Streets of Rage 3 - Sega Mega Drive (Let's Play & Opinion)

Channel:

Village Monk's Gaming Memories

Subscribers:

233

Published on December 18, 2016 7:14:55 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mudqa-rNHIc

Game:

Streets of Rage 3 (1994)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 56:59

78 views

1

Streets of Rage 3 is the last of the Sega fighting franchise which seemingly Sega don’t seem to want to have anything to do with anymore, along with the vast majority of their IPs – popular or not. This of course is a sequel to Streets of Rage and Streets of Rage 2 and was at the time exclusive to the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis in 1994. It has since been re-released via emulation for a bunch of different Sega collections such as the ‘Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics’ collection on Steam.

Just like the others this is a 2D side scrolling beat em up where you control from one of four different characters as they try to make it to the end of the level, defeating thugs along the way, before taking on the boss at the end. Axel, Blaze and Skates all return from SOR 2, but this time Max is completely dropped from the face of the earth with the robotic armed Dr Zan coming in to replace him.

Graphically the game looks and animates wonderfully, it really is pushing the Mega Drive sprite rendering capabilities to the maximum. The levels are a bit part of the visual eye candy with plenty of colour, parallax scrolling and plenty of cool new effects such as the flickering lights in the nightclub and those really annoying trams in the underground sections. Yuzo Koshiro returns to do the music and once again hits the mark perfectly.
Game play wise it’s pretty much has the same features found in Streets of Rage 2, which considering that’s my favourite on the system, that’s a really good thing. However a few things have been added additionally. Axel and co can now run with a left or right double tap and you can dodge up and down up double tapping vertically, which is really useful for getting out of the way from enemy projectiles. Lastly there’s the upgrade system. The further you get on a single life the more your special attacks power up, you can see this from the stars underneath your health bar, with three stars being the strongest. You’ll also want to use the Mega Drive 6 button controller over the standard 3 button version as it allows you to use moves such as the reverse attack via a single button.

Now although this does have many features which improve it over Streets of Rage 2, I still prefer the previous game. Why? Because Sega decided in all of their wisdom to make changes for the western releases and not all were for the better. My most notable problem is the difficulty wherein the normal mode in this version is harder than the Japanese hard mode, as a result I have never managed to finish this title. To make matters worse the easy mode in this version stops you progressing after stage 5 so realistically you have to play on this hardened difficulty. Normally I wouldn’t complain too much about this, but I felt that the difficulty in Bare Knuckle 3 was about right, very similar to the previous games in the series, so I’m a little disappointed that they just ramped it up here. There are also a bunch of other differences, but I’m not going to go into that at the moment, I will save that for when I do the Japanese version - Bare Knuckle 3.

If you're interested in seeing more retro or current game videos then feel free to subscribe or check out some of my playlists:
Atari ST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzF1WNCk2yjFs9SNEZUf6o3
Sega Mega Drive: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzY6iR6W6cRsFRt7zUlgHIE
Sega Master System: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfySbjh71hXweL28cqu-DbR5
Windows PC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfxkkqPP6dWcSarH94BPrbvr

Other Statistics