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I don’t know if it was because there was a Spring Sale, or if it was Golden Week in Japan, or maybe because of all the Coronavirus stuff.  But there have been a BUNCH of games on sale lately.  A few weeks ago, I got about five games on sale on PS4 for mostly less than ten bucks each!  Most of them were arcade collections.  Originally they were all 20 bucks, which isn’t THAT bad anyway.  But I feel that digital only collections like this are still too pricey at that amount.  If they were physical copies yeah I’d pay that.  But since they were only digital I decided to wait for a sale.  One of the games I got from that sale was the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle, which comes with seven arcade classic co-op side scrolling beat ‘em ups.  There are also a bunch of neat artwork galleries in this game as well, plus you can save your games and even play them online!  But since I like to talk about the games in these collections, let’s do that with this one.  In the coming weeks I’ll talk about some of the other games I got on sale, too!

Final Fight

I have a lot of really good memories playing Final Fight with my best friend in arcades back in the day.  It’s not the first beat ‘em up, but it’s one of the first that really perfected it.  I think it’s aged very well, especially graphically.  Sure it’s very hard and cheap sometimes, but that’s because it was designed to be an arcade game.  That’s why when they ported it to the SNES, it didn’t fare as well.  You know I’ve never played Final Fight 2 and 3 on the SNES?  I’d like to, but when they were out, I didn’t want to play full price for them, and I don’t remember seeing them in the local movie rental places.  In the first game, I almost always pick Haggar.  He’s cool.  The NES game Mighty Final Fight is really good, and the GBA port of the arcade has a few nice additions.  So yeah, I like Final Fight pretty well.

Captain Commando

Oh man, I played this a ton at a gas station near my house when I was a kid.  Yeah, gas stations used to have arcade machines in them.  Technically this isn’t as good as Final Fight, gameplay-wise.  But boy it sure has style.  It’s like a kooky sci-fi comic book.  You can play as Captain Commando, a ninja, a mummy, or my favorite: Baby Head.  He’s a baby riding inside a giant mech!  One of the power-ups you can get is a mech you can ride in, so when you play as Baby Head, you’re controlling a baby riding a mech, which is riding a bigger mech!  How cool is that?  You can also pick up rocket launchers and other guns for some long distance carnage.  I also like the locations you fight in.  They ditch dingy city slums for places like a futuristic museum, circus, and aquarium!  I never played the SNES version but I sure did enjoy it in the arcade.

The King of Dragons

The next couple of games on this list are medieval fantasy themed.  I don’t remember seeing these games specifically in arcades, but I’m sure I did, they probably just didn’t stick out in my mind.  It also doesn’t help that Capcom also made a couple of beat ‘em ups with the Dungeons and Dragons license, and if you showed me any of them, I couldn’t tell you if that’s what they were or not.  But in this first one, you could pick from five characters, like a Fighter, Cleric, Elf, or Dwarf.  I picked the dwarf because I liked how he bellowed out “HOOOOOAAAA” before battle.  Only other notable thing is that this one was pretty long, like 20 stages!  Granted the stages were short and a lot of the enemies and bosses were pallet swapped, but it still took longer to beat!  You can level up your characters and get new weapons and shields, but I don’t know if they really do anything.  You still take the same amount of damage and dish out the same amount to enemies no matter what level and weapons you have, at least from what I could tell.

Knights of the Round

This is the other medieval themed game on here.  It’s not as interesting as King of Dragons, though, because in that other game you fought all sorts of fantasy creatures like dragons, skeletons, and more.  But in this one you just fight other knights in armor all the time.  You can choose to be Arthur, Lancelot, or Percaval.  I’m not sure how to spell that last name, but the arcade game wasn’t sure either because they spelled it several different ways in it!  I picked that last guy, though, because he used an axe and was really strong.  Like in the last game, you can level up, which gives you more armor, but I couldn’t tell that it did anything.  The saving grace of this game is that you can ride a horse!  It’s funny to see the horse walk backwards, though!  There was a SNES version of this, but I never played it.

Warriors of Fate

OK technically this one is medieval themed as well, but it’s medieval China themed, not European.  So you pick from five Chinese fighter dudes and brawl other Chinese fighter dudes.  And it’s really not that interesting.  You can still ride a horse like in the last game, so that’s it’s only saving grace.  Capcom advertised that the last two games on this list were never seen in a collection before, but honestly, I don’t remember this one either.  I know I definitely don’t remember seeing it in any arcade anyway.

Armored Warriors

Now this one’s different!  And very good because of it.  I had never heard of this one before.  You drive giant mechs and beat up other mechs and stomp on little guys on the ground (you even get an end level bonus for that).  Instead of eating roast turkey on the floor, you pick up screwdrivers, wrenches, and oil to refill your health.  And you can pick up items from defeated enemies to equip to your mech, too.  Arms like drills, claws, and my favorite: laser swords!  Also mobility options like tank treads or spider legs.  And you get long distance attacks with guns like flamethrowers and missile launchers.  If you’re quick, you can re-pick them up after you die, so you can keep what you want for a long time.  The music has a Mega Man X vibe to it, too.  Very cool idea for a beat ‘em up!

Battle Circuit

OK I know they said this game was never released in the US before, but some of the characters look a little familiar to me at least.  So I know I’ve seen it, or at least references or cameos of it, somewhere before.  I also read this was Capcom’s last beat ‘em up game in the arcade.  Anyway, if you thought Captain Commando was weird, hold onto your seats for this one!  Battle Circuit also has a kooky sci-fi storyline and setting, with intergalactic bounty hunters out to beat up space criminals for money.  You’ll fight a mad scientist named Dr. Saturn who drives a vehicle that looks like Dick Dastardly’s Mean Machine from Wacky Races.  And the characters you can play as include a yellow cat elf lady with her pet fox, a girl riding a giant pink ostrich, a plant creature, and two super hero dudes!  The money you earn in each stage you can spend to buy new Street Fighter style moves for the next area, which will make things a lot easier if you can pull them off.  Also, the stages are shorter but the boss battles are longer, making this one feel like a combination of a side scrolling beat ‘em up and a one on one fighter.  But it’s worth playing multiple times just to try out all the crazy characters!

And those are all the games.  Let me know what you think in the comments section, and tell me your favorite Capcom beat ‘em ups!  In the coming weeks I’ll write blogs about the other games I got on sale, which are the Konami game collections.  There’s the Arcade Classics, Contra, and Castlevania collections.  So stay tuned for those later!  --Cary

Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session (PS4)

OK this is a totally different game that I got on sale, but I don’t have enough words about it to write a full blog on, so I’ll just tack it on here.  It was only 15 bucks as opposed to 50, so that’s why I got it.  I’m a big Taiko game fan, but I’m not spending that much money on a digital only game that they didn’t bother to translate anything but the text, and it has mostly J-Pop songs I’ve never heard of.  Not only that, but most of the good songs are paid DLC only and are $1.50 a pop, so no thank you.  Because of that, I think the main game should’ve always been 15 bucks!  The new feature in this game is that in some of the songs, you can play against the computer, who will be represented by a special character.  So you might go up against Pac-Man or Heiachi from Tekken, Hatsune Miku, Doraemon, or even Hello Kitty!  When you win, you’ll get a special doll of that character that you can place next to your drum guy when you play.  And that’s it.  I’m certainly glad I got this game on sale and didn’t pay full price for it!  Oh yeah, and you can get Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 for free for PS4, Xbox, and PC until May 10, so you might want to check that out, too.