The Music of Streets of Rage: Part 2...and more!

Beatnik on the Ship

Stealthy Steps

Violent Breathing

Big Boss

The Last Soul

My Little Baby

 You Became The Bad Guy

Game Over

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BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 7 of 7

Here it is...the final battle with Mr. X!

New enemies that only show up here come out to play when you beat Abadede again.

The martial artists in black take more damage than the orange ones. When they fight in groups, they're pretty annoying. Fight them like you would the orange ones.

The other ones are light green variations of the dominatrix and the juggler. They show up just before you fight the evil Blaze Fielding twins again, and if you're playing on Easy, neither of them will show up.

The green juggler fights like the red ones. Also, these two enemies follow the same color scheme as the almost-as-scarce green Signals.

I forgot to mention how nicely the night transitions to day through the windows in this level. It's a very nice touch.

The final boss here is Mr. X. If you accept his offer in 1-Player Mode or if both of you accept it in 2-Player Mode, you'll be sent back to Round 6. (If you make it back, you'll fight him once and for all.) If one of you accepts and the other rejects in 2-Player Mode, you'll both have to fight each other. If the one that accepts wins, he'll become the new syndicate leader and you'll get the bad ending. If you reject his offer in 1-Player Mode, or if both of you reject it in 2-Player Mode, he'll send some red Galsias after you. Fight them off, and you'll fight the man himself.

He'll hit you with the butt of his gun, similar to Abadede's clothesline, except he stops a little more quickly. He'll also try to shoot you down, too. Jump kicks work best against his charge attacks. When he's shooting, throw the red Galsias at him, and keep your distance. He'll look at you, the player, before he shoots, which gives him away every time.

Just like Abadede's clothesline, you can sidestep it and do grab damage on Mr. X if you're quick enough, which is actually pretty nice. Throwing the red Galsias at him does more damage to him than anything else, though, so keep that in mind.

When you beat Mr. X, you'll send him flying, with machine gun clips flying around before he gets back up only to fall over like he's suffering from a heart attack.

Enjoy your ending, as well as your new high score!

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 6 of 7

Once again, you get two levels for the price of one.

If you've always wanted to jump people on an elevator, the next level is your big chance!

Round 7

Ah, the elevator level. My favorite.

The music is good, and the laughable deaths are plentiful. Jumping off the top of the wall at the right side of the elevator and kicking anyone nearby, throwing people off the elevator, suplexing people through the elevator so they fall through the floor (yes, you can do that)...yeah, this level's pretty good.

The elevator makes five stops before you make your way into the enemy stronghold. The enemies get tougher and more plentiful as you make your way up - kind of like a boss rush for normal enemies, if you will.

If you make it to the last stop with your special still available, use it. It'll push the inevitable ahead, plus it looks really cool to see the whole level again when you use it.

If you finish the level with a weapon in your hand, the game won't let you carry it over into the next one. You've probably learned that in Round 6 if you've played the game before, but it's easier to find this out here. Just saying.

And in case it isn't obvious yet, there's also no boss here. Relax...go nuts!

Round 8

Well...here we are.

The first noticeable difference here is that you move the left the entire time. The second one is that you won't be able to use your special for the rest of the game.

For some strange reason, BirthofaNova triggers a glitch when the green Galsia gets thrown and lands where the apple and pipe are. I wonder how he did it...?

Once again, the enemies get stronger and take more hits as the battle wears on. You'll also fight the bosses again, in order of appearance throughout the game. Yes, that's right...a boss rush.

By the way, I like the palette swaps for the bosses here. Just saying.

The items are in dining carts for the last stage. The ones that are just standing there have them; the ones that roll your way don't. If you can't sidestep away from the latter in time, hit it with a jump kick.

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 5 of 7

What do they even make in this factory? Seriously, nothing is there that hints at what it makes!

