#110: Best of the Best: Championship Karate

Who's the best?

'Best of the Best' on its own is a name that doesn't tell me anything about the game I'm about to play. But the byline about championship karate makes it all crystal clear. This will be a karate game, and presumably one where you fight one on one in a tournament of sorts in an attempt to show you're the absolute best of the best.

Go Canada Go!

That is, in fact, exactly what we have here. There's a bit of a metagame going on where you earn money and can do training to raise your stats. You can customize your character moves, though I found that screen confusing so I didn't play around with it. I do remember using it when I was a kid and I think it was a good addition.

Canada down. 8(

The game has a cool metagame, and it actually includes Canada as a country option which always makes me happy. But is the core game any good? It felt like a pretty decent fighter as far as an SNES fighter goes. It felt pretty smooth and I feel like the pace was slow enough that you could work in counters and such if you were good.

I am not good at fighters. If I practice a whole ton I can get decent at them, but right off the hop when I don't really know the buttons I have no chance. So I got blown out here. I didn't feel super frustrated though, which probably bodes well for this being a decent if slow paced fighter.

Rating: C

#107: TKO Super Championship Boxing

TKO!

Well, I sure know what I'm getting into from the title of this game. Some sort of boxing game. Punch some dudes, knock them out. Maybe only technically knock them out, but knock them out regardless.

Licensee name on the corners? Tacky!

TKO turns out to be a game where you can move around in a 2 dimensional ring and where you have a limited amount of stamina to use on punching before you need to stop punching. There are different kinds of punches (jabs, hooks, etc...) and different ways to dodge a punch. Unfortunately the controls are garbage and I could never figure out how to dodge at all, let alone how to choose which dodge to use. The AI could dodge though, so as soon as I got past the first couple fights and they started dodging I was screwed.

I feel like laying down some tar...

The 2 dimensional aspect had the same 'problem' as Double Dragon did, which was the AI wasn't very good at working out how to attack someone not on the same plane as them. So it was pretty easy to strafe up and down in order to attack when I had full stamina and flee when I wanted to regenerate. It worked like a charm until the AI learned to block and then I was in trouble.

The game had a neat leveling system where after each win I'd get to pick one of five ways to train which would raise a stat and make me better at something. I like this idea a lot. If only it wasn't in a game that was pretty bad otherwise...

Rating: D

#80: George Foreman's KO Boxing

Stick to the grills, Georgie.

I remember George Foreman for his TV show and his meat grills. He was also quite the boxer and has several records relating to his world heavyweight championship victory at the age of 45. This game came out in the middle of his 'old man comeback' and plays up the fact that he's still just as strong a puncher as he was in his youth.

PHYSICS!

Unfortunately while the game claims he's still a powerful puncher the game itself disputes that quite heavily. You play as George Foreman and you do no damage with your punches. You need to land dozens of punches to do the same amount of damage that your opponent does in a single punch. George Foreman was reknown for winning by knockout; I won two matches and they were both by decision.

PS: Eat Doritos.

Take a look at that stat line! I landed 35 more punches and yet I got knocked down and he didn't. The first guy was pretty easy to dodge and counter attack so I can almost see why they'd want to set it up this way... But I'm supposed to be the awesome George Foreman. If the first guy is easy to dodge and counter attack so be it. Let me lay him out! Let me murder him! That's what boxing is all about!

On the plus side the game had voice overs and I like the way the faces get beat up as the fighters take damage. On the down side George Foreman doesn't do enough damage and that's a really big down side. Having Little Mac need to dodge and punch a bajillion times to take out Mike Tyson feels like it might make sense. But having George Foreman need to dodge every single punch and land a ton himself to get ahead? Sorry, that's just not right.

Rating: D-

#67: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Warrior or Worrier?

I will admit to being very surprised when I went to load up this game. Apparently there are 11 different Street Fighter II roms that were in the download pack I found when I started this little adventure. I played a fair amount of SNES SFII way back in the day, but I think it was mostly on the Turbo edition.

Uh, Gief? I don't think that's appropriate touching.

I kicked things off with my favourite character, Zangief! The gigantic bear wrestling dude from Russia. I do recall that some versions of the game have a terrible Gief, and some versions have a truly terribly Gief. And one version had an absurd Gief where his spin made him fly and he'd wrap around the top of the screen back to the bottom. This version has a truly terrible Gief. He doesn't move at all when he spins and he has no other move. A bunch of throws, which are impossible to use on a smart opponent. The AI did not start smart, so I got to murder them with Gief. Then they stopped being bad and I couldn't win.

YA-TSA!

