Which was your favorite SOR?

[elvis]

I have a friend who's a pretty big arcade collector (his personal collection of machines is currently in the hundreds), and I've been trying for quite literally 5 years now to convince him to even TRY the SOR series.

He's a die-hard Final Fight fan, and pretty much dismisses anything on MegaDrive/Genesis due to the audio (of all things).

Final Fight is nice and all, but it's entirely limited in terms of available moves (which in my mind is why SOR beats most other scrolling beat 'em ups).

I have no idea how to convince the guy to try the games. He's as stubborn as an ox. (A very wealthy ox, but an ox all the same).

[synapse]

Final Fight is nice and all, but it's entirely limited in terms of available moves (which in my mind is why SOR beats most other scrolling beat 'em ups).

Not to mention the original Final Fight has an absolutely dull, forgettable music, which is exatly where the SoR series stands out.

[StarwindTheBold]

Don't get me wrong, I liked the Final Fight series (at least until Streetwise ) , but they couldn't come close to how good SoR was. I even still liked the third game, but for me, it was all about Rage 2. The best stages, enemies, music, everything about it was gold before the series started losing its mind in the third one.

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I loved the third. Ash, Shiva, Mona and Lisa, Robot X, Robot Y blew my mind

[Original_Name]

I find myself enjoying the first one above all, if nothing else, for its ambiance. For all its cheesiness, it actually maintained that 80's action-flick epicness and charm that's so hard to find these days. I'm not big on video games emulating movies, but Streets of Rage was such an early, pure attempt at it while still keeping such great gameplay intact that it's hard to fault it for it. The sequel, like someone mentioned earlier, took out the awesome police car assault special attacks and replaced them with fireballs and flaming uppercuts which just seemed silly in the context of the game; add in the bizarre alien level and cyborgs and crap, and the series has completely lost its way. I liked it much better as the gritty story of a bunch of ex-cops trying to take their city back from the grubby hands of a corrupt syndicate, as opposed to the bizarre sci-fi motive the later installments took on.

That said, the first game was already sort of ridiculous, what with its clown-face painted enemies and so forth, but all-told, I found the ambiance of it to be a bit more engaging. It just depends if you go for ambiance or completely over the top, which the later deliver in spades. Then again, calling in your police friends to fire a barrage of missiles at your enemies is pretty over-the-top.

To further the point about it feeling like a movie, though, I remember when I was very small, I owned both Streets of Rage 1 and 2 (my friend owned the third one, and I only acquired it for myself fairly recently). My sister had this Barbie movie theater toy which had this big pink frame with a couple of mirrors inside it so that you could set up the Barbie theater in front of a television screen to make it look like they were watching a movie on their screen (hard to explain). Anyway, one day my sister asked me to play a video game on our TV so she could pretend her dolls were watching a movie, and I bypassed the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ristar, Vectorman, Ecco the Dolphin, ToeJam & Earl, and even Comix Zone and Streets of Rage 2 for the likes of the first Streets of Rage. It just had that feel for it, especially with that epic opening with the awesome scrolling backstory and gorgeous soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro.

Then again, maybe it's just nostalgia.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

The napalm attack from SOR 1 does completely trump the specials from the sequels.

Oh, and the intro from SOR is incredibly epic.

[Gamerforlife]

I'm glad some other people appreciate certain aspects of the original SOR. It seems to very often get overshadowed by SOR 2. I would agree that it had a certain feel or ambiance or whatever that felt different from the sequels. The boss theme had this urban feel which was completely lost in SOR 2's boss music. I hear that theme from SOR 1 and I can picture two street gangs getting ready to fight. SOR 2's boss music just sounds...weird.

And like I touched on before, Blaze was different. She looked like a bad ass martial artist in the original. Her standing pose, the headband. In SOR 2, she really doesn't look like a fighter at all and her walking animation in SOR 2 just looked terrible as well. Her sprite does show a little bit more skin though if you look at her top. Shows you where Sega's priorities were

[jalvarez82]

Eh...the first one is the best for me. Just the bad ass soundtrack alone, man. God bless Yuzo Koshiro.

[Pulsar_t]

With the translation patch finally finished Bare Knuckle 3 is my definite game in the series. They're taking their sweet time releasing SorR v5.