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Completed but pulled from western release schedules at the eleventh hour, Nightmare Circus managed to make it to store shelves in South America thanks to Tec Toy. Given just how bad the game is, it’s no wonder that it was canned. Shoddy controls, poor hit detection, and an overall lack of action make this one game that would have been better off stillborn.
Beat-’em-ups are quite common on the Genesis, and there are those that are truly memorable, such as Streets of Rage 2 and Final Fight CD on the Sega CD. However, for every light there is a darkness; for every ying a yang; for every Streets of Rage, there is a Growl. While Taito’s brawler might not seem so bad in isolation, compared to other releases in the genre – specifically those released before it – the game is substandard. Another victim in Taito’s line of neutered ports, Growl is a title only worthy of playing out of momentary curiosity.
Long after the 16-bit era has ended, gamers in the west are finally beginning to enjoy these titles through emulation and the efforts of companies such as Super Fighter Team. One beat-’em-up that conjures forth images of Capcom’s Knights of the Round is Never Ending Soft’s Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan (known to many outside Taiwan as Water Margin: Beneath the Clouds) is a two-player experience that most definitely should have been localized.
Most people wouldn’t think of Kabuki theater when talking about martial arts, but hey, why not? Dreamworks’ Mystical Fighter brings all the splendor and mysticism of Japan’s classic drama to a side-scrolling beat-’em-up. The weird thing? It’s actually kind of fun!
The Sega CD seemed to peak in the beat-’em-up genre with the early release of Final Fight, since few games that followed, if any, equaled that level of quality. Sony Imagesoft, known for its dreadful line of licensed games (Mickey Mania was a fortunate hiccup), tried to fill the void with Ultraverse Prime, a game based on the Malibu Comics superhero. To say the game is underwhelming is a major understatement, and it comes off as a digital checklist of how to make a generic brawler. It did have an interesting theme song though…