Working Title 08.01.09: The Perfect Beat 'Em Up

Posted by Jordan Williams on 08.01.2009

You know what? I'm going to go for a more cliche teaser here. Are you a bad enough dude to make the perfect beat 'em up game?

Welcome to the #1 Column to have to go to court last week to testify in the whole bus accident fiasco, WORKING TITLE. Yeah, I got a subpoena to show up in court to tell my side of the bus accident story. Obviously it was a boring experience but I actually got to miss work to do it so…yay?

Last week was supposed to kick off the next block of Working Perfection but it has obviously been pushed back to this week. I still didn't have a clear idea of whether to do the perfect FPS or the perfect Beat ‘Em Up, but Toddo's comment on the fact that FPS games are so overdone nowadays make me choose the harder route and try to make a perfect Beat ‘Em Up game.

Beat ‘Em Up games have pretty much gone the way of the platformer in recent years. They are too few and far between and the only ones that seem to be any good are from pre-existing franchises or they are remakes or ports of the good ones from the good ole days or they have the word "Ultimate" or "Crashers" in them. So this is a two fold problem. Not only do I have to somehow make a perfect beat'em up using the parts of other beat ‘em up games, but on top of that I have to make one that would be relevant to today's ZOMG SHOOT EVERYTHING FUCK YEAH GREY AND BLOOD RATED M FOR MATURE game style.

Okay, maybe that's a broad generalization there but it's no secret that the gaming market of the early 90s (where Beat Em Ups were king) is definitely different from the market of today, where First and Third Person shooters are the alpha and omega of the industry.

So what pieces will be used? Luckily since BEUs (Getting tired of typing it) are such a closed genre, this can actually just fit in one column and I can be done with it.


Working Perfection: Beat Em' Up



Players: 1-4

This is pretty damn obvious that pretty much any multiplayer game that is made nowadays has to have four player support. Now the fans of the old X-Men Arcade game might be up in a bit of a tizzy, but you have to remember the thing that made the X-Men Super Arcade game good was also the fact that it was across three screens. Unless you had a BITCHIN' widescreen TV or something trying to fit that many players on one screen would be cluttered as fuck…or it would just look really fucking bad. I can't really cite a game here for players seeing as the amount of players really doesn't make a difference unless you are trying to do some sort of team up move…and that part will actually come out later. You also have to realize that with online play and four player local multiplayers being the current wave of the…present. It just seems like having four players would be in the best interests of everyone. They could even go the route of having the difficulty of the game change to accommodate the amount of players that are playing.



Camera: Fighting Force (Full 3D)

Fighting Force might not have been the best game, but looking through the BEUs over the years it is the only game I can see that had a full 3D camera that actually managed to still work no matter who was on the screen. With games like MUA and XML, the camera pans out to accommodate to everyone going all wily nilly and if you are playing with particularly slow people or idiots, it might not work well. With games like The Bouncer the camera turned into to full shit when you weren't on open ground. And then there was Shaolin Monks, which had probably the worst 3D Camera of any BEU I have ever seen. The game was still sound though.

The main point here is that with the game in full 3D you can actually lend more to the fighters and characters themselves. On 2D you are always restricted to fighting character in a left to right fashion, there might be moments where you can attack ‘up' or ‘down' but you are still moving from one side of the screen to another. In full 3D there are just other things you can do. You can have full range of motion attacks and variable moves. Instead of feeling like you are locked into "Attack from the front" or "Attack from behind" you could flesh out the characters to have a bit more of a fighting game feel as their moves can be actually represented in full 3D.

Of course, talking so much about the characters and what they would do would also mean you would have to have a diverse set of characters. So which BEU would you look to for that…?


Character Types: Streets of Rage (Series)

Yes, Streets of Rage. I cannot think of any other BEU that had such a fucking eclectic group of characters in it's serious. BEU characters are always so cookie cutter that it's sort of refreshing to have one where it's like "What the hell?" In Double Dragon you have the Awesome Kung Fu Brothers; in Final Fight you have the Awesome Kung Fu Best Friends and Haggar with just different variations until Final Fight 3. Games like TMNT and BattleToads are out there, but they are all the same interchangeable characters with no real difference.

Then you get to Streets of Rage. Admittedly the first game was cookie cutter. Badass Cop #1 and Black Dude. But then you got to SoR 2. A Fucking Pro Wrestler (that LOOKED like one) and a kid on skates? Hell yeah.

