Psychological Drink has immediately launched a brand new model of 1997’s MS-DOS title Battle’n’Joke, which doesn’t have any relation with 2017’s Battle’n Rage (that I do know of). This re-release is fairly lavish, that includes rollback netcode and on-line multiplayer. That’s swinging for the fences.

Should you hadn’t heard of Battle’n’Joke, neither had I. It’s laborious to overstate the huge affect that 1991’s Avenue Fighter II had on the sport business, so the ‘90s had been packed to the rafters with combating video games trying to get in on that candy, candy success. This additionally resulted in a couple of parody video games like Clay Fighter and Brutal: Paws of Fury. DOS wasn’t precisely essentially the most occurring place for combating video games, nonetheless. Should you needed to be taken significantly, you typically wanted an arcade launch.

What actually caught my consideration with this Battle’n’Joke re-release was the sincerity behind it. About 5 individuals labored on the unique launch, however regardless of that, it seems fairly good for a late DOS title and it options most of what you’d count on from a combating sport. Positive, it’s two-button (plus a cost button), however so had been a number of the NeoGeo Pocket combating video games like SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium. I’m not attempting to say it’s nice, it simply punches above its weight class.

There are 10 characters plus 4 which might be unlockable and 11 phases. You possibly can re-map the controls, so it really works simply with an arcade stick. The title alone units it up prefer it’s speculated to be humorous, however it’s largely simply cartoonish like a newspaper sketch. The press launch truly describes it as “semi-humorous,” which might be about proper.

Psychological Drink nonetheless options the identical brothers who had been behind Nasty Brothers Software program, the creators of Battle’n’Joke. The re-release ports the sport to a brand new engine that runs natively on fashionable working techniques. Together with on-line multiplayer, that’s not a simple job. It actually speaks to how a lot affection they’ve for the little title. It was beforehand ported to Swap and Xbox One, however that model didn’t have on-line multiplayer. They’re planning to patch the console variations to convey them to parity with the PC model.

Battle’n’Joke is on the market now on PC. Though it’s listed as Early Entry, the core sport is full. Psychological Drink is simply on the lookout for suggestions on the net efficiency.