Humpday Gaming: Brawl Brothers (SNES)
Okay, so Brawl Brothers. No, it’s not some Super Smash Bros spinoff, or really anything like that. Brawl Brothers is actually an old as nails Super NES beat-em-up that no one would ever give a shit about except that one kid that rented it at the video store when nothing else better was available. Yes, that kid was me. And today, I’m going to pay respects to the game that gave me more than a few weekends of “well, it’s better than nothing” fun.
Really, there’s nothing special about Brawl Brothers at all. It’s just as mindless as every other beat-em-up at the time. If not more so. Most of the enemies soaked up punches to the face like some sort of hurt sponge, and the levels stretched on far after they had worn out their welcome. Especially stage 2, which saw you going through a maze-like sewer, fighting endless waves of bad guys while trying to figure out which doors to exit through to get to the end. Playing it now, it was enough to make me turn the game off in a fit of boredom. Back then though, I considered it a feature that I couldn’t blow through the entire game in an hour. Sugar and youth will do shit like that to you.
What brawl Brothers does do right, though, are the basics. All of the characters are fun to play as (especially the ninja), the controls are tight, and the graphics are bright and colorful. All aspects that any ADD-addled youth could appreciate. And even though the sewer stage is a bad example, the game did at least try to mix things up a bit by doing things like that. It even had an awesome chopper attack on a bridge in the first stage, which at the time was like starring in your own – albeit extremely repetitive – action movie.
That’s about the best I can say for Brawl Brothers. A cool brawler for the time, but mostly lost in a sea of far better brawlers. Far better brawlers that I wish my video store had access to. I don’t regret my time with Brawl Brothers. It served me well for many weekends, after all. But come on, what kind of video store gets this game over Turtles In Time? Give a kid a break.
I didn’t play this game, but I did play another Jaleco beat-em-up called The Peace Keepers, which was actually very good. It had different pathways you could choose, different dialogue and storylines depending on what character you were using at the time, two secret characters, the ability to get your character really pissed off and super strong, and a color edit mode where you could change the look of every person and object in the game. It has infinite replay value.
There were so many brawlers for the SNES that it was hard to keep up with them all even if you really loved them. I think this is another one that just blended in with the background too much to be noticed. Never heard of it until this, and I played tons of brawlers