Oh man. There are so many. Of course we had the well known games, but so many went totally under the radar. At least my radar. I just love finding stuff like this. So interesting! So;
Martial Champion (Konami, 1993) is one I never heard of until recently. It's interesting, with obvious copies of various Street Fighter tropes that were being established at the time. I mean, it doesn't look to bring anything new to the table but some of the characters are interesting, like Chaos the Chinese vampire (a whole year before Darkstalkers' Hisen-Ko)!
Then you have games like Kaiser Knuckle (Taito 1994) which has very detailed spritework, wonderful parallax scrolling, and some scaling effects. Stages that actually take damage and stay until the match ends, and walls that break away. Shits crazy. And the soundtrack is pretty great, too. How this went under my radar for so long, I don't know. One of the bosses looks like one of the Pillar Men from the JoJo series, right down to his versus screen pose and movelist.
There's others worth mentioning. Monster Maulers (which seems to have been the inspiration for Warzard/Red Earth), Dragoon Might. Etc.
Martial Champion (Konami, 1993) is one I never heard of until recently. It's interesting, with obvious copies of various Street Fighter tropes that were being established at the time. I mean, it doesn't look to bring anything new to the table but some of the characters are interesting, like Chaos the Chinese vampire (a whole year before Darkstalkers' Hisen-Ko)!
Then you have games like Kaiser Knuckle (Taito 1994) which has very detailed spritework, wonderful parallax scrolling, and some scaling effects. Stages that actually take damage and stay until the match ends, and walls that break away. Shits crazy. And the soundtrack is pretty great, too. How this went under my radar for so long, I don't know. One of the bosses looks like one of the Pillar Men from the JoJo series, right down to his versus screen pose and movelist.
There's others worth mentioning. Monster Maulers (which seems to have been the inspiration for Warzard/Red Earth), Dragoon Might. Etc.