スパルタンX

The first arcade beat-em up has limited controls, only featuring a single punch and kick for standing, crouching and jumping, but manoeuvering is smooth and the framerate and response is high, giving progeny to the versatility of fighting game characters. It makes slapping henchmen with a snappy strike and a loud kiai so immensely satisfying. You get five levels of that as well as some obstacle courses with decent variety in enemies and traps, but it gets boring almost immediately just because of the soul-crushing difficulty. There's a slo-mo dip switch in the arcade(activated by holding down the P2 start button) that makes the game a lot more better for playing, in my opinion. Beat em ups could use more bullet time sequences. Arcade: 2.0

The NES version is really impressive in a lot of ways. The gameplay is very faithfuly and fluently ported, and its mere 40kb of memory still provides enough space for Thomas' iconic shouts and even the villain's laughter, but by far the biggest improvement is the leap in managability for surmounting the game. It's much easier than the arcade version though still pretty hard, but not enough so that it will harm your play while using rewind or save states. 3.0

ZX Spectrum version is bad, with sloppy controls, and graphics that are just a skeleton of the arcade game. 1.5