Worst Fighting Games of the 1990's part 1

This list begins with a bang, the kind of bang that comes out of an ass. I've yet to decide just how many games will appear on this list, but I am hoping to get to at least 5 or more. Considering what kind of shit came out in the 1990's, that won't be too hard. This was a time when video games were really trying to experiment with things, from full motion video, to polygon based graphics. It takes a considerable failure to make it here, a company has to make a game that doesn't just suck, it also has to waste things, like time, money, logic, and even sanity. Some failures start off with good ideas but then just end in horror and im starting off with that here.

I should also point out that this list isn't in any kind of order, the reasoning behind that is due to my inablilty to really name what sucks the most. These games all are equally shitty.

Ask anyone what would be a fun fight to watch, weather they be a man on the streets, a businessman in a suit, or an african tribesman with a large bone ring in his nose. Most of them would tell you that dinosaurs and giant apes would be fun. Thank God that Atari answered that prayer and gave us the hit game, Primal Rage. The second thing they would answer is large robots, metal machines of death armed with sharp blades, lazer guns, or SOMETHING that they would use to emaciate each other. One such game answered that prayer and gave us a shit game called Rise of the Robots.

Rise of the Robots

1994

Time Warner Interactive/Mirage

SNES,Genesis, and also the losers of the 90's like the 3do, CDi, Amiga and the like.

This game had it all going for it, or so it seemed on the outside of the box it came in. The graphics to ROTR were all computer generated in the style of games like Killer Instinct. This game was all about robots kicking each others metal asses and taking model names, all for the sake of finding out who was built better. The story to this game is kinda typical, following a plot of an evil company doing bad things involving robots and getting them to fight rather that just have an all out war. No one followed plots of video games back in these days, so who gave a damn WHY the robots were fighting, just throw them into a ring and watch them bash each other.

This game had 7 fighters, all of them ranging from robots with human forms, to machines that look like forklifts with legs, spider robots, hell even a gorilla robot. Before matches, each robot had a cool opening movie to introduce themselves, seeing this happen on a SNES was unbelieveable. The games opening title screen reminded me of Super Street Fighter 2's Ryu opener. The look of this game was not seen on the 16 bit systems and the aforementioned Killer Instinct was still a year away. Lets also not forget that this was a fighting game with ROBOTS, so what could go wrong,? You'd have to work really hard for a concept like that to fail.

The main fighter, the 'Ryu' protagonist of ROTR is a fighter called ECO35-2, or 'Coton' for short. Now if you think that name is fucking dumb then wait till you meet the rest of them. The other fighters are called:

Loader

Builder

Crusher

Military

Sentry

The Supervisor

If you want background information on this motley bunch of recycled tin-canned-ass-bags, then just read thier name, thats how imaginative the developers were willing to go. Now, one would hope that even a game like this could at least give you a good selection of these characters, right? Right?

Wrong, if you were player one, you were shit out of luck. You only got to play as 1 damn fighter:

ECO35-2 thats it. In two player made player two could pick them all, even the boss- The Supervisor was availiable if you entered the cheat. Meanwhile player one is stuck with the blue, generic, bland way-too-human to be a robot fighter: ECO35-2.

This game can be beaten in one sitting. Its way too simple. The AI genius of this game is hard however if you try to think that this game is even remotely complex. The controls are set up exactly like Street Fighter 2 in that you have 3 punches and 3 kicks, all of which look the same but are performed at different speeds and inflict less or more damage. The key to winning this isn't anything special or difficult, no combos needed and no special moves. The key to survival in ROTR is walking your clunky, blue, slow ass robot towards your enemy and hitting the punch button and then... repeat. I've never completed a game so easily, and frankly the games ending for just 1 character didn't make me feel good for finishing this piece of shit.

Graphics sell this game as I have mentioned, and sound gets a few points too. The package and ads for this game noted Queen Guitarist Brian May scoring the soundtrack but in fact his track called 'The Dark' is the only song that made it on the main intro screen. I guess the designers for ROTR tested this game while their Cd player at the office played hits like 'Bicycle' or 'Radio ga-ga' and thought it would rock. No insult to Brian May at all, he's a guitar legend, but this project was NOT for him. Queen is ok, but not for a fighting game. While fighting you'll hear energizing music and lots of samples of what resembles metal hitting metal sounds, which works for it. No voice samples are in this game, no announcer yelling FIGHT! Lame.

