Dear Future Gamer

After reading Tom Fardon's views on Golden Axe (FG59) I felt compelled to rush to the defence to what I (and hopefully the majority of Future Gamer readers) believe is a classic game from a fantastic genre.

Last year I had the misfortune of visiting Sega World in London, and you know what? Tucked away in a corner was the arcade Golden Axe. People were being conned left right and centre - one quid for a minute tops on big-screen machines - but together with a mate I spent 45 minutes completing Golden Axe and all it cost was £1.50 between us. I also had a great laugh playing it, but much to my annoyance they've got rid of the game now.

So what if there was awful collision detection and so forth? As I see it, Golden Axe wasn't designed to be a game of finesse. Indeed, it was more like a fantasy version of Double Dragon and I loved it for that. After Target Renegade 2, it was one of my favourite games on the Speccy, despite the 'load each level from the tape' nonsense.

Why were games such as Double Dragon, Golden Axe and Final Fight so good? If you'd had a stressful day you could come home and bash the hell out some bad guys, screaming, "BRING IT ON!" as if they were your worst enemies in real life. Sure, there's little skill involved, but its bloody great fun all the same. To be frank, I'm bored stupid of these one-on-one efforts that have spawned since the days of Streetfighter. I don't want to have to spend my life learning 10-button combinations to do some special move. I just want to get in there, take out some aggression and feel great for doing so. All you games developers out there, give us a true beat 'em up to be proud of, otherwise I'm just gonna have to get my Spectrum out again...

Andrew Vivian

FG: We've had a surprising amount of feedback defending Golden Axe and some other old beat 'em ups, and we agree with what Andrew's saying here. A lot of fun can be had by simply hitting one or two buttons to defeat enemies without necessarily having to master complicated combos all the time.