Round 6 takes place in a factory. Don't ask what kind of factory, the game doesn't even give you hints as to what kind it is. Conveyor belts and crushers make the terrain here a little rocky, and there are still some new things in here.

Items are stored in crates, and the first one you'll break has some gold bars in it. They give you 5000 points, which is more than what the money bags give you.

You'll also see red Galsias with gray hair. Those take even more damage than the green ones, and they're plentiful in this level, so get ready for a fight.

You'll see one of the crushers pretty soon. When you get close enough to it, the bottom light will flash red, telling it to crush whatever is below it with its big steel plates. They can hurt you, but they can also hurt any nearby enemies on their way down as well. When the plates hit the floor, you're free to walk on by.

After this first crusher, you'll come face to face with the big fire-breather again. He's alone this time, so it'll be easier to get close to him and do grab damage without being interrupted.

After two more crushers, you'll see two conveyor belts next to each other going in opposite directions. Sidestepping from one to the other as you move from one enemy to the next will make movement in this area easier.

A little further along, you'll see three crates in quick succession. The first two have an extra special attack and a 1-Up respectively; the third has a pipe in case you've lost both baseball bats and you're still itching to hit a home run with someone's head. Trust me, I know the feeling.

Freddy Krueger makes a return appearance, and this time he brings his own clone. I guess good help is hard to find these days...

Same strategies apply here. Once again, normal enemies won't show up here, so throw one of the bosses into the other for best results.

The Music of Streets of Rage/Bare Knuckle, Part 1

The Streets of Rage

 

 Player Select

 

Fighting In The Street

 

Attack The Barbarian

 

Dilapidated Town

 

Moon Beach

 

Keep The Groovin'

 

Round Clear

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 4 of 7

Hope you got your sea legs with you, because the enemies are coming in droves now. Are you ready?

Round 5 takes place on a ship.

It's not long after you begin the stage that enemies come after you in groups. Keeping the numbers of enemies down to a minimum as much as possible is key in this stage - you don't want to be ganged up on by as many as seven opponents at once.

In the event that does happen, throw an enemy into others. You just might get an opportunity to use your regular combo, jump kick or rear attack on three guys at once.

The green Galsias with the knives in their hands will home in on you when you're close by. Hit them with jump kicks to back them up, and keep knocking them down with it. Grabbing one of their knives and stabbing another one of them with it does wonders, too.

The black dominatrix girls have a new tactic - get hit, then fall to their knees. If you turn back or wait too long, she'll immediately strike with the whip when they get back up. Avoid this entirely by using grab attacks.

Port holes in the ground hide items, and they're plentiful at the times they show up. One of them even carries a little replica of a police car that gives you another super attack to destroy everything on-screen with when picked up.

After the first piece of meat (which you'll probably need), martial arts fighters will leap out from behind the bottom of the ship. Fight them off as you go; don't continue right when they pop up.

Abadede pops up again, now wearing green. You'll probably have that pipe you just found in your hands, and timing your swings right will definitely keep him away. If not, just use the same strategies as before.

You'll soon find the small police car I was talking about...as well as a new form of the juggler. These guys have black pants and light brown hair, and these guys will jump around and throw items that seemingly appeared from out of nowhere at you. Where do these guys keep their stuff? You could use that extra special right away, our you can use jump kicks (and grabs, if you're cunning enough).

The boss here is a pair of Blaze Fielding recolors. Aside from wearing green, they also perform acrobatics. Interestingly, the backflips are a combination of both Blaze's suplex animation and the backflip from her standing combo, while the somersaults are from her team attack animation. I didn't really notice this until I got older.

The best time to grab them is when they come straight down from a jump kick. You'll definitely get some damage on one of them for sure this way. If you're fortunate enough to bring a weapon such as a pipe or a bat to the boss fight, that works too.

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 3 of 7

Two stages for the prices of one! Aren't you happy?

Round 3

Round 3 takes us to the beach, behind a park as well as some billboards. You'll be rained on a couple of times throughout the stage.