Thankfully this was a rental at a Blockbuster and I wasn't a sorry bastard that actually went out and bought this. Otherwise this game would have been tied to a brick and thrown through a window of a Walmart. The even scarier part is that this game had sequal that appered on the Sony PSone and the Saturn, which got the same reception as the first game. No one can learn sometimes.

There was a lot of innovative gaming systems comming out in the mid-90's and a lot of them tanked. This game wasn't bad enough to kill the Nintendo SNES or the Sega Genesis, but it probably had its hand in on killing the 3do, and CDi systems ever so slowly. So while your cruising Ebay don't be surprised if Rise of the Robots is a pack in game for someone trying to rid themselves of a CDi or 3do system, they're just trying to get rid of the financial hex put on them from that fateful day when they had spent 500 plus dollars into what was supposed to be the newest generation of gaming system and what could have been a original and creative fighting game if only the folks at Mirage gave more than a damn.

Diamonds and Dogshit Report- Dogshit- Nintendo starts seeing red

I am currently writing an article about Sega and its rise and fall. Ultimately that piece of writing will be a truthful and brutally honest commentary on HOW that company blew it and now no longer makes consoles. But in the process of writing that, I thought: Nintendo has had some stinkers too. The Power Glove was Nintendo's worst peripheral back in the 80's, so bad that even its 90 minute movie/commercial starring Fred Savage (The Wizard) couldn't save it. That however was the 80's and I hadn't gotten into gaming then. Nintendo enjoyed a prosperous and well deserved place at the top back in the 1990's with the SNES and its Gameboy systems, which gives good reason that they would take some risks, try to cash in on a trend, and then lose.

Nintendo loves to try something new weather its needed or not. Lately they've released the Nintendo DS, a portable with 2 screens, one of them being a touch screen, not to mention N64 graphic and sound capabilities. So far that has been a success, even as currently the Game Cube is eating the dust of the original Xbox and PS2, Nintendo manages to keep afloat with its portable market. But Nintendo can't afford to fuck things up now, drastic moves in the wrong direction will send them into bankruptcy and force them to join the ranks with Atari and Sega as 'failed console companies'. As far as consoles Nintendo only has 1 failure: The Virtual Boy.

In the 1990's Virtual Reality was this buzzword that hit the gaming world by storm and it seemed to have one common element that would make an ordinary game seem like a virtual game: a screen inside a pair of large goggles. If the screen was 2 inches away from your face than you suddenly were IN the game. Games like Doom and Hexen gave us a new genre called the 'first person shooter'. This was a time when people didn't want to just SEE Mario beat king Kuppa they wanted to BE Mario and beat king Kuppa. Trouble is, console makers really didn't know what to do with VR. Sega had a cool VR system in the works but it never made it past the prototype phase. Even the Atari Jaguar had a VR system planned as a cool peripheral. Nintendo ran with this concept and the inventor of the Gameboy, Gunpei Yokoi dreamed up a product.

The VB came out in 1995 and on the outside this thing looked pretty,... interesting. VB looked like a pair of huge googles mounted on the tripod. This device has some interesting hardware inside, such as a 32 bit processor. Another thing that made this thing unique was its ability to play a different set of graphics in each eye creating an illusion of 3d, similar to the effects used to make 3d glasses. The controller was pretty innovative being that it was made to be switchable between left and right handed. Not a horrible idea in all, but it came with one HUGE flaw. Red graphics!

This thing only had 2 colors in its display, red and black. Games like Mario Tennis on this machine gave the impression that our favorite Italian plumber was playing tennis in Hell. Red Mario hitting the red ball to Red Yoshi, under a black sky. That is tennis in Hell, not the usual bright happy place Mario dwells and roams. I could mention other games but honestly this was all I had played. I remember displays of this thing set up at Blockbusters. I was so young at the time and even then I was soooo not impressed. I played about 2 minutes of Mario Tennis before my eyes began to hurt a little. This machine had a manual that was loaded with warnings telling kids to not play this thing for more that an hour and take breaks to rest your eyes. Hmm I wonder just HOW they found out that this thing was dangerous to eyes?

