Arabian Magic

[Discoalucard]

www.hardcoregaming101.net/arabianmagic/arabianmagic.htm

A fairly decent beat-em-up from Taito. Personally, I keep getting it confused with Dungeon Magic, another beat-em-up by Taito, and Arabian Fight, a technically impressive but kinda bad beat-em-up from Sega. This is on one of the Taito collections too, so I guess I have no excuse to not give it a shot.

[Neo Rasa]

Also don't forget Dungeon Magic the unrelated Natsume dungeon crawler. I get those two mixed up constantly.

This game is pretty fun, I love the genie super move thing because of its awesome laugh voice over and the game moves relatively fast. Back when beat'em ups were big I would have liked to have seen more with smaller characters/more stuff going on at once but only Technos really tried for that consistently.

[Lord Dalek]

"Interestingly enough, a year after Arabian Magic, Sega would attempt their own take on the same theme with Arabian Fight..."

...yeah Arabian Fight actually came out a year BEFORE Arabian Magic.

[Neo Rasa]

I'm fairly sure both of these games were released in 1992, though an exact date will be difficult to pinpoint unless someone can get an All About or Gamest Mook as those will have release dates down to the day if the information exists.

[Magma MK-II]

"WOHOHOHOHO!"

I absolutely love this game!

[Lord Dalek]

Nov 30, 2014 20:10:58 GMT -5 Neo Rasa said:

I'm fairly sure both of these games were released in 1992, though an exact date will be difficult to pinpoint unless someone can get an All About or Gamest Mook as those will have release dates down to the day if the information exists.

Well Arabian Fight is dated 1991 on its title screen so it appears to be older.

[derboo]

Nov 30, 2014 20:10:58 GMT -5 Neo Rasa said:

I'm fairly sure both of these games were released in 1992, though an exact date will be difficult to pinpoint unless someone can get an All About or Gamest Mook as those will have release dates down to the day if the information exists.

It's usually down to the month with arcade games. I don't have my Enterbrain Sega History books handy (and don't own anything for Taito, anyway), but Arcade History says January for Arabian Fight and July for Arabian Magic. Or on-site article for Arabian Fight strangely said 1993 in the title line but 1992 in the text, until I fixed it just now.

[starscream]

The July date for Arabian Magic probably comes from the ROM, it gets displayed when accessing test mode. Such dates are not uncommon to find at Arcade-History, e.g. they also list Capcom CPS board revision dates as "release", though I would think these quite don't match in every case (e.g. 19xx War of Destiny December revisions have a 1996 copyright ingame).

It seems it's actually not that uncommon that sources disagree about the exact release months for older arcade games, see here for a comparsion with Centuri releases.

[Neo Rasa]

It's because of the logistics of distributing something so bulky that also has a bunch of boards in it at the time. Some sources will look at the year on the title screen while some will look at when distributor first shipped or when the cabinet first appeared in location tests.

[Woody Alien]

Hm, just because I'm addicted to TV Tropes (seriously, don't go there), I may add Arabian Fight and Arabian Magic to their list of "Dueling Games".

Or maybe not, since someone removed my contribution regarding Soccer Kid and Marko's Magic Football (then again, they left my comparison between Baraduke and Metroid). I'm such a geek...

[izenger]

This game quite resemble with capcom's The king of dragon with no RPG element, summon, and better combat
My favs is Sinbad who can charge his sword and block attacks at the same time, and unleash quite-big-damaging slash
But quite point down for tedious fight against Roc (the big eagle)