There is now a green variant of Galsia in this stage, and they take slightly more damage than their blue counterparts.

Stacks of tires hold useful items in this level, so give them a whack.

After you find the first piece of meat, you'll see a soda can rolling around on the ground. That's pretty nice detail for a Genesis game. You'll also see the martial artists pull a new strategy: grouping up into threes and triple-teaming you. Move up or down to sidestep their attacks, and try to put a hurting on one of them. If one dies, the other two fight like they normally would.

The boss here is Abadede, the professional wrestler who looks a lot like the Ultimate Warrior of WWE fame. He'll line up with you, then try to hit you with a running clothesline and back up before lining up for another one. Throwing enemies into him does a good amount of damage, and if you can sidestep his clothesline and do some grab damage on him, that's great.

Round 4

We're now on a bridge. Of all things...a bridge.

First of all, there are pits throughout the bridge at certain points. Falling into them means instant death not only for you but for the enemies as well. Knock them in if you get the chance; it makes everything easier.

You'll meet a palette swap of the Signals at the beginning. Their suits are purple and their hair is yellow. Yes, they've switched colors. Yes, they take more damage.

Cones, barricades and poles carry power-ups. How you can hide an apple in a narrow pole like that, I'll never know.

You'll also meet black-clad versions of the dominatrix with the whip. They also take as much damage as the green Galsias and the purple Signals.

There are also martial artists in brown and orange that take more damage. These guys attack more frequently, and they also have a long jump kick that the guys in gray don't have. Fight them accordingly, but be on your guard, as their attack movements are fast.

The last regular enemy you'll meet is a green Signal with melon-colored hair, and they take even more damage than the purple ones. They don't pop up too often, but when they do, they're annoying.

The boss here is a bald man as big as he is tall. He'll run at you, breathing fire into your face for impressive damage. He's pretty slow, so lining him up to throw enemies at him works well. He's like a slower version of Abadede, except he runs off-screen.

If you happen to grab him, do not throw him or suplex him. He'll fall on you and cause damage to you solely with his girth.

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 2 of 7

Look, guys! Slums!

Steel barrels carry items both old and new as you fight your way through the worse-off parts of town.

Money gives you 1000 points. When you get 50,000 points, you receive an extra life. You also get one for every 100,000 points you earn after that.

One of the new things you'll find here is a pepper shaker. It's even more of a one-use-only weapon than the knife (at least you an stab people with the knife before you throw it). If it hits any enemies after you throw it, it stuns them for a brief time. Use that time to beat them up scot-free!

The tiny figurines of Adam, Axel and Blaze clumped together are an extra life. If you find one, grab it!

A new enemy appears later in the level: a street juggler. Sometimes they'll juggle torches, sometimes they juggle axes. They both hurt, so don't try to grab them. Instead, fight them with your standard attack or with your jump kick. They'll also stop to throw objects at you during which you'll have more than enough time to hit them, stun them and then grab them.

The boss here is some Freddy Krueger look-alike without the hat. He'll try to scratch you with his claws. Whatever you do, do not use jump kicks; he will instantly try to dodge it and hit you with a blurry, seemingly fast set of claw swipes.

Enemies (mostly Galsias) will show up, giving you ammunition to fight him from afar with. Line him up and take him out!

You can grab him like you did the first boss. It usually involves walking to him from an angle, just to throw him off. One of the normal enemies that pops up has a knife. Hope your aim is true.

BirthofaNova plays Streets of Rage - Part 1 of 7

This city was once a happy, peaceful place...until one day, a powerful secret criminal organization took over. This vicious syndicate soon had control of the government and even the police force. The city as become a center of crime and violence where no one is safe.

Amid this turmoil, a group of determined young police officers has sworn to clean up the city. Among them are Adam Hunter, Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. They are willing to risk anything...even their lives...on the...

