Demolish Fist (Arcade)

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, beat em ups as a genre entered something of a drought, from which the genre's never really recovered. While shooting games and 2D platformers have plenty of great representatives from both mainstream and independent developers, new beat em ups are few and far between, and a lot of the time, they're ruined by the kinds of stupid game-killing design choices I've complained about in many, many posts on this blog before: levelling up/skill shops, negative difficulty curves, and a new one I only discovered recently: there's a game available on PS4 and PC called Mother Russia Bleeds, and the lives/continue system is so broken as to make it impossible to get a game over (as far as I could tell), rendering the game completely pointless.

But anyway, that drought. It was still very much in effect in 2003, when Demolish Fist was released, and even among the few beat em ups released about that time, this one stands out by being more traditional. Though it's entirely in 3D and you can move and face in all eight directions, the camera sticks rigidly in one position (not counting cutscenes, obviously), making the game play like a regular, old-fashioned belt scroller. And it does a great job of it, too! You walk along, beat up crowds of bad guys, pick up weapons and power-ups and a good time is had by all.

Of course, every beat em up needs to have a gimmick to make it stand out, even if it has no contemporary competitors, and Demolish Fist actually has a few! Firstly, there's a block button. It's not a massive thing, but it's still something that a lot of beat em ups don't have. Secondly, the game takes an approach to weaponry akin to Two Crude Dudes or Dynamite Deka, having tons of stuff available to pick up and swing and/or throw: cattleprods, baseball bats with nails hammered into the end, swords, electrified gloves, fuel tanks, vending machines, motorcycles, cars and so on. The final, and most unique gimmick is the vertigo system. You get a power bar that fills up from attacking enemies, like in many other games. When it fills up, you can press all three buttons to enter vertigo mode, during which you're not only invincible, but you can also attack as fast as you're able to hammer the attack button. This lasts for ten seconds or until every enemy present has been defeated, and it never gets old or stops being satisfying.

I also want to talk about this game's setting and aesthetic, which I like as much as the game itself. It's a kind of look that was used in a lot of anime and Japanese videogames around the turn of the century that I'm going to call "sunset dystopia", a world where there hasn't been any kind of cataclysmic event, but it's just kind of lurching slowly towards an eventual apocalypse through societal entropy that's just on the horizon. I guess other examples of the look would be Daraku Tenshi, King of Fighters 99, and Crimson Tears.

So yeah, Demolish Fist is an excellent game. If you're able to play it (and most fairly modern computers should be able to emulate the Atomiswave at a decent speed by now. My pre-owned laptop can manage it, even!), then you definitely should.

Parasol Henbee (Game Boy)

So, this game is based on an anime I've never seen, and had never heard of before playing the game. And I wouldn't have even heard of the game itself had it not happened to be one of the 66 games built into some models of the excellent Game Boy Color clone, the KongFeng GB Boy Colour. So what kind of game is Parasol Henbee? It's a platform game with an incredibly sedate pace and feel, akin to going out for a leisurely stroll.

You play as the eponymous Henbee (or possibly Henbei, depending on the romanisation), and you literally just got from left to right on each stage, avoiding enemies and hazards until you reach the end. You do have an attack, but it's awkward to use, and it depletes your health almost as much as getting hit by an enemy does. You start out with pretty low health, though there is a reason for that: your walking speed and the height/length of your jumps has a correlation with the state of your health bar, and there's lots of little items floating around that increase your health a tiny amount. Of course, this means that in later stages, when the platforms start getting smaller, and the gaps between them bigger, if you take a few hits, finishing the stage becomes basically impossible. And there are points in those later stages that require military precision to avoid touching the enemies.

