16bit Chronicles: Super FamiComplete #85: Pit-Fighter

Title: Pit-Fighter (NA)

Release Date: March 1992

Developer: Tengen

Publisher: Tengen

I will be honest about this up front, but this is just a really awful game. Arguably one of the most bare bones and poorly constructed games I have played for this blog thus far. Luckily, this game is also one of the shortest games that we have played yet. My playthrough of the single player game took a grand total of 11 minutes.

Background

This game was originally an Atari arcade title, and was most known for using its digitized actors. The original arcade game, while also not being very good, showed a lot more promise than what was ported to the SNES. The game let you choose from three fighters, Buzz, Ty, and Kato, and you went through a series of underground pit fights against a variety of opponents in hopes of taking on the champion, the "Masked Warrior." You had to make it through seven matches, and your life would carry over between matches; the score system of the game would be how much money you earned from the people betting on you in the fight. The crowd, in the arcade title, would even interact with the fight, throwing in power ups and weapons to make the fight more interesting. Sometimes, members of the crowd would even reach out and stab your fighter, which is mildly terrifying in thought.

Before we talk about the port, it must be mentioned that this idea of underground and illegal "pit fighting" seemed to be a big thing with movies in the 80s and 90s, especially with the popularization of martial arts movies and actors becoming more mainstream. Jean-Claude Van Damme comes to mind specifically, as he had a series of movies about underground fight clubs, such as Lionheart, The Quest, Bloodsport, and Kickboxer. This game really seems to take inspiration from Lionheart in particular. While there are some media that still focus on this "setting" (Netflix's Kengan Ashura and Baki are some recent examples) this seems to be a genre that is on the decline.

Now the SNES port is a really rough one. The game has no intro cutscene or context, you press start, choose one of the fighters, and you are thrown into your first match. Instead of eight opponents, you fight five, and they have cut out all the power-ups or weapons from the game. The game still supports two player versus which is kind of neat as you don't play against each other, but instead fight two versions of each opponent together. Overall, though, this is an incredibly hewed game.

Gameplay

This game is one of the most rudimentary and sloppy "fighting" games that I have played. You have a punch button, a kick button, and if you press both together you do a "special move." What hinders this is the animation of your digitized actors is incredibly poor and limited, as your characters just jolt from key frame to key frame. The result is that each fighter just looks like they are seizing and flailing with no sense of visual coherence. Punches don't look like punches, kicks don't look like kicks, and nothing has a sense of impact. Without your health going down, there is no real indication of who is doing damage to who. Your sprites, too, are weirdly too small; one thing Mortal Kombat did really well was to digitize the actors so they were tall and each part of their body was clearly animated. In Pit-Fighter, all of the characters are boxy and squat, which aids in the visual confusion. Honestly, you should watch a youtube video just to see how piss-poor this looks.

This poor digitization extends to the truly god awful crowd. They are arranged with no real sense of visual mis-en-scene or proper visual organization. The crowd looks like someone's amateur attempt at photoshopping different people into a photograph. They all animate strangely, and are all oddly the same shade of olive green.

The design of your opponents is no great shakes either. Your first opponent, the Executioner (truncated to just the Exec), is just a fat guy in a ski-mask. Your second opponent is a squat guy with shades and a bandana, and even your champion is a squat guy in a mask. Not good at all.

Finally the game is a crap shoot in its difficulty. I beat the first three matches as Buzz, the pro-wrestler, by just holding forward and spamming the punch button. The enemy fighter could never get up off the ground without me awkwardly punching him back to the pavement. The later fights are certainly more "challenging" but it just felt like luck if I was able to knock down the fighter first and could stun lock them. As well, Buzz seems like the only viable choice of a fighter, as Ty is a kickboxer who kicks too slowly, and Kato, being a 3rd degree blackbelt, bows at the beginning of each match, which the enemy fighter hilariously ignores and starts wailing on you. All told, you can, with some luck, clear the game in less than ten minutes, whereupon your champ is hoisted up on a forklift as the underground fighting master.