An experiential and analytical look at the medium of video games in a particular order. Currently there is "Capcom A to Z," a look at the games of Capcom in alphabetical order, and "Super FamiComplete" a look at all of the games of the SNES/Super Famicom in chronological order.
Hello everyone! A short update blog post. This blog has been a weird exercise for me, starting as a passion project with a clear goal but a muddled voice, turning into a project with a clear voice but without the passion behind it. The fact it went on (well off an on) for 10+ years is something I am pretty proud of, and it stinks that I only made it to 118 games (that is counting a redo on most of them though), but I am going to have to live with not covering games I really hoped to talk about someday: Pocky and Rocky, Live a Live, Marvelous, etc. Life, to a degree, is accepting that you can't do everything that you want to do in this one go round on earth, and sadly I don't think this blog will be one I will accomplish, at least in my current state of being. I love the idea of completing this blog, but do not love the work it takes to complete it.
That's right, this is goodbye, at least for now. This is a project I am planning on continuing, but for now I am going to play the games without blogging and see if some of the passion can reignite . Thank you for those who have kept up and read as I've sparsely updated; I really appreciate you all, and the kind words you've shared. Buh-bye!
To start off July 1992, we have a Japanese only JRPG/SRPG hybrid that is incredibly obscure. There are no working english translation hacks for this game, and I will openly admit I didn't play beyond the first few random battles in this game. Tt has been overlooked by my normal research go-tos (it didn't even make it into the excellent bitmap books JRPG compendium book), but I did watch an entire playthrough and read an excellent written let's play (shout out to the Youtube channel Batista_Harpu, who is playing through the full SNES/SFC catalogue, and the blog SuperfamicomRPGS.blogspot.com by Kurisu respectively, of which I am using several images from their playthrough). While this won't be my experience playing through the game, this will be a brief overview of what this game is about, and why it might or might not be worth your time.
Background
While the developer and publisher may seem rather unknown, they have actually popped up on this blog before. Know for shoveling out kusoge and other filth, both Advance Communication Company and Tonkinhouse were the folks who developed and published the port of Ys III that we played earlier in the blog. If you remember, that was a game from a beloved series that was translated into a rather unfun 2D action RPG. Their mark of shame only continues as they were the folks who made the atrocious Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES, which rose to ignominy due to the Angry Video Game Nerd making a popular episode about it.
The story of Light Fantasy is relatively simple: the King of Light and his kingdom are being threatened by the King of Darkness, who demands a holy artifact (a magical mirror) or he will destroy the Light Kingdom. The Princess of the Kingdom, Lefina, let's herself be taken by the Dark King in order to buy the player some time to use the Light Mirror to instead save the world. The Light King orders the protagonist (you choose the name), to find the Light Mirror (which gets stolen) and then save the princess. Apparently at the beginning of the game, you can actually refuse to go on the quest, and the king gives you the ole' "but thou must" by throwing you in prison until you agree! The game is relatively short, about 15-20 hours, and has a second act twist where you beat the Dark King, but then the Dragon King Maryu kidnaps the princess and you have to charge up the legendary sword with eight spirits to fight him. Overall, pretty typical for this era.
The art style of the game is one of the stronger aspects. It is that delightful chibi random of children's manga and anime from this era; this is less Record of the Lodoss War style fantasy JRPG, and more reminiscent of anime like Ninja Nonsense in style.For a style reference, it's like a marriage between Slayers and Kirby. Even the boss demons, dragons, and goblins look kind of cute! The human characters are all chibi fantasy archetypes too: knights, princesses, peasants, bunny girl dancers on loan from Dragon Quest; each main and recruitable character has its own portrait when you talk with them to show off this art style. There are also plenty of anime styled narrative scenes (not quite cutscenes) which further show off the art style.
Gameplay
Sadly, the gameplay is really quite lacking and borderline broken, to the point where the developers added in workarounds to help juice the grinding economy. To start, the game world is rather small: encompassing five towns with all the surrounding dungeons. In a neat twist, you can recruit NPCS from the town to join your party; in the opening town, for example, you can recruit a bunny dancer, a bartender, and a dog. At certain points, you will also have "destiny characters" who are forced into your party due to story importance.
