Streets of Rage Remake

This is getting awfully close to what I wanted to avoid talking about, classic games but there’s enough difference and “indie love” in the remake that it makes the cut. Streets of Rage is a classic scrolling beat’em up from the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive days that was created to compete with Final Fight initially and then Street Fighter 2 in the sequel. However contrary to Final Fight and many other scrolling beat’em ups of its time, SoR was never a mash-one-button pony. There are a staggering amount of moves, multiple combinations and grab moves, vaults, team up attacks, specials, back attacks and more. It’s simply the best scrolling beat’em up ever made being the only series to eclipse the granddaddy of them all Double Dragon.

The remake merges characters and stages from all three games in the series, introduces new moves and specials as well as new characters such as a redrawn and remixed SoR1 Adam in SoR2/3 style. The stages are all integrated so there is greater coherency in the journey to the final base with multiple paths and hidden stages depending on paths taken and enemies fought. There are multiple new endings just like in the original SoR games as well as completely new fantastic looking art and additional game modes like volleyball and survival. It all adds up to be one big long love letter from fans who grew up and never forgot the impact the series had on them when they were kids.  This game would be fantastic on XBL Arcade or any console’s online arcade marketplace actually, if Sega would pay these guys for their hard work and make it official. There were always rumours of a SoR 4 but it got stuck in development hell and eventually killed, this about as good as a real sequel the fans have wanted and deserved to get anyway.

 aaaaaaaand…. it’s free http://www.bombergames.net/sorr.htm

Super Cosplay War Ultra

Fighting games usually aren’t found on the PC, not the best ones anyway. Once upon a time we did play the likes of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 Turbo on PC with keyboard controls. Anyone remember the original version of Mugen used for a homebrewed “clone” of Street Fighter and all the hacked versions that followed? how about Body Blows? Super Fighter? Sango Fighter? well.. I digress. These days “keyboard fighters” are still being made but not commercially, instead they are the realm of “doujin fighters” which is japanese for fan made fighting games.

Super Cosplay War Ultra is arguably the best one I’ve played. Essentially it is a a juiced up version of Pocket Fighter with a more advanced fighting engine (air dash!) where the characters are cosplayers or parodies of cosplayer stereotypes with moves where they’ll transform into their favourite characters (bad costumes included). There are references galore to both games and anime everywhere both in the characters as well as the backgrounds. The endboss is also particularly hilarious with both jabs at cosplay and a parody/homage of “SNK boss syndrome”. The game is very polished with 3D particle effects and tight controls. Amazingly it’s free. If only because it’d be kind of hard to sell it uh… anywhere.

Get it here. http://a030032098.myweb.hinet.net/2004scwu_indexjp/2004scwu_indexjp.htm