The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. First annual meeting. 01/01/1990
Morton Kombat (Chairman in charge of getting over here): The first meeting of the Non-Capcom/SNK fighting game union is called to order. You all know why we are here…
Battle Arena Tom Shinden (Treasurer of Smuckleberry pie) : Well I don’t know why and it’s making me rather (Southern) Cross.
Morton Kombat: Well then I will explain that we are here to plan good ways of destroying our mutual enemies of Capcom and their SNK lackeys. As long as Hadou-can we Hadou-cannot stop trying to take a share of those delicious fighting game profits.
Battle Arena Tom Shinden: But how can we do that? Where can fighting games go now that Capcom have used up all the racial stereotypes?
Joel Calibur (Assistant cog motion capture artist.): Well my plan is to introduce 10% more cog throwing into all fighting games.
Morton Kombat: You and your cogs! I declare this meeting finish(ed) Him!
Nero Divide (New aged whack manager): Hey guys did I miss anything?
Joel Calibur: Yes THE POINT!
All: HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
Which is to say I’m going to try to review every fighting game I have played but haven’t already reviewed. i.e. every non Capcom or non SNK fighting game. It may sound like a huge task but I’m not intending to do a very good job! (Also I realise that I didn’t get to review Marvel Vs Capcom 3: At Worlds End. My opinions on that are “Too much Girl Wolverine not enough Stages.”)
Battle Arena Toshinden
I believe the Toshinden series eventually abandoned the “Battle Arena” prefix, possibly because the Toshinden nature of the series could no longer be confined to official battle arenas but more likely because the Toshinden series wasn’t selling very well and they needed to save on print costs. The final game in the series is infamous for being packaged in envelopes with “In-dun 5” scrawled across them or at least it would be if that had happened. (Possible marketing idea?)
I only ever actually played the original Battle Arena Toshinden and a demo of Toshinden 2, a very stupid demo which let you play as the only two new characters in the game. As you may have guessed I don’t have particularly strong feelings for the series but I must have seen something in those blocky characters as I not only bought the Playstation version but felt the need to add the PC version to my games collection. I cannot recollect the reason for doing this. It may have been because it came in a twin pack with Wild Ambition: Fatal Fury or it may have been because I enjoyed the voice acting so much. What other game features a man with a heavy Scottish accent repeatedly shouting “Deadly Raise?” (Or as he would put it “Deedly Rhease!”)
Scots-warrior aside this game has little to recommend it and so it is deservedly cast into the dustbin of electronics boutique alongside many copies of Gex: Deep Cover Gecko and Krazy Ivan. I should however mention that the stage music on the raft level is probably the best music ever created.
Overall I’m awarding this game a paltry half Rungo out of Ellis.
Tobal No.1
Too my inexperienced young eyes Tobal No.1 was very exciting for two reasons.
1. It came in a slightly different (and in my opinion better) case than other Playstation games. 2. It had a quote on it that said “Sell your granny and play Tobal until your fingers BLEED”.
Which was an entirely irresponsible thing to say to an impressionable child, imagine my disappointment when I found it impossible to even sublet my grandparents. Even worse when I eventually “saved up for” (convinced brother to get for his birthday) Tobal and commended playing I realised that my fingers would never bleed because I was a robot with fingers made of pure steel.
This did not stop me giving Tobal more attention than it rightfully deserved and becoming overexcited about its rubbish quest mode. “Other fighting games don’t even HAVE a quest mode” I was heard to utter on more than one occasion. It’s probably even true that Ill goa could beat Kazuya in a fight but there was no need to take out an advert in the local paper.
“Red skinned devil man in off shoulder number seeks pointy haired goon for punching in face.”
So great was Tobal No.1 that it eventually got a sequel, the aptly named “Tobal No.1: Reloaded” (Tobal No:2) It was never released in Europe due to the legendary European hatred of Emperor Udan. I was able to get a naughty copy from a man on the market and am able to confirm that it featured a Chocobo as a playable character. Everyone says “Yeah so what?” in unison and goes back to replaying Metal Gear Solid to unlock the Stealth Suit.
