When I was about 10 years old, hey stop doing the math, I used to walk down my grandparents street, Highfield Road in Korsten in PE. Back then Highfield road was like a favella mixed with China Town and a main boulevard all rolled into one with one story apartments above Chinese owned corner shops. Id tell my grandparents I was going to the shop down stairs to play games but in actual fact I’d walk for kilometers looking for games I hadn’t seen before. I found this gem at the end of Highfield Road one day, I couldn’t believe it. The sequel to Double Dragon, the classic side scrolling beat em up. This game was so hardcore whereas at the beginning of the first game they just punched your girlfriend in the belly before kidnapping her. In this one they straight up gun her down in cold blood as you start the game. Hello! They were not messing around. DD2 takes all the best elements of the side scrolling beat em up and speeds it up and adds more colour and smoother animations and adds an extra button and a tricky but intuitive control scheme once you get the hang of it. The first few times it makes absolutely no sense and you look like a fool wondering why you get kicks facing one way , and punches facing another. Yes this is another of those games I was happy just to watch the other kids play as it was so fast and intense and basically killed your 2bop in 10 seconds if you didn’t know what you were doing. Unlike the Fist Double Dragon you could’t just elbow everybody to death while pulling a skuif on an entjie. These games fed my imagination as to what downtown areas in the states and in big cities were like even though they were made by Japanese companies using a limited number of colours and informed more by 80s action movies than reality. This might explain why I wanted to have a helicopter in my garage as a kid. I always thought it was Airwolf’s fault