Focus Home Interactive has bought Streets of Rage 4 publisher Dotemu for €38.5m (£32.6m), with an additional payment of up to €15m (£12.7m) conditional on certain revenue targets.

AA publisher Focus bought 77.5 percent of the share capital of Dotemu, the French company that focuses on developing and publishing retro-themed games.

Dotemu, which is made up of about 30 staff, worked alongside Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games to publish the critically-acclaimed Streets of Rage 4. Martin dished out a coveted Essential badge in Eurogamer's Streets of Rage 4 review, calling it "a sequel that manages to best its forebears". Streets of Rage 4 has now been played by two-and-a-half million people.

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Streets of Rage 4's Mr. X Nightmare premium DLC adds three new playable characters.

The beat 'em-up, which has sold an impressive 2.5m copies, is also getting a new mode and new customisation options.

Estel Aguirre is one of the three new playable characters. She appeared in the game as an intimidating, boss fight-style foe. The video below shows Estel as a playable DLC character. There's also a hint at the DLC's two other characters yet to be revealed.

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Music Week continues with Bertie meeting a composer whose work had a powerful effect on him, and whose processes aren't at all what he expected.

What is it about the music in Vampyr that appeals to me so much? I've played plenty of games with great music but this was the first to really make me think about it, to listen, to contemplate, to wonder. Maybe it's the loneliness of the cello. There's a powerful melancholy and almost yearning quality to it, in the way the bow sweeps the strings and makes that rasping, sonorous wave of noise; in and out, the sound lapping at your attention. And within it, there's a sense of aching. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be Jonathan Reid, the vampire, alone on the streets of 1918 London. Alone while coming to terms with what he is, what this world is, and where he fits within it.

Not only do I love the sound and the associations of it, I love the confidence I picture behind it. A confidence to do things differently, to strip everything back and just present a naked sound. No orchestra, no overt demonstration of musical power, no insecurity fuelling a need to impress. Instead, a cello. A cello played almost improvisationally, with scraps of melody moving irregularly as if on a whim. A cello not afraid to be ugly, to squeak by being played on the bridge. Who does that? Who commands someone to make those sounds for a game and knows they will be OK, that they will be enough?

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Streets of Rage 4 has a big new update that makes more than 80 enhancements to the game.

The patch makes some important changes to the well-received beat 'em-up, with online improvements (better fluidity and stability, less latency), new online stats display options on the HUD, and various bug fixes and fixes for random crashes.

Meanwhile, there's a balance sweep for all main characters, and gameplay improvements for all stages. Specials and star moves now interrupt all hitstun states, including air, and there are buffs to Axel and Cherry. Axel has a faster move speed and less recovery on some moves, while Cherry's flying punch from combos is now fully invincible. If you're into the game, the patch notes are worth a read.

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Good news! There's Streets of Rage 4 DLC on the way. Bad news! There's no ETA on when we'll get it just yet.

Posing a hypothetical question on its own Twitter feed, developer Dotemu responded to a question about additional content by confirming DLC is on the way.

"YES, we will [add new content] but there is no ETA," the developer said. "You guys are awesome and deserve the best so give us time to do things right."

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For a brief period in the late 80s and early 90s, the side-scrolling brawler captured the imagination - and the coinage - of gamers everywhere. Standing shoulder to shoulder around an arcade cabinet taking down waves of enemies as you gradually work your way to the end of the game was a wonderful experience, but Sega's Streets of Rage not only brought this experience home, it took it to the next level. And now it's back, better than ever. In fact, Streets of Rage 4 is nothing short of a masterpiece.

The golden age of brawlers kicked off with a wave of games spearheaded by Double Dragon, a coop-based side-scrolling beat 'em up that triggered a deluge of competing titles from a range of publishers. Capcom asserted its dominance here with the epic Final Fight - and its subsequent port to Super Famicom in late 1990 served as a powerful opening salvo in the 16-bit console war. Despite enjoying success with Golden Axe, Sega needed something darker, grittier and more 'urban'. It needed a Final Fight killer and Streets of Rage was its answer.

Released just six months after the Super Famicom conversion of Final Fight hit the market, Streets of Rage boasted simultaneous two-player action, with crunching combat backed by a killer soundtrack. It was a strong effort, but it was with Streets of Rage 2 and its sequel that Sega amped up the action, refining a winning formula and fully delivering on what I consider to be the three key pillars of brawler design.

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If you ask me what it is that made Sega's games really sing when they were in their 90s pomp, I'd settle on just one thing. It's the swagger, that cocky self-assuredness backed up with an impeccable sense of style. Any doubt that Streets of Rage began life as a Final Fight clone is soon erased if you look at the similarity between the two leading men, but could Cody Travers ever match the sheer attitude of Axel Stone as he piled through neon-slicked streets full of hoodlums in step to Yuzo Koshiro's searing techno beats?

There might have been better Sega games in the 90s, but there's no better 90s Sega games than the Mega Drive's Streets of Rage trilogy. From the soundtrack to the set-up to the styles that characters wear - this is stonewashed denim through and through - Streets of Rage and its two sequels embody so much of the 90s spirit, something backed up by the fact that this is a series that never saw beyond the decade.

Until now, that is, but Streets of Rage 4 is more than a belated sequel. Like Sonic Mania before it, this is a fan-made game that's at once a faithful and fully-endorsed follow-up to a Sega classic as well as a little more besides. And as with Sonic Mania before it, Streets of Rage 4 proves that, sometimes, the fans really do know best.

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