Overall I would give this game Nork out of Nork.
Bonus Tobal jokes!
Q. Why was the Gren Government unpopular?
A. Because they had to make lots of Gren Kutz to public services.
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Ill goa!
Ill goa who?
Ill goa the shops tomorrow!
Q. What do robots do when they can’t remember the words?
A. They just Hom!
Q. What animal says moofu?
A. To-cow No.1!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Udan
Udan who?
Udan – t wanna dance!
Virtua Fighter
An interesting story about Virtua Fighter is that one time I had to take Castlevania IV back to gamestation because they had sold me an American version that wouldn’t fit into the SNES. However the man said I could only have “credits” so I had to try and decide what to have their and then. I spent ages looking for something I actually wanted but couldn’t concentrate properly because they kept playing the song “Freestyler” by the Bomfunk MC at ear splitting volumes. (This was in the days before Gamestation went all corporate so the staff used to play their awful taste in music at ear splitting volumes. Why do you not play songs from games in games shops? Also they used to try and ask me about games I was buying like “You can play as the villain in Sonic Adventure 2” as if I had been desperate for years to play as Dr Robotnik.)
The moral of this story is that I ended up getting the special edition of Virtua Fighter for the Sega Saturn BUT they didn’t put the bonus disc in so it wasn’t very special at all!
From this experience I concluded that Virtua Fighter is just a rubbish version of Tekken with very boring characters such as Jeffrey McWild and Jeffrey McTame. A lot of people seem to think that Virtua Fighting is very skilful but then a lot of people tried to stack up enough chairs to reach the moon and look how that turned out! (All the chairs fell over on a man’s leg and one of the chairs went inside a Pink Panther cartoon booth.)
Overall I give Virtua Fighter a “Yeah straight from the top of my dome” out of a Gold Dural.
Last Bronx
Would it be a brilliant character trait if I started saying “Last Bronx” instead of Last Straw? i.e.
Me: “I can’t believe you broke my copy of Last Bronx, this is the last Bronx!”
Jonas Bruner: “Please accept my Fighting Vipers.” (My brother says Fighting Vipers instead of apologies, also he was offering me his copy of Fighting Vipers.)
Uncle Pete: “What the Fighters Megamix is going on!?”
Actually I don’t really know what the difference was between Fighting Vipers and Last Bronx, other than that one of them featured being able to knock off people’s armour and that the prequel to Last Bronx would be called First Bronx. Look here is my review of Fighting Bronx: Megamix because I can’t pick them apart in my brain.
You press a button to punch and another to kick or you can press the block button to block. The first one to lose his energy does not win. The last boss is Called Urabahn and he wears a coat also you can fight as a car and an Arabian man.
Overall I give Fighters Megamix a Rent a Hero Number one out of 5.
Soul Series
The best thing about any of the Soul Blade/Edge/Calibur games is the song from the beginning of Soul Blade – “Transcending History and the World a tale of souls and swords eternally retold – that will eventually feature ill conceived guest characters.”
Apart from welcoming you repeatedly to the stage of history the soul games comprise of jabbing each other with weaponry and making Sephiroth in the custom character creator over and over again. Why don’t more game feature custom character creation? It seemed like we were going to get it all the time in the Playstation era but then everything went online and rubbish. Speaking of rubbish, many people like to ‘talk rubbish’ about the Soul series so lets expose some popular myths.
* The original Dreamcast Soul Calibur is the best – WRONG it has a nice quest mode but actually plays the same as all the others. It’s just that you only played the Dreamcast one and then got bored with the series and started playing Call of Calibur: Modern Cervantes instead. (A game where pirates throw swords at each other and you pay £7.50 to buy new treasure maps.)
* The Gamecube version of Soulcalibur II was the best because it sold the most copies, also Link was the best guest character. – WRONG the gamecube version sold the most because Gamecube owners had no other fighting games to choose from. (Other than Bloody Roar 3) Also all guest characters are equally awful because they won’t return in future games meaning that there will never be a ‘complete’ edition. This goes double for the awful Necron character.