Streets of Rage

This playthrough is on Normal, by the way.

Round 1 takes place in the downtown area of the city. This part is basically really easy, even on Hardest.

The orange-haired guys in blue are your standard meat-and-potatoes flunky. A full combo takes them out easily. They're usually known by the name "Galsia." (In Streets of Rage 3, they anglicized it to "Garcia.")

The yellow guys with the purple mohawks have two attacks: a slide and a throw. They're usually known as "Signals." (I'm going by Streets of Rage 2 enemy names, so bear with me.) They can be taken out fairly easily as well. In case they or any enemy throws you, hold Up and press C right before you hit the ground, and you'll land on your feet without taking throw damage.

The Asian martial artists move fairly slow, and all they really have are kick attacks and backflips. They're also easy.

The red dominatrices can hit you with their whips and knock you to the floor with one strike if you mosey around. They fall easily, but they don't have to get really close to hurt you, so watch out!

This is a pretty interesting stage. There are telephone booths to smash up and find items in, neon lights for every store, and for some strange reason everyone drives a late-'80s Jeep Grand Cherokee...unless you're a police officer. Hey, the same one shows up in the foreground every five seconds!

The weapons you'll pick up as you go are your standard street fighting affair. Bottles that break upon meeting an enemy's head (nice!), baseballs bats, metal pipes and knives make up your first tools of destruction. If you drop a weapon three times, though, it disappears.

Apples refill part of your health, while meat refills it completely. You'll usually find meat near the end of a stage in case you're needing extra health for the boss battle.

The boss here is some sort of weird guy with denim outerwear, a striped shirt and a crew cut carrying a boomerang. He'll kick at you before you finish your combo, and throw boomerangs in a desperate attempt to hit you in the back of the head. When he throws them, he's most vulnerable, but you can grab him just about anytime you want and whack away at him.

Introduction to: Streets of Rage

Introduction

Is it me, or was 1991 a fertile year for gaming? Super Mario World, ActRaiser, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan), F-Zero, Street Fighter II...there was a lot going on. Even though the NES was still selling like hotcakes, and the Game Boy was dominating the hand-held competition, the battle cries and war flags of the 16-bit systems were thrown up like gang signs, especially after the Sega Mega Drive - renamed the Genesis in America - gradually rose to prominence and pounded a decent dent into the NES's market share before the Super NES came in and put the video game market back on lock down for Nintendo for a few more years. Either represent, or go home.

Of course, I was only four years old at the time...but it's not too hard to see that with all the variety of interesting games and systems that were supported at the time, this was not an easy time to be a gamer. PC gaming was still "nerd central," everybody loved the NES, the Master System was on the way out, the Genesis/Mega Drive was gaining ground, Game Boy tore up its competition, and the Super Nintendo was about to reinforce Nintendo's superiority.

It wasn't until July 30, 1997 - my eleventh birthday - that I played this game for the first time during the sunset of the "Bit Wars." I had never played this genre at all, so to get a Genesis Model II system with the 6-Pak cartridge and find this game as the pack-in title was a treat.

Once I played this game and found out how to grab enemies and perform some extreme close-quarter combat, I began to love the game ever more, and along with Chrono Trigger became one of the games I grew up with.

Streets of Rage

During the early 1990s, the success of Capcom's Final Fight signaled the birth of the beat-'em-up that took place in the streets of the modern world rather than in medieval setting that emphasized combat with melee weapons and magic (which Sega had already covered with the Golden Axe series), letting loose many titles that were made to cash in on the action caused by this change of pace in this setting. During the beginning of the 1990s, Sega decided to throw their hat in the ring and create their own as well. But rather than rehash Final Fight, Sega took their time and both refined and improved upon what made Final Fight so great, and in the end created a genre landmark of their own that spawned two sequels and a place in video game history.

