Great post ^^ River City Ransom FTW!

All Kunio Kun games were awesome. This from the Kunio Kun series which includes River C?ty Ransom.

">

There is only one distinction that needs to be made to classify these I think, and that is whether or not the game was targetting the arcade, or a home console.
Arcade games were made to be extremely simple, and to make as much money as possible. So purely arcade style beat em ups have a little bit of a different design. Unlike a console, there are no set number of continues that you can use, and you can keep buying in until you go broke.

So enemies and levels are designed with a cost in mind. Best example I can think of is the factory level in Final Fight. There is fire shooting up through the floor randomly that takes a huge chunk of your health, and tons of enemies who are making it impossible to safely navigate through it. It's a very expensive level.
...
Console based games are different. They focus on you trying to become really good at them, and then winning them within a limited number of lives. A lot of them also have extra content such as secret areas or alternate level paths and different endings.

Ahem... the exact opposite would be the truth. Arcade games are, by necessity, designed with extremely tight balancing to be hard but generally fair and beatable. If the games were easy, people would play them once and leave having paid just one credit. If they were unfair, people would be disappointed and take their money to the next arcade cabinet. On consoles, there is no selection pressure like that. The developer already has the user's money, so they can make the game however easy, unfair and badly balanced without immediately feeling it in their wallet.

In short: if you dump your money on continues, not only are you wasting your money, but also completely missing the point of the game. Even if the credits are virtual, as in an emulated game or a port, continuing means depriving yourself of the game as it's intended to be played - with one credit from start to finish.

Here's that "fire shooting randomly" level from Final Fight you complain about, only there's nothing random. There are clear patterns and the player dodges all of the fire.

">

I haven't really played 2D beat'em ups, but more than once I've heard Capcom's Aliens vs Predator quoted as being the best one.

Thank you for all the replies! After reading some I think I now understand how to make a game that's difficult, but fair. But also able to a have a variety of attacks to counter the enemy.

I do have one more question. For use of a keyboard what would be the best button combination for a beat'm up game?

My setup would be:

wasd: for movement

left Shift: to run

jkl: for action buttons

Is this a good setup or do you have any ideas of your own that you can add?

I am also trying to develop a beat em up. I think a beat em up is played best with a gamepad. So I use a ps3 style gamepad layout:

D-pad to move

square => punch

x =>kick

o => jump

triangle => grab

R1 => block

R2 => attack modifier (l1 + punch will result in a different attack from punch only)

L1 => use

L2 => inventory (think of use and inventory like in castle crashers)

*ahem*

It's possible to beat any of them on 1 quarter. But to get that good at them, you have to spend a lot of quarters practicing. Arcade machines are something someone buys for their business. They are there to make money for the operator and have to justify the floor space they take up.

At one point, where fighting game machines were at their heyday here, and charging dollar a pop, they were making about a dollar a minute on a busy day when people were lined up to play them against each other.

Games designed for an arcade machine have different design goals than something that is made for a home release. They are designed to keep money flowing into the machine as much as possible. No different than carnival games, or those games you see in malls and stores where you put in some money and try to grab a prize with a robotic arm (and they are rigged to not give anything out until a certain $ threshold has been reached.)

I remember when the guy running one of the old arcades here would walk into the convenience store across the street, and buy a 2$ comic book to offer as a prize, and people would burn through 10$-20$ each trying to get it.

We are in a very different era. When the Saturn, PSX, and N64 came out, arcade machines no longer had any real technological advantage, and the bar was raised content wise. Arcade style games became simple and outdated almost overnight.

There was a store across the street from my highschool that had an X-Men machine, a Killer Instinct Machine, and a Virtua Fighter machine. We'd all blow our money in there at lunch time if we were lucky enough to play! We were lined up so deep there was no room to move in the store. The owner must have made a killing with those. A year later they were gone. They were no longer making enough to justify the space they were taken up.

Dedicated Arcades held on for a little bit longer and tried new things, like debit cards you had to pre-load, and dark rooms with Quake 2 lan parties you could play for 15 minutes at a time. That didn't go over well.

Why would you pay to play Quake 2 on local lan for a few minutes at a time in a room full of noisy arcade machines when you can play at home and have a much better experience?

Why would dump quarters into a beat em up when you could take 10$ to blockbuster and take 2 much better ones home to play all weekend?

Same with fighting games. The home releases got much better for most games. And the allure of going to the arcade to match up against good players was gone, because no one else was going. Your opponent would be a random kid who just begged his mom for a single quarter and never saw the game before.

This is probably all completely alien to anyone born in the early nineties.

Same with fighting games. The home releases got much better for most games.

Despite the decline of the business, arcade competely dominates the fighting game genre to the degree where almost any worthwhile fighter is an arcade game. Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Guilty Gear, Blazblue and Arcana Heart series are all arcade games; the latest installment of every one of these series was designed for and first released at the arcade.

The best shoot'em ups are pretty much all arcade as well.

Arcades are still going in some regions. Fighting and rhythm games are big in Japan.

Sony gave us all 10$ on PSN last week, so I bought FIGHTING FORCE which I never had a chance to play it before. It really shows that it started it's life as Streets Of Rage 4. All the characters got renamed and a slight appearance switch, but they are all there. Even the traditional level style is the same.

It's a bit sluggish, but it's still addictive. It's very basic in some areas, but more advanced in others. I like how you can use almost anything you find as a weapon, including pulling hand railings off the walls.

This series could have had a lot of potential to go somewhere. It's too bad FF2 was horrible, and FF3 (which went back to being a pure beat-em-up) was canned.

I started playing Yakuza 4 again just to do a little bit of analysis for this thread, and now I'm like 50 hours into a new game. I really like how the gang members blend in with the other NPCs walking past on the street, and they don't reveal themselves until the look-out guy approach you, then you get swarmed.

Then after you beat them, you shake them down for money and items, which is a nice alternative to them dumping loads of money on the ground River City Ransom style. You can also make friends with people who run shops, and they'll come to your aid if you get jumped near their place.

(I've written enough about these games now to have written a blog or something...)