Bad Street Brawler

The Good
This game is complete nonsense. It's a campy side-scrolling beat 'em-up in which you play a wrestler who has to clean the streets of the city, beating up large amounts of enemies (including psychotic old, blind men with canes) so grandma can cross the street safely. I'd rather have this concept than another game with Billy Lee clones.

There are five different levels (levels 6 to 10 are rehashes of the first five levels and after level 10 the game goes into infinite repeat mode; level 11 = level 6) and the moves available to you depend on the level you're playing. Besides the standard kick you also got two other attacks per level. Most of these attacks are ridiculously over-the-top, just take a look at the screenshots. Anyway, I thought it was a good idea to change the moves after each level as it adds some variety.

Yes the graphics are blocky, but I kind of liked them. They give the game a bit of a comic book look. Especially with the text bulbs that appear every now and then.

The Bad
A lot, let's see:

• The ingame music is annoying.
• The controls are somewhat sluggish & unresponsive.
• Not much is done with the grandmother-concept. Enemies don't attack her so you really don't need to protect her, she enters and leaves the screen at will and she never reaches a destination. It would have made more sense if you had to escort her to her home or something. Now grandma is just annoying as she constantly gets in the way.
• It's frustrating as you can suddenly get your ass kicked within seconds. In my opinion the game quickly becomes insanely difficult. I never got past level 5 until I started messing around with a hex editor.
• The fact that the game goes into infinite repeat mode instead of having a decent ending (well I guess since they made the game so difficult, you're not supposed to get that far anyway).
• In level 6 (which is just level 1 with more enemies) and every level after it you can't use your basic kick anymore. That's right, not only do you have to play the same levels again but you also can't perform your best attack anymore. How cheap!
• In nearly all of these games you can move to the forefront or the background to evade enemies. Not in Bad Street Brawler (looking at the NES screenshots, I think this feature is available in the NES version). Also you can't pick up any weapons or garbage cans to throw at your enemies.

The Bottom Line
At first I wanted to write something like "it's so bad it's good" but that would be rubbish. It's just plain bad... bad, campy & silly with terrible gameplay. One of the worst games I've played.