Fighter Games
When I first set up this page, I had little knowledge of and
little interest in arcade games in general,
and I inadvertedly created this term fighter game
which you
won't find anywhere else. Since there seems to be no term that
encompasses both beat 'em ups and fighting games, I might just as
well keep it.
Note that the two genres weren't always neatly separated.
Karateka has the save your girl
storyline and progressive gameplay of a beat 'em up, yet you fight
only one enemy at a time. In
Onna Sansirou: Typhoon Gal, Yuki fights one-on-one in the
dojos, but often against two enemies in the forest.
| Karateka | ![Apple ][](../platform/apple.gif) |
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84 |  |
Jordan Mechner | |
| The Way of the Little Dragon |  |
87 |  |
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| Budokan |  |
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89 | |
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| Full Contact | |
91 |  |
Team17 | ||||
| Body Blows | |
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93 | |
Team17 | |||
| Fatal Encounter | |
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C&E | |||||
| The Ultimate Arena | |
94 |  |
T.R. Buz | ||||
| Dangerous Streets | |
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| Metal & Lace | |
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| Pretty Fighter | SNES | |
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| Tattoo Assassins | Coin-Op | |
never released | |||||
| Strip Fighter II | Turbogfx-16 | 95 | |
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| Capital Punishment | |
96 |  |
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| Fightin' Spirit | |
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| Aazohm Krypht | |
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In a beat 'em up, the protagonist will fight against large
numbers of enemies, just like in a
shoot 'em up. In multiplayer mode,
the players will co-operate. There are level end bosses and
usually a story of sorts, most commonly of the kidnapped
girlfriend kind. Beat 'em ups are also known as brawlers,
or, in France, as beat them alls.
In a versus fighting game, or just fighting game, two players fight each other one-on-one. There usually is a wide range of characters to select from. The game might furnish backstories for these characters, but will otherwise have no plot to speak of. The fights are often presented as sports events.
This genre didn't really take off until
Street Fighter II, then it quickly outshone the beat 'em ups
in popularity. Note that in France, this type of game used to be
known as beat them up,
probably to avoid confusion the
term jeu de combat
is meanwhile preferred.
Fatal Fury 3: Road to the Final Victory (SNK, 1995)
I do have a few links about the two game creation systems for this genre that I know about, though I have not tried any of them and cannot give you any details. As far as I know, there are really only these two, at least available in English. Fighter games are actually rather complicated, and they are at home more on consoles and coin-ops than on computers.
2D Fighter Maker 95 comes, like the RPG makers, from ASCII, and has been, like them, illegaly translated. It never stood well against M.U.G.E.N., but meanwhile there is a new version (2D Fighter Maker 2nd) that surpasses it in some aspects.
M.U.G.E.N. is an engine for 2D fighting games. Rather weird license which basically does not allow you to distribute a playable game. You may only distribute the material (graphics, characters) you created, other people have to download M.U.G.E.N. to play the game. Since there are very, very few fighter makers, it has its fans.
It was originally written for DOS, has now been ported to Linux, and a Windows version is in development, or was, for the homepage (elecbyte.com) has been down now for quite a while.
