Game:

Streets of Rage 2 (1992)

Duration: 15:33

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3

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU-

Oh dear. Anyone who's played the MD/Genesis originals will generally agree; Streets Of Rage is a fine game, and the sequel, Streets Of Rage II, is... uh... 'streets ahead'.

Alright, that was incredibly shit wordplay, I apologise.

Anyway, that's the general concensus; that the sequel is a superior game in pretty much every way. So you'd automatically assume that it's the same case for the SMS, wouldn't you?

Um... about that...

First up is gameplay of the first stage of the first game. While it's easy to notice that it's definitely inferior to its MD/Gen counterpart, all in all it's still a reasonably solid attempt at bringing SoR to the SMS; the only real gripe is with seemingly random collision detection.

After that, you'd expect the same level of quality and further refinement for a port of SoR II, right?

Wrong.

It's barely a port. It's more of an awfully shitty rush-job. The graphics are worse. The framerate is worse. The mechanics are worse.

Everything is worse.

I'm by no means a 'professional' SoR player, but the difficulty of SoR II on the SMS is just unbelievable. I know there are special moves that I was too lazy to figure out, but come on. Even with those it wouldn't help much, especially when:

* The gamespeed is turbo.
* You're knocked down way too easily.
* Enemies cheap you to death by beginning an unavoidable attack while you're still on the floor.
* You have literally no time to react against most attacks.
* Attempting to grab certain enemies will often result in them throwing you away like an old food wrapper.
* Landing on your feet is random.
* The music is bad enough to be off-putting.

Apparently the Game Gear version is much, MUCH better (despite looking the same to me). But I'm not touching that.

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