Beats of Rage is a freeware open source video game and brawling game engine made by Senile Team, and inspired by Sega's classic Streets of Rage series.
The Beats of Rage game[]
Screenshot of the original Beats of Rage.
As Beats of Rage is a customizable engine, the game included with the engine is but one of the many games available.
In the included game, character sprites and some background art was taken from the King of Fighters games by SNK Playmore. The gameplay is traditional "walk and punch" or beat 'em up style.
Beats of Rage was listed as a "cream of the crop" game in the June 2006 issue of the British PSP magazine Pure. It was also covered on the television show Cinematech: Nocturnal Emissions on the television network, G4.
The Beats of Rage engine[]
First programmed for DOS, it was later ported to the Sega Dreamcast console by Neill Corlett. It was also ported to Linux, Playstation 2, PSP, Pocket PC, Wii, Windows, and Android.
The engine is customizable, and allows for new games to be built on the engine in distributed in its custom PAK format. The games developed for the Beats of Rage engine are commonly referred to as "mods", the creators are commonly reffered to as "modders", and the engine itself is commonly referred to as "moddable".
Beats of Rage has become so popular due to the engine's ability to be completely customizable that it has become the watermark for customizable engines for video game consoles. Customizable engines for these systems are now often referred to as "moddable like Beats of Rage".
Open Source Engine Enhancements[]
Lift, an OpenBOR shooter mod, by Bloodbane
Senile Team no longer hosts Beats of Rage, but it lives on as OpenBOR. This project aims to give more functionality to Beats of Rage. It gives modders the ability to add new moves and combos to their games that were not in the original Beats of Rage game. It also now allows for mods to support three or four simultaneous players as opposed to the original engine's maximum of two.
HoR, a subproject of OpenBOR by Lord Ball that allows modders to create horizontal and vertical two dimensional aircraft shooting games using the Beats of Rage engine, has now been added to the main OpenBOR project. Because of this, OpenBOR can now be used to create more than just brawling games.