"Brutal: Paws of Fury" version comparison

"Brutal: Paws of Fury" was a fighting game from 1994 made exclusively with anthro characters. It was furry as fuck, but no one seemed to mind that back then. twas way before the "furry thing" became mainstream and got it's stereotype.

But that's not what this is about.

It came out in an age where there were tons of systems around and ports were commonly different from each other. This was mostly because of limitations, or because the developpers had more time to add content between releases. I personally enjoy articles that point out differences between systems releases.

Earlier I was talking to Bitten, and looked at the wiki page for Brutal. I was really surprised to see it was available for 7 systems. However, couldn't find an article that pointed those out. So I spent this morning playing all the versions I could get.

I played the versions DOS, SNES, Genesis, SegaCD, 32X. In that exact order, but I'm going to talk about them in the order I assume they came out. here are my findings:

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Genesis version

The Genesis version is the one I played as a kid, it wasn't very appealing back then because it required you to have the 6 button gamepad to be efficient at it, otherwise you had to press start to switch between punches and kicks. However, if you had the pad (or got used to switching), it actually had one of the best gameplays out of all the incarnations of the game.

The art was kinda bad (stick around, it'll get worse), and it featured the worse backgrounds from all the version by far. They look like someone's first attempt to do background art in MS paint. the leaves on the trees especially bother me for some reason. I would go as far as to say they didn't have a background artist at all and asked the character artist to make those.

Sound wise, it was a pretty poor version as well, mundane music and generic low quality sound effects for everyone.

Screens:

Sega CD version

This version is very similar to the genesis one visually, but it has a lot of extras to it. However the gameplay actually feels worse, not quite sure how.

Otherwise, the title screen, character art and stages look the same. Something neat that was added was a nice animated intro, here's a link to it.

Sound wise one thing I want to notice is that the quality is much higher for both the music and sound effects. I think it may actually have specific sound effects for Foxy Roxy as well.

Now, the extras:

• Best intro screen out of all the versions. (roundhouse kick into the Sega logo)
  
• VS screen character art with awkwardly long necks. (pic 1)
  
• A jukebox mode that plays a song while some of the characters jam. (pic 2)
• An epilogue for each character defeated after the fight. (pic 3)
• Overall, the presentation is improved and nice.
• An outtake section.
  

The outtake section is basically a montage of scrapped stuff, character designs and concept art. It's actually neat, you can watch that here.

Screens:

SNES version

This version I only played as an adult on an emulator, it's notably different from the Genesis one.

I read this version was preferred over the Genesis version at the time mainly because of the gamepad, the SNES had enough buttons for it. However, the gameplay feels worse than in the Genesis version, better than the Sega CD one though.

For this version, it seems that they finally got a background artist, There's a graphic overall from the title screen, to the character sprites and the backgrounds especially. If you look closely you can tell they increased the palette size for this game and the characters had an extra shade per color (pic 3). This actually reduces the contrast of the game and makes the characters look less dynamic shading wise.

Although they got a background artist, they must have fired the character artist as the character art is the worse from all the versions. look at that Foxy in pic 2. ugh...

Sound is better than the genesis version, but not as good as the Sega CD one. However to note, it sounds very "SNES-ish" somehow, must be because of the sound chip it sounds distinct.

Screens:

32X version

This version along with the next one are technically "Brutal Unleashed: Above the claw", It's not quite a sequel, more like special versions with extra characters, tweaks and new music.

The gameplay, which oddly was getting worse over each version, was improved on but only a bit. I'd say it's a slightly improved Genesis version in that aspect.

The new music is a nice change and of nice quality, sound effect though, same old.

You can see in the pic 3 that it looks sharper than the SNES version, They fixed the palettes from that version to this one. Also new character art which looks very good now.

Screens:

DOS version

This is what fucked me up today, I played the best one first and it made me look down on all the other versions.

This version is near identical to the 32X version, but the minor differences actually make the DOS version the better one.

This gameplay is the tightest out of all the versions. it still controls bad, but this is as good as it got.

It's hard to tell, but if u closely compare the screens, there's a bigger palette used in the DOS one. I'm guessing the DOS version came out before the 32X one considering it still carries the old subtitle of the game.

Looking at pic 3, it still used the stages from the SNES game. which, for that particular stage, is better than the one that ended in the 32X, because that one blocks the action too much. really depends from stage to stage though.

The sound is practically the same on both the 32X and the DOS one.

Screens:

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There are 2 more version I didn't play, the Amiga and the Amiga CD versions.

From what I saw, the Amiga version looked like a slightly nicer Genesis version, and the Amiga CD looked like the SNES one.