SPIKERS BATTLE
Too bad this one didn't quite pan out for SEGA, but at least we can run the game on PCs now until the day we get Like a Dragon 15 Kiwami where they actually decide to port this one (which should be possible if they ported Slashout as a bonus in Kiwami 3).
Quoting myself from 2024 where I had written a dedicated page for Spikers Battle, this is a spin-off that keeps most of the same gameplay basics but moves them to a fighting-style game where the last one standing wins, instead of a beat-em-up where you play co-op with others from start to end.
This spin-off is actually the less beloved one out of all the Spikeout-related games in Japan, something I had noticed between one time I asked in a Japanese Spikeout stream the order of games they liked (I think it went SPKFE > BS > Slash > Battle- forgot if DBO was mentioned too) and how that strategy guide I had translated back then called it a “shitty game” that was bad enough that it didn’t even last enough time in most arcades for the boss character unlock conditions to be met.
You know, if Spikeout itself is already considered obscure and definitely was before Infinite Wealth released, then what is there left for this one?
Anyhow, I'll be adding the rest of info inside collapsibles - the stuff from 2024 I'll mark it as such, and if unmarked then it means its something I wrote recently for this.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS GAME IN 2026
Gives me MMX6 vibes in the sense that it is conceptually cool and you can feel the ideas being there as you play it, but the conditions, single-player setup and how it compares to its predecessor basically doomed this one to flop EVEN IN JAPAN, the one place where Spikeout was most popular at.
I have a more thorough summary of the details that make this game tick (and fail for some) in my first thoughts from 2024 due to how those already list down the differences between Spikeout's gameplay on its own game and then here, but a few things I could mention here are:
Number 1: The C3 attack (hold the charge button and release with the second bar full, has to be well timed since it will otherwise go into C4) is still meant to stun, and seems a bit more effective at that if hit from the back, but here the most you might get from it is a guarantee to get a grab into another player.
Number 2: The sweep attacks (Beat + Charge) might be handy to knock one or two enemies for a moment to attack a third one. Spamming these will NOT guarantee victory, but if used well as you try to space yourself, you might get a slightly better chance to sort out at least one out of three enemies, and by that point you have one foot on the door to win.
Number 3: Apparently, Raphael will taunt after he gets up if you knock him down in his invincible state (one round away from winning against him). Doesn't make the fight SUPER easy, but could be useful if you need him to stay away while you beat the other two in order to actually beat him.
Number 4: An important detail for Raphael's fight that applies everywhere else is that the timer will automatically lower itself to a certain amount if only one enemy is left. If you somehow manage to beat the other two with 40 or more seconds left, you WILL have to hurry against him anyways.
Number 5: Not a gameplay trick, but something I learned from Taiwanese player TAIWANDSPJ is that holding Start while pushing a specfic button in character select will give you an alternate color. For the main 4 (Spike, White, Linda and Tenshin), Start + Beat gives a green color, Start + Charge gives a blue color, and Start + Jump gives a yellow color. Alternate colors for the others should be accessible same way but the colors they get will vary, and that Start + Beat always gives the equivalent to Player 2's color if there's two of the same character on a match.
RAPHAEL: Red (Start + Beat), Black (Start + Charge), Green (Start + Jump)
That aside, this is basically a free-for-all fighting game with Spikeout's gameplay, except that if you're playing alone, it's basically you versus three other enemies (and the only way they can even get friendly fire AGAINST EACH OTHER is through thrown weapons - but they will casually run through a CPU's flamethrower attack while you're struggling to escape it). It is essentially a glorified versus mode for Spikeout with a few tweaks intended for it, but the single player ladder being against you can make things unfair.
As soon as Stage 4 (or even Stage 3 if unlucky), the others will dodge way more often and try to attack you all at once, or at least interrupt you if you're trying to combo one of the enemies. Stage 6 has three Clay enemies that have a chance to make you lose over half of your health or even touch of death you if they run into you, knock you down and then do a combo between two or three of them. Then Stage 8 has Raphael taking no damage if you're one round away from beating him, having to defeat the other two first before tackling him.
