Street Smart

Street Smart, is a 1989 beat 'em up arcade game by SNK/Treco. The game's objective is to win money, girls and glory on the streets. It is notorious for its level of difficulty requiring a great deal of brawling before the player's opponents go down.

Gameplay
The gameplay resembles other fighting games like Double Dragon where the player can move in all eight directions in an arena fight and the player can kick, punch or do special moves. The player can choose to fight as "Karate Man", a martial arts expert with lightning quick moves, or "Crusher" with a powerful punch. Unlike most side-scrolling fighters, the players fight in an enclosed arena space, similar to Pit-Fighter, Violence Fight, or Aggressors of Dark Kombat. If two players are present, they can take on the enemy together but will always have a "Grudge Match" in the next round to determine who gets a bonus life/points. The two players can play through the entire game together.

Ports
This arcade game was ported to the Mega Drive/Genesis in 1991. The port used fewer colors and the top and bottom black frames were used to compensate for the large sprites animating on screen. However, the game implemented a betting system where you could win money for winning a fight or throwing one (Similar to the later PSP game The Con) as well as a new last boss. The Genesis port also lacked the two players vs. the CPU mode (two players only fought onscreen in the "Grudge Match" after each taking turns against a CPU opponent). This was done due to memory limitations of the cartridge at the time. In the Genesis port, "Karate Man" wears a red outfit instead of white. Both characters are also given a new spinning "power move" that can take an enemy down in one hit (by pressing all three buttons at once) but reduces the player's health. There are three endings to the game, depending upon if you are broke or not when the final boss is defeated. Should you be "broke" the final image is that of your player in rags, sitting in the gutter. Attaining a respectable amount of money will see the character well dressed, in a fashionable car with an attractive girlfriend. If the character earns an outstanding amount of money (usually gained by gambling all winnings on the player to win before each round), he is shown as a made man with four girls, in an apartment full of money.

A final difference between the Genesis port and the arcade game, is in the console version's ability to grant the player "points" at the end of each successful match that can be assigned to character attributes. The player can gain a larger lifebar, greater speed or power, for example, so that their character will be much more deadly by the end of the game than at the beginning.

Trivia

 * The music that plays in the first stage can be heard in Fatal Fury, when the players fight each other in versus mode.
 * The Player 1 character looks very similar to Takuma Sakazaki.