Hippodrome/Fighting Fantasy (Data East, 1989)

I've sort of subconsciously known about this game for a while and only recently got around to playing it. Like most of anything Data East makes, it's sure to be interesting in some bizarre way after all.

Funnily enough, this actually reminds me a lot of a much saner, darker, 1-on-1 version of their absolutely off-the-wall beat-em-up, Trio The Punch. Gameplay is as simple (exchanges magic attacks for different attack angles), music and sound effects are very similar, and the enemies are almost as strange.

For what it is, it really isn't that bad, although calling it 'great' would be terribly false. The opponents are hard as hell, which only gets harder as it goes on, but that's a challenge for you. Of course, there have been times where I just got plain frustrated and wished it was more like TTP so I could have my character scream BAAGH and do a full-screen attack by having his head grow gigantic so I didn't have to deal with being overwhelmed. Then again, I do massively suck at this game.

Another similarity to TTP: there's only one track that plays during battles. I think the game has about only 3 real tracks in it. Regardless, the theme when you go shopping for weapons is totally dope.

The game does have voice acting in it...and it's extremely repetitive. The same 'blagh!' noises happen every single time you hit the opponent, although it is kind of hilarious with certain enemies.

Graphics-wise, it does it's job pretty damn well, I must say. Everything has this dreary, medieval feel to it, and the stages feel the same way. I'm even going to include the enemies' portraits because some of them are just so goddamn ugly I couldn't leave them out. Which, again, is kind of appropriate considering most of the cast are hideous monsters. And I loves me some freakish, hideous monsters!

Well, onto actually playing it.

THEY MUST ALSO LOOK LIKE A BARBARIAN VERSION OF ROGER FROM DYNA GEAR TO WIN.

The game's enemy order goes like this: beat the first 3 available, it gives you 3 more, then unlocks the sub-boss, which leads you to the final boss. Let's meet 'em shall we?

One of the more original 'medusa' characters and the owner of one of the most ghastly and creepy looking portraits I've seen in a fighting game, Cawnus is otherwise very easy as she owns the same weapon you do.

Doesn't stop me from getting my ass kicked, but we aren't asking for miracles here.

Upon defeating her, she goes insane and spams her pain noise over and over again, eventually crumbling into dust.

Which prompts our hero to let out a really dorky sounding HAAAA in victory as he goes into the shop.

I'll be honest, I go to shop only to see if I have enough gold to buy this weapon, the Halberd, as it has the longest range out of all of them. So far I'm screwed. And yes, you might notice I'm playing the Japanese version here. Kind of weird how everything else is in plain English, isn't it? Off to the next fellow.

Gran here looks awfully happy to see us. I can see why too.

He is able to lazily fling projectiles out of his stomach, which are already pretty annoying to avoid. He can also fly but that's pretty easy to counter.

Feels like I'm swatting the freakiest-looking housefly ever, to be honest.

With him absolutely destroyed, we move on to the next guy.

Looking like he couldn't care less he's fighting in the Hippodrome, Norfolk is notable in that he's the first guy to give me a severe ass-whooping, but there's one drawback to his strategy of 'block like a bitch and then be completely relentless':

His shield apparently can only take so many hits, so moving in on him after this is really the only thing you can do.

His death animation isn't as creative as the first two. The game is pretty inconsistent with enemies either being disintegrated or just having a heart attack and passing out.

This guy is my favorite design out of all of them, even though his portrait makes it look like he's seriously ill from some sort of disease. We seriously do need more half-man half-scorpion people in fighting games. About 'GUM' being in the weapons?

He is able to hock Spearmint chewing gum at you which completely incapacitates your character as you helplessly stand around and hope he's too dumb to do anything about it.

And hope he forgot that he can use his tail Duo Lon-style and attack you from under the ground, which poisons you. Interestingly, 'poison' in this game doesn't mean your health slowly drains, it just slows you down a whole bunch really.

Unhappy about having his tail chopped off, he throws out all his trickery and goes in for the stabbing. Thing is, he hocked more gum at me during this point, and...

Well, let's just say I was frozen during the time I had my sword out. He ran into it repeatedly, which damaged him each time.

Try not to be such a fucking dumbass next time, Daldnoa.

