Beat-em-ups didn't die with the arcade, but they did enter a recession after the heyday of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Final Fight. After the rush in arcades, with classics pouring in from Konami and Capcom, they slowed to a trickle as interest in walking right and punching faded. But they didn't die. On Steam, the beat-em-up lives on. There are still gang-laden streets that need to be cleared by the fists of heroes.

With Streets of Rage 4 coming, we decided to dig into the surprisingly vibrant selection of indie beat-em-ups on PC that have kept the genre’s stylistic violence going. The best of them manage to channel the pure bliss of the arcade days, or add something novel to a genre famous for its 90s simplicity.

Sega Genesis Classics

Link: Steam

It’s a small cheat to open this list, but among the 59 games included in this compilation sit both the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe trilogies. Each entry in the Streets of Rage series is worth owning (they can be purchased separately as well), beginning with the dour original, into the brightly saturated sequel, and the oddball third game. In terms of the Genesis, these three represent the best of the genre on that hardware, and then by default, some of the best on PC too.

Don’t rule out Golden Axe either. The mystical, swords & sorcery aesthetic presents a morbid clash of weapons. The first two games follow similar paths, hacking away at the minions of Death Adder. The third game—a Japanese exclusive for decades—is worth a look, refining the mechanics, plus adding new characters and tighter action.

Streets of Fury EX

Link: Steam

Before taking the Streets of Rage 4 gig, developer Guard Crush Games worked on this kooky and irreverent brawler. In an alternate timeline where Mortal Kombat’s digitized sprites never went out of style, Streets of Fury EX is the standard. With technological progress, the dev team uses expanded animation possibilities, goofing around with the sprites. Characters acknowledge the screen, perform nunchuck skits, and slowly roll over and die. It’s nonsense.

Comedy aside, there’s a competent game underneath. Combos lift enemies up, up, up into the air and the range of attacks (oddball as they often look) keeps repetition at bay. Plus, there’s a bevy of characters to unlock and choose from, including YouTubers like Nostalgia Critic. They all set off to clear London of gang activity—even if not a single one of these people make a convincing street thug.

Fight'N Rage

Link: Steam

The best at capturing the true spirit of the arcade era, this beat-em-up is a furious and sprite-based game that just came out in 2017. It’s full of sleaze, and done in the form of an animal world. The foes? Rats, pigs, wolves, and others, reminscent of some of the enemies in the arcade Battletoads or TMNT brawlers. That set-up is done with a gorgeous, glossy glaze that emphasizes shadows and highlights. And you can bet there are CRT filters.

In action, it’s superlative. While the movesets don’t aim for depth, impact feels sold from every hit. The weight of the combat—and even better the speed—push Fight’N Rage to the top of Steam’s beat-em-up roster.

Mother Russia Bleeds

Link: Steam

Embracing the adult part of the M rating, Mother Russia Bleeds revels in exploitation-level violence. Weapons include syringes and knives and hits connect with plenty of blood. Punches hit like rapid fire tanks, mauling enemies as they slowly lose teeth and clothes the longer they hold on, like the after-effect of too many street drugs.

It all fits a cynical setting, set during a time of high post-Soviet Russia drug use. Fights happen in dreary alleys and prisons, but break out later inside a sex club where people “engage” each other in bondage gear, while others just watch. Mother Russia Bleeds has no morals. This genre is a suitable one.

River City Ransom Underground

Link: Steam

A reboot of an iconic NES game (and extension of the winding Kunio series that started it), River City Ransom Underground uses an open world where Japanese gangs run the streets. The heart of the series remains: It’s still about pummeling rivals, taking their cash, and upgrading your character. The Scott Pilgrim beat-em-up took great inspiration from River City Ransom with RPG-like experience and unlockable movesets, and those features are back here.

Underground fuels itself with a deluge of animation, extending combat and forcing strategy. Each punch counts, and slew of playable characters offer unique ways to execute even base combos. Better still, this all connects to the original game (or at least the American adaptation) where the original River City stars return, now aged and grizzled. It’s a smart reset, both different and advanced enough to feel new. And yes, *Barf still remains.

Castle Crashers

Link: Steam

The modern tentpole of the genre is this wacky four-player weapons-based beat-em-up. Doused with an eclectic sense of humor and coupled with a catchy leveling system, this is, like River City, the rare beat-em-up worth losing a dozen or more hours to.

