So the year 1990 music was at that odd spot between songs like the famed Humpty Dance and Madonna’s Vogue. The world seemed simpler as I remember it as a child the NES was still king and about to be blown over by the SNES and Genesis, however, the actual world was going through massive changes we had Iraq start their wasp nest by invading Kuwait. But in arcades, we were seeing a massive influx in new game technology and 16-bit graphics.
A genre that I remember seeing a lot of was mirrored after games like Final Fight. The side-scrolling “beat-em-ups” genre was all over and you couldn’t walk past 2-3 machines without finding some other thing to pound on. I was the type of kid who looked for the odd games with an interesting story then plop goes my quarter.
With all that being said I came across Growl. It was a 4 player side-scrolling beat-em-up game (there was also a 2 player cabinet) where you played one of 4 different park rangers. Now I know who wants to play a park ranger or DNR (Michigan term) officer/ranger right? Well, when you see animals in cages and evil smugglers and poachers beating on them you have to join the fight!
Now what got me was 2 of the rangers were spitting images of Indiana Jones and yes there were whips in the game that were AWESOME so I sorta put the whole helping animals concept out of my mind and pretended I was playing as Indiana Jones in some offshoot movie.
The game is set in the early 20th century you set off to beat the ever-loving heck out of poachers in large numbers and gather special weapons along the way i.e. pipes, whips, swords, revolvers, rocker launchers (and even the animals you saved would help you for a bit on the same screen). Each weapon had a special attack that when you’d press both attack and jump would execute. I remember my favorite was the whip it would whip the guy in front of you and behind you and looked hilarious. But that didn’t stop me from pushing through this game. I never did beat it in the arcades and it wasn’t until the emulation scene started supporting arcade games that I was able to sit and beat the game.
On a challenge level, it’s around a 6/7 out of 10 but as a kid in the 90’s it was rather hard. The game had 7 stages or rounds and a bonus game for a total of 8 stages. We moved from an old run-down African town to a moving train, a boat, a jungle and cavern, and finally the poacher’s hideouts. This game didn’t vary much though in the enemy department. Only really giving you 6 types of enemies excluding the final boss that had 2 forms.
Eventually, this game found its way home on the Sega Genesis which I remember was a fairly good port and suffered slow downs. Eventually, it was re-released on the Taito Legends 2 for PSX 2, Xbox, and MS Windows (I have not played this version)
So all in all if you are a fan of the beat-em-up games similar to the more popular Final Fight, X-Men, Turtles, or Simpsons you should enjoy this game the backgrounds are interesting, and like I said it’s easy to think you are Indiana Jones heck just look at the poster!
Please excuse the quality of the images I don’t run emulation anymore so I had to just crawl around and find these. It’s the Arcade game flier, marquee, and info, Sega Genesis Cover front and back, and some arcade and Sega pictures.