Next up we have Solomon the wizard, who looks like an angry beast in his portrait even though he's just some asshole wizard. Emphasis on being an asshole. I finally bought my halberd too, but I shouldn't have even bothered.

This guy has about a million goddamn attacks, 2 or 3 of them being seemingly unblockable. He also never shuts the hell up ever, yelling LIIIIIGHTNING and FIRRRRE BAAAAAWWLL and other overdramatic things.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I'm pretty sure this guy is the first fighting game character who completely bombards his opponent with a gigantic array of projectiles. With his constant talking and his intolerable use of close range fighting, I'm pretty sure Solomon could fit right the fuck in as a character in Marvel vs Capcom 3.

I finally beat him, and he just drops dead. That isn't satisfying at all. I want this motherfucker to die Hokuto no Ken style and see his muscles forcibly eject his own goddamn skeleton out of his back.

There's a reason I mentioned HNK there. You'll see in a short bit. Right now we have to deal with this jerkass.

Sharon the dragon is also pretty damn irritating, stopping the beginning of the fight to yell DRAGON BREATH just to emphasize it. I've lost a lot of times to this prick too.

I love his death animation though. Like somebody out of Reikai Doushi, his head just pops right off no matter where you deal the final blow. With him headless, we move on to the sub-boss(es).

I thought these two looked awfully familiar when I first saw them, then it hit me.

These two are none other than Sha and Zhan, two very minor henchman from the land of Asura in Hokuto no Ken 2. Right down to the weapons and back braid. I suppose this is just typical from Data East who based quite a bit of characters heavily on manga characters (most notably Makoto Mizoguchi from the Fighter's History series being Momotaro Tsurugi from Sakigake Otokojuku). Ironically, Charry and Steeve are much more effective than the original duo (who died in like a minute), probably because I'm not playing as Kenshiro.

These two tricksters here have a wide array of ways to kill you, including a really fast rushdown, a circus-like attack in which they jump off of each others shoulders, and the attack in the inset shot where they hold you and do about 10 points of damage each time. Thank god they didn't figure out this is the best time to have the other guy attack him, or I'd die even FASTER.

These guys also can block anywhere and have it confirm defense, as opposed to me who can't block low at all. Argh.

Well they're dead. Now onto the final boss, who is...

...goddammit.

Uighur apparently also has entered the Hippodrome. Although to Pon's credit, he doesn't have a whip, rather a spiked ball who renders this fight pretty much impossible. He also doesn't have the badass vocal stylings of Daisuke Gouri, he just sorta makes this loud belching noise whenever you damage him. Oh wait, he's got something else.

A devastating shoulder attack, which Uighur also has.

To come completely clean: I was not going to tolerate losing a million times to a giant viking with a ball that hit everywhere AND the Mouko Hakyou Do, so I just cheated to skip to the credits.

The credits congratulate you for winning as it shows all the corpses of your enemies (or mostly just them in shame) as it reveals more about the 'story'.

'It's queen'...? So if Mr. Scorpio there won, he'd be getting it on with the kingdom's queen? Or even worse, Medusa? I suppose it is a good thing I cheated then.

Funny thing, that. They weren't lying. They made a sequel to this game for the SNES known as Death Brade (yes, it's called that). I dunno why they said 'wait until you see NEXT year's opponents', because the game's enemies are really lame. Maybe they said that to set me up for disappointment.

Oddly enough, too, one of the game's enemies, a cluster of snakes, is named 'Charry'. I guess he didn't want to be an assassin from Asura anymore.

They also list voice credits, and this name looked awfully familiar.

After a quick Google search, not only has he been a very important figure in Data East's life, he is also the one mostly responsible for Tattoo Assassins's creation, apparently. I have him to thank for a lot of things, apparently. Possibly for Solomon's stupid-ass attack declarations, but they don't specify who voices who.

So that's Hippodrome, the Fighting Fantasy. It's worth playing through at least once, but I dunno why you'd play it again unless you're writing a lame review about it. Nevertheless, it's a very intriguing entry in the Data East selection which spanned out more than several years, so at any rate it's interesting to at least see.

Survival Arts (Scarab, 1993)

So let's start off with a fairly obvious one. A fighting game seemingly developed by Sammy, most known for publishing Guilty Gear, was actually developed by Scarab, a sub-company within Sammy, strangely without credit. Scarab was a very obscure group of Japanese developers who had a knack for making just....weird shit. But it was cool weird shit. Not that they were greatly made games, mind you, but they were never boring things to play at any rate. Battle Monsters is the second fighting game these fellows have created, but we'll get to that soon.