Castle Crashers uses a delightfully cheery color palette and wild bosses (including a memorable river cat) to keep itself interesting, and if you obsess over leveling and unlocking characters there are multiple difficulty levels to progress through. The chaos of multiplayer with up to four people is a joy, and there's enough depth here to really sink your teeth into. Catching low-level foes in a combo trap only adds to the sense of melee. And the scenery is drizzled with low-brow humor, which really brings out the laughs when among friends.

Double Dragon: Neon

Link: Steam

WayForward revitalized the Double Dragon brand with a remarkable do-over. It’s part parody, playing to an audience of nostalgia-rich 30 year-olds who grew up on hair bands and Saturday mornings. The level of detail (including individual songs playing for every power-up) goes beyond expectations. Not only colorful, the dialog is pure glee, and holds up on multiple playthroughs as the screechy villain Skullmageddon realizes his failing plot.

And really, this is no straightforward update. Neon demands mastery of an accessible counter system and timing, rare in an often brainless genre. It works. Heroes Billy and Jimmy Lee sport all of their classic moves, and the enemy roster? That’s an update of the classics too. Note the original Double Dragon Trilogy is available for download too (along with a recently released fourth entry), but Neon is that rare reboot better than the original.

Big Action Mega Fight!

Link: Steam

With the tempo and simplicity of a mobile game and the look of something from the modern Cartoon Network, there’s little special about Big Action Mega Fight! Not even the exclamation point counts.

However, it’s snappy, and the restrained combat system opens up as levels get cleared. Each stage only lasts a minute or two, breaking up the small time action to make everything digestible. Each punch connects with a tight pop, and a small assist by the way of auto targeting adds the right amount of aggression in the fight. Seeing what Big Action Mega Fight! has to offer down the line makes dealing with the routine early levels a worthy endeavor.

Raging Justice

Link: Steam

Published by Worms developer Team17, Raging Justice brings back pre-rendered sprites at high resolution to embody a cruel, pro-police spectacle. There’s a choice though: Either punch enemies into submission to play bad cop or make an arrest for good cop. Both earn points, and stages offer awards no matter which route you choose. In the middle of a fight, playing good cop is a challenge, so a perfect run is something to strive for.

Raging Justice isn’t pouring out depth. It’s routine. Punch, kick, and grab, and that's about it. It’s even a little stubby in terms of strike impact. However, that unique look, so rarely employed as traditional pixel art or low count polygons dominate the indie scene, gives Raging Justice a memorable quality.

Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara

Link: Steam

This list is intentionally light on classic ports, but Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons beat-em-ups arrived on PC in rare form: two games in one, with modern updates including online play and leaderboards. An achievement-style system with fun goals, modifiers and new modes give you a lot of new ways to play, but you could also ignore it all and simply play two of Capcom's best, and certainly deepest, 90s beat-em-ups.

These D&D games combined Capcom's penchant for great-feeling walk-right-and-punch action with weapons, items, magic, and classes. If you crave depth in a classic beat-em-up, look no further.

Bonus: Streets of Rage Remake

If you know where to look, this fan remake (once eight years in the making) is a celebration of everything Streets of Rage. Sadly, Sega’s cease-and-desist rendered this unavailable on any fan-official channels, but it’s out there and worth tracking down.

Each Streets of Rage offered a unique combat system and this remake used and combined them all. From the outset, it’s possible to choose between your favorite, and every character is playable, including their alternate costumes. Locations, enemies, and weapons come together in a massive beat-em-up. Although hardly using any new assets (nearly everything is pulled from the original Genesis games, with some from the Master System/Game Gear editions), this is—or was, rather—a gloriously all-inclusive celebration of a 16-bit icon.

SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics has received a new update, ushering in a bunch of new features well worth checking out. The first of these is VR support: you can now play Phantasy Star in VR, though the experience is about inhabiting a retro-themed bedroom where a ye olde CRT monitor displays the game, rather than inhabiting the game itself. Still, it's pretty cool.

Two-player online multiplayer is now supported across all titles that have previously supported local multiplayer, so you'll be able to team up for the likes of Streets of Rage and Virtua Fighter 2.  Elsewhere, there are new leaderboards, challenge modes, new graphics filters and border options, and a fast-forward and rewind feature.

My favourite addition is the ability to play ROMs from other regions. If there were notable differences between the PAL and NTSC versions of any given game, you'll be able to check out both. And if a game proves too familiar for you, you can trigger Mirror mode and play it backwards.

