I know the point of an arcade machine is to collect your quarters so at times games are a bit difficult, but this one takes it to a whole new extreme. The strange part is that this particular one was brought to us by Konami, a company that made the great TMNT arcade beat em up. This one though was infuriatingly difficult. If you are going solo on this machine back in the day, forget about winning it unless you have 30 or 40 dollars worth of quarters, I played this on an emulator where I could inject as much life into the character as I wanted and I still thought about quitting before I finished it!
The story, some crime boss has kidnapped some girls so it is up to you and three of your friends to take him out. Of course, I took this game on solo, and at first I thought, "Well the hit detection is crumby, but it is alright." That is until I noticed that the enemies were literally getting to do cooler moves to the character than you were to them! I was getting destroyed by certain enemies and only my unlimited health helped me! Not sure why the bosses that seemed to be either horror icons our designed to look like Dolph Lundgren...
The game play in this thing was horrid. In a beat em up, your character is the butt kicker who throws down wave after wave of enemies. Sure, you take damage, but for the most part your character has the upper hand. Here, he can get backed into a corner and repeatedly knocked down by chainsaws or knives and there is no real equalizer such as Hagger from Final Fight's spin attack or Billy and Jimmy's spin kick and Double Dragon predates this one! No health, most of the time when you pick up a knife or pipe you get hit right away and away it goes, no health and no power ups. Just a slog through level after level of minions knocking you down! And here is the best part, most enemies aside from the bosses cannot die unless knocked down! Some of these enemies are very hard to knock down and when there is six of them your attack will often be interrupted before a knock down occurs meaning you will fight some enemies seemingly forever!
Earlier during the day I played a game called Cadillac and Dinosaurs which had fun fluid fighting, health pickups galore and many cool weapons. This one had nothing of the sort. Strange humor at time too at the hero's expense. This fighting game may be for masochists that love watching the hero get his butt handed to him. About the closest game I would say that resembles this thing is Renegade; however, that game was even better than this. You didn't have a special there, but enemies didn't constantly throw you around or whip you!