There's not much else to say about the game, mechanically speaking. There's no bosses, very little variety, and you can get through most of the game without feeling any sense of progress or achievement. There are some interesting things to say about it aesthetically and thematically, though! Firstly, Henbee looks like a Mr. Saturn from Earthbound, though this game and the series on which it's based is older than that game. Also, the first couple of stages, which are set in what's clearly supposed to be a friendly Japanese suburb look more like a feral city, left to rot by uncaring corrupt politicians, as the streets are lined with piles of uncollected rubbish and populated by packs of wild dogs and cats. Maybe I'm wrong, and the creator of Doraemon did make a series that was a biting social commentary that somehow got a licensed Gamy Boy game made out of it, but I'd be very surprised if that were the case.

I don't recommend Parasol Henbee. It's not interesting enough to bother hunting down, and even if you do have a GB Boy Colour and no actual cartridges to put in it, there's plenty of much, much better games on the built in list you can enjoy while waiting for your ebay-purchased carts to arrive.

Doman (Amiga)

Round about the mid-90s, though most people had cast the Amiga into the past, never to be thought of ahain, there was still enough of a following for the system that commercial game releases were still coming (and, in fact, would continue until at least the early 00s). It's in the mid-90s that a small Polish developer, named World Software, released a few belt-scrolling beam em ups, that would become infamous for their grim settings and gratuitous violence. Doman is one of those games.

I can't tell you anything about the plot, as obviously, all the game's text is in Polish. But I can tell you that it's set in a dark, bleak world of medieval fantasy, where the background has giant black mountains and foreboding forests, while the foreground has impoverished villages where all the inhabitants are hung up, or beheaded, or generally suffering some kind of severe misfortune. You play as one of two absurdly muscular barbarians, one with dark hair and a sword, the other with blonde hair, a beard and an axe. You walk from left to right, violently murderering groups of soldiers, orcs, wizards, demons, archers, and so on.

Despite coming out as late as 1994, it doesn't have any option (as far as I can tell) to use two-button controllers, nor does it have the typical beat em up combo system. Instead, you can perform different attacks by holding the fire button and pressing different directions. The most effective strategy is to rely on the attacks assigned to up and down. The up attack knocks enemies to the ground, allowing you to pummel whoever's standing with the down attack, which is pretty good for attack power, range and speed. When the downed enemy starts to get up, knock the current guy down and switch targets.

The structure is pretty strange: the first time I played, I though I was just doing really badly, and failing to get past an incredibly long first stage. After getting a game over and seeing the high score table, I realised I was wrong: the scores are just a simple percentage, which I assume is how far you made it through the game. So that's pretty interesting, the game being one long stage, right? There is one bad thing about the game, though: there's a lot of loading. It stops to load every time you walk a screen's distance, it stops to load whenever a group of enemies appear, and the load times at the start of the game, and between games are very long. Also, if you plan on playing it on real hardware, it comes on five disks, which will be an immense pain if you only have one disk drive.

Doman isn't a bad game. It can seem unfairly hard at first, but once you've got a hang of how the combat works, it gets a lot more manageable. Obviously, there's many, much better beat em ups on consoles and in arcades, but as far as they go on the Amiga, it's easily the best I've ever played. Plus, there's a little bit of novelty in playing an arcade-style game that comes from Poland, when in recent years, eastern Europe is probably more known for PC games, first person shooters, and so on.

He Jin Zhuang Bei II (Game Boy Color)

I don't know what the title means, or if there's actually a  He Jin Zhuang Bei I, but what I do know is that this is an unlicensed beat em up themed around the Metal Gear Solid games. Despite it's worldwide popularity, Metal Gear Solid doesn't seem to have inspired many pirate games, compared to the likes of Street Fighter or Dynasty Warriors. In fact, before this game, the only previous MGS Pirate I'd seen was a Russian Mega Drive pirate, that was just a quick hack of Crack Down with only the title screen changed.