Check out the full notes for the (free) update here. There's a new trailer below:

Golden Axe was already an old game when I found it at the back of an arcade in the 1990s. The dusty cabinet only cost 20 cents per credit while shiny new games demanded a whole dollar. It was good value: only 20 cents to become a dwarf who could ride dragons or weird chicken-leg creatures, bash up tiny gnomes for their magic potions, and sometimes summon lightning from the sky.

Even at that price I could never finish it, and playing it years later on Steam as part of the Sega Mega Drive & Classics Collection it's obvious why. The boss fights are cheap, enemies burst out of doorways to hammer you on the head, the difficulty spikes are entirely random, and ledges are precarious. It has all the hallmarks of arcade games designed first and foremost to vacuum coins straight out of childrens' pockets with maximum efficiency. But thanks to a Steam Workshop modder, it no longer has to be that way.

Tucked away among the mods in the Steam Workshop, behind the ones that inserted Knuckles into the original Sonic the Hedgehog or played the weird noise Tim Allen makes whenever someone dies, I found the Chill Editions. These personalised tweaksets alter arcade classics, some of them adding infinite lives or unlimited time, level selection, or protection from death when you fall off the edge of the screen.

Games from Altered Beast to Vectorman 2 had been given the Chill Edition treatment. They took the rage out of Streets of Rage 2, and made even frantic games like Gunstar Heroes into relaxing experiences you can zone out to while listening to a podcast. At first I thought that was all there was to it, and then I looked into the identity of the blessed saint of a Steam user called xONLYUSEmeFEET responsible for these mods.

Turns out he's AJ Ryan, who has a condition called Arthrogryposis that restricts the use of his hands. Ryan steers his wheelchair, types, and plays games using his feet hence the username. You can check him out on YouTube playing arcade games and playing them well, and he s able to type at 50 words-per-minute and use a mouse with his feet as well. Though he can play with controllers the triggers can be hard to depress with his toes and he s switched to PC gaming for his favorite first-person shooters. I'm glad I did because I can hold my own against my friends now! he says. But Ryan's keenly aware that not everybody is capable of doing what he can.

"Many Sega games are difficult to beat even for the most seasoned gamer and more people should be able to see these games through," Ryan says, explaining the impetus behind his project. "I began work on a few games before Workshop support released so I could have my mods on the store as soon as possible. I started making one of my favorite games, Streets of Rage 2, more accessible by adding in Infinite Lives and enabling additional features in the options menu. Upon completion of the mod, I decided I needed a name for my work. I didn t want to call direct attention to the fact my audience was those with disabilities so I decided on the Chill Edition moniker as I believed these Chill Editions could be enjoyed by anyone."

He was right. There were 34,143 players subscribed to various Chill Editions, and most of them had no idea who is responsible for them or that their creator has an even nobler motivation than saving modern players from ragequitting. His most popular mod is for Comix Zone an innovative but bastard-hard beat-em-up about an artist trapped in a comic who can traverse levels by ripping a path through the panel dividers which had 2,677 subscribers. The Chill Edition of Comix Zone made enemies weaker, adds infinite energy, and when you use the ability to rip a chunk of paper off the page and make a plane out of it, you now get health back instead of losing some. Each Chill Edition's modifications were chosen to suit the difficulties of that particular game.

"The experience I wanted for each Chill Edition game was to allow the player to go through the game at their own pace without worrying about a game over," Ryan explains. "So infinite lives/health were always my top priority for each Chill Edition game as if I could do that, any player could eventually beat the game. I also tried to enable stage/level select for every game to allow players to start the game from any level of their choosing. From there, I added features specific to each game that had a minor impact on difficulty such as infinite shurikens in Shinobi III or infinite time in Sonic."

Ryan started modding seven years ago, creating Doom maps when he was in high school, but his first Chill Edition for Streets of Rage 2 presented a new kind of challenge. "I was not familiar with Hex Editing or the workflow I needed to create in order to make my mods," he says. "The biggest obstacle for me was figuring out I needed to modify Sega s code protection in order to get any of the games to boot."

Though the process got easier once Ryan cleared that obstacle, his later work on the Sonic trilogy turned out to be "a nightmare" as he puts it. "All three games are structurally very different from each other so I was unable to get the same exact features across all of them which was always my goal for series of games." Sonic 3 & Knuckles was the Chill Edition fans requested most frequently and is currently the most popular one, but getting it to work took a lot of trial and error. "Additionally, getting complete hazard and drowning immunity in Sonic 3 & Knuckles to work without having the game lock out took forever to figure out."

