Streets of Rage Remake

4 Some quality violence
I have some very fond memories of this game. I used to play the hell out of it with my brother back in the Genesis days and I remember it being a complete blast.

Streets of Rage was a classic arcade-style beat-em-up. You traversed the city from left to right and brung justice to the streets by beating ridiculous amount of goons to death. You know, the usual way problems were solved in the 90s.

It was much like the SNES Final Fight — maybe even better as it did some stuff that Nintendidn’t. Fighting system was a bit more dynamic thanks to the ability to dash, and there were few more moves and different characters available (no one as awesome and iconic as the mayor Haggar though).

How does it hold up by today’s standards? I must first say that – while I do feel nostalgic for the games of my childhood – I’m not much of a retro gamer and I’m not one to praise outdated designs just because I grew up with them. And still – Streets of Rage Remake plays great.

It’s core mechanics are of course much simpler than in the current action games, but for me it works to its advantage. It’s not about remembering moves combination, but about strategic positioning, avoiding being surounded and simply beating the hell out of people.

The remake quality is excellent and it literally drips with fan love. It pools content and gameplay from all three games in the series, using the same sprites and remixed tunes, and it also includes few new features as well as the ability to play with CPU if you don’t have a willing buddy around. There’s a mandatory gamepad support (although, for only one player), few new game modes and several minor tweaks that fortunately don’t upset the game’s balance in any way. It plays excellent.

Capcom recently released a similar remake of the first Final Fight. It costs few bucks and its’s a pretty worthy purchase. But this here is a free game that may actually be even better and is certainly more content-packed. And it’s not like the market is flowing with good beat-em-ups as of lately.

NOTE: the build from the TigDB download link doesn’t work with Vista sometimes. There’s a patch on the developer’s website that fixes this issue.

4 Retro action ressurected!
Streets of Rage Remake is a sort of a remake of the “Streets of Rage” video games. You see, it involves 6 heroes from the Sega Genesis games uniting against Mr. X’s evil plans. If you liked the Sega Genesis games, this game might be for you, because it has a good feel to it, along with remixes of music from the official games. There is at least one swear, but there shouldn’t be too much of any swearing. Also, there is blood, but relax; no gory stuff.