From here, you explore the overworld and dungeons, engaging in random battles. The battles do not shift from the world map, but instead are played out on the screen where you encounter them. The battles break into turn based combat fought on a grid. You have movement points and action points, which allow you to attack the enemy or perform other actions like casting magic or using items. Movement, unlike other SRPGS at the time, is extremely limited, though certain recruitable characters move like chess or shogi pieces, ie. far in one direction but limited in others.
Enemies, as well, are incredibly spongey and hit like dump trucks without grinding. The first random battle I witnessed, against one slime (the prototypical easy JRPG enemy), ended with the slime ruthlessly slaughtering the party of adventurers. The enemies also seem to love inflicting status affects, of which there are more than ten types. These usually prevent your characters from acting, moving, will move your characters in random directions, cause them to target friend as well as foe, or just deal light to heavy damage whenever you act. My favorite is the "food" status affect, which just turns your characters into apples.
Grinding for money and experience is, sadly, a must if you want to progress in this game. The game's difficulty curve is geared to make you grind up front for hours (the playthrough I watched was about five to six hours of grinding before starting the game proper) so that the rest of the playthrough is smoother. The bottom line seems to be that the combat is slow, tedious, and the encounter rate is incredibly high.
Another funny frustration in the battle is that most every enemy drops an item where they die, which can't be picked up until after the battle. This takes up the space in that battle, though, and you can move through the item but not stop on that space. This means there are situations where, due to the limited movement, you can't get through a line of items that you've made, and neither can the other enemies, so the game softlocks into this weird stalemate, forcing a reset. In both the playthrough and the let's play, this happened more than a couple times.
As I mentioned before, the game provided some workarounds to the grinding and the dull battles: one, there is a matching game in the first town that you can use to win easy money to buy new armor and weapons. You can actually enter a button combination that will make it so that you pick the right choice every time, giving you an endless fount of money to use. As well, there is an item that is easily attainable that, for several minutes, eliminates random encounters. This means that once you are done leveling, if you stockpile this item, you will never have to worry about random encounters again, and just blow through the rest of the game. It's a weird solution for the developers to make instead of fine-tuning the gameplay.
Music
The OST does have some solid tunes!
Overall
This is a weird JRPG that does have some merits as far as style, but is severely hampered by poor gameplay design. The people who play it nowaday are people who, like me, are interested in completing a catalogue or devotees to the system or JRPGs. Overall, this one is worth skipping. The next game, fortunately, is much, much, much better.
Title: Space Football One-on-One (NA), Super Linear Ball (JP)
Release Date: June 1992
Developer: Argonaut Games
Publisher: Triffix
Space Football is the final US developed game for June 1992, and the last game in general that we are covering for the month. Sadly, as often is the case for the blog, this last game of the month is not very good.
Background
This game really doesn't have a story to it. Sometime in the far off future, a form of entertainment is made that is an evolution of football, but instead of playing with teams or running around on feet, it is a one on one game played in hovercraft like spaceships. Competitions take place in weird pinball like arenas, with the game making use of the system's Mode 7 to provide an F-Zero like perspective to the game.
The game was developed by British Developer Bit Studios and Argonaut games. Bit Studios made a bunch of licensed titles from around this time, such as Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and Last Action Hero. It was not known for making quality games or selling well with them, and they were shuttered in 2008. Argonaut games had a bit more success, as they were the co-developers of the original Star Fox, specializing in the faux-3D created for that game (some of which you see on display during the character select screen). Recently, they even helped bring Star Fox 2 to the SNES classic.
Gameplay
So this game is a take not on American Football, but uses football in the way that the entire world aside from the United States means it: soccer. Each player has a goal that they have to defend, and they are trying to maneuver a little puck/sphere/ball/robot around the arena with their hovercrafts. If you manage to touch the ball with the front-ish area of your hovercraft, it sticks to the front for about for seconds, after which it will launch off in the direction you are facing. Unlike soccer, you cannot launch the ball into the rival's goal, but instead have to carry it into the goal yourself. If you score higher than your opponent by the end of the round, you win and move onto the next stage, rinse and repeat.
This sounds simple enough, but the controls are utterly wretched in the hands. The B button sends you moving forward, while the A button sends you flying backwards, while left and right points you in the direction you want to move; this creates an incredibly fast style of tank controls, which are awkward to control to say the least. The first person perspective, as well, makes the game very disorienting and rough on folks if, like me, you suffer from motion sickness. There is just a LOT of spinning around.