The game starts with a codec conversation (in Chinese) between Snake, Mei Ling and the Colonel, before dumping you on an RPG-esque map screen. From this map, there are two stages the player can visit, in whatever order they like. There's an incredibly tedious bridge stage, that feels like it goes on forever, and sees Snake fight various kinds of soldiers and also what appear to be martial artists dressed in raggedy jester costumes with sacks on their heads. The other's a kind of warehouse district that doesn't have the jesters, though it does end with a boss fight against a big robot, that towers over Snake (who himself must be about seven feet tall, being significantly taller than most of the human enemy types). I dont know if there's some kind of copy protection that hasn't been cracked, or if there's some I was meant to do but never knew about because I can't read any of the text, but after completing these two stages, I could only play them again, the game didn't open up anything new.

Mechanically, it's very mediocre. Like a lot of other unlicensed GBC beat em ups (especially the many Dynasty Warriors games, and Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War), it has a levelling up system, and for the first few levels of experience, you do very little damage to enemies and every fight is a boring slog. You have a button to attack (doing Snake's punch-punch-kick combo from Metal Gear Solid!) and another to jump. Pressing them together performs a gun attack that drains your health and hardly ever hits, so don't bother with it. Other than that, there's really nothing about the way He Jin Zhuang Bei II plays that's particularly uniue or interesting.

Unless you're a rabid obsessive for either unlicensed games or Metal Gear Solid, there's unfortunately not really much to recommend about He Jin Zhuan Bei II, the various Dynasty Warriors GBC bootlegs are mostly better than it, and it definitely doesn't hold a torch to the excellent School Fighter.

Big Fight - Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean (Arcade)

Probably the best thing about playing obscure games is when you find a game you've never even seen anyone talk about online and it turns out to be an unsung classic of the genre, and that's what i realised had happened shortly after I'd started playing Big Fight - Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a beat em up, of course, and it's from the early 90s, and though the early 90s was something of a boom period for the genre, that also means there was a lot of pretty terrible cash-in garbage released then, too.  Big Fight is not one of those pieces of garbage. In fact, it's surprising it was released all the way back in 1992, since it's so packed with cool ideas. It even rivals critically acclaimed entries into the genre that came much later, like 1995's Guardians/Denjin Makai II. It's a terrible shame that it was apparently Tatsumi's last ever videogame.

So anyway, as the game starts, it appears to have a pretty typical set up for a beat em up: some bad guys are up to no good on an ocean liner and three heroes go out there to stop them. Those three heroes being, as you'd expect, an average guy (Kevin), a speedy girl (Zill) and a big strong guy (Gear). Straight away, the player can benefit from the game's first gimmick: each character has one or two fighting game-style special moves, the most useful being Zill's leaping, burning knee attack thing, performed by double-tapping forwards and pressing attack. Another thing, the characters seemingly have little or no recovery time for their normal combo attacks, meaning that the player can attack pretty much as quickly as they can press the button.

After you've taken some damage, you'll come across the next of the game's gimmicks: the anger meter. Appearing only when the player is knocked down and a low health, the anger meter is filled by rapidly tapping the attack button before the character gets back on their feet. If it's successfully filled (a knack that shouldn't take long for players to pick up), the character rises to their feet with a special attack (as in the typical beat em up health-draining all-round attack) without the health loss, and for a short time, all their attacks do extra damage and set enemies on fire. It's a nice way of giving ailing players a little help surviving just a little bit longer to the next health power-up.

A little way into the first stage, the game allows the player to choose one of three routes, though I'm pretty sure all the areas get covered eventually, this is still a pretty important choice to make, since ach of the three areas you can choose to tackle first obviously ends in a different boss, and that's where Big Fight's coolest gimmick comes in: at the start of each stage after the first, the player can change their character, with defeated bosses joining the playable roster! The bosses are a pretty varied bunch, too: there's the typical beat em up dominatrix, an offensive Native American stereotype (but offensive racial stereotypes never stopped anyone playing Street Fighter II, did they?), a bizarre pharoah character with long limbs and laser eyes, a cartoonish sumo wrestler, and presumably a few more, since I've not yet been able to complete the game.

Anyway, this game is excellent, and I strongly recommend you go and play it. It's not perfectly emulated in MAME, but there's only a few minor graphical glitches that don't affect gameplay, and don't make the game significantly uglier. Hopefully, it can start to recieve the recognition it should have got a long time ago.

