[Throughout this project, I will be handing over this space to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I once again welcome Edward Okulicz, who previously wrote about Monty on the Run]
I love side-scrolling beat-‘em-ups. They give you endless hours of utterly unrealistic fun. I mean, the very idea that you can only attack someone if they are on exactly the same horizontal plane! And that nobody can attack you from a 90 degree angle! It’s the classic example of a genre which made huge compromises from reality in the aid of simplicity and fun. Because I’m sad, and also old, one of the things I’m most looking forward to in 2019 is the release of Streets of Rage 4, a game I’ve been waiting for someone to (officially, anyway) make for about 25 years. Streets of Rage 1 and 3 are very good games, but Streets of Rage 2 is certainly my favourite beat-’em-up of all time. Original it was not, of course. It was a superior but nonetheless blatant Final Fight clone, and Final Fight itself owed a lot to Double Dragon, which was one of the coolest arcade games of its time. Double Dragon didn’t come out of nowhere, as it was in turn built off the ideas in Renegade.
Renegade is very much the ur-text for this kind of game. It doesn’t have long scrolling levels from right to left, but short ones where you go back and forth taking out enemies. After you take out enough enemies, a boss appears at the same time as you fend off the last of the regular foes. In the arcades, it had a control system that probably seemed a bit odd at the time. Three buttons were used: one to attack left, one to attack right, and one to jump. Your standard attack is to punch, but if you attack in the direction you’re not facing, you unleash a useful backwards kick. You can also jump and do a flying kick, and most, but not all, enemies can also be attacked while they’re on the ground. You get on them and punch them in the face while they’re on the ground. Once you learn you can’t do this to the bosses until they’re sufficiently weakened, it’s great fun. It’s really a wonder I didn’t turn into a thug. (Then again, I played a lot of Bubble Bobble and I didn’t turn into a bubble-blowing dragon either. What a pity.) What’s surprising is that the 3-button scheme is a very effective control system that allows precise execution of the range of moves at times when you might be attacked on all sides. Well, you know, both sides, given the genre.
Of course, most home systems had one button on their joystick, two tops. How to reduce a relatively complex control system down to a one-button joystick becomes the most important part of the conversion. The Sega Master System version (which is heavily extended) and the NES version both make use of their controllers’ two buttons, one for left, one for right, and both together to jump. The Commodore 64 version gave up and used three keys on the keyboard (left attack, jump, right attack) for maximum faithfulness and maximum awkwardness, unless you have particularly skilful toes. The Spectrum uses the joystick or keyboard, but always seems to use the keyboard to attack even with the joystick – the manual says the fire button is not used. This isn’t a big issue in the days of emulators and mapping keys to controllers, of course. But it only makes use of one attack button (so why not use the stick, designers?). So to attack left, you press left plus the attack key together. Right plus the attack key attacks right. Up plus the attack key jumps. This is, unsurprisingly, a very bad control system. Forget pulling off smooth moves when being attached from all sides. Both sides. You know what I mean.
And good control is key to a good game. This seems like such a fundamental mistake in design that it renders the game stiff and unrewarding to play.
It’s also disappointing, because Renegade is a well-designed game of a type that should be resilient to downgrading to home ports, and it looks like all the necessary elements are present here. The game ups the ante each stage from the easy first one (as long as you don’t fall off the edge), to the second with motorcyclists that need to be neutralised with flying kicks, to the third with its physically imposing (female!) boss who requires excellent timing to land hits on or she’ll knock you over, to the final two stages with one-hit melee kills and eventually a final boss with a gun. So to win the game you have to beat guys with one-hit kill razors and a guy with a one-hit kill gun, having death surround you in all directions, but of course, only being a threat in two of them!
Scrolling wasn’t the Spectrum’s forte, but the flick-screen to allow the full extent of the levels isn’t as disorientating as I thought it would be. The way the enemies walk the same direction and speed as your hero makes for some amusing moments, like you have them on strings, or you’re taking part in some very tight choreography (the arcade also did this, and I love it). The sprite work is good and clear, and the backgrounds do the best with the Spectrum’s colour limitations, and there’s even some in-game music, even if it sounds a bit… well, people didn’t buy the Spectrum because of it’s sound chip. I struggled to beat the first level, but I managed it because I realised that the flying kick is slightly easier to time and score hits with in this version compared to the others. I know I at least got to the guy with the gun in the C64 version.
I’m quite surprised to see that gaming magazines really rated this game at the time. Especially when compared to the colorful, satisfying, 3-key+stick Commodore version released at the same time, and the brisk, smooth NES version with cool extra bits like a on-bike fight sequence, this version plays awkwardly and to me just isn’t fun. But it’s probably also true that there were few really good side-scrolling beat-’em’-ups on the 8-bit systems. The various home versions of Double Dragon were uniformly incompetent, though Double Dragon II on the C64 is lively and enjoyable. Give or take some not-too-bad 8-bit conversions of some of Konami’s amazing arcade cartoon licence brawlers, It would really take the 16-bit machines to really move all those bad dudes around for you to take your aggression out on.
