Issue #60: Hot-Blooded Beat-'Em-Ups! – July/August 2022

Lace up your sneakers, grab your favorite baseball bat and make sure you've eaten a balanced breakfast, because it's time to head outside, hit the streets and throw down with any roaming bands of punks who get in your way! The milestone 60th issue of Nintendo Force is here, and in this edition we're celebrating the bare-knuckled beauty and brutality of beat-'em-ups!

The upcoming release of WayForward's all-new River City Girls 2 has inspired this selection of direction, as it's all about paying homage to the early glory days of the brawler genre while also working to push the design further forward into the future. We've got a new pre-release preview that will go into detail about what to expect from Misako and Kyoko's second big adventure, as well as our review of River City Girls Zero in this issue's Download section. Check it out to learn more about the origins of this pair of punch-happy protagonists!

Our central feature this time around is simply called "Go!" in honor of that exact two-letter encouragement so frequently flashing onto the screen in beat-'em-ups to motivate players to keep making progress. It's a go-to resource for an overview of how brawlers began, how they evolved over time and where the genre stands today.

Further supporting content keeping the momentum moving includes coverage of the two newest TMNT beat-'em-up releases, reviews of a pair of new books written about beat-'em-up history, an interview with Bannon Rudis (who is leading development on River City Girls 2) and a revival of our old "It's New to Me!" column in the Retro section, now reworked to give our writers a chance to fill in some gaps in their personal play histories. If all that sounds good, then get ready to start your page-flipping! Go ahead! Go!

Print subscribers, we accelerated production of this issue to get us back on our normal printing and shipping schedule, after the late April release of Nintendo Switch Sports pushed Issue #59 further into May than it otherwise would have been. If your copy of that issue arrived slower than usual, hopefully this one will find its way to your mailbox at closer to our usual speed!

Digital subscribers, keep an eye on your email inbox tonight, as I'll send the links to download the PDF edition before the sun sets on this fine Summer Solstice.

The next post you'll see from us here will likely be the one to address the strained paper supply problems we've encountered recently, as to keep NF moving as expected and avoid a permanent price increase on our Patreon pledge tiers here, we may need to run one extra charge here in 2022 to cover increased production costs. I'll make sure and have the most up-to-date information from our printing company to inform that post, which will probably be around a month from now. Beyond that, we'll keep rolling with Issue #61 and beyond!

I hope you all have a great summer season ahead! Let me know if your NF issues end up traveling with you anywhere fun, like a beach or a mountaintop!

~ Lucas M. Thomas