Nekketsu Oyako (Playstation)

So, the title apparently translates as "hot blooded family", and refers to the three playable characters: a dad and his son and daughter. The dad, Rando is the worst character. He's slow, can't pick up most of the guns in the game and has less moves than the other two. His two redeeming features are his Haggar-esque jumping

piledriver and the fact that he's the only character who can use the (very rare) bazooka weapon. There's also a beer health pickup that only he can use, but it doesn't heal very much and it's at least as rare as the bazooka (I've only seen one of each). The daughter, Rio is a little better. She moves faster, and has a fun little move where she can pogo around on top of the enemies' heads. There's also a nice little touch with her when she picks up a weapon and walks around with it, she does so while carrying it on her back. It's a pointless thing, but it adds a little personality. The son, Tora is the best character by far, though. He has a bunch of moves, like a flying kick that bounces off the top of enemies upwards and away, a brutal moves where he repeatedly slashes a knife back and forth, doing and ton of damage, and he's the only character of
the three who can run.
The game itself seems at first to be a regular, generic beat em up, though it does have a couple of interesting gimmicks, like the versatility and mobility of Tora's moveset, and the fact that though you obviously start with a single bar of health, even when its full you can collect more food to fill it up a second bar (like in the Dynamite Deka series).
The setting is pretty cool, too. The first stage takes place on the city streets like any other beat em up, but as soon as the first boss is defeated, things take a more surreal turn. A whale smashes through the bridge on whivh you're standing and swallows you, leading you to spend the next stage inside and on top of the whale, fighting the usual thugs and goons along with boxing gloce-wearing octopi and weird creatures

made of water. The next stage mostly returns to normalcy on a theme park island resort, but includes a really cool section where you fight big crowds of enemies on top of a roller coaster.
Nekketsu Oyako isn't anything special, but it is pretty good. There's also an english path available, though there's barely any Japanese text in the game, and none of what there is is essential for progress. The game's worth playing, but you should definitely play as Tora if you do.

Hany on the Road (PC Engine)

Although it's not a beat em up, the easiest way to describe Hany on the Road would be "belt scroller", as belts and the scrolling thereof are a major element in this game.
In it, the player controllers a walking haniwa idol (which, you may be aware, have made many appearances

in videogames over the years) going along a series of long roads, avoiding gaps and enemies. The enemies tend to also be things associated with ancient Japan and Japanese folklore, such as dogu statues, cloud-riding oni, and so on. There are also some gimmick stages, such as one with an erupting volcano in the background, during which the player must avoid falling rocks while also traversing the gaps in the floor.
An interesting point is that the gaps don't kill the player on every stage: on some stages, falling through a gap leads to a hell-like secret stage (similar to certain points in the first two Splatterhouse games). The main hook of the game is that the stages are split into four scolling "belts", and on most stages, those belts scroll at different speeds.
The game is pretty fun in general, though it has a couple of bad points that might ruin it for you. The first is the fact that there are points items littered around the stages in the form of pots marked with question marks. The problem is that these pots give a random amount of points each time, making playing for score a waste of time (if you're interesting in playing for score on an ancient game no-one cares about). The second, much

bigger problem is the controls, which themselves have two problems. The way Hany moves has way too much momentum, stopping and turning a split-second after you tell him to, as if he's constantly on a slippy-slidy ice level and also, his kick attack is far too short range. This means that to defeat enemies, you kind of have to wait for them to come to you, then kick just before they hit you, and it makes hitting bosses far too difficult. There's also a weird little glitch regarding the blue potions which give an extra life on collection of 25: if you get a game over and then start a new game, the potion counter doesn't reset, meaning you start with however many you had when your previous game ended.
If you have the patience to overlook those faults, Hany in the Sky is a pretty fun game, and it does look nice, too. The control issues are the biggest shame, as if the movement was a bit tighter and the attack a bit more useful, this would probably be a minor classic in the field of action
games.