And one of them was a digitized fighting game that went under the name Survival Arts.

Now, this is going to go into a debate that I'm gonna try not to incite with every review of a digitized fighting game ever, but it needs to be addressed since it plagues the mention of this game strongly.

Let's just go with a random blog post here:

"I watched a full gameplay video of it and it's obviously just a Mortal Kombat ripoff."

Obviously because Mortal Kombat was the first game to ever feature live-action sprites and deaths. Oh wait. It actually fucking wasn't. Then again the same guy complains that Dantel doesn't know actual martial arts but breathes fire. Gimme a goddamn break, like Mortal Kombat actually knew anything about martial arts. Don't even try to tell me those later 3D clunkfests prove otherwise, because they just don't work like that. Regardless, it's an absolutely dumb thing to complain about when the comparative game gets away with the same shit. Anyway.

Reikai Doushi, a....I guess beat-em-up from 1988 (a full 4 years before MK would even come out) was a game featuring digitized claymation models depicting this Chinese exorcist beating up a bunch of jiang-shi vampires. Whoever won got their heads popped clean off, which I feel like I have to clarify kills them. I've actually seen people denying this but it's just fact. I dunno what's there to argue about. Reikai Doushi was the first game to feature live action and moves to kill the opponent. Simple as that. But I'm gonna guess that obviously ripped off Mortal Kombat too...somehow.

And before I go into my actual overview of this game, I've seen a few people criticizing this game for 'bad animations'. Well, I guess it might be as terrible as they say, so I suppose I'll present SA and MK animations side by side.

Mmmhmm. Survival Arts is clearly inferior to MK in that regard...?

Well anyhoo, random faux-AVGN reviewers complaining about stuff and not actually backing their opinions up with any sort of explanation aside, it's...an interesting game at any rate. Let's start off slow and look at the characters, whose photos I just lazily swapped from ZanyVGquotes.

That is Grammy-movie-script backstory material right there. Viper, a guy who reminds me of Crispin Glover for some bizarre reason, is, I suppose, the 'main character' of the game, and is essentially what you'd call a shotoclone, but not really at the same time. Instead of a standard hadouken, it's not a projectile at all. Instead of a standard hurricane kick, his is more grounded and actually has a slow cooldown, so spamming it ain't exactly going to work. He doesn't have an uppercut at all, but an elbow dash (while yelling HEYHEYHEYHEYHEY! for style points). He also randomly has a Kenshiro's Hundred Crack Fist as a repeated press move. For a basic shoto he's one of the more interesting characters who follow the structure.

This guy, however, isn't very interesting. He has a gunshot. He has an air gunshot. That's about it. He pretty much can get by with his hilarious 'CAM ON' and 'HAAAY' soundbytes though. That and me and a circle of friends mockingly reference this goddamn horrible review of the game whenever we mention him, so now he's just The Janitor (Who Dropped His Mop), because he specifically looks like one who dropped his mop as opposed to one that never had one, apparently.

Eh. Not much to say really, although her backstory (and ending) are noticably heavily depressing. Which is the odd thing about Scarab. No matter how unintentionally amusing their results may be, both of their games play themselves off deathly seriously. It's kinda strange. But yeah. Other than her time-skipping-karate-palm move which has one of the most ear-grating noises I've ever heard, I can't say much about her. For whatever reason though, there's countless people drooling over this chick on the internet. Stay away from these people.

WHAT THIS ISN'T STRIDER HIRYU 0/10 - everyone on the internet

Although he looks pretty frail, Hiryu is by far the best character in the game. He has options for just about everything, it's absolutely ridiculous. Let's lay it out in a list:

• Ninja star projectile which has varying speeds, and he is able to manually change the trajectory of it if he wants to
• Dashing motion basically gives him a KOF-esque dodge, which none of the other characters do
• Down+right allows him to roll under projectiles
• He has quadruple jump. Eat your heart out, Chipp Zanuff.
• Wall latch (amusingly, similar to how Strider Hiryu can do it in the MVC games)

Combined with how massively damaging everything in Survival Arts is and the fact that everything is easy to combo into, this guy is a monster. Even more so to the characters who don't even have much to work with.

