Month: April 2020

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  A perfectly acceptable location to start brawling anew. Welcome back to Streets of Rage.

Decades later, however, these arcade classics can feel clunky and repetitive. After the pre-teen thrill of faking like Michelangelo or a mayor wears off, you're left mashing a single attack button through an eternity of repetitive foes. We haven't seen many modern games take up that throne, and the best exceptions are either RPG-like juggles (Castle Crashers) or combo-loaded 3D smorgasbords (Devil May Cry). For years, I've yearned for a modern beat-'em-up that splits the difference: simple and accessible to start, with layers of satisfying nuance to uncover the more I play.

Streets of Rage 4 is exactly that game. Everything that made the series stand out in the early '90s returns as a selling point once again, and new ideas have been added in careful, tasteful fashion.

It's also another example of Sega handing a classic series to Western retro-crazed developers, giving them the freedom to go nuts, and getting a great game as a result. We've seen this with mascots like Sonic and Wonder Boy, and, now, the biggest beat-'em-up from the Sega Genesis has been reborn.

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  The 2020 iPhone SE. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

It's finally here. Nearly two years after discontinuing the 4-inch iPhone SE, Apple has introduced a new iPhone SE with a highly competitive $399 starting price tag.

Like its predecessor, this release puts Apple's latest processor inside the chassis of the company's heretofore cheapest phone, giving buyers who want a powerful, future-proof handset an option for quite a bit less than the $1,000 cost that has become common for flagship phones.

That said, there's at least one key difference between the phone released in 2016 and the one arriving today. The previous iPhone SE was 4 inches, but this one is 4.7—which might not be the ideal size for users who operate their phones one-handed.