The poor reception over Japan is probably due to the switch to versus mode, which is probably not as fun for players there as the coop beat em up style, as well as how the single player forcing you to find "CPU players" makes strategies you'd use in Spikeout ineffective (such as the C3 not being a proper stun to actually get long follow ups, or potentially being interrupted mid-combo by others or even from the enemy's special attack). And the single player seup definitely feels a bit flawed which is why I'd give it a 3/5 like with X6, since the controls aren't too bad (although anyone expecting a block button here will be very disappointed) and the idea is very cool, but having to deal with getting jumped halfway through the game several times to complete it is going to be a turn-off for some players.
PLAYING AS ENEMY CHARACTERS
The solution to this question I asked myself years ago somehow arrived at my guestbook not too long ago, and that was the reason why I decided to, in big 2026, return to restore some Spikeout stuff in this site, including Spikers Battle..
That thing I mentioned at the start about time-locked boss characters was something I wrote back in 2024, but I also followed it up with this:
"But if you are curious about that, there’s this video where you can see a boss character being played. However, aside from this and few websites mentioning the command to choose the characters assuming that the unlock condition is fulfilled, there’s no data about these. Not even the actual specific amount of time that the cabinet needs to be running at to activate".
However, in 2025, a Chinese player named "湄南河龍王" (channel tag "ChaoPrayaDK") also had the same question, only that they got to look into it WAY deeper than I ever could get to, finding clues on Twitter and getting to find the right values for total time + games in Cheat Engine, doing some trial and error to finally find the specific conditions to unlock the 7 enemy characters you run into in single player.
The video has Chinese subtitles you can autotranslate to watch in your language, and you can get to see all the steps that went on figuring out the instructions...and also includes downloads for NVRAM files to use in DEMUL and Flycast (although you have to rename Flycast's to the proper name if you're using the intended zip/chd setup). With those, you can get the time-locked chars already available from the get go!
Props to that player for finding that out painstakingly, plus the player "夜王勝仔" (TAIWANDSPJ) who had been doing insane Spikers Battle runs in very hard and happened to do a run with Bullet (one of the unlockable chars), and big shoutouts to "A Spiker Battler" who wrote in my guestbook with all this information I'm presenting you here - I really didn't expect that the answer to something I wondered about for so long would quite literally arrive at my guestbook while checking it, thank you so much for your kindness to share that information with me.
Anyhow, if you used the NVRAM file, then you should be able to select these by pressing Up 11 times on the top row or Down 11 times on the bottom row, except for Alberto which opens the Random slot. The character slots which unlock which are the following:
Spike unlocks SHENLONG, White unlocks CLAY, Linda unlocks KITTY, Tenshin unlocks CHAMP, Hikaru unlocks BULLET, Gorn unlocks RUDOLF and Fengli unlocks RAPHAEL.
And yes, I made a playthrough with one of these - Raphael to be specific, since I've always wondered how it would be to play as the big final boss himself.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS GAME IN 2024
All of this was written in the original page dedicated for Spikers Battle back in 2024, which I hadn't brought back until now, although instead of being a separate HTML, its now getting stuffed here as a collapsible inside the new page in Game Zones.
According to the official website for this game:
“4-player battle royale format! A hot battle awaits you!
This is the latest title in the “Spikeout” series, which was the first in the industry to offer 4-player cooperative play through 4-player communication. The game has been reborn as a battle royale style game with the same control system and worldview as the previous title!”
The game could have garnered that reputation due to the way the changes were done:
Since it is now designed with versus multiplayer in mind rather than co-op, if you were playing with three other human players, the dynamic changes a fair bit with how you’re fighting players with your exact same controls.
You can stun someone with C3 but it can wear off very quickly if mashed by the other player, you can be interrupted during a grounded combo by a special attack, you can be subjected to the classic Spikeout combos by another player…and if the stars align in the worst way possible, you can even end up getting combo’d to death like a mook in Spikeout if two or three players all juggle you with attacks on a corner.
