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As I recently divulged in the GBA Shmup post, I've been playing through a lot of various arcade-style games in an effort to test out my new Hori Gamecube Fighting Stick. This has led to a continuing onslaught of blog-posts randomly surveying various genres of arcade games released throughout the Game Boy lifetime. Much like last time, I find it important to preemptively point out that these posts are not meant to be comprehensive by any means. Nor are they a list of the Top 10 games or anything like that. They're just a smattering of games that I've played presented in a vaguely organized manner. So come with me, Dear Reader as we investigate GBA Beat-em-ups.
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As many GBA collectors are fully aware, Atlus rules. In 2003, they released Double Dragon Advance, a remake of the original 1987 arcade game Double Dragon which is quite visually different than the NES port that most of us grew up on. Unsurprisingly, Atlus did a fantastic job with this remake. The sprites are large, but not too large for the GBA screen; the colors and graphics are brilliant; and if you've got two carts they made the 2-Player mode fully co-op. This game is definitely recommended to fans of the series.
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Capcom's Final Fight One is basically a port of the SNES version of Final Fight. The game is really quite good. It features large sprites and graphics that rival -- and maybe even trump the SNES version. Capcom also had the good thinking to include co-op 2-Player mode via GBA link cable. Oh and the game is also still pretty damn hard with its constant barrage of dudes anxious to beat the hell out of Mayor Haggar and his friends. I must admit though that I'm not a huge Final Fight fan personally, as I grew up on the Streets Of Rage series and tended to prefer those instead.
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Golden Axe was included as part of the 2002 Sega Smash Pack. This version is pretty much a port of the Genesis version in both graphics and sound. Strangely though, THQ decided to remove the co-op 2-Player mode. Generally this serves as a turn off to most fans of the series. I don't do a whole lot of cooperative video-gaming personally. However, my major complaint is that I feel like the enemies in this version are a whole lot cheaper than I remember them being on back on the Genesis. I feel like they all tend to just run at you from off-screen, giving you pretty much no warning. So either it's the cheapness, or the game just hasn't aged as well as I would have wanted. One or the other.
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Very late in the GBA's lifespan Capcom released the Capcom Classics Mini Mix, a small collection of their NES games. And luckily it included the NES version of Final Fight which was dubbed Mighty Final Fight. Though this game strays very far from the arcade original -- instead opting for tiny super-deformed sprites -- it kicks ass. In fact, I'm not embarrassed to say that I completely prefer this version over the original. The game is fast-paced and crams a ton of the original into a teeny-tiny package. If you want proof of how amazingly awesome an 8-bit demake can be, then check this one out. Highly recommended.
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X-Men: Reign Of Apocalypse may have gotten lost in the shuffle of a million other Marvel-related games. That's too bad however, as it's actually one of the closest games to the classic Konami X-Men arcade game. It's very similar both graphically and in game-play. The game allows you to choose from four X-men and the controls are excellent. The game also features 2-Player co-op, though it's certainly a blast in single player mode. As far as GBA originals go, this one is definitely a must-have for Beat-em-up fans.
I was intending to include some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games in this post as well, but ultimately decided that I would eventually devote an entire post to their Game Boy and GBA lineage. So besides any of those, what Beat-em-ups have I missed out on? And which are so terrible they should be avoided at all cost?
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The original Game Boy found its way under my Christmas tree in 1989. And with it came what would be known as perhaps the greatest puzzle game of all time: Tetris. There's certainly no arguing with how great Tetris really is. And in all honesty, there's been a lot of thoughtful and insightful analysis written on the game. But the reason I bring all this up is to make it known that I in no way knock Tetris nor its importance to Nintendo, the Game Boy and the rise of so-called Casual Gaming. There's no denying that Tetris was meant for the pea-green-gray brick. And up until last year Tetris would have been my favorite puzzle game of all time, because that's when I discovered Super Puzzle Fighter II.
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Super Puzzle Fighter II is the sort of game that is made for fans; in this case fans of Capcom. There's lots of in-jokes and references. And let it be no secret that I am a fan of Capcom. Here they've taken the tried and true formula of dropping multi-colored shapes from the ceiling and having the player organize them until things get too chaotic, and somehow managed to make it entirely fresh. How the did this was by mixing the puzzle genre with the Player-vs.-Player intensity of their 2D Fighting games. As ridiculous as that may sound, it actually works amazingly well.
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What immediately draws in geeks fans like myself is the art style. Whereas most puzzle games are very simple -- and generally speaking, that's often the point of many puzzlers -- Super Puzzle Fighter II has amazingly rendered 2D sprites. Characters from both the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers series are reimagined in a cutesy super-deformed style. The two fighters occupy the middle of the screen and slug it out Capcom Vs. style in a representation of the puzzle-solving skills of their respective player.
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Luckily for puzzle fans the actual puzzling element of the game is just as great as the art. The game seems simple enough: gems fall of different colors; you put like-colors together until a glowing gem of that color appears. By pressing say a red glowing gem to a bunch of red gems you've piled up, you cause a bunch of crap to fall on your opponent. However, the real strategy comes in choosing which colors you'll try to build up, and how you'll arrange them -- the bigger the squares or rectangles you create, the more crap that you'll send over to the enemy. Meanwhile, in true Street Fighter fashion, it's just important to keep an eye on the other guy and think defensively. Indeed Puzzle Fighter II is one of the most addictive puzzlers I've ever played. It's easy enough for a beginner to enjoy, but then requires an incredible amount of strategy to fully exceed at.
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I also wanted to point out a very unique aspect to this game. Capcom came up with an incredibly original (and perhaps strange) way for two players to enjoy the game using only one cart. The idea was that in Vs. Mode two players would hover of the same GBA unit and each use half of the buttons. So Player One would use left and right to control the gems and the L-Button to flip them. Meanwhile Player Two would use the A and B to move their gems and R to flip theirs. I've never actually tried this single-GBA approach to playing, as it certainly sounds awkward in theory. However this means that a single Puzzle Fighter II cart can be inserted into the Gamecube Game Boy Player, and can be played totally co-op with each player using his own controller since the Game Boy Player recognizes any controllers plugged in at the same time. Certainly this wasn't Capcom's original intention, but it's definitely a bonus for current enthusiasts of the Game Boy Player.
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