Then you get Streets of Rage 3. Now I have Cliché Cop, Busty White Girl, An Old Man Cyborg, A kid on Skates, A Ninja, A FLAMING gay guy, AND A FUCKING KANGAROO.

I want to stress this again. This game let you play as a boxing fucking Kangaroo. I love TMNT, I love BattleToads. But I would honestly stick a toothpick under my big toe and kick a wall if it meant I could own a boxing Kangaroo that beat up drug lords.

The point is that while most BEUs characters were interchangeable outside of special moves (if applicable) Streets of Rage actually had some sort of gimmick with each character that worked. They had stats, range, and play styles. Now with the Arcade BEUs like Simpsons and X-men, there actually was a reason to choose one character over another, but honestly it didn't matter who you used. In Streets of Rage (3 especially) you need to actually know who you are using and what they do best. Skate might be cool and all, but he is super weak and will die in the blink of an eye.

Having a character list so diverse and out there also meant it attracts more people to the game and gives you more story opportunities. Who wants to play "Badass Cops beat up Street Thugs #4" when they can play "Cyborg, Rollerblader, and Kangaroo beat up Street Thugs #4"

Exactly.

Difficulty: The Simpsons

Difficulty is a big part of a BEU. There has to be a right balance between making it hard enough to be a fun challenge, and but making it easy enough for everyone to get into and play. Of all of the BEUs I can think up it seems that The Simpsons is the one that comes to mind when I think of a game with balanced difficulty. The first few levels of the game are easy; in fact you hardly even need other characters to help out. But then it seems once you hit the Graveyard level it all seems to go downhill. Simpsons is a game that is possible to beat with one person, but it you definitely need four people if you want to do it without wasting a ton of money.

Which is why BEUs sort of differ between Arcade and Console because most Arcade games were purposely made to be hard (or at the very least, challenging) because it's a scheme to get more money out of you one way or another. If you play alone, you are going to pump a ton of money into the cabinet to stay alive, but if you think about it you'd be pumping in the same amount of money even if you had three other people with you.

Either way, Simpsons had the right flow of difficulty going across his levels, the first level as appropriately easy, but by the time you got to Smithers you were nearly pulling your hair out or trying to get everyone to conduct a giant attack of fuck awesome proportions. But in most old school BEUs, you didn't have much in the way of team attacks. In Simpsons and TMNT you did have attacks that you could use, but they weren't any more useful than your standard button mashy stuff, but with a game this difficult and stressing multiplayer teamwork, we are going to have to look to the new school for a solution to that situation…

Teamwork: Marvel Ultimate Alliance/X-Men Legends

Now I understand that MUA/XML isn't a BEU in the purest sense, it's more of an Action-RPG, but they still have very BEU-like tendencies. You are traveling to a set piece to beat the living shit out of anyone who dares to get in your way, and you also have more than one person to help you with…and depending on and who you play as the game is actually pretty hard as well. But the main reason the game is here because it stresses teamwork.

In so many BEUs you might see more than one person playing but there isn't a real sense of teamwork. You have four turtles on the screen at one time but most of the time they are off doing their own thing or taking out a certain sector of the level, not really teaming up to do damage. Where as in MUA/XML it is very easy to get overwhelmed and the game will actually force you to help out your teammates on more than one occasion.

Also to go with the teamwork feel you have those special moves, now I wanted to use MUA2 as an example of how to do correct teamwork moves but since that game isn't out yet I don't think it would be entirely fair to use it. So I will use the lesser known combo version from the XML and MUA games. While not as flashy as they are now they still had a purpose, if one character used a certain type of move and another character did as well, they would get a slight boost in power. Now the perfect BEU is a BEU game and not an action RPG, so we can forget about status effects and all of that jazz, but the idea that coordinating attacks and getting a reward for it just seems like a mechanic that should be in most BEU games and it just isn't.

Well, that's not entirely true. Old school games like Double Dragon did allow one person to hold an enemy while the other one kicks the ever loving shit out of them. At the time that was probably deep as FUCK but now in the ‘next' gen (We should really stop calling the current gen ‘next gen'.) that just isn't going to fly.

Story: ????

Okay, I went through damn near every BEU I can think of for a story. I really did…and no matter how hard I tried they all ended up being the same damn thing. Someone gets kidnapped by Evil Guy, Heroes go to save them.

