Homebrew recommendations for old school Speccy fans

[PeteProdge]

How about if someone mentioned their gaming tastes (like a Desert Islands Disc-esque list) from the Speccy's commercial era, and then the homebrew experts on here (not really me, but I'm learning) could point them in the direction of post-1993 games that would appeal?

I'm really into explorative* beat-em-ups (Renegade, Target Renegade, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Coin Op and - wishing the Speccy version was any good, Double Dragon), which should come as no surprise, I've banged on about them before. What homebrew games should I check out on that basis?

Anyway, that's the idea for this thread.

* = As opposed to the one-on-one beat-em-ups like yer Street Fighter 2.

[Audionautas]

* Mighty Final Fight
* Angels
* Ninja Gaiden Shadow Warriors
* Mister Kung Fu

[PeteProdge]

Thank you so much @Audionautas, good suggestions.

* Mighty Final Fight

I was annoyed by those tiny cutesy sprites, which made me feel like I'm on the NES. But then I realised the 'inspiration' really is an actual NES game and this is a pseudo-port of it that clones it very well indeed. It may suffer from the sprites being tough to see on the highly colourful backgrounds but at least they don't flicker madly like the NES original! And I love the deviation where a roaming rodent is a convenient power-up. In some ways, better than the original, so there, Misutā Nintendo!

Yeah, this has been surprisingly good and probably the closest thing on the Speccy to the Streets Of Rage franchise. Very impressed. I'm not great at it, but this is going to be on my 'playlist' for a while.

* Angels

I'll get my gripe out of the way now. It's 'on rails', like Kung-Fu Master; Altered Beast and DragonNinja. That said, the graphics are astonishing, a lot of effort has gone into animation and colour. Really impressive for an 'on rails' beat 'em up. Frankly, it's what should have been put in the box of Wild Streets instead of the diabolical awfulness that Titus gave us. I love the stuff going on in the backgrounds too. This is pretty good indeed.

* Ninja Gaiden Shadow Warriors

With the rather compact playing area and much reduced sprites, this gave me the feel of playing on an Atari Lynx or Sega Game Gear. I persevered and thank goodness I did. It's a tiny bit like Black Tiger, but properly magnificent.

* Mister Kung Fu

Ah, I have played this before. Now, I'm not really a fan of the original coin-op. If it's in an arcade, sure, I'll play it, but I know I'll be rubbish at it and get in an 'enemy sandwich' right in the middle of level one, three times over. The infamous official ZX Spectrum conversion, as we all know, was a truly slow rehashing and then this comes along in 2018 and rights all those wrongs. I will go as far as to say this is actually BETTER than the coin-op, as I have less of an urge to rage quit. It's a little bit easier, which is needed!

Yeah, I can see myself returning to Mighty Final Fight and Ninja Gaiden Shadow Warriors a lot. All of these suggestions would be easily worthy of full price release status and strongly positive reviews back in the day had they existed then.

[R-Tape]

There haven't been many in this genre post commercial era. Audionatas mentions the best there, and Mister Kung Fu is my favourite of them. Others are:

Fist-RO Fighter. It's as much arcade action as gang beat-em-up, but it's pretty good.
The Agorers. It's certainly no Renegade, but I found it surprisingly playable. With a few tweaks it could be a really good bm'up.

There's also Ralf's MODs, which don't really count as they're classic era games, but some of them have more than just colours tweaked.