Palace Software‘s notorious Barbarian is a ‘sword and sandal’ beat ’em up with a knockout gimmick: you can decapitate your opponent with a well-placed sword stroke!
Granted: you have to time it correctly, and get the distance between you and your opponent right, but when you pull it off the head bounces off in hilarious fashion, before being finally getting booted off the screen by a gremlin.
Mercs is a classic arcade shooter from 1990. It was jointly developed by Sega and Capcom and features simultaneous three-player cooperative gameplay.
Released ten years after the original Salamander, Konami‘s 1996 sequel – Salamander 2 – is more of the same horizontal/vertical scrolling blasting action, but with a different style of graphics, bigger, better weapons, and more spectacular events.
A side-scrolling beat ’em up released into arcades by Capcom in 1989, Final Fight was originally intended as a sequel to Street Fighter, but was eventually changed after the success of Double Dragon.
Mortal Kombat 3 was co-developed by Midway and Atari Games and was released into arcades by Midway in 1995 and it continues the fine Mortal Kombat tradition of outraging anyone without a sense of humour…
Released a year after the original Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II took arcades by storm in 1993, with its mix of beat ’em up action and absurdly violent parody.
Arch Rivals is a classic basketball video game, developed and manufactured by Midway in 1989. It’s a two-on-two basketball game, and one that encourages players to hit each other to steal the ball.
Sega‘s 1990 arcade hit, Alien Storm, is a one, two, or three-player action game with side-scrolling and first-person shooting sections.
Sega‘s classic Golden Axe is a scrolling beat ’em up first released into arcades in 1989. It is fondly-remembered, often re-released, and has been converted to many other systems.
What’s so good about Golden Axe, then?
Altered Beast is an influential Sega beat ’em up first released into arcades in 1988. In some respects it was the predecessor to Golden Axe and Alien Storm; both similar games, and both to come later from Sega.
The King of Grabs 