Games - Beat 'em up

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	Games - Beat 'em up

Beat 'em ups (often called scrolling fighting games, scrolling beat 'em ups or sometimes brawlers) are action video games with close combat fighting as the main selling point. Unlike versus fighting games, play can take place over a large level, with the screen scrolling as the player moves through the stage. Though weapons may be featured, unlike shoot 'em up games the purpose of the game and main means of progress is hand-to-hand fighting against waves of enemies.

In this type of fighting game one or more players (most often two, but sometimes as many as six) each choose a unique character and team up to punch, kick, throw and slash their way through a horde of computer-controlled enemies. The fighting occurs in a series of side-scrolling stages, some with a powerful boss enemy at the end. In the most common variation, players can move away and toward the screen as well as left and right, although earlier scrolling fighting games such as Kung Fu were more likely to allow only single-dimensional or linear movement, plus jumping. This style is sometimes referred to as a walk and punch game.

There are two main variations on the style of gameplay: a fisticuffs and martial arts emphasized, or weapons emphasized. Fisticuff emphasized games focus on primarily fighting opponents with hand to hand combat. On occasion these games will have weapons which the player can find lying around in the game world, or can take from opponents holding them (e.g. knocking down an opponent holding a bat in Double Dragon and Final Fight makes the opponent drop the bat). Since the primary focus of gameplay is hand-to-hand combat, it is common in this type of game for weapons to disappear relatively shortly after a player acquires them. This typically happens whenever a player is knocked down, uses the weapon more than specified number of times, or heads to another stage. Example of games with martial arts emphasized include the Streets of Rage series, River City Ransom, Final Fight, and the Double Dragon series.

Weapons-emphasized games have a plethora of martial-arts weapons (such as nunchaku and shuriken) as well as other types of weapons that are already at the player's disposal or can be found as the player progresses through the game. While some of these games do have hand-to-hand combat moves, like being to throw a close-standing opponent, the focus is on mêlée or ranged weapon combat. Because the player is armed, these games typically have more opponents attacking a player at one time than games where the emphasis is on martial arts. Examples of games with weapons emphasized include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, Alien vs. Predator, Ninja Gaiden series, Devil May Cry series, Captain Commando, Dynamite Cop, Golden Axe series and Magic Sword.

Golden age of scrolling fighting games

Starting in the mid 1980s, particularly with Double Dragon, the ability to move sideways via perspective was added. Two major milestones, which utilize this perspective approach are Double Dragon and Final Fight; both of these games spawned franchises that still survive today, while some of the most popular scrolling fighting games from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s utilized the same gameplay approach. At its height, the side scroller was one of the most popular kinds of arcade games, but they have since fallen out of fashion. Capcom was known for producing several popular scrolling fighting games, ranging from original titles such as Captain Commando and the Final Fight series to licenced works such as Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara, Knights of the Round and Alien vs. Predator Capcom's most recent scrolling fighting game is Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance, which incorporates RPG-like gameplay.

Video game consoles also had some very popular scrolling fighting games, particularly River City Ransom for the NES, and the Streets of Rage series for the Sega Genesis.

Modern scrolling fighting games

While a few 3D scrolling fighting games exist (notably Urban Reign, Sega's Die Hard Arcade and Spikeout, Squaresoft's The Bouncer and Konami's remake of 1989's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), they are much more a niche genre than the 2D iterations were. They are mostly attempts to captialize on popular franchises on previous video game consoles. The major innovation that in the modern games is the introduction of combo, and versus fighting game style moves to execute various attacks. In a combo system, the player can execute a certain series of moves to prevent the opponent from being able to counter attack and possibly receive bonuses for the number of consecutive hits. These gameplay extensions in part due to the expansion of the amount of buttons on modern controller interfaces, but also to add depth in what has been historically very simplistic gameplay (with some exceptions, such as the fighting system in the Kunio Kun games.

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