Dangerous Streets

Dangerous Streets is a fighting game developed by Italian game studio Micromania and released by Flair Software for the Amiga, Amiga CD32, and MS-DOS in 1993. It was poorly received by critics. Dangerous Streets was bundled with the CD32 in The Dangerous Streets Pack.

Gameplay


Dangerous Streets offers two-player battles, single matches against the computer, and a tournament mode. The eight characters can be controlled with either a joystick or a keyboard and have the ability to punch or kick in the range of weak, medium, and strong. The characters in their portraits below the playfield will appear more injured as they take more damage in game.

Characters

 * Sgiosacapeli🇮🇹, a musically tasteless DJ at the roughest night spot in Italy, who has now turned his attention to martial arts after reaching top grade at Shotokan Street Fighting.
 * Pinen🇨🇭, a massive lorry driver who works for a local software company. He spends most of his nights in the bars and taverns of Switzerland, where he is feared by nearly all of the thugs who flock there.
 * Tony🇮🇹/🇺🇸, a playboy with a twisted dark side to his life. He meditates for hours each day, summoning up all of the world's dark and evil forces which, combined with his deadly street fighting skills, make him a fearsome opponent.
 * Luisa🇫🇷, a gym teacher who directs a class of fitness enthusiasts. Her extreme degree of athleticism has made her a very tough opponent in combat, deceptive considering her slick appearance.
 * Macalosh, the spiritual leader of the Sioux. Found abandoned as a child by an old and wise chief, he has been trained since childhood in the Indian fighting arts, learning to fight alongside the creatures of the forest.
 * Ombra🇺🇸, an expert palmist who fights using his occult powers rather than physical abilities. Raised by an old Pennsylvanian alchemist, he practices his art to a fine degree, which has produced a calm, collected and intelligent fighter.
 * Keo🇩🇪, a devout monk from an old castle who wears shoes with large springs, allowing him to jump higher and faster than his opponents. In addition to this signature "Spring Fighting", he can also transform into the Moat Monster, a tentacled beast.
 * Lola🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, the British Osaka Karate champion and top model. She puts as much work into her fighting skills as her looks, aiming to be the very best in any profession she does, as clearly reflected when one sees her in action.

Reception
The game was derided by critics. Stuart Campbell of Amiga Power gave it a rating of 3%, describing it as the worst game for the CD32 and one of the worst games ever. Amiga CD32 gamer gave the game a score of 2 out of 10, remarking that the "animation reveals the artist's complete lack of understanding human physiology and is painful to watch. There's also far too few frames of animation, movement is too fast and control is lousy. Whoever put this in the CD32 pack has a complete contempt for gamers, or is in the paid employ of Sega."

Among non-English reviewers, the French magazine Joystick unusually gave the game a more positive rating of 65%. The German magazine Amiga Joker gave the game a score of 20%, giving mixed reception to its graphics and sound but deriding its gameplay.

The Amiga CD32 version is included in Stuart Ashen's 2015 book Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of, in which he remarks that Dangerous Streets looks "quite pretty" in screenshots, expressing that "characters are competently drawn and well-defined, and the backgrounds are colourful". He however expresses that this is no longer the case when the characters move, as Ashen calls Dangerous Streets'  animation "beyond laughable", and speculates that this was "a marketing strategy to make magazine reviews and the back of the box more impressive". Ashen criticises Dangerous Streets'  gameplay and controls, calling its fighting moves "an almost animation-free cavalcade of seemingly random, jerky attacks with no thought put into how they would affect the gameplay", and expresses that the controls "make no sense" and moving quickly is "a nightmare" due to the character's "bizarre" jump animations.

In 2018, the game was briefly covered by Angry Video Game Nerd in his episode on the Amiga CD32, where he similarly derided it.