The mechanic where you can only hold onto the ball for four seconds makes a sense if you are used to sports like basketball or soccer where you have to shoot or pass after a certain amount of time, but this would make more sense if you could score by shooting the ball into the goal. The fact that you have to carry it into the goal leads to some frustrating moments where you are approaching the goal, and then the ball goes flying, careens off a wall, and your opponent catches it. Luckily, the enemy AI is pretty stupid and just kind of goes all over the place.
Finally, in another baffling decision, they decided to add hazards to the arena: there are bumpers which send you flying in a random directions, spinners which spin you around incredibly quickly (another blow to motion sickness), or boosts which send you jumping upward. This just adds a layer of chaos which makes the controls of the game much more difficult. Add into this the rival player who can bumper kart into you and send you flying too, and the ice like hover physics, and you have a game that is not fun to control, makes you sick to watch, and frustrating to actually win. The game has 32 levels, each with a different layout to the arena, but I can't imagine anyone playing through each of them.
Music
The music is exceptionally forgettable...
Ads
Overall
This game goes in the category of "slight and forgettable." It is half a game concept that is taken as far as it can go over the course of a playthrough. It reminded me, both in art style and in gameplay, of games like Hyperzone and Cameltry in its slightness. Could you imagine being a kid who gets this for a gift and this is all you have to play? That would be incredibly depressing. Overall, skip this one!
Title: Krusty's Super Fun House (NA), Krusty World (JP)
Release Date: June 1992
Developer: Audiogenic Ltd.
Publisher: Acclaim
Our first Simpsons game, and boy what a weird one at that. I could have sworn that our first one would be Bart's Nightmare, but sadly not the case. This was a game that I was always vaguely aware of as a kid, but knew it more due to its Gameboy port. I knew it was a puzzle platformer, but didn't know too much beyond that. Weirdly enough, I would say this is tied for the best US developed game we have encountered thus far (that being Super Smash TV of course). Anyways, let's get to it.
Background
While I don't think this paragraph is really needed due the the cultural prevalence of the Simpsons, but perhaps there is someone who is interested in the history of the Super Nintendo or 90s culture but doesn't like cartoons in the least...The Simpsons is an animated sitcom created by Matt Groening, that started as a lampoon of 90s United States and American culture in response the the neo-conservatism and "traditional" values brought about by the Reagan/Bush Sr. era of the 1980s into the early 1990s. You had a "typical" american family of an obese lazy, alcoholic but well meaning Dad, a stay at home Mom who is overly moral, a delinquent son, the know it all daughter and a baby. You also have the characters of the town of Springfield as well each mocking a different aspect of American life.
While the show has since become a mockery of itself, at the time this game was coming out it was only around the Simpsons 3rd season, and the property was incredibly popular. This was the peak era of commercializing on the "brand" that was the Simpsons. You had Homer and Bart shilling "Butterfingers," the "Do the Bartman" single off the terrible "Simpsons Sing the Blues Album," and a whole bunch of other tchotchke merchandise. Of course, you also had video games of all shapes and sizes: from the good like the Konami Beat-em-up, the mediocre like...well this game, the bad like Bart vs the Space Mutants, and the weird like Virtual Bart or Bart's Nightmare.
This game features the eponymous Krusty the Clown, the local children's show emcee who is willing to sell his brand to the highest bidder, and puts his mug on any product regardless of quality as long as he gets paid. The story of this game leans into that: Krusty Land (a theme park that is more like a cyclopean horror house), has been overrun by rats. These rats are going to cause the park to get shut down by the health inspectors if something isn't done, so the new "Krusty Recruits" (Bart, Homer, Sideshow Mel, and Corporal Punishment) have to help exterminate the rats.
Audiogenic isn't a developer I have much background with, and it seems like they didn't do too much. They are British developer who got their start during the home console programmer era of the 1980s. Acclaim was one of the big American publishers from the 1990s that is now defunct after some pretty bad mismanagement. We will continue to bump into them throughout this blog.
