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Meeting strange and wonderful people from other lands and knocking seven shades of stuffing out of them has become a very popular pastime, and joining the band of beat-em-ups, such as Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat is this bout of carnage, Dangerous Streets. It uses almost exactly the same formula s the other games – you pick one of the eight fighters and opt for either a straight one-on-one with an Amiga or human-controlled opponent, or go for the tournament, where you get to fight your way through the whole bunch of nutters.
The characters are a funny lot, including a lorry driver, a palmist and a disc jockey. Each has a range of special moves, some of which are distinctly weird and include turning into a moat monster or whipping people with your hair.

Control is by joystick and exactly which move you perform depends on the distance you are from your target. Once you have sussed the special moves they are easy to execute.
Each fight has a time limit, and the least damaged body by the end of it wins. There are two cameos of the contestants at the bottom of the screen, which gradually get more battered as your character does. Unfortunately, there is little indication of a successful hit, and no staggering characters let you know you have dished out a good pasting.

The characters are colourful, the sprites are a decent size and they have a cartoony look, although they do seem a little amateurish. There are a good few fighting moves but not many frames of animation, making the moves very jerky. The backgrounds are lush with some snappy parallax scrolling and loads of colours, but the sound effects are a bit wimpy, so it is a better idea to go for the music option.

The action is certainly fast, there are three speed settings and on the quickest one the characters leap about like demented souls. To get a good hit you need to be at the right distance for the attack, so you tend to spend a lot of time flailing around trying to get the impact point of a blow over the opponent’s head.

Dangerous Streets has a few exasperating features, such as the controls for the fighters being different – push up on the joystick and one character will jump and another will kick. You can also move completely off the screen which is a bit poor, but the special moves are imaginative, and the whole game has a light-hearted feel to it. There is none of the gritty reality of punching people in the kidneys here.

The truth of the matter is that Dangerous Streets won’t keep beat-em-up fans happy as long as they have got games like Body Blows Galactic and Mortal Kombat. It is wacky and weird but ultimately fails to really grab the imagination.
Chris Lloyd