Blaze Fielding? You're not foreign are you?

Quick one today, yeah? I'm busy.

I found a mega drive controller in a one of my boxes today. Coincidentally my friend lost his when we were young.

Streets of rage, a veritable yakult bottle of nostalgia milk. I remember playing as Adam on my friend's mega drive, Adam was black, so it was probably controversial back in 1992.

I had a master system, which was the malnourished nephew the mega drive never talked about in public, for fear of having a useless relative tarnish its image. I had the lightgun, though, and rambo, so no-one could tell me anything about pixel count or processing speeds...I could shoot dudes in the fucking mouth if I wanted to. I could also brag about my dust-flap if the bickering got heavy.

But can you remember the boss at the end of stage 2? Bit of a step up from a blue ensemble with a boomerang, wouldn't you agree? He had claws, metal ones...and the enhanced speed that obviously comes from wearing them.

He was the game's reality check, He'd seen how you'd been slowly making your way through the lower echelons of a society gone to the dogs. Making light work of the henchmen with nothing more than a few pieces of fruit and one-use-only disposable knives. Knives, that once thrown, displayed a gravity-mocking trajectory that would probably allow the point a complete circumvention of the globe, ultimately leading to a brutal case of poetic justice as you're stabbed in the back by the knife you threw several months ago.

He knew you'd be feeling pretty good about yourself, 'streets of rage? HA, more like streets of piss-easy'. He knew you weren't even aware that pallete-swapping existed in this game, having spent the last 15 minutes punch, punch, knee, kicking your way through an army of denim-clad gingers with grown-out crew cuts.

But then the music drops out, switches and comes in again. A new beat, opening with a menacing siren, quickly spreading out into a Snap!-esque bell-a-thon.

He had you on the ground before the cops could blitz the side-order with the arcing, tube-born fire of too little too late. It's only fire, 'clawry man' probably uses a blowtorch to shave his balls.

There's no real moral to this story, well there is...

Don't let your friend die whilst playing co-op.