Gameplay
You play as an adorable Krusty the Clown as he navigates the backstage area of Krusty Land, which is a horrifying maze of corridors, pipes, and machinery. The rats start pouring out of their holes when the stage begins, and will walk forward slowly until they hit an object that they can't mount (the rats are able mount blocks and ledges that are their own height), and will then turn around and walk in the opposite direction. They are impervious to harm, except for if they collide with the devices manned by Bart, Homer, or one of the other characters; when this happens, the rat will be smashed, zapped, or ground into powder, thoroughly exterminating them from the level. Once you have exterminated all the rats, Krusty must return to the entrance in order to end the level. Thus, the puzzle aspect of this usually revolves around moving blocks, pipes, or spring boards in order to move the rats to the extermination machines, in a similar style of puzzle to Lemmings.
Krusty himself must also contend with the perils of the level: snakes, robots, and sometimes the shoddy upkeep of Krusty Land itself will try to hurt Krusty, and he can die if he sustains enough damage. He is pretty mobile, and can pick up weapons such as pies or the fucking superball from Super Mario Land to help defend himself. Each level usually has a ton of secrets which you can explore to get more power-ups and extra lives. The game has a "high score" system as well, which is popular amongst the speedrunners of this game.
The game is split into a series of areas that don't have really a huge thematic difference, in that you will get a new song for the area and generally a different helper. The overworld is a long hallway with rooms that lead to the "stages" of the game (more rooms). Once you complete the levels in a room, Krusty will get a clearance from the health board, allowing the next section of the hallway to be accessed.
The levels do get more complex as the game continues, with difficulty usually being cranked up by adding more moving parts. Some levels will have more starting holes for rats to pour from, more blocks that must be juggled, and more hazards in the middle of critical movement areas. You can easily work yourself into a situation where you just can't win, either trapping the rats or yourself in a location with no way to exit, which is why you can actually cause Krusty to kill himself with the tap of the "give up" button (Krusty just goes "good grief" and sits down on the ground in defeat).
Music
The music is very clown polka and not very good. Definitely grating if you are frustrated with a puzzle.
Ads and Artwork
Overall
The game is a fun diversion, but it is quite long for a puzzle game, without enough variation in the puzzles or gameplay to make it worth a complete playthrough. There is a lot of love for the property apparent though, with deep cut characters such as Corporal Punishment and Sideshow Bob having a presence. Worth playing? Kind of! If you are a Simpsons fan it is certainly worth checking out, though I would recommend the Gameboy version personally; puzzle games just play better when they are portable.
Title: Garry Kitchen's Super Battletank: War in the Gulf
Release Date: June 1992
Developer: Imagineering Inc
Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
Our first US developed game for June is a really weird game in that it is a game set during a war that was only a year in the past at the time this game was made (and arguably was being developed at the time the conflict was taking place. This really isn't something that is done anymore, and while there have been plenty of games since that have fetishized or glorified the modern soldier or war (looking at you Soldier of Fortune, which was the fictitious accounts of a real life mercenary who contributed to the magazine of the same name), this really comes off as unique.
Background
Let's start with the name in the title: Garry Kitchen. Mr. Kitchen was a well known American programmer and developer, best known for making the Atari 2600 port of Donkey Kong, a complete remake of the arcade game that was actually pretty decent and the first home console port of the incredibly popular arcade game. He was actually the founder of Absolute Entertainment (and subsequently the developer, Imagineering, who were the in-house developers), the publisher for this game, though they really didn't accomplish too much as a developer or publisher, though they certainly earned some notoriety by developing Bart vs the Space Mutants. He really hasn't done much as far as making video games as of late, but he did help co-found the National Video Game Museum and still sits on their board.
Now for a bit of a history lesson. The Persian Gulf War or the Gulf War was a military response by the American military and 34 allied nations to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Iraq, ostensibly, invaded Kuwait due to perceived "economic" threats to their country, claiming that the overproduction of oil by Kuwait was hurting the Iraqi economy by devaluing their oil. The United States and its allies entered Kuwait with the goal to repel the Iraqis, and this led to a two year conflict which ended when the forces invaded Iraq and the Iraqis sued for peace. The Gulf War was one of the first widely televised wars, with tv stations streaming from cameras attached to bombers, and gained a lot of publicity to issues that surround wars such as PTSD and war related trauma. Apparently, though, in inspiration to this game, this war hosted the third largest American tank battle ever. In this game, you play in an M-1 Abrams Tank, the main tank used by the American coalition in the Gulf conflict.
