The Abridged History of the Brawler, part 25

The following games found a balance between the traditional side scrolling mechanics and the free-roaming brawler. They too featured wave after wave of opponents to battle but offered new ranged game mechanics to do so. Players no longer had to wait for an opponent to come to them, they could instead pace out the advancing bad guys with some well timed projectiles. We'll begin with the one that combined animé stylization with side scrolling action.

Namco's Rolling Thunder from 1986 was not a typical run-and-gun game. Instead players had to carefully track through an enemy compound while shooting or avoiding hooded sentries. Players could jump up or down to platforms and even sneak behind fences or inside of doors to evade captors. Although the game was still set in 2D, being able to interact with the environment gave players the illusion that there was height and depth to the levels as well. It also added a bit of a puzzle playing element to the shooting mechanic. Players did not have unlimited ammo so simply running and shooting was out of the question. Players could save up machine gun rounds between levels by shooting only when they had to. What the main character, the super spy named Albatross, lacked in this game was the ability to perform close range combat with the bad guys. That gameplay element would be introduced a year later by Sega.

The original Shinobi had very similar play mechanics to Rolling Thunder in that the character could jump to different levels and avoid enemies and strike from a distance. Joe Musashi used ninja stars to strike but could upgrade to a pistol. The game was unique for its use of a magic system which could wipe opponents off of the screen or do tremendous damage to a boss character. Both Shinobi and Rolling Thunder would stay popular with gamers and sequels would be released on arcade and home consoles.

The ninja was beginning to develop a following in the US and by 1988 two major ninja games were released. The brawler Ninja Gaiden I had featured previously in this series. The second was the side scrolling action game the Ninja Warriors by Taito. As the game allowed two-players on screen fighting against opponents at the same time it could be considered a brawler. What made this game remarkable was that it was the second game that Tecmo released that was two monitors wide, the previous one was Tecmo Bowl from 1987. Ninja Warriors was a brutally hard game. Players had to have an absolute sense of range and timing in order to get very far into the game on one quarter The ranged ammunition, the ninja stars, were limited and there were no weapon upgrades. Players could wait for opponents to reach them and then cut them down with a short sword, but that also put them at risk of having opponents reach them from behind.

Visually the game was impressive. The levels were highly detailed and the sprites were large and well animated, I want to say that the moves were rotoscoped for how fluid the animation looked. On two displays it was like being the hero in a widescreen movie. However that sensation would be short lived. The Ninja Warriors was the first arcade game where I felt as if the ending were a hollow victory. I do not mean the poor translation in the credits either, the part that read: "A revorution broke out. And everything became to and end. The troubled country seemed to be finished by the death of the wicked machines. But the peace did not came."

Instead I refer to the defeat of the military dictator. He was a fat military character that was groveling and running with fear inside of his palace. He was impervious to ninja stars so players had to walk right up to him and cut him down with a knife attack. He went down with one stab, not very final boss-like at all, what came next would shock and sadden me. Some general, whose face was hidden in the darkness, pressed a red button, detonating a bomb hidden inside the robots, flattening the palace of the dictator. I was stunned. There would be no sequel, no chance to continue the adventure. The heroes were disposable. By extension the players felt the same way as well.

That same year another Japanese studio made players feel like real heroes. Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja was released by Data East and had some of the best two-player side scrolling combat in any brawler. In fact when I did not mention this title early on in my brawler series my friend was upset. He was wondering how the "Double Dragon" of 2D side-scrollers could be left out. I told him that I would actually be saving this entry for when I spoke exclusively to the 2D brawlers that helped define the genre. What Bad Dudes did was more than define the genre. They set a standard for the Japanese pandering to young Western male gamers. President Ronnie, who happened to look a lot like the popular Ronald Reagan, was kidnapped by the Dragon Ninja clan. It was up to a duo of street fighters to save him. If that wasn't a premise for a low-budget 1980's action film then I don't know what was!

