Best Lesser-Known Beat-'em-Ups

[Tain]

On Saturn and PS1 (apparently better on Saturn?) is Nekketsu Oyako, a pretty cool Technosoft beat 'em up.

[NeoZeedeater]

lol, I just meant examples of obscure consoles in the US; I'm not limiting it to those. The Saturn still counts! I love buying Saturn games.

Yeah, I didn't think you were limiting yourself to just those two. I was just saying the options on those are more limited than on some other systems.

[MechDeus]

Also, lest we forget:

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[George]

Dominique Cross 4ever

[Frogacuda]

Really? They came out relatively close together, and the graphical style, sounds, and level design are incredibly similar. Well at least they're both still Konami.

Yeah, they're both the same department at Konami and probably share an "engine" or tools, but not the actual people working on them.

[jyoung]

And, does anyone like Charlie Murder?

I liked it enough to play through the game once. It's basically Castle Crashers with a hard rock aesthetic. Took about 8 hours to beat.

Also Batman Returns on the SNES. I haven't gone back to it in years, but I remember loving it back in the day.

I played it a few months back, and the graphics and sound are still great for the SNES, but the gameplay hasn't held up very well. The enemies swarm you really easily and they take way too many hits to kill.

It really felt like that game was designed for two-players, then they removed the feature at the last second for some reason and forget to tune the difficulty back down to where one person could beat it.

[jyoung]

Brawl Brothers for the SNES sprung to mind.

I have the complete Jaleco beat-em-up trilogy for SNES (Rival Turf and Peace Keepers are the other two), and none of them are really worth playing through more than once.

The animation and controls feel like shit compared to Capcom, Technos or Konami beat-em-ups.

I don't think anything by Technos can be considered obscure, but The Combatribes is damn good.

I can't speak for the arcade version, but the SNES version was no fun. It felt like a bad reskin of Renegade.

[jyoung]

If you guys have a PS2 capable of playing imports, you need the Sega Ages re-release of Die Hard Arcade:



It has the full original game, a new version with redone graphics, and some weird bonus features like Ax Battler and Tyris Flare costumes.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

I have the complete Jaleco beat-em-up trilogy for SNES (Rival Turf and Peace Keepers are the other two), and none of them are really worth playing through more than once.

The animation and controls feel like shit compared to Capcom, Technos or Konami beat-em-ups.

The American releases are fairly inferior to the japanese releases (Rushing Beat series) from what I've read.

[Mzo]

And beat 'em ups are the SMS's weakest genre, IMO. It does have a unique version of Renegade, though. I'm not really a fan of any version anymore.

Definitely gonna look this one up. I really, really like NES Renegade! What's wrong with it? You have so many moves and you get to beat up women.