Gameplay
The gameplay is pretty simple! You get a briefing from a general, and then are plopped into the middle of a map in your M-1 Abrams tank. You control your tank on a Mode 7 plane from a first person perspective while driving around and destroying your enemies with the tank cannon. Much of the gameplay is maneuvering to get an advantageous position on the enemies while avoiding getting cornered and destroyed by the rival tanks, making this feel like a form of ground-based dogfighting.
The game does challenge realism quite a bit. Much like a hunting shooting gallery video game where you are killing 100s of animals in one round, this game is the most fast-paced tank combat imaginable. You zip around the battlefield like an F-Zero car, and your cannon shoots as fast as you can hit the button.
That's really it! The game is not too long and it is not exceptionally challenging (at least until you get to the later missions where you are immediately surrounded by enemy troops). Missions play out in a matter of minutes, and the game does offer some varieties of enemies in the later missions when they add helicopters, SCUD launchers, and humvees/jeeps.
Music
The music is incredibly limited, but here it is anyway...
Ads
This actually has a commercial, which really seems like is is some "YVAN EHT NIOJ" style marketing; like they want to sell action figures of the Abrams as well as get kids to enlist. Really weird.
Final Verdict
This is another game where the fact that it exists, and it is steeped in a weird corner of history, is really the most interesting thing about it. Otherwise its is a really mediocre tank-battler. Overall, I would skip this one.
Title: Yokoyama Mitsuteru Sangokushi (trans. Yokoyama Mitsuteru's version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms)
Release: 06/26/1992
Developer: Tose
Publisher: Angel
Once again we have returned to the bane of this blog: a Japanese exclusive strategy rpg about either the Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Sengoku period in Japan. This one is about the former: you can see a Zhuge Liang staring right at you with his telltale feather fan and Guan Yu with his beautiful beard right on the box. This will most likely be rather inscrutable.
Background
Yokoyama Mitsuteru was a manga artist who started work in the 1950s, making him one of those stalwarts of the manga industry and a contemporary of the greats such as Osamu Tezuka. He worked diligently in the industry up until his death in 2004, and was known for such works as Tetsujin-28-go a mecha manga, Sally the Witch and Princess Comet, some of the first "magical girl" manga, and most important for today's blog post, manga based on classic Chinese literature such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margins.
While his work never reached international acclaim like Tezuka, he was a much loved manga author in Japan, winning a multitude of awards and with much of his work being adapted into anime, film, and as here, video games. This game is based on the manga of the same name, and is a retelling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. For those who don't remember read our earlier blog post on the Koei game of the same name, never played a Dynasty Warriors game, or aren't familiar with Chinese literature or literature, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is considered one of the great classics of Chinese literature, written by Luo Guanzhong. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms tells the story of the dissolution of the Han Dynasty in China, one of the more powerful early dynasties that existed around the same time as the Roman Empire, and the resultant civil war that erupted between the Wu, Shu, and Wei kingdoms.
The "three kingdoms" break down as follows: you have the Wu, led by the Sun family (of Sun Tzu fame), represented the old guard nobility steeped in family history and tradition (but ultimately ineffectual and callous to the common man and the welfare of China as a state), the Wei led by the despotic Cao Cao, represented military prowess, authoritarianism, and ruthlessness, and the Shu, led by the idealistic Lui Bei and his two sworn brothers, are often considered the "heroes" of this tale, representing the can-do attitude and gumption of the common man in the face of overwhelming odds. It is a much loved story both in China and the world abroad, and many of the people from this tale have been elevated into legends and folklore.
Yokoyama Mitsuteru Sangokushi is Mitsuteru's retelling of the story in a way that is pretty comprehensive; all the various factions are represented, though the story gives special weight to the Shu and Wei factions. The "drama" of the period is especially heightened, and there is a romance subplot built upon between Liu Bei and a girl he saves during the Yellow Turban Rebellion (the inciting incident for this plot). The manga ran for an impressive 16 years and 60 volumes, which speaks for itself it terms of popularity.
As far as developer we have the faithful workhorse, Tose, and the publisher is Angel (later absorbed into Bandai), whom we have seen a couple of times thus far in the blog publishing some other Japanese exclusive games.
Gameplay
Now a quick proviso right up front: once again I do not speak Japanese nor read their written word and there is no working translation available for this game online, so this review will be rather short and making best guesses.
