Arcade veterans will remember Cody from Final Fight. As Streetwise opens, it's made clear that Cody is now older and too worn down to fight, so he's working the corner for his younger brother Kyle. To get things started, Kyle is doing his best to stay standing in a pit fight set up to look exactly like Fight Club.

You won't need a tutorial to mash your way through the first fight. Once you learn the timing and reach of one attack, two if you're ambitious, putting away the poor slob in front of you is just a matter of time. After it's over, you'll have a profanity-laden conversation with your big brother before you're left on the street to wander around.

The setting for Streetwise is a run-down, dreary city, and you've got free reign to wander as you see fit. The main story – involving Cody being in too much trouble, and you his savior – is progressed by finding the next mission and usually beating someone up. You don't get much help finding the mission area, but once you get close you'll see a big arrow, so that's something.

The missions themselves consist mostly of a fight against an opponent that's no smarter or dumber than the last one. The difficulty gets a little harder because of sheer numbers, but even then, you can connect on multiple baddies with one attack. This is no doubt a tribute to the original games, but it's a tactic that makes the only challenging part of the game that much less so.

There are side missions with which to deal, just as one would expect in a game that offers a world for exploration. And while it's fine to be asked to clear vermin out of someone's basement in a game like Bard's Tale or other dungeon crawlers, the idea of stepping on rats in a Final Fight game is absurd.

As you progress through the story, you'll unlock more attacks and combos, but you won't need them. The button mashing is so boring, the dialogue so conspicuously profane and inane and the presentation so blocky and dull that the only motivating factor in playing is the promise of unlocking the original Final Fight.

Games like Final Fight and Double Dragon may no longer have a place on the gaming shelf. They were very simple and repetitive while being charming and fun at the same time, but tastes and expectations evolve. Until someone makes an attempt at remaking one of those games in earnest, however, instead of mixing the nostalgia of a classic with copycat, trendy, poorly executed features of the moment, we will never know.