A new obstacle stands in front of the Chill Editions right now, however. This week, dozens if not hundreds of mods have been pulled from the Mega Drive & Genesis Classics Collection, removing those that sneakily uploaded entire games as well as perfectly legit mods like Ryan s. Because of how many mods I uploaded I'm currently banned from the Workshop for 28 days! he says. Since the mods were first taken down, four Chill Edition mods have been reinstated, but that still leaves many more unaccounted for.

Even mods created by Simon Thomley, aka Stealth, the modder hired by Sega to create Sonic Mania, have been caught in the mass ban. Ryan s hoping to get his mods reinstated or hosted elsewhere, but at the moment they are frustratingly unavailable on Steam, and modders are struggling to get more than stock answers from Steam support.

Ryan plans to continue working on the Chill Editions in the future, bugfixing existing ones while deciding which game to Chill next. He's hesitant to double up on work being done by other modders a lot of players request the JRPG Phantasy Star II, but there's already an Easy Mode out there for it. He's also considering modding other mods, like the original Japanese edition of Streets of Rage 3 which fans can now find under the name Bare Knuckle 3 Translated, although he wants to make sure the previous modders receive appropriate credit for their work. "I m always looking for suggestions on Chill Edition mods so always feel free to let me know! I ll make Chill Editions for as long as players ask me to."

The Chill Editions have proved worthwhile for both to disabled players who can now experience games that previously relied too much on fussy precision and tight reaction times, and anyone who never saw the end of Alien Soldier because it was just too hard. There are even commenters on Steam popping up to say how happy they are to be able to play games games they remember from their youth like Golden Axe alongside their own children, no matter what age they are.

Sometimes players are critical of the Chill Editions for being too easy, but that's the point of them. Arcade classics in particular weren't designed with accessibility in mind, and that's a shame. Video games all of them, including these historical artifacts of the coin-operated days should be for everyone.

Update: Earlier this week, dozens of Steam Workshop mods vanished from the Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics Hub without explanation. Sega has now responded, suggesting neither it nor Valve have removed mods that do not fall foul of Steam's terms of service.

According to Sega, this process has occurred automatically and both it and Steam are actively working to resolve those affected. The statement in full reads as follows:"SEGA would like to reiterate how delighted it is with how the Mega Drive/Genesis Collection community has self-moderated content on Steam Workshop. We've seen some fantastic mods created and released on the platform and want to encourage the community's continued creativity by helping to curate a library of outstanding mods.

"However, due to some erratic user behaviour over the last few days, many mods which didn't breach Steam's terms of service were automatically removed from Steam Workshop. SEGA and Valve are working together with the affected modders to reinstate their work as soon as possible and have already reversed a number of removals.

"SEGA and Valve are not actively removing mods that do not violate the terms of service, only those that do. We appreciate the help of the community's self-moderation in removing illegal or offensive content to maintain the high standard of legal mods on the platform. If you feel your mod does not breach the Steam terms of service but was removed, please contact community@sega.co.uk and SEGA will investigate."

Original story:

Earlier this year Sega opened a Steam Workshop section for their Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics Hub, allowing modders to tinker with emulated versions of games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage. On Tuesday, dozens of those mods were removed without explanation.

Modders asking why their creations were taken down have received a stock reply from Steam Support: Due to reporting of content that violates the Steam Terms of Service, the content in question has been removed from the Steam Community.

Among the mods removed are some that violate copyright by uploading entire games including NBA Jam and Mutant League Football, but also many that are entirely within the Terms of Service. These include 'Sonic 1 Megamix' and 'Knuckles in Sonic 1' by modder Stealth, who was hired by Sega to create Sonic Mania on the strength of ROM hacks like these, as well as over 20 'Chill Edition' mods created by xONLYUSEmeFEET to make games more accessible for players with disabilities.

After lodging a support ticket, modder Tiddles managed to get 'Sonic 3 Complete' reinstated, a collection of tweaks that include bugfixes and the option to hear the original PC version's music. Other modders are still waiting and have received nothing beyond Valve's standard response: It is our policy not to provide specific feedback on removed content.

As of press time, some of the mods have been restored, but not all.

Sega has not replied to a request for comment.