Beat ‘Em Up genre is not dead! | OpenBOR
Beat ’em up games is here to stay! Thanks to the OpenBOR community.
In 80’s and 90’s, most games released were games with beat ’em up genre – games where its mission is to beat up all enemies on screen, wipe them clear.
Beat ‘Em Up is a dying genre
But coming to 2000’s where there were plenty of advancements happening not only to the hardware (faster processor, bigger and cheaper memory) but also on the game engines as well as the game genre themselves, beat ’em up games was slowly dying and left behind. 2000’s are about 3D, stealth, and more intelligent actions, not just punching beat ’em up here and there.
Fast forward to today, games are mostly online (or at least requires to be online and connected) and starting to move to cloud. Battle Royale and MMORPG are two of currently most favorite genres.
Beat ‘Em ‘Up genre is here to stay!
Despite all those facts and how fascinating those new games and genres are, I’m pretty sure out there, there are people who still like and love beat ’em up games. I’m one of them. Being a kid in 90’s era, I played a lot of beat ’em up games and still fall in love with the genre – simply because playing beat ’em up games requires little-to-no effort to think, make a strategy and such, all you need to do is to relax and enjoy the game, punching enemies and stay alive to beat the Boss.
Luckily, there are people out there who also love beat ’em up genre and have taken actions long time ago to cherish and keeping the genre alive. There were (and are) group of people creating and maintaining what they called as beat ’em up games engine known as OpenBOR engine.
Meet OpenBOR – The Open Source Engine for Beat ‘Em Up games
Long story short about history of OpenBOR, it was created about 10 years after Street of Rage 2. Inspired by the game and like what I mentioned earlier that coming to 2000’s, beat ’em up genre was dying, this group (Senile team) created Beats of Rage (BOR) engine as well as the games that made use of the engine, coincidentally the game was also called Beats of Rage – based on Street of Rage 2 game. It was first released on DOS on 2003 and became popular between beat ’em up game enthusiasts.
After some time, Senile Team stopped maintaining the engine and released it to the public and became Open Beats of Rage or in short OpenBOR – the open source version of the original BOR. Now the engine is available and maintained on both Chrono Crash forum and Source Forge.
These are OpenBOR Games
These are few samples of what OpenBOR can do and what the community and fans can produce.
Do you know if Street Fighter has beat ’em up games? See this video below to believe!
Ever see Sonic The Hedgehog – SEGA’s mascot in a beat ’em up game? Well, see for yourself here.
What about King Of Fighters?
What about Mortal Kombat adventure?
There are plenty more beat ’em up games which you won’t find anywhere else, other than in OpenBOR platform.
OpenBOR Download Links
There are many ports of OpenBOR, many of them were discontinued due to the platform itself is dead (Eg: Sega DreamCast), but here they are in alphabetical:
Android: Chrono Crash | Source Forge
Nintendo Switch: Chrono Crash (not official yet)
PSP: Source Forge
Wii: Source Forge
Windows: Source Forge
Any other ports, do check it to the official forum here.
OpenBOR Games download links
OpenBOR games are fan-made which you can’t and won’t find on stores like Google Play Stores or physical game shops.
OpenBOR games can be found and download here:
1) Chrono Crash forum or,
2) Go Go Free Games.
3) If still not enough, tryGoogle for it.
How to install and use OpenBOR
Depends on the platform you choose (Windows, Android, or something else), here are the basic steps to do to play those amazing games:
1) Install or extract OpenBOR app or application. Download link above.
OpenBOR unfortunately is not available on Google Play Store. To install OpenBOR on Android, first you need to allow 3rd party installer file to be executed on your Android, follow the steps here.
2) Once installed/extracted, run the OpenBOR. On Windows machine, double click OpenBOR.exe. On Android, tap on OpenBOR app.
3) Download the game. Download links above. If the game is form of .zip or .rar, extract them first and put .pak or .PAK into /OpenBOR/Paks folder.
4) Select the games and have fun playing!
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