Don't believe me?

Final Fight – Girlfriend gets kidnapped by Mad Gear. Cody/Guy/Haggar to save her.
BattleToads – Pimple gets kidnapped by Queen Tits. Rash and Zit have to save him.

Double Dragon – Girlfriend gets kidnapped by Shadow Guy. Billy and Jimmy have to save them.

X-men – Xavier gets kidnapped by Magneto. X-men have to save him.

Simpsons – Maggie gets kidnapped by Mr. Burns. Simpsons have to save her.

The list goes on and on. And honestly…they all fucking suck. Sure, they might make sense but…wait no! They don't even make sense! If some fucktard kidnapped by best friend/girlfriend/daughter/President of the United States I would start driving through back alleys and construction sites. I'd get in a car and drive right to where I know they are. So with this one…I am going to have to concede. I cannot think of a single BEU that had a good…let alone decent story. If you can think of one out there, by all means let me know…but I am going to chalk this up to the "Who fucking NEEDS a story" column and be done with it.

And for those of you who want to say MUA and XML, yeah. They had decent stories but just like I mentioned with Teamwork…they weren't pure BEU games so I wouldn't feel right using those.

Boss Fights: TMNT: Turtles in Time

And appropriately, we reach the end of the column and the end of the level. So we look at these BEUs over the last few years and we have to look at level bosses. This was also another one where I was sort of iffy on seeing as a lot of BEUs tend to have the same sort of boss types. But after replaying TMNT: TiT (if you just laughed, you are not alone) I see that the boss battles in this were just a smidge more creative than the usual boss battles we see. You still had the "Welp, this is a boss. Watch his pattern and hope to live" stuff going on, but you also had ones like Baxter Stockman, whom of which you had only a short time to hit him. You had the two on one fights like Tokka and Rahzar (I'm strictly talking about the SNES version). You even had boss fights that were completely off the wall like Shredder in the Technodrome, although I will admit that that boss fight was lifted from BattleToads. But it's all good.

The fact is that TiT (Yep, still laughing) had a variety with its bosses. This is sort of thin to say seeing as nearly all BEUs have variety, but in TiT's case it just made the bosses have much more personality. You look at games like Final Fight and the bosses just seem to be super strong versions of the normal thugs you see just with a new move or two. You look at BattleToads and you realize…bosses were kind of not there. Even in newer BEUs like Wolverine the bosses really didn't amount to much, you just ran up and slashed the fuck out of them and that was it.

This isn't to say that TiT is the end all be all of boss fights for a BEU, but in the interest of picking the best parts of the best games to make the perfect game, out of the well-known BEUs (and even the lesser known) ones, I feel that TiT had that feeling of "THIS is a boss fight" more than "this is the end of the level, so now you get that one strong douche who will kill you in two hits."

The only other game I can think of that had that level of awesomeness to its bosses was Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. …Which really needs a goddamn sequel.

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Working Question

So at Comic-Con Bungie said that Halo: Reach will be the last thing it does with Halo. Microsoft has launched 343 Studios to take over all things Halo-related from now on. Do you think this move is going to help or hurt Halo? Seeing as Microsoft now has complete control over what it can do with it, do you think we will start seeing Halo whored out to Guitar Hero levels or do you think they will do the fans right and keep Halo a good thing.

Personally, I am not looking forward to 343's reign over Halo. I am not the biggest Halo fan in the world but it was very obvious that Bungie knew what it was doing with its franchise and where it was going. One might say Microsoft has been wanting to do other stuff with Halo but Bungie pretty much shut them down. Coupled with the fact that Halo 3 really put a button on the end of the whole storyline, I can't see 343 doing anything ‘new' with Halo outside a ton of prequels and expanded universe stuff. It's already evident that even Bungie knows the Halo story is over with ODST being a prequel to a sequel and Reach apparently being a super prequel.

So what say you?

Also, next week Working Perfection will continue with The Perfect FPS to appease Bobby. By the way, Zelda IS a platformer. It might not be Sonic or Mario but you are still navigating through a level in a third person perspective to get to point A to point B. It might not be a pure platformer and have a bit more of an action-based style, but for all intents and purposes so was Mario 64 and it's considered a platformer as well.

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams and…EVERYBODY LOVES DONUTS…LORD KNOWS I DO-HOO-HOOO (if you haven't played the game to which that song belongs to you are doing yourself a huge disservice).