[A-Z Games] B: Bare Knuckle

Before Street Fighter 2 came and fundamentally changed the feel of arcades, two player beat em ups were commonplace but as scrollers with 2 player co-op. Games of my youth seemed to be more cooperative, I'm sure. Maybe that was just the way I played them...

Anyway, a slightly cheeky choice as Bare Knuckle is known by most as Streets of Rage in the West - even me (I wasn't some kind of esoteric NTSC only gamer when I was 12), so a spot of poetic licence. As you play the game, one of the levels has other characters playing an arcade called Bare Knuckle (even in the Streets of Rage versions) so I was not entirely oblivious.

Streets of Rage 2 was one of my most played games, I just loved all the characters and the variations between them. The sequel added one further character to the Streets Of Rage roster and so there were now characters to represent speed (Skate, the new one), finesse (Blaze), power (Max, new to replace Adam) and balance (Axel) which allowed you to play the game as you wanted and also to allow you to master different styles. The Megadrive controller had three main buttons so there were some nice combinations needed to do specials and rear attacks but, what I preferred in the second game was that the "A" special attack was for your character to do rather than calling on a special weapons attack team from onscreen to mortar the fighting zone^[1].It was a great two player game which I played regularly with my cousins and with plenty of cooperation, unless there was a "beef" (to this day, I have no idea why we called the item which looks like a roast chicken and replenished all your life, that) or we 'accidentally' threw knives or people at each other. You could also grab your partner and do combined attacks but this was quite rare for us as we were not to be trusted in close proximity. At the time, there just seemed to be so many little tricks and attack patterns to learn. At the time...

The problem with a lot of retro games is that they just don't hold up to playing now but Streets of Rage is still excellent. There are various moves and characters which still buzz on screen and the look is still spectacular. And the soundtrack is truly exceptional, using the relatively basic Mega Drive sound chip in ways I had not heard before - even on a 14" portable. It is absolutely still a great game. There was more of a console war feel in the 90's and each game felt like it had a counterpart and this was up against the arcade classic, Final Fight, which was ported relatively early to the SNES. And, you know what? It was better then and it is miles better now. Final Fight has not aged well at all with the chunky sprites looking good but handling poorly. Streets of Rage all the way. I mean, "Bare Knuckle".

You can play it on "Steam" from here and it is available on many modern platforms.

3 other B titles that might be interesting: 
Bayonetta -  A brilliantly stylish love letter to the action genre with references aplenty.
Bangai-Oh - A wonderful and explosive reworking of the risk and reward balance in shooters.
Batman (Amiga) - Film tie-ins used to be brilliant, with a multi-genre game to show the skills of a superhero.

^{1. I always kind of liked the outlandish way that the police dealt with problems in Japanese videogames - taken to its logical extreme in Jet Set Radio where the army, with helicopter gunships, are called out to stop you spray painting walls. Streets of Rage was originally to be a part of another game series called ESWAT and you can see the weak legacy of this in the special attacks in the first game which use the car from ESWAT.↩}