The catch is that if you are playing alone, you’re essentially fighting three players at the same time against you. Certain Spikeout strats no longer work reliably or at all if you thought they could be useful to beat this game, whether sometimes the enemy can interrupt you with a somersault if trying to hit them with the BBBBBB string, C3 doesn’t stun for long to keep one enemy on hold while you deal with the others, and because you can’t leave enemies stunned that long, setting up combos with walls or otherwise gets very unlikely halfway through the game as you’ll have to expect another enemy rushing in with a dash kick or even throwing a weapon at you.
Oh yeah, and now you have to watch for whether enemies hit you with weapons too.
Spikeout is a longer game overall, but this one can be more frustrating for unfamiliar players to even endure from start to end despite how its only 8 stages you have to complete not only due to all that, but because you have to win two rounds to proceed to the next stage.
In SpikeOut, the wall can be your own training (if you are trying to improve by not continuing after a death or playing with limited credits), your virtual pocket in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, or maybe even just your time and patience as you could technically endure the entire game with theoretically infinite credits/free play enabled and continue as much as you want.
But here, until you’re able to beat two rounds of every 1v3 fight, you’re not going to continue to the next stage. So it could still take up to an hour if you start getting walled by the fifth or sixth stage where the enemies start getting really cheesy against you. Note that if you die twice in a match, you have to continue and try winning two rounds again, as while in matches with human players each one gets their win count, playing alone has all three computer players share the win points.
And going back to mentioning that possibility of getting juggled to death by other players…I learned that from FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE.
SPIKERS BATTLE WOMBO COMBO!!! (youtube.com)
References to other games?
The first stage, Diesel Town, is set in the basketball court of the aforementioned place seen in Spikeout, although it is possible for some beginner Spikeout players to never have seen this in-game if they only took the sewer route, and said court in Spikeout is much darker with rain and dim colors compared to here where its all bright SEGA blue skies.
In the 4th stage, there’s something written that says SLASHOUT, this being the other Spikeout spinoff released before it that only changed gameplay through the level system and mainly overhauled the presentation to have a fantasy setting.
The 6th Stage, Imperial Opera, is named after the final stage of Spikeout, and is actually set in the very arena that appears where you fight the final boss of the entire game in said stage: A floating glowing platform with the view of the theater below you.
While I can’t confirm whether Bullet or Champ are enemies seen in Spikeout, the other AI-exclusive characters definitely are: Rudolph is a Diesel Town mook, Shenlong is one of the bosses in Astro Mall, Kitty is one of the bosses in Ship Yard, Clay is one of the bosses in Imperial Opera, and while Mikhail does NOT appear, Raphael is basically an expy/counterpart of him in this game.
What about the presentation?
Even if you aren’t a fan of the gameplay choices or style, you have to give credit for the game keeping the expected flair of a SEGA arcade game from the time. My biggest highlight is Hidenori Shoji’s soundtrack: This composer is already a stacked one in past and future credits such as F-Zero GX and the Yakuza franchise [another carry-over from Spikeout’s roots], but his music here definitely gives it a much more of a proper fighting game vibe than some of the shorter loops for either frantic enemy encounters or just fitting with the place itself.
Diesel Town’s theme in particular was such a striking one for me that it had got me looking for OST rips of the game, and since there were none on Youtube [there’s one in khinsider now], I actually uploaded four or five of those years ago…and was supposed to upload more but I never got to do that for some reason.
Some of my other liked tracks are for East River and that city stage, though the latter marks the halfway point where enemies will start to get really grating with their team tactics against you.
It is cool to see the classic team with slightly higher resolution models and new portraits, after how they looked more blocky in the Model 3 board likely for the sake of performance with the amount of enemies there and the resolution, which also is why the portraits are so tiny in that game. Though being able to find your character’s back immediately will have you notice that Spike no longer carries his little son on his back.
Spikers Battle runs on the NAOMI so it does look cleaner in some ways between the higher resolution and the smaller fighting areas allowing for more detail, and while the enviroments are varied and cool, what you think about this is very likely going to depend on how much of a fan for SEGA stuff you are…although chances are that you definitely are up there if you’re even reading this in the first place.
What else?
Uhhh…I’ll let you know whenever I update this again, perhaps with screenshots and info of each thing in the game, but…that might or might not happen later.