Bad Dudes was a better version of  Kung Fu Master and Vigilante. To show off the pedigree Data East even made Karnov, the first boss in the game. The famous strongman and fire breather was one of their earlier arcade stars. In Bad Dudes players fought waves of ninjas approaching from the sides, and could jump to different platforms to continue the adventure similar to Rolling Thunder or Shinobi's mechanics. Players could get knives or nunchaku's for weapons, however their best strikes were dished out with bare hands. The characters could charge up a punch by holding down the attack button and then release it once their character was glowing with energy. The force of the punch would actually send an invisible shockwave through the air, knocking down any ninja that was at least 2/3 of a screen or closer. This worked well on boss characters and large groups of opponents. Players could kick ninja stars out of the air, knock opponents off ledges and do all sorts of over-the-top moves.

The only game that could have possibly topped this game for action and impossible stunts was another one by Data East. Most brawling fans might think I was referring to Sly Spy, the 1989 title that gave Rolling Thunder a run for its money. The game even began with the secret agent jumping out of an airplane and shooting at terrorists while free falling over the White House! However like Shinobi and Rolling Thunder the game was a 1-player affair.

The title that tried to outdo the Bad Dudes was called Two Crude Dudes aka Crude Buster. The 1991 title had a completely different art style, one which did not settle with most fans of the original Bad Dudes. The characters were large, brightly colored, mohawk wearing bruisers, fighting to save a post apocalyptic New York. It was as if the Japanese were trying to make a game that looked like a comic book, complete with word balloons during strikes, only they had no idea how American comic heroes were supposed to look or act. The game allowed the Crude brothers to interact with the scenery. They could lift and throw cars at opponents, yank street signs out of the ground and swing them like clubs and even knock down buildings The game pandered to every insignificant detail the programmers knew about the USA. There was graffiti on the walls, a fallen Statue of Liberty and even a KISS knock-off boss in the first level. The problem was that the game might have been appealing to pop culture from 1981, rather than 1991.

The other side-scrolling Data East games would fare better because they would be based on licenses. Before the company ruined their good name with the abysmal Captain America and the Avengers game they released Robocop. The 1988 title was based on the hit movie and featured locations, sound bites and villains right from the film. Players could shoot or punch opponents, they could even get different types of ammunition as well. The film and game based on it were so well made that Sega poached the concept in ESWAT a couple of years later.

Just as they had released a one-two punch with Bad Dudes and Two Crude in 88 and 91, so too did they follow up their run-n-gun attempt with Robocop 2. The sequel played out as you would expect, the publisher took some liberties with the characters and locations but followed the general direction of the movie including turning Cain into the nemesis. The game was actually more like a brawler as it provided 2-player action and free roaming levels. The game was notable for the limited use of depth in the game. If the two player-controlled Robocops came at the intersection of a street or an alley, they could actually shoot at opponents in the distance as well as those to the immediate left or right.

Licenses were hot for many of the arcade brawlers, one of the biggest licenses from 1988, Superman was again developed by Taito. Unfortunately this arcade game was very simplistic. It was a 2D brawler that had side scrolling levels where Superman could kick and punch his opponents as well as flying levels where he could shoot his heat vision and even energy punches at meteors and helicopters.

The reason I would consider this a brawler was because it was actually a 2-player game. The second person could play as "Red Superman." He was nothing more than a palette swap of the original character. Same powers, same strength, same everything. Which was a shame really. My brothers and I would pretend that he was actually Valor, an alien from the far future that had powers and abilities that were comparable to Superman. DC had actually featured Red Superman characters for some time, not including Shazam / Captain Marvel. The best part of the game was probably the soundtrack which was a digitized version of the classic John Williams soundtrack.

A slightly better 2D brawler based on a comic book appeared in 1991. SNK published Eightman, a game based on a classic manga and anime character. Eightman was a cyborg that could move super fast. He was defending humanity from rogue robots and cyborgs. The character was very influential and helped inspire cyborgs like Robocop and even some of the villains in Mega Man.

