1. 3D Power Drift
3DS2. Maze Hunter 3-D
3DS3. Hyrule Warriors Legends
3DS4. Icarus Proudbottom's World of Typing Weekly
PC5. Paper Mario
N646. Catherine
PS37. Glover
N648. Blast Corps
N649. Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together!
Switch eShop10. Pullblox
3DS eShop11. Pokémon Picross
3DS eShop12. Bare Knuckle III
Mega DriveBare Knuckle III As we've discussed in the beat-em-ups thread recently, I am a big fan of the Streets of Rage series. They were games that defined by childhood, alongside Sonic the Hedgehog, Golden Axe, Mega Bomberman and Pokémon, and I adore them.
Streets of Rage 1 is simple compared to the others, but fun for a blast through now and again. Streets of Rage 2 is a high watermark of the genre - excellent level variety, enemy variety, attack variety, graphics and sound. A wonderful game. Streets of Rage 3 though, always felt like the weak link to me. Something always seemed off about it when I was a kid. The characters were all wearing different clothes for some reason. Weapons had health bars. Enemies took forever to beat. The special moves seemed really useless, but not as useless as everything else - you barely chipped enemies with each attack. And damn, was it hard. As a kid I could solo Streets of Rage 2 on hard mode no problem. I struggled to beat Streets of Rage 3 on easy. I still played the game and liked it OK - you could play as a Kangaroo, and I loved that, but it was definitely the poor third wheel to me.
I played the game later as an adult, intending to get to the end of Normal mode, and see the real ending. Little did I know there are 4. Me and a friend pushed on through and made it to stage 6, where we had to rescue a guy who was tied up in a time limit. This stage felt essentially impossible - the enemies you needed to kill too too long to die, especially if you played as Skate or Roo like I did, and we lost it, and went to the bad ending route. It was after this that I learned of all the ridiculous changes that happened to Streets of Rage 3 when it was bought west. The game was essentially mutilated.
So I heard about the character Ash being removed, being a fairly offensive parody of a camp gay man. That's fine, it didn't really bother me. But it was only the start of the changes. There are less health items in Streets of Rage 3. You do less damage when attacking. Enemies have way more health, especially bosses who sometimes have triple the health on Easy mode in SOR3 compared to Normal on Bare Knuckle 3. Enemy damage scales in Sor3 - a Galsia does 6 times the damage on hard compared to easy, whereas the difficulty in Bare Knuckle 3 comes solely from higher enemy density. This means that SOR3 difficult scales exponentially, rather than in a nice linear fashion, and it's outrageous to begin with. A section with a bulldozer requires you to bunch the bulldozer once to stop it in Bare Knuckle 3, and several times in SOR3 - meaning it generally gets you a couple times. More enemies attack you at once too, on every difficulty. It's a lot harder, but way too unbalanced.
The rebalancing of damage and health ruins game mechanics. The game has a special move system where your special moves are powered up the more points you get without dying. If you die, it drops 1 level. I literally never knew this existed in Streets of Rage 3 because I never lasted long enough to keep my rank up. This means you use the crap version of these special moves for the whole game. The level where you rescue the general was already mentioned, but it makes that level go from a fun challenge to basically impossible as some characters and incredibly luck dependent as others (oh, and they actually LOWERED the timer so it's even harder. Arseholes). The game also has a special move system where a meter charges, allowing you to use your A button special moves without hurting yourself when it's full.
In Bare Knuckle 3, it hurts a lot to use special moves outside of this meter, but it's reduced in SOR3, presumably as a concession to try and help you kill enemies faster. Shame it doesn't help characters like Skate as his special tends to knock people away rather than do lots of damage.
Mostly, it makes the game tedious as shit. The msot notable part is the 4th boss who boucnes about, has 6(!) health bars and can take like 15 minutes to kill in SOR3 on Easy. In Bare Knuckle 3, he took about a minute, had 3 health bars on Normal and was probably the easiest boss in the game.
Basically what I'm saying is that Bare Knuckle is a much better, much fairer and WAY more fun version of the game in just about every way. This is clearly the way the game should be played, because it's the way that makes the game more enjoyable. If THIS version had been released in the west, then Streets of Rage 3 might have a reputation as high as Streets of Rage 2. People would fight over which was better, like they do with Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. But they didn't. They butchered it for the sake of discouraging one time rentals like they did with so many other games, and the game is a whole lot worse for it.
Bare Knuckle 3 isn't perfect mind. It has a problem with enemy variety in some sections, where it forces you to fight dozens of the same enemy for long stretches instead of mixing it up - the subway tunnel full of endless ninjas for example. The weapons still break after a few uses in this version, and that'd be fine it they didn't break faster than the Tree Branches do in Breath of the wild. 3 stabs with a knife and it's normally done, and it's not like the knives are that great anyway. I still don't like the music as much as SOR2, but that's a matter of taste. And, ironically enough, the game is too easy, being the easiest of the 3 games to beat by a reasonable margin. The only difficult bits in the game are the 2 timed sections, which feel kinda like cop-outs as they can ruin your run for the good ending and force you to start over. Either way though, a slightly easy game is much better than an unfairly tedious and hard one, and this is definitely the version to play.
On a quick note, some more differences: Women wear less clothes in Japan, all the playable characters wear the original coloured clothes they wore in 1 and 2 in Bare Knuckle 3, and the story was changed entirely from an international terrorist plot in BK3 to a plot about blowing up city hall which is definitely not the White House in SOR3
Playing SOR3 this way was a marked improvement, and it's making me wonder if maybe I should just bite the bullet and play Dynamite Headdy as it was originally too. That's another game they made harder for no good reason, and one which I'm yet to finish.