Like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the story has "scenarios" that you play through, which act as the set dressing for the game itself. Now you can play through this scenario in a whole multitude of different ways and don't need to follow the narrative of the story, but it is there to give context to the different factions. The first scenario starts at what is considered the "inciting incident" of the Three Kingdoms era, which is the Yellow Turban Rebellion. This was a populist and religious rebellion centered around a cult of mystics who wished to overthrow the Han Dynasty, and the noble families and many of the central heroes of the three kingdoms era cut their teeth on the during this revolt. In this scenario it looks like you play the heroes of the Han court in its final days. The second scenario starts right at the actual civil war between the three kingdoms. You can choose who your starting side and build your kingdom from their starting zone.
Sadly, though, there isn't too much more I can really say beyond this. It is a menu have 4X strategy game, and I couldn't figure out how to progress out of my turn, or exactly what actions I was enacting. The presentation is pretty solid: they incorporate the art and styling of Mitsuteru into the game pretty well, which gives your generals and nobles much more personality than in the Romance games. Many of your menu screens will be against splash backgrounds depicting scenes in a city or in the royal court.
Music
The music is pretty solid too!
Manga and Anime
Instead of showing advertisements, I figured I would show off more of the manga and anime this game is based on...
Final Verdict
It certainly is a neat oddity of a game, but one that is inscrutable unless you are a language speaker and reader. And with that, we are done June 1992 EXCEPT for the US developed games.
Here we have another Japanese exclusive game with an amazing example of box art that could only exist in the 90s. This one seems to be a wrestling game of some kind, so let's jump in.
Background
So this game is based on the Japanese equivalent of 90s UFC. The UFC was very different in the 90's; nowadays, the fighting styles utilized in the sport are homogenized into that MMA style: lots of striking leading to grappling on the floor. 90's UFC though, was truly a competition between various forms of martial arts: you would have sumo vs the riot cop, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu vs Greco-Roman Wrestling. UFC would primarily make its money through pay-per-view style distribution, and then VHS and DVD sales. It was kind of a carnival of strange gladiatorial combat, available at Blockbusters everywhere.
This game is based on a similar organization in Japan, called the Fighting Network Rings. The roster in this game is actually based on some of the fighters that worked at that time in the league. FNR, like the original version of UFC, went out of fashion in the early 2000s, with many of the fighters instead moving over to the "pro-wrestling" leagues in Japan.
The developer I really can't find anything about online. They made some other games in the 1990s but only a few titles that made it to North America. The publisher, as you can tell from the name, was actually a record producer founded in the 1930s, but also started to dabble in the video game market in the 1980s and 1990s. They are personally noted for publishing the game with the raddest title Jesus: Bio Monster."
Roster
In this game, you have representatives of 9 major "fighting styles" personified by some of the fighters that were in the FNR in the 90s...actually after doing some research, there definitely seems to be some real people and some fictional characters. The boxer, for example, is basically Mike Tyson...weird.
You have Barnov Grainer, who fought using Sambo, the Russian grappling and striking style, Somchai Pet Noi, the Muay Thai fighter, Akira Maeda, a Japanese professional wrestler, Kenji Takezawa, a Japanese karate fighter, Shiro Kimura, a Japanese Judo expert, James Taylor, a boxer from the US, Lee Wang-Yu, a kung fu expert from China, Billy J. Gibson, a US kickboxer, and Spell Falcon, a luchador.
Gameplay
Its a pretty stock standard wrestling game. You pick your character and slowly fight through the roster. Beat every character and you win the championship. The characters favor the moves that are prominent in their fighting style; in other words, every character can punch, kick, grapple, do reversals, and pin, but some characters favor one attack over the other. The boxer is the strongest puncher, the kickboxer the strongest kicker, etc. Your characters also do have a super meter and a special attack that you can utilize, though it takes a while to fill, and it is easy to lose the super meter by taking hits.
Overall, the gameplay is really weak: if you aren't using your character's strength, then you are losing the fights. Even when you are winning, you are just mercilessly cheesing the enemy with the same move until they get knocked out. If you are losing, the best thing to do is run around the ring and avoid until the round is over, as you get some of your stamina back between rounds.
Also, the game just doesn't look good. All the characters are compressed sprites, and the color palette is incredibly blah.
OST
The music isn't much to write home about...
Final Verdict
This game will actually spawn two sequels, both of which we will play over the course of this blog. Overall, though, this game is pretty forgettable. It is certainly better than Pit Fighter but it still isn't that good. Skip this one!
