This has to be the most underrated game genre. It's rarely to get one nowadays.

Okay, we have so many fighting games and they're nice but I miss the feel that you're walking with someone and bashing baddies' skulls in like in Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, etc...

If there are some nowadays, what could you recommend me?

Anyway, that's what The Burnhams (one of my comics) is inspired from.

Unfortunately, beat'em ups seem to have had some difficulty with the transition to 3D and were lost along the way. You can still find some on systems that still featue a ot of sprite driven games, like the DS, but beyond that, they're kind of a lost art. I remember a few for the Dreamcast and X-Men Legeneds sort of had that feel, but otherwise, the genre more of less got assimilated by your single-player action games like God of War.

I've thought about making one myself, but while I have no problem animating sprites and coming up with game systems and story lines, I don't really have the programming know-how to pull off my ideas and the established game engines and makers don't really do what I want without some serious coding.

Ya could say Dynasty warriors was a beat em up since you beat a crap ton of people in a single swing, but if you look it in that way then you know why the Beat em up franchise has gone down.

Warriors and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks are older games but my sister and I had a grand old time beating the crap out of people in them. :) ESPECIALLY Warriors. But you're right, I sure hope they bring those back soon.

I heard they were trying to revive the idea of making a new Streets of Rage game...but I dunno.

I thought Spikeout was supposed to be the spiritual successor to Streets of Rage. didn't the Xbox version even have Streets of Rage characters in it?

I sort of see Assassin's Creed as a beat 'em up game.

So did The Warriors live up to the hype?

Not sure if this is what you mean by "beat 'em up," but the Soul Edge/Soul Calibur series has always been my favorite. I don't like how they're sticking in Yoda & Darth Vader for IV, but I'll still buy it. Soul Calibur III was my favorite because you could customize your own character with costumes, hair, skin color, weapon, etc and then name it whatever you want. It was really nice. ....I also liked the amount of unlockables they always had in this game. It was always fun to play and then discover you had unlocked a secret weapon for your character, a new arena, an alternate ending, concept art, etc.

lastcall
Not sure if this is what you mean by "beat 'em up," but the Soul Edge/Soul Calibur series has always been my favorite. I don't like how they're sticking in Yoda & Darth Vader for IV, but I'll still buy it. Soul Calibur III was my favorite because you could customize your own character with costumes, hair, skin color, weapon, etc and then name it whatever you want. It was really nice. ....I also liked the amount of unlockables they always had in this game. It was always fun to play and then discover you had unlocked a secret weapon for your character, a new arena, an alternate ending, concept art, etc.

You're thinking of a "Fighting Game", which is more of a one-on-one thing. A Beat 'Em Up is essentially where one or two guys fight loads of people, generally with melee attacks (which is part of what separates the concept from games like Contra).

The Warriors is the most recent high-quality beat-em-up that I've played. It's also really the only successful transition of a beat-em-up into 3D that I've played.

I wondered for a while if it was ever possible to make a 3D revival of River City Ransom. And while in a few ways I think it could work, I think it's mostly a bad idea. Some things you gotta leave alone.

I guess you can see The Warriors as the grown-up 3D version of River City Ransom.
God that was a great little game. I only wish the NES version was like the updated version, which finally included unique signature attacks for the bosses. Also I wish everyone were in uniforms, and even delinquent uniforms. Everyone wearing different colored shirts gave me a bad taste of Jagged Alliance.

Nothing will ever top TMNT 4 Turtles in Time as a beat em up :(

That's like the funnest game ever made.

I liked the arcade version of TMNT 4, but the SNES version was way too easy. I had no problems beating that game on one life at the hardest difficulty setting. They dumbed down the AI on the bosses making the three hit and run strategy work on everything. Plus having the ability to pull off special at will made it easy to just slide through everything in the game.

In terms of gameplay, though, I actually liked some of the Capcom titles a little more. Aliens vs Predator was great just for Linn Kurosawa. Maybe not the deepest game in the genre, but I really did enjoy pulling off some of her longer combos. Another one tat never failed to impress me was Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. Not only did it have a fairly deep system with stats based on the pen and paper RPG, it also had a system for leveling, unique class-based weapons and armor that could be picked up and used in the game, class based skills and spells (plus the characters were fairly well balanced), branching pathways, secret areas and weapons which could only be accessed via multiplayer, and a number of secret areas.

You also had a few games hit the console market after the interest in arcade beat'em ups started to fade. Guardian Heroes is still my favorite game with it's overblown combo system which let you juggle enemies infinitely, long branching story mode that included two-player co-op play and a branching storyline with five different endings (each with a different end boss), as well as a six player vs mode where you could play as any character in the game, including background villagers and minor enemies as well as bosses. The playstation got it's own clone of that game under the title Panzer Bandit. The vs mode was cut down to four players and the game was much simpler with only two planes and no stats or system for leveling up your characters, but the sprites were larger and the game seemed to be harder, if a bit shorter.

I just realized that the Adventure Mode in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is pretty much a beat 'em up.