The game had a unique power up system which allowed Eightman to gain stronger attacks and even get screen-clearing moves. Player-2 in the game took control of Nineman, the red palette-swap version. The two fought in futuristic landscapes. On some stages of the game they ran quickly along the ground, racing cars and fighting other high speed villains. It was a great effect that was even better than the flying sequences in the Superman game.

Post 1991 the side scrolling brawler, run-and-gun and even hack-and-slash were not long for the arcades. The formats were kept alive on home consoles through the early 90's but trends were quickly shifting. The next blog will highlight the last great hurrah from the hack-and-slash brawlers. I hope to see you back for that. As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The road to Rising Thunder, part 3...

The first generation of game designers had grown up reading about giant robots in comics and watching giant robot cartoons. They were only too eager to make games that revolved around these machines. There was a downside however to being in the first group of developers. The software and hardware they worked with were woefully underpowered. They had a difficult time coming up with a game that could capture the power of piloting a giant robot. So instead of that the developers learned workarounds. They would create arcade titles that featured mostly static images of robot sprites with smaller characters moving around them (Space Harrier). They would create platform titles and change the colors of the human character to make them appear more robotic (Mega Man). They would even replace a fighter jet with the top view of a robot on the shooting titles (M.U.S.H.A. Aleste). Sega was just one of the publishers that did this and at the same time they managed to match the trends in robot designs happening on television at the same time. Take a look at how the robot designs changed between Space Harrier in 1985 to Virtual On in 1996. They were on par with the designs featured in VOTOMS and Gundam.

 

There was a reason why the designs used by the mid-90s were show quality. The robot figures in Virtual On were created by Hajime Katoki, he was a senior mecha designer on the Gundam series. It was a long time coming where robots in fighting games had as much planning put into their look and purpose as human characters had since the start of the industry. Sprites and sprite-based engines were how characters were represented in games through the '80s and early '90s. Robots in fighting games were rare at the start of the genre. The vast majority were usually cyborgs, humans with a few robotic enhancements. One of the first robot boss characters in a fighting game was named Ram-X. The character debuted in the 1993 Sega game Dark Edge. It was a unique title in that allowed a pseudo 360-degree playing field where sprites shrunk and grew to create the illusion that they were moving further back or closer to the player. Ram-X appeared like a Macross-style robot, one which could transform into a black fighter jet. It was a sub-boss character and non-playable. Audiences had a number of unique fighters they could play as, the characters Yeager and M.E.K. were cyborgs.

 

In the late '80s there was a big shift in technology. Arcade titles began to be developed on 3D engines. The earliest of which were racing titles because studios did not yet have hardware powerful enough to render convincing human shapes that could move and fight. That changed in the early '90s with the introduction of the Virtua Fighter and Tekken series by Sega and Namco respectively. In addition to being the first 3D fighters the two were notable for being some of the first to have android fighters. Androids were humanoid robots with artificial intelligence. The boss of Virtua Fighter was named Dural, she was a silver-skinned fighter that adapted to the moves of her opponents. Being a faceless, voiceless opponent made her intimidating. Of course the next android character was even more menacing. The enormous Jack appeared in every version of the Tekken series starting in 1994 and was "upgraded" on each new version. He looked like a bodybuilder-turned-soldier but underneath his plastic skin he was a robot. He could swing his arms like propellers, spin his torso 360 degrees and punch with the force of a cannon. If I didn't know better he was nothing more than a re-skinned version of the Mechanical Man that Mickey Mouse had build more than half a century earlier.