* Soulcalibur II was the best – WRONG it has a rubbish mix of characters including NO SIEGFRIED and no character creation. Also one of the characters has an owl for a head. “Ocladan, bottler Sam more like!” Soulcalibur II is actually the worst entry in the series because even Soul Blade had nice music.
*Soulcalibur III is not the best – WRONG it is the best.
Overall I’m giving the soul series a Voldo out of Li Long.
Mortal Kombat
Two stories about Mortal Kombat –
When the original Mortal Kombat came out the connected ad campaign featured people stood in the middle of the road shouting “Mortal Kombat” it also dubbed the day it came out “Mortal Monday”. I tried to excitedly discuss “Mortal Monday” with my school pals but they didn’t know what I was talking about. I really hated my school friends.
Jonas Bruner made a Terry Nutkins character in Mortal Kombat Armageddon. Imagine the look on his face when Scorpion roughly grabbed Mr Nutkins by the waist and ripped off the top half of his body. Suffice to say he can no longer watch the Really Wild Show (Because they don’t make it anymore.)
The main selling points of Mortal Kombat were blood and John Turk but in the modern era every game has stupid amounts of blood and digitised sprites have been replaced with generic looking 3D. Stripped of these unique features Mortal Kombat can only be sent to the depths of generic fighting game hell alongside War Gods, BioFreaks and Dead or Alive. The only way to save it is for Midway to become un-bankrupt and invent a new technique of motion capture so that the game looks like Mad Dog Macree or The Journey Man project. Unfortunately this will never happen and they will keep adding new generic characters like “Fendrex” and “Dashon” .
In the meantime lets all enjoy our hazy members of the original Mortal Kombat –
Daz: “I remember on Mortal Kombat when Sub Zero would throw a harpoon and say please could you come in this direction!”
Bazzer: “I remember that you could unlock Kintaro on the pit stage by getting a perfect victory with Arden Lynn.”
Renton DX: “They should well make a Street Fighter Vs mortal Kombat because those games have comparable levels of gameplay and Mortal Kombat isn’t at all a gimmick laden mess.”
Overall I’m going to award Mortal Kombat a Blind Kenshi out of a Blind’s Dungeon.
Guilty Gear
In my opinion those gears have an awful lot to feel guilty about as this in another game series which promises the presence of gears and then fails to deliver on these promises with nary a cog to be seen. What can be seen is a very nicely animated 2-D fighting game that will never do very well because nobody can be bothered to learn non-streetfighter related button inputs.
At one stage I became very good at guilty gear and learned how to do things like “dust attacks” and “Roman Cancels” but then realised this was utterly pointless as literally no one else in Europe was bothered about playing it. I have since forgotten all my ‘gearformation” which is probably for the best as Guilty Gear 2 wasn’t a fighting game at all but a sort of RTS. (The reason for this being that the developer had gone mad from making too many character’s whose names were heavy metal references i.e. Vinny Aerosmith and Fujin Fighters.)
I would have scored Guilty Gear a lot more highly but I’ve just spent a weekend listening to Jonas Bruner go on about how Potemkin is his favourite character so it’s only getting a Zato 1 out of Zato 5.
Zero Divide
Q. Is Zero Divide the prequel to One Divide?
A. There is no such thing as One Divide!
If you could have a “One Divide” with anyone who would it be? A champion athlete says that he would have it with Martin Luther King and ask him why the game Zero Divide was so rubbish and whether or not a slow moving, robot themed 3D beat em up had anything to do with civil rights.
Martin Luther King has never played Zero divide but if he had he would probably have a dream where games featuring blue humanoid robots kicking red crab robots were judged not on their box art but on the fact that they were useless and rubbish.
Overall Zero Divide gets a lowly segregated swimming pool out of five.
The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. annual meeting. 01/01/2002
Martin Arth (Associate editor of Falco Punching): Hello friends, does the game “Super Smash Brothers” count as a fighting game?
Morton Kombat: NO!
(And that’s why I haven’t reviewed it.)
