(This next game got its attention for 1 reason, It got the actor who played Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat fired. Since I fucking hated Johnny cage, I'll give this travesty some credit. At least we didn't have to see that egotistical pansy ruin Mortal Kombat 3 (that game ruined itself).
I won't name the actor who played Cage, but I'm sure you can google it if you'd like. The actor had appeared in a magazine ad dressed as the Johnny Cage character standing next to a cabinet to an arcade game that Midway didn't make, with his hand on the controls. Midway fired him because of his presence in that ad being a contractual no-no. I remember seeing him in the ad as well in a game magazine back in the day, smiling his ass off, which was obviously Oscar-worthy acting because the game he stood next to wasn't worth cracking a smile.
If a game maker is going to hijack a mascot from someone else's franchise then that might tell you that the company really is into being shady. Frankly thats like getting Sega to have Mario appear in an ad for its next Sonic game. You know what other buisnesses are this shady? The Mafia.)
BloodStorm
Incredible Technologies/Chun Soft/ Strata
1994
I won't bother talking you through the craze and hype of Mortal Kombat again, because we all saw it and I already have enough MK pages to sink your ship. In this vain however, Strata needed to compete with the famous fighting game. Its previous try-TimeKillers, wasn't cutting it and they needed to follow that with a much more vile fighter that would get the sadists of arcades to drop them their quarters. One would expect them to give up the failed formula of Timekillers and try something new, get better artists, animate characters better, throw in some nudity, make the game fun, or for goods sake have a better way of attacking other that just mashing buttons into the floor. But NOOOOOO.
Mortal Kombat had blood, and was famous. So the makers of another way-to-violent-game, came up with a game more bloody than MK and its Timekillers game combined. They called it Bloodstorm.
[Game Developer: Hey chief, You know that insanely red and bloody game that were working on, well dammit, I just can't think of a name for it.
45-year-old-Game Developers' boss: Well the best way to sell a game is to give it a good name, not just make it fun and re-playable there, sonny. If we have that we'll take the arcade world by storm!
Developer: IT GOT IT! Blood,... Storm! Blood Storm! We can even remove the space in the middle of the 2 words and make it ONE word. We can invent a word!
Boss: Good job, sonny. Now get out of my office and feed my ostriches.]
Using the finest cheap comic book artists from England, and the greatest animators of Mrs. Cornholepeckers 5th grade class, they cranked out a fighting game filled with characters that made no sense, all fighting for the most original prize that any hero or villain could fight for: World domination! Yeah makes sense, no fictional protagonist/antagonist has EVER wanted that before.
These fighters all get something about their look that either makes them very futuristic or very primitive. All of them are ridiculous in some way or form, from either having a giant concrete fist to smash you with, having a bionic eye or fighting in a thong.
Excess ensues on an even grander scale. Characters can lose limbs thus giving the other guy an advantage. Once you've lost both arms your stuck with using your feet or at worse, headbutting. Its just that sad. This game features a block button as well ala Mortal Kombat. Why, you might ask? Because anyone who liked using the 'hold back' feature of Timekillers will surely go mutinous and move on. One could guess they were trying to piss people off.
Blood fills the screen in larger amounts, like in Kill Bill Vol1 or this game wasn't trying to be funny with it. Heads can be cut off at anytime by any opponent via 'death moves' that can be even executed at the beginning of a match (mind you, the CPU always blocks it, unless they are 'stunned').
This game tries to be innovative to the eyes by giving us some rendered 3d objects to use as weapons. The end result looks like crap, a cartoon character armed with a CGI-looking rocket launcher on his back. It doesn't look right, in fact it looks cheap. You can either be an animated game with cartoon-ish graphics or a CGI game, both together look like ass. Each character in the game has a CGI looking weapon and after you defeat a character you can steal it. Shoulder mounted rocket launchers, optical laser eyes, giant concrete fists, and belts with pockets that carry explosives. By the end of the game your fighter looks like he or she could lighten the load a bit, trying to carry enough gear to start a war.
This little ditty has tons of unneeded and who-gives-a-shit secrets. If you win a match in a special way, you get to fight against a secret hidden super tough boss, don't worry about losing those fights though, the match is only for shits, giggles, frustration, and the off chance of higher points. I've encountered two of these travesties, one is named Blood which is a red clad fighter with a red body, and a distracting, moving spraying blood splatter for a head. The other fighter I found was called "Shadow" who is a character that is invisible and forces you to follow his shadow on the floor. I have yet to beat these challengers, mostly due to the cheap bastard AI this game uses. I also found it just a little too easy to get access to fighting the secret characters, which makes this game even more of a pain in the ass. No one wants a CHORE of fighting an impossible cheap opponent just because they lopped off a head at the end of a match.
Speaking of cheap, the bosses of this game suck too, one of them being a rendered polygon 3d robot that towers to about 15 feet tall. I can't really describe it, its just the lamest damn fighting game character. Its like MK3's Motaro only way dumber and lazier in the design department. The other boss is a flying character that looks like a 1st generation CGI looking bat. If fighting against a boss the size of a damn mosquito sounds like fun to you, then please don't ever mate. The fact that I cannot be any more descriptive, or remember their names is a bad sign too.
Incredible Technologies no longer exists as a game developer as far as I know. The thing that surprises me the most is that BloodStorm was even getting prepped for a sequel before that company imploded. Those out there looking for a good hybrid of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat should just try Timekillers, and they'll see why gore and cartoons in video games is a tightrope walk between art and playability, and clearly Incredible just didn't walk it.
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