20 Nostalgic Yet Awful PC MS-DOS Beat 'Em Up Games
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Publicado 2022-10-27
Games like Streets of Rage and Final Fight have stood the test of time thanks to a very solid foundation that amazed fans of fighting games in the arcades and home consoles of the late 80s and early 90s. Years later they continue to attract attention, not only for their influence on other genres, but also for their ability to awaken the nostalgia of fans, even those who have never touched an arcade machine. The unfortunate reality is that for every title that is a hit, several will be complete and utter garbage.
And if one thinks about the PC gaming market before 3D accelerator graphics cards, Steam, online gaming and other technological advances since the 1990s, the vision is even bleaker. In the era before Windows there was MS-DOS and the games released on this emblematic system were counted by disappointments, ports made with few resources, where the good game was the exception and never the norm. Of course, the MS-DOS beat em ups of the time are Dantesque... and although they awaken our youthful nostalgia, there can be no doubt that the passage of time has left them as a kind of electronic trash.
Intro and Outro Music
Aries Beats "Synthwave Dreams 2020" is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: free-songs.de/synthwave-2020/
Games Featured
0:00 Intro
0:24 Karateka
0:55 Bad Street Brawler
1:26 Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja
1:59 Double Dragon
2:31 Double Dragon II: The Revenge
3:03 Renegade
3:35 Axe of Rage
4:10 Shinobi
4:48 Targhan
5:20 Altered Beast
5:58 Crime Wave
6:34 Ikari III: The Rescue
7:06 The Simpsons Arcade Game
7:39 Ninja Gaiden 2: The Dark Sword of Chaos
8:10 Golden Axe
8:41 Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9:14 International Ninja Rabbits
9:47 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Manhattan Missions
10:24 Batman Returns
11:00 Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone
11:34 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
12:09 Batman Forever: The Arcade Game
12:44 The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga
13:17 Outro
⚠️ All gameplay recording, game curation and opinions included in this video, as well as editing is completely done by me
Bits & Beats creates videos about the history of video games. In this channel you'll find comparisons, retrospectives, technical analysis, but, mostly, game curations with the idea of having an important task of preserving video games, and make them relevant to society at large.
Curation isn't just about digging up neat games, but it's also about preservation, interpretation, and using one's knowledge to make it relevant to people. With my videos I want older gamers to look back and remember the influence of video games on their lives, and new gamers to understand the larger context of the series they're playing for the first time today.
I put significant time and creative effort into each one of my videos, including research, digging into archives, playing video games and recording hours of footage, selecting specific clips, writing reviews for each title, and making a very careful video editing in the way to transmit both educational and entertaining values to my audience. Every video takes a lot of hours to produce, because I strive to give my audience a consistent, high-quality content.
Fidelity and preservation of the video games is essential in Bits & Beats, so the recordings are made with the highest bitrate quality. It is done this way to preserve original game look and sound through modern footage, with no superfluous additions. I recommend you watch the video at 4K and 60 frames per second to get the best possible viewing experience.
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#BITSANDBEATS #pcgaming #beatemup
Todos los comentarios (21)
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Well, okay, not all of them are that horrible... and there are 22 games in the video, not 20! Hope you have fond memories 😉
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If you select Roland as a sound device, you need to actually get a Roland device emulator. In your Ninja Gaiden 2 and TMNT Arcade segments the sound is not right because it's playing wrong instruments on a General MIDI player. Ninja Gaiden 2 needs an MT-32, and TMNT Arcade is targeting the CM32L to get the sound effects.
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This channel keeps delivering awesome niche stuff that super interests me. Keep it up!
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Another outstanding video thanks!😎👍🏻👍🏻
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Like you're work 👍 keep up the good job on your videos 👏👏👏
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bad street might be the worst but sure as hell its the funniest. i forgot to mention that Shinobi is NOT a beat em up :) and love the channel, keep up the good work
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I think it's important to remember that in the first 10-12 years of the PC existing it was a platform where you could play games on it but the PC graphics and sound architectures of the time were not well suited for games, especially games that did scrolling! The NES and Master System had graphics and sound hardware for games superior almost all PCs of the 1980's and even into the early 90s. But try to do a spreadsheet or database, type up a letter or invoice or run a modem based BBS using either one of those consoles. :) It wasn't until the early 90's when 386/486 CPUs, 256 color VGA/SVGA graphics and Sound Blaster (not just Adlib) sound compatibility were required that games started to get better on the PC. Even then unless a game used a DOS protected mode memory manager like DOS4GW (as Doom, Quake, Duke3d and similar games all did) then the main program of a game had to be able to fit into usually less than 500KB of conventional memory with additional sound & graphics data located above 1MB in extended or expanded RAM while in DOS. Because while the 386 and later CPUs were 32bit, DOS at it's heart was a 16bit OS with lots of limitations. Like it or not Windows was one of the best things to ever happen to gaming on the PC along with standards like Direct X and Open GL. They all helped make the PC as a platform much more viable along with getting rid of the limitations of memory management in DOS. I've been a console gamer since the early 80s and a PC gamer since the late 80s and it's been a wild ride to say the least!
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What’s the game with the blonde ponytail dude you have at the beginning and end of your video? I’ve been looking for it for ages
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Bad Street Brawler. I didn't know Hulk Hogan had his own beat em' up.LOL.😄
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To think that there was a time when console games were superior to PC ports, performance wise
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I actually own the Super Nintendo version of Batman Forever. The commercial showed Batman beating up thugs with moves lifted from Mortal Kombat, and as a kid, I was a huge MK fan. Did a playthrough of it on my own channel for a chuckle anyway.
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Wait, why the ports of some games (like Double Dragon) are considered awful? I didn't get to play both version so I don't understand the difference
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Most of these games such as golden axe, double dragon, crime wave, ninja turtles manhattan project and i never noticed unconfortable controls except if you owned a 12 mhz cpu and the speed lagged. Karateka is a cult game and the father of many sidescrolling beat em up games on pc and should not be considered awful. I remembered playing this game many times and loved the fibal part of kicking the eagle.
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That reminder that there was that point in time when PC wasn't better than console ...
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Great list but it's missing the best bad exclusive beat em up on DOS... The Executioners. I had the shareware version of this and I loved it back in the early 90s.
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I remember that scene in Terminator 2 where the T-800 & T-1000 slowly inched toward each other removing just a piece of skin at a time from one another til one was down. James Cameron is a genius.
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Comix Zone shows up at the thumbnail. Doesn't mention it at all on the list. Me: Epic Confusion
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Crime Wave is basically just using Pink Floyd’s One Slip.
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I been had, I clicked for Comix Zone.
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wha really? I didn't know Simpson's ever had a home port of that game