Tekken Series
It’s ironic that even though Tekken is now up to it’s sixth incarnation the only game where you can play as Tekkenman blade is in Tatsunoko Vs Capcom! Of course I am merely “Tekken your leg” I know full well that it’s actually Yatterman blade! (In Japan Tekken is known as Yatter and Tekken Tag Tournament is known as Yatter Yag Yournement – sounds more like double Dutch eh readers!?)
Anyway the Tekken series is at core a game about child abuse, specifically abuse by dropping child into volcanoes. However there is a message that if you drop enough children into volcanoes you yourself may find yourself dropped into a volcano. As Nietzsche says “He who spends long periods of times dropping children into volcanoes must be careful to not get dropped into a volcano himself, or if he does he must make sure that he has a devil gene so that he can come back to life.”
The good features of Tekken are how there are lots of secret characters to unlock and proper endings such as a Jaguar man running an orphanage or a blonde woman having her shoes stolen this is outweighed by bad features such as killing of Jun even though she was the only character I bothered to learn the combos for (they all have 3 ring circus in the middle) and adding stupid modes such as “Tekken Force” and “Whatever Tekken Force is called on Tekken 6”.” I also strongly disagree with how Yoshimitsu has been allowed to change his appearance from boxy tin man with a rapier to Skelington with a wheel on his back and a light sabre. Where is all the classic Yoshimitsu fan service? I would also insist that they bring back Kuminitsu but she would probably end up being a crocodile made of flames.
Overall I’m giving Tekken a Gon in Sixty Seconds out of the Fast and the Brian Furious. (And that’s mostly because of the time my granddad played the original Tekken and proclaimed “I am the law!” while playing as Marshall Law.)
Dead or Alive Series
Blah Blah ‘JIGGLE PHYSICS’ blah blah blah MEDIOCRE FIGHTING GAME blah blah blah EH READERS!?
Blah blah VOLLEYBALL …………. SIGH (Blah blah) Blah blah blah JESSE HOLD ON BY B*WITCHED blah
Overall it gets a predictably written review out of a Kage is actually pronounced Cag-aye.
Star Wars Masters of Teras Kasi
The best feature of this game OR ANY GAME is that it features a Tusken Raider named “Hoar” (Sounds like Whore!) and a Gammorean named “Thok” (Sounds like fuck!!)
After that it’s just a fighting game but with lightsabers and Jodo Kast and a really bad Harrison Ford impersonator. It’s not even that bad a game but it did get a lot of bad reviews at the time mainly because people weren’t yet used to the Star Wars franchise being abused in ludicrous ways. It may seem a bit silly that Princess Leia can beat Darth Vader in a fight but is that really worse than Jabba the Hutt’s gay purple cousin? The answer of course depends on whether or not you have seen Star Wars: the Clone Wars.
Anyway this game is well renowned for me making everybody play it at my Brother’s birthday party and trouncing everyone until I made the mistake of picking Jodo Kast. I was clearly being over confident and should have known that even in video games a fake Boba Fett will never defeat Darth Vader, especially if the person playing as Darth Vader is hyped up on caterpillar cake.
Overall I’m giving Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi an Easier than shooting Womp Rats back home out of a Mara Jade.
Psychic Force Series
A solitary copy of Psychic Force could be found loitering on the shelf of my local Electronics Boutique for many years. On many occasions I nearly gave in to temptation and bought it, attracted as I was by its anime style box art and ever falling price. Eventually that branch of Electronics Boutique closed down because of an overestimation of the demand for Rayman pens and Electronics Boutique being a rubbish name for a shop. I can only imagine what happened to that copy of Psychic force, more than likely it was thrown in a big skip and then incinerated alongside Buzz Lightyear. (Spoilers!) But I’d like to think it ended up being bought by a well meaning millionaire who later found out it was his grandson. (Why he would care about that but not his own daughter who he chucked out as soon as she became pregnant is anybodies guess.)