I beat a few people with Ken, and then got stuck on Mike Tyson Balrog. Eventually I decided to pull out the big guns and use the cheating fat man on him. Cheating fat man doesn't really get to cheat in this version (Honda is rooting when using his hundred hand punch) but just standing still with it up was good enough. Balrog had no way to attack me through it, and eventually got bored and threw himself into the hands. Over and over until I won.

Then Vega blew me up and I got bored and quit. Street Fighter is still a great game, regardless. Better against a human instead of just the AI, but still fun.

Rating: B+

#45: WWF Super Wrestlemania

Eat your vitamins, kids!

I have always been a WWF/WWE fan. I rarely find time to watch on tv anymore, and I haven't seen a Pay Per View event in many years, but I still enjoy tuning in from time to time. As a big gamer who likes wrestling you'd expect I'd like this game...

OH YEAH!

You'd be right! I used to play wrestling games in the arcade, and on the SNES, and a ton of them on the N64. I definitely played a lot of this particular game as a kid. It has a survivor series mode where each team has 4 characters on it, and I definitely had to give that a spin. My team was captained by The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase and was rounded out by The Natural Disasters (Earthquake and Typhoon) and The Macho Man Randy Savage. Snap into a Slim Jim! The computer chose Hulk Hogan, Sid Justice, and The Legion of Doom (Hawk and Animal).

WOO!

Wrestling games eventually evolved with lots of bells and whistles. Characters would get access to their signature moves. You could get steel chairs from the stands. This game is before those times, but was still very fun. The controls are relatively smooth and make sense. They use 6 buttons, which is great! The characters may not have special moves but they do look the parts at least. The Million Dollar Man and Earthquake were my two favourite wrestlers as a kid, and I hated Hulk Hogan, so it was a good blast of nostalgia to be able to take Hogan down with Earthquake.

I haven't played a new generation wrestling game, and now I'm tempted to try to track an xBox 360 one down...

Rating: A

#43: Pit-Fighter

FIGHT!

I remember renting Pit-Fighter as a kid. Once. I don't have terribly fond memories of the game, but I didn't really remember it as being abysmally terrible. Turns out my memory isn't great.

Alas, poor Buzz.

Pit-Fighter is a 3d ring fighting game. Punch, kick, jump, do some throws. That sort of thing. MMA before there was a real MMA. I know you can punch, kick, and do throws because that's what Exec up there was doing to me. He even got me in a piledriver! For my part I was hitting buttons, which seemed to randomly flail in bad directions, and then getting killed.

What game?

I took a look on the internet to see if I was missing something, but it seems like no. Maybe the game is better with 2 players since then both of you flail around randomly until one of you dies. I'm sure that's how we played when we rented it, so maybe the issue is just the AI is too good. I don't know. Pit-Fighter was apparently ground breaking in that it used footage of actual actors to build the fighters. Also it was an arcade game that got ported around. If there's one thing I'm learning it's that arcade games that get ported to the SNES are _terrible_.

Rating: F-

#15: Ultraman Towards The Future

So, moving forward at one second per second?

Ultraman was one of the first games I remember my brother and I renting for our SNES. I don't remember it being terribly engrossing. But is that just my mind playing tricks on me?

Kick!

No, my memory was actually pretty spot on. This game is terrible. It's a fighting game where you have no special moves. No combos. No ability to really defend yourself. It feels like your only hope of winning is to have the AI decide to lose since it seems to have ranged attacks and you don't.

HOW?!?

Ok, that's not quite true. You build up special power in the middle of the screen and can consume a good amount of it to fire off a slow, bad, ranged attack. This was my plan for the first fight and I got the enemy out of health. Woo! But then it just flashed FINISH in his health bar and I had no idea how to do that. Eventually I built up a full special meter and then randomly hit R. It changed which projectile my special ability button would fire. Crank it all the way to the top setting and hit a FINISH enemy with it to blow them up. So I found a way to progress which was nice but it meant I couldn't use any special moves in order to conserve killing blow power. (I ended up dying on the first guy while I figured this out but then was able to take out 4 guys in a row.)

DUN DUN DUUUUN!

I went to check if I was missing any moves or anything that would make the game more interesting than 'try to barely clip the monster with the edge of your kick while hoping he chooses not to kill me' and it turns out no. I also discovered that Ultraman was actually HUGE in Japan. There was a live action television show that was hugely popular where a guy in an Ultraman suit would throw pathetic punches and kicks at a guy in a monster suit. The SNES game seems to emulate that pretty well. Maybe they weren't trying to make a quality fighting game. Maybe they were trying to make a true Ultraman game. And maybe the kids in Japan ate it up. As a kid in Canada who'd never seen an Ultraman tv show this was just a bad game. And it remains that way today.

Rating: F