DD CREW
Original Release: Sega, 1991, Arcade
Sega was a big part of the early history of beat em ups ... but it wasn't because of this game!
DD Crew (Arcade, Sega, 1991)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
DD Crew is a forgotten beat-em-up from Sega ... and it only takes a couple minutes of playing it to see why they tried so hard to forget it!
Sega would get urban fisticuffs brawling right a couple years later with Streets of Rage, but at this point it looks like their goal was to simply knock off Final Fight without knowledge or care for what made it good. All the more strange that this is two years after they helped to usher in the golden age of beat-em-ups with the much more competent Golden Axe ... but clearly that was a different team.
Aside from the absurd introduction, the first thing that jumps out at you about DD Crew is that they went really hard with the hiphop soundtrack. But when you think "hiphop," consider this was 1991 and it was some Japanese guy throwing it together on probably short notice. It's sort of a Bobby Brown dance style that was the fashion of the time, but extremely repetitive and with a real fever dream quality to it thanks to the awkward spamming of all sorts of different voice samples.
This theming doesn't really extend to the rest of the game either. We face off against the typical incredibly well-funded 80s/90s gang of The Punks as they make a bomb threat against an amusement park, but also seem to have taken it over with a small army ... never was clear what their strategy was there. Anyway they're an eclectic bunch ranging from Chinese kungfu students to Cuban revolutionaries who march in with machine guns they seemingly refuse to use. The first boss is some kind of gay Latin stickfighter and they have a girlboss who wields a mace too. Our heroes are similarly diverse (and weird) though: bomber jacket Guile-ish guy, old drunken monkey master, meaty beefhead and "boxer who gets all dressed up to box and then just uses elbows and kicks instead."
The game has a couple small highlights. The best intentional one is the use of Sega's System 18 board, which also powered the cool effects in Alien Storm, to have some rotation and multi-layered backgrounds; the best unintentional one is the goofy boss taunts before they fight you. The boss battles are by and large some of the most painful parts of the game though, they're simply invincible in most of their frames of animation and leave you little opportunity to hit them.
In general the game is a blatant quarter-muncher, even wading through the common enemies is pretty tough as you can only take three hits or so before a life is depleted. The same small handful of repetitive enemies are also spammed for the entire game, it recycles some of its awful songs in later levels, and despite having only like six levels total it takes an eternity to get through (and in a real arcade would have cost a small fortune to boot).
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