The point is that I got my copy of Psychic force from Barnsley market for £2.50 the funds were provided by Uncle Pete as part of an extensive bribery package relating to attendance of a cousins wedding. Actually the point is that Uncle Pete told me that the Cousin would be wearing a gold waistcoat AND had learned the song “True” to sing at the wedding reception. The waistcoat was merely cream with gold trim and the DJ forgot to bring the Spandau Ballet hit and so no singing occurred. An altogether disappointing experience and further evidence to support our suspicion that Uncle Pete has a flagrant disregard for the truth.
You may not be able to trust your parents/guardians but you can always trust psychic force to provide an adequate game experience. Again a lie because Psychic force is nothing but a proto- Bandai anime game with bad voice acting. Hearing a character called “Wong” say “Da Worwd is Myne” might have been amusing to those sailors in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story but those sailors found themselves on the receiving end of some Jeet Kun Do and now have an aversion to anything even vaguely Chinese. Meanwhile Psychic force is trying to convince us that Keith is a legitimate name for a villain with icicle powers, a stark contrast to the fire controlling main character simply named “Burn”. Was Freeze considered too common for a man wearing a cape?
Psychic force 2012 wasn’t much better; in fact it was almost exactly the same but with Dreamcast graphics instead of Playstation graphics. I think the company that made the series went bust shortly after, possibly as a result of ordering production on too many Keith action figures.
Overall the Psychic force series gets a “Phew Barely made that” out of Keith.
Evil Zone
A good advert for this game would have been “Do not enter the Evil Zone” because it gives the impression that the Zone is so evil that nobody would want to enter it and so makes you curious about playing the game. After all could anything truly be that evil? (Its probably a Zone about Justin Biebers he readers!?)
Q. What Pokemon causes lots of arguments on Youtube?
A. Justin Bibarel!
Q. Why do people go on about Justin Bieber so much?
A. because the button has broken off their radios making it impossible to change the frequency so they will be forced to listen to his songs until they either get a new radio. (Which they can’t because of the credit crunch) or destroy his career by saying bad things about him.
Q. Who is Justin Bieber?
A. I have no idea.
Maybe if Justin Bieber had done an advert for Evil Zone where he says “Zone out of Evil!” it would have sold more copies. As it was only two people ever bought the game – me and the person that ran the Angelfire Evil Zone site. I can only speculate from the lack of a sequel to Titus the Fox in Marrakesh that this was the final nail in the Titus coffin. (Fingers crossed for an HD fan remake!!!) A great shame because Evil Zone is probably in my top 150 favourite games even though it isn’t really a fighting game at all, it’s an anime parody simulator with a ropey fighting game bolted on.
The fighting is in fact so ropey that it only uses two buttons and if I remember correctly one of those in block. (The other is not-block i.e. attack) However it looks very impressive and you wont even care because you will be too busy remembering the between fight cut scenes which present each fight as an episode form a TV show based on the character you are playing as. My personal favourite is businessman Keiya who operates a self help service between fights and gives advice on problems such as “My wife doesn’t like me drinking beer.” Generally his advice is sound but occasionally he just tells them that he hates them. Similarly if you are a hard time imagining this making a good game then I hate you and I am going to hold down the square button until I have charged up two crystals after which I will fire thousands of unblocakble missiles at you.
Evil Zone is getting Danzaiver out of Danzaiver and if you don’t agree with that you can ‘zaiver off!
Naruto/Dragonball Z/Bleach/One-Piece/Saint Seiya/YuYuHashuko
If you like this anime you will enjoy seeing all your favourite characters having a battle and using the specials moves that they use in the show. My personal favourite is “Antagonist that becomes secondary protagonist” although it features all the characters up to the “Big baddie appears from space is tougher than all other baddies so far” saga. This is the “Ninety Third” game of the series out this year and they are all pretty similar but this one is definitely “the best”.
If you are a fan of this show then you will enjoy a lot of the fan service elements such as “main character” doing his “special move that he invents to defeat the baddie at the last minute.” You’ll also like elements such as using the original voice actors from the show even though the voice acting in the show is probably rubbish and scraping the barrel for new characters such as “man from filler episode A” and “Insensitive racial stereotype contestant number 3”
I’m going to give this game a gold cloth out of a PoPo but upgrade that to a Spirit Bomb if you are a fan of the show in question.
