there’s no reason to not default to Rando’s dragon punch attack for example

-Sprites and general production values are uncharacteristically underwhelming for a Technosoft game. It feels more at home on the SNES than the P S1s and Saturns it was actually released on (the Saturn soundtrack is great tho).

It’s a lot of fun though! With the amount of shit you can do, it’s less of a struggle to survive like most beat em ups and more like a stage to show off.

... But shame about the price.

Edited by Glowsquid on Nov 25th 2019 at 7:52:32 AM

Bumping this thread since it's the closet one I could find about the old TMNT games.

Welp, it's now time to ride our hoverboards down the highway.