The Beat-Em-Up genre is one that has grown old and retired, now reliving its golden years on various online virtual arcades available on the Wii and XBox 360. Though it did make the transition to 3D, sort of, with games such as State of Emergency, Hybrid Heaven, Dynasty Warriors and others - these games are all classed as "action/adventure" and therefore do not really fit the bill of that classic 2D genre. However, there are still plenty of great scrolling fighters available for the handheld market, which is the last true outpost for the 2D generation of games.
While it is safe to say that Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and Double Dragon are perhaps the best known of the "traditional" scrolling fighters, we shouldn't overlook the Konami classics of The Simpsons and TMNT, Technos' other great scrolling-fighter River City Ransom and Treasure's phenomenal Guardian Heroes, which still counts as a scrolling fighter. I guess, technically, we could also include Castlevania titles. Viewtiful Joe is perhaps the last scrolling fighter to do something new with the genre.
Before I start, I should mention that I've already created a B-E-U (boo!) game idea in this blog already, as part of the "Spam Fighter" series of games comprised of content generated from online junk mail, but I sort of wanted a proper Design Genres for these games since I played so much of them as a kid.
My idea starts out like any of the above series: You control a street-smart fighter out to recover his girlfriend from the criminal gangs of the city you reside in. Cliche enough premise you might think, but it's important to keep this aspect deliberately old school initially as you'll soon see. You can have up to four players, learn attacks and gain health bonuses like any other games. You can find objects and use them: but the twist is you have to "learn" how to use more complicated weaponry by training, and you can also learn how to do more damage with more mundane items. Enemies drop money and sellable goods (treasure, in other words) like River City Ransom.
As the game gets on, it starts becoming weird. For instance, entering an underground subway to take a shortcut to enemy territory (it's a popular destination for games like Final Fight) puts you head-to-head against sewer zombies and all manner of evil subterranean creatures. As you emerge, you find out that the criminal gang has somehow been able to summon demons to take over the city. But it doesn't stop there, as after you enter the tower that the criminal gang has taken over, they start transporting you to various dimensions they've taken over. You end up having to take out robots from the future, medieval dragons and knights, and a hellish dimension of colossal Cthulhu creatures - all of whom bear the symbol of the criminal organisation. You find out that the criminals are actually an incredibly powerful secret sect that has been planning the apocalypse for millenia and taking your girlfriend was the final step; yet no matter what they throw at you you're able to beat the crap out of it with "video game kung-fu" moves and a headband.
The game is sort of both a spoof and an homage to all scrolling fighters. You frequently take on opponents many times your size and strength, and have to figure out the best way of kicking it in the face. While also keeping the gameplay simple and layering on the epicness boss fight by boss fight, there is a degree of RPG-esque development for your character: You can extend damage dealt, health and defensive power by earning "XP" from opponents. This XP is frequently flowing in from the hordes of creatures you're fighting. As well as the above augments, you can also make yourself "luckier" (increase drops), upgrade and modify combo attacks as well as purchase "summons": an additional fighter controlled by the computer who will fight on your side for a limited duration. These summons may be related either to older scrolling fighters - Abobo may show up therefore - or simply kickass warriors in general from all sorts of media. Having the T-800/Conan/Bruce Lee/Rocky/whoever on your side would help out a lot.
Because the game wants you to keep moving and not worry about levelling yourself, you can decide a general path for the XP to go in, letting it choose your next power-up for the sort of fighter you're suited to. If you like mindless tanks that wade in and clobber everything (and who doesn't?), the game will aim for power-ups that increase defence, health and attack power and ignore some of the more technical stuff. If you want to be a technical fighter though, it'll attempt to integrate more special attacks and combo modifiers in lieu of flat-out stat bonuses for the advanced player. You do of course have the option to keep track of what power-up you'll next receive - all XP goes towards one new power-up at a time, and you can assign which power-up should be the next one you learn - but if you have three other friends playing along this system can be set up to be entirely automatic in order to avoid long pauses during the fun.
The intention of this game is to start with beating up thugs on the street with five inch health bars that say "Slick" or "Morris" on them to massive bosses like giant skeletal dragons called "The Terrorwyrm" with seven or eight full screen-length health bars that go down just as rapidly as the thugs' did as you pummel it with atomic spin kicks. Awesomeness and lack of any kind of intelligent stimulation is the aim of this game, and I hope to design something like the above that will deliver on this front.