Blazblue
Fact: BlazBlue was originally going to be called “Battle Frentox – Alberto Waltz” but the characters were so strange that during beta testing the head of Arc System works (Mr Yashimoto) was heard to exclaim “What in the blue blazes is going on here!”. A knight who was guarding the game thought he had said “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!” and so the game became BlazBlue.
Actually that fact may not be a fact at all it may be a nega-fact or “lie”. I have no way of confirming this either way because I have only played Blazblue for half an hour when Jonas Bruner brought it round for some disappointing 2D action. During that time I wasn’t able to pick up much about the game other than the fact that calling a match a rebel dosent make your game not be Guilty Gear 3. I also learned that BlazBlue does not have many characters in it. I have read that this does not matter because all the characters are very interesting and well balanced but tot hat I say imagine how good the game would have been with twice the amount of interesting and well balanced characters.
The bottom line is that I cannot be bothered learning any more obscure beat em ups, especially ones where people have extraneous moves like throwing flower pots or extending limbs in unrealistic directions. Blazblue is getting a Continuum Shift out of Continuum Ctrl Alt Del.
The Union of non - Capcom/SNK fighting games. annual meeting. 01/01/2007
Dennis Inoba (Head of shitake mushrooms): Hello chums, sorry for being late to the party. Does my new game Dissidia count as a fighting game?
Keith: No of course not, it’s just Virtual On with big hair and swords. (The Guinness book of world records disagrees saying it is the first fighting game spin off from an RPG series. The Guinness book of records is stupid because they hadn’t played Spectral Souls!)
Dennis Inoba: What about Ergheiz?
Keith: Go on then.
Dennis Inoba: keith out.
Keith: I INVENTED KEITH!
Ergheiz
Or to give it it’s full title Ergheiz: God bless the ring. In this case God did bless the ring with Final Fantasy guest characters which caused us to take an interest in a game that we might have otherwise ignored. (Also the first time Zach was a playable character fact fans) This was no bad thing because Ergheiz is surprisingly competent and plays a bit like a less frantic version of Powerstone in that you can run in all directions and navigate environmental hazards such as boxes or small fences. Ergheiz also features a dungeon crawler style quest mode where you play an archaeologist who falls down a well and has to fight their way through a dungeon consisting mostly of shark men and shitake mushrooms. I would have said this was a welcome addition to the game only the first boss was an immortal octopus and getting killed made you lose everything and start again. As the saying goes “Octopus boss results in a sales loss.”
So yeah you can play as topless Sephiroth, It has to get Neo Bahamut out of Bahamut!
Gundam Battle Assualt
Or as the game would have it “Gundam Batta Attalt!” and who am I to argue? (A man who can pronounce words properly that’s who.)
Mangling of the English language aside this game concerns giant robots from the various Gundam franchises having serious disagreements and then solving these disagreements in the form of a 2D fighting game. We only actually recognised the Gundam Wing characters but rest assured there are enough Gundams in this game to give you a good grun for your Gundam. Fan favourites such as Zaku, Zaku II and Char’s Zaku stand alongside more obscure offerings like the Full Armour ZZ Gundam and the humble Hi-Gogg. Perhaps they should have got JEAN CLAUDE GUN-DAM to be in it! (They couldn’t get him because he was busy filming Kickmaster 3: Legend of the Legs.)
For a Playstation game Gundam Battle Assault certainly packs in a high volume of animations. (Albeit very slow clunky ones.) It also features the ability to not care about this game if you know nothing about Gundam. (i.e. almost everybody) However the mangled remains of several Gundam model kits left at my parent’s house mean I will never be objective enough to properly review this game.
Therefore Gundam Battle Assault is getting a non-applicable out of a Zeong.
That covers every fighting game ever made (apart from Killer instinct, Balls and Shaq Fu) I hope my comments will help you decide which fighting game to buy. (None of them)