Like this poor soul who only has about one move, and it sucks. She somewhat has Hiryu's ducking walk  thing except it's way slower and I can't imagine it actually works out too well. I can't say much about her either other than the announcer calling her 'Erika' when you select her. The hell..?

Also to bat down the accusations of her ripping off of Kitana/Mileena in their MK2 debuts; Survival Arts was released only a short bit after MK2. Do you really think they would spend that time making a character just to mimick another one right before they were done with the game? That isn't how making video games works, people.

This guy, though. Hoo boy. This guy.

He has maybe a few moves more than Hiryu who already had far too many, and has an almost insta-kill carpet bombing move, among many, many, many others. All while yelling 'YOU DIE' and 'KILL YOU' (more like KIRYU really) in a voice that was obviously dropped 20 octaves through the use of an audio editor. I think the most jarring thing about him is that he seems like he was filmed by a completely different crew. The rest of the cast is somewhat grainy but smooth looking enough, but when Mongo animates he just looks horrible. As opposed to the rest of the cast again, his palettes look awful because they don't mesh with the changed colors well at all. Also you can see that in his portrait he's...like...all orange and stuff. Mongo is by far the reason why this game gets mocked a lot, and deservingly so in this case, namely he's sometimes hailed as a classic case of firearm-centric characters being incredibly irritating in fighting games. Well, aside from Dantel anyway....

Random tidbit: the actor for Mongo, known as Kanda David, was also credited with dialogue translation in Scarab's side scrolling game, Dyna Gear. With lines like 'do you have umbrella?' and 'this takes bitter', I'm not entirely sure he was the best pick for that job. Or, sadly, maybe he was.

Just Scarab being their weird as hell selves. A completely pale alien that fights for his two children (revealed in his ending), but other than that I can't really place what his moveset was going for. He's got Viper's Hundred Crack Fist thing but he has a dashing grapple of some sort at the same time. Oddly enough, he's the only character who dies no matter what if he loses. If he dies by a basic attack, he melts. Aliens must be really fragile in the Survival Arts universe.

Then this guy. I don't care for him much. He has only two moves but they both practically do like 50% damage anyway. His theme is unfittingly melancholy though, but it's also my favorite piece of music in the game, dull-sounding instrument samples be damned.

Lastly, I feel the boss needs no introduction:

He's been called a ripoff of many things, but come on. That is obviously Michael Bolton.

Dantel is an absolutely ludicrous boss to fight, having options for practically everything. But I'll shoot down that intimidating front by revealing something. Fight him with Gunner. Spam the gunshots. Dantel's reaction time is far too long to escape from them. Easy victory. I suppose Scarab didn't have many playtesters on their side.

Yeah yeah the characters, how about the gameplay? Well first off, I'll say this; whoever says Survival Arts is an MK ripoff clearly never played the fucking thing. It's a pretty responsive and smooth-feeling 6 button fighter which has a nice combo system going for it. At the same time, that's what kills it. Damage in this game is far FAR too high, and most combos can net you about 58% on average if you know what chains to do. There's also the weapon pick-up system, but I never bother with it, although I suppose it's an interesting idea at any rate. Interestingly there's no chip damage in the game unless you use the obtainable weapons, so I guess there's that. All in all, if you're looking for a fighter that for all it's flaws is fairly and campily fun with some neat ideas and want something amusing to play with your friends, I totally recommend getting yourself a 'copy' of this. Just don't let any of your friends know the command for Mongo's bomb move.

I might have left out a lot of essential content out of this overview, but I'm exhausted at the moment. I do plan on adding a second part, describing the stages and gameplay in more depth.

Oh god how does this work

So I might start doing some reviews of those WORST FIGHTING GAMES EVER but not being completely biased, rambling on and on about how they're 'rip-offs' and actually describing what is good and bad about them (i.e. if I whine THESE CONTROLS ARE SO BAD I will describe how, instead of just randomly playing Survival Arts and complaining about it's perfectly fine controls). Seeing how I am possibly the laziest person in the world who is just a step shy of being too unmotivated to breathe, I'm hoping I can actually do something with this. So be on the look out, I'll probably link updates to Facebook or some jazz just to make sure at least two people see it. In the meantime, have a clown juggling squirrels with a dumb grin on his face.