The premise to Bare Knuckle - renamed Streets of Rage for the Western market - was simple: the city has been corrupted by a crime syndicate, and three young cops quit the force to take matters into their own hands. The standard gang member stereotypes were there" the standard street punk, the dominatrix with the whip, the martial artist from Chinatown, the freak with the mohawk. The weapons, the combat, the thrill of beating up bad guys...they were all obviously in the mix. So what separated this game from the rest of the pack?

First off, the controls were improved upon what Final Fight allowed you to do. You could still punch and grab people, but you could also vault over them after grabbing them and hold them from behind, putting them in a German suplex and knocking them to the floor. If you were playing with a friend, one person could grab the other and either have their teammate kick enemies in the torso with both feet for major damage, or they could toss their teammate towards the enemy only for the throwee to somersault and hit them with a flying kick. And if things got too hectic, one character could use their Super attack (similar to Golden's Axe magic) to call a squad car to blow everyone away with a rocket launcer or a machine gun.

Second, the game was given a contemporary soundtrack consisting of club beats with a Freestyle/Eurobeat feel by Yuzo Koshiro, who had previously composed music for the Ys series before leaving Falcom and working on ActRaiser. Not only did the music give the game more of an inner-city feel, it was also published separately and was released as a soundtrack album back in Japan, where the game was known as Bare Knuckle. Koshiro ended up producing and composing the music for the rest of the series, and the soundtrack albums for the games are hard-to-find, fetching high prices on eBay.

Third, the controls were just right. They were easy to figure out, and with the right strategies and know-how, anyone could take down the crime syndicate. The responsiveness of the controls kept the game from being harder than it already was, and allowed for a slightly larger scope of abilities than in Final Fight, and that scope would keep growing as the series continued.

The Characters

Like Final Fight, Streets of Rage had three playable characters. The most notable change in this was that none of the characters were similar to Final Fight's Mike Haggar, so all three characters were easy to pick up and experiment with even though they were all still different from one another.

Adam Hunter

Age: 23

History: Ex-cop

Hobby: Bonsai

Ability: Boxing

Power: A

Speed: B

Jump: A

Adam Hunter is slower than the other two characters; however, his uppercut can knock people into the air, and his standing kick can knock enemies clear to the other side of the screen. His standing attacks have the most range out of all three characters.

Interestingly, this is his only playable appearance in the series, though he does factor into the sequels' storylines quite nicely.

Axel Stone

Age: 22

History: Ex-cop

Hobby: Video Games

Ability: Martial Arts

Power: A

Speed: A

Jump: B

Axel Stone is playable in all three games. He is the most balanced of the three, though his jump (and jump attack range) leave something to be desired. Still he's faster than Adam and is as powerful as him, so he's still worth a try.

His standing attack combo is pretty fast, and even though his stats wouldn't improve much through the series (making him the jack-of-all-trades character of the series), his move list definitely would.

Blaze Fielding

Age: 21

History: Ex-cop

Hobby: Lambada

Ability: Judo

Power: B

Speed: A

Jump: A

Like Axel, Blaze Fielding is also playable in all three games. Her weaker strength keeps her from dealing more damage to bosses than the guys, but her jump attack has the longest range and is enough to make up for it sometimes. Her standing combo is pretty slow after the two punches, though. Still, don't let all that fool you. She's still a decent character to start out with...assuming you know how to juke and jive so that you can grab enemies on the sly.

If you stare at her picture long enough at the character select screen, she winks at you. Just pointing that out.

Legacy

Streets of Rage was released to great success, and paved the way for two sequels, the first of which was also distributed and released in arcades like its predecessor. The soundtracks of each game in the trilogy further cemented the success and growing reputation of composer Yuzo Koshiro, who had worked on the soundtracks for the Ys series and Actraiser before switching gears, with the Streets of Rage series, as the three soundtracks were also released as separate albums and garnered cult status throughout the years, leading to high prices whenever copies are sold on eBay, as genuine copies of the soundtrack albums are hard to find.