Namco kept the tradition of androids alive in the series through other characters like P-Jack, the prototype Jack and more recently Alisa Bosconovich in 2009's Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion. Alisa is very similar to Astro Boy in that she has a number of weapons hidden underneath her artificial skin. She also mirrors Astro in that she was created to be a surrogate child for a professor, in this case it was Professor Gepetto Bosconovich. Of course anybody familiar with the story of Pinocchio recognizes the name of her creator. The Japanese were fond of borrowing from pop culture while designing their games. When it came to putting robots in fighters they could design based on the trends or they could outright poach the look of a character. The second option was used in Galaxy Fight. The robot Musafar was actually the head and brain of a human encased in the body of a robot. His design and attacks were modeled after Robocop 2, the villain in the movie and game of the same name. Robocop 2 was a game made by Data East a few years prior.

The 1995 title by Sunsoft was set in the far future and was one of the first to focus on human versus alien combat. Galaxy Fight had a diverse cast and featured a typical plot of the humans and aliens uniting to defeat a powerful alien bent on galactic domination. Despite the serious tone and history of some characters the game was interjected with some humor. Some of the characters in the game appeared a year later in a more comedic fighter called Waku Waku 7. What was interesting about the robots featured in gaming, not just from Japan, were how many cues they took from pop culture. Musafar was just one example but the influences did not stop there. I had mentioned previously the 1995 game Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness. The game by Capcom had some very unique designs. The influences from pop culture were subtle and instead the artists at Capcom, including Kinu Nishimura and Daigo Ikeno got a chance to work on original mecha ideas. The biggest poach of the game was Zero Gouki, but he did not appear until the game was adapted for consoles.

 

A few years later Capcom would go into full fanboy mode and release their first and only 3D fighting game featuring giant robots. The 1998 title Tech Romancer was an homage to the various giant robot shows over the past 40 years. There was at least one robot in the show that represented every type of giant robot anime that the producers had grown up with. Whether it was a silly kids show or a space drama for teens, from the Transformers to Macross and everything in between there was a robot that reminded audiences of 40+ years of anime. Capcom did a good job of changing just enough details so that they couldn't be accused of plagiarism. Also unlike Sega's Virtual On the combat for these robots was closer to a traditional fighting game than a 3D simulator.

 

Capcom had a history of making some memorable robotic fighters. Some of their best work had nothing to do with piloted mecha. As early as 1994 the studio had started a trend that they would follow through the rest of the decade. The game Darkstalkers, Vampire in Japan, introduced the world to Hutzil. It was actually an ancient robot that was modeled after the clay Dogu statues by the Jomon people, the neolithic ancestors in Japan. Huitzil could change shape and had a number of weapons hidden throughout its forms. From the ancient robot to the futuristic Capcom next explored fighting robots in the game Star Gladiator in 1996 and its sequel Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein in 1998. Both of those titles were done on 3D engines. The robots Vector and Omega fought similarly. They could spin, twist and shoot their machine guns as well as internal lasers. The Star Gladiator series was a sort of fighting game homage to Star Wars with the exception that the robots in this game were not comedic sidekicks.

Around this time the west was experimenting with different types of fighting games as well. Since CGI graphics were relatively new they stood out when compared to the hand-drawn sprites that made up 99% of fighting games. Going with computer-generated models was part of the appeal of the original Killer Instinct. One of the first, if not the first, all-robot fighting game was Rise of the Robots. The 1994 game by Mirage was considered one of the worst fighting games ever released. The studio focused its efforts on a diverse cast of robots and highly-detailed backgrounds. What the studio forgot to do was focus on the gameplay, animation and balance. Those three things pretty much determined a hit or miss in the community. Despite the cool looking robots the game played like a slug. Also the publisher failed to recognize that neither the consoles nor the home computer was powerful enough to render the complex models and stages in real time. When the game was released it was mostly pre-rendered backgrounds and sprites.

 

Rise of the Robots, just like many fighting games that came before and after, failed to live up to the hype. How would a new western effort like Rising Thunder be any different? Well first off it was any indy game and had no connection to a major publisher. The game was also a free-to-play online title. As far as the gameplay went it was being balanced thanks to the feedback of the fighting game community. These were just a few things that Rising Thunder had in its favor. The next blog will look at the stars of the game and wrap up this series. I hope to see you back for that! As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!