Maybe it was timing, maybe it was lack of software, maybe it was the red screen, or fuck perhaps the fact that after an hour your got a headache while using this thing, truthfully this thing has all this to blame for its failure. The price didn't help either: $169.00. A Game Boy with its green and white screen didn't cost more that $40 at this point in time, and at least that thing didn't cause eye damage unless you played the fucking thing in the dark. Few games were made for this machine. None of them really took advantage of the 'virtual' concept of putting you IN the game, most of the games just showed you a Viewmaster effect, but in motion. In less than a year Nintendo stopped pushing this device and began focusing a little more on the N64. Smart move.

Gunpei was fired after this, which is really a sad loss. The Game Boy he invented was THE system that made the industry rethink of the handheld market as something to take seriously. In 1997 he was killed in a car accident after losing his job at Nintendo.

Was it fate? If it is then that makes the Virtual Boy responsible for murder. The Jaguar sucked, but the worst of that fallout was that a few designers and programmers might have had to go look for another job. Nintendo now has hand helds that rock and all of them are made to the standard that Gunpei had always wanted, for example he had origionally said 'no' to a color version of the Game Boy until technology was made to make the battery life longer. This is one the reasons color game units like the Sega Game Gear didn't hold a great fight against the 'green giant' Game Boy. Gunpei is rumored to have said that the VB wasn't to his liking when it was released and was rushed out too early, and he was absolutely right. A year after his death the Game Boy color came out and the rest is history.

I make trips to antique shops and Goodwills alot. I'm looking for things like this. I don't know why but I love a loser. I can't really explain it. Oh well.

The Death of a Once Great Console Developer

Between each entry of this top 5 list, I will be taking a moment to write, criticize, rant, praise or maybe even cry about something from the lovely 90's era of gaming. There is really not much logic to this, living in the past is bad for us, so they say, but these are undoubtedly the very things that made gaming what it is now.

These little reports will be classified and filed in two forms, weather this innovation or game is a diamond that made gaming rock, or dogshit that failed. This is the Diamonds and Dogshit report. I'll start with dogshit, its more fun to write about a failure rather than remembering and groveling at the feet of something that everyone loves. Failures are also way more important because the rest of the world can learn from it.

Entry 1

Atari's last stand.

I am too young to remember the Atari 2600 when it was in its prime, but I have messed around with one. When I was little, and long before my parents finally broke down and bought me a Gameboy, I got to play an Atari system at a mom's friends house. The NES was already in full swing and was blowing people away all over the world, but my mom's friend wasn't that far ahead. This friend was a black woman with a family that lived out in the 'hood (no this is not a bad joke I’m writing). Whenever I came over to their home I immediately ran into their sons room and fired up his Atari 2600 and played games like... damn I can't remember, but in all seriousness few people do. With all due respect to the first big video gaming system, most of the Atari 2600 games look the same. That is how I remembered the Atari company name years later when I was a SNES fan, and Atari released a system that was supposed to outperform and REPLACE my beloved SNES system.

I was an avid reader of EGM in those days and at that time the magazine was about 30% content, articles and reviews and 70% ads. Those ads featured some promising products, some obscure some major, and most not worth your money. In the pages of game and peripheral ads, a new system was emerging on the horizon called the Atari Jaguar, a 64 bit system with a familiar name behind it. I was impressed by some of the screenshots that I saw from some of its games like Alien vs Predator (plus the idea of playing a game based on Aliens, marines and Predators fighting was bad ass to me).

The console itself looked cool. Black and sleek like the Genesis, but compact. It was a cartridge system and from the pics I’ve seen it only has one button on the console to turn it on, no reset button or eject lever. The controller looked a little odd. It was huge and had a numerical keypad on it, but what made it a controller for games was that it also had three action buttons and a directional pad also just like a Genesis model 1 but with 13 extra buttons. How this thing was going to be used to play a 6 button fighting game I had no idea but the whole thing sparked curiosity to my 13 year old mind.

I didn't really realize in those days that Atari had a bad reputation. I never even knew about the horrors of its Pac-man translation and the failure of the ET game on the 2600 system. I had no knowledge of the gaming crash of 83-84, and how should I know these things? After all I was 13 years old and eager to find something that could replace my SNES and the only other new system on the market at that time was the 3do, a system to complicated for me to really follow not to mention cost about $700 (whoa). There was also the Sega CD attachment but at that time I wasn't interested in Night Trap (who the hell was?) I guess back then I was afraid of CD's. It was truly a big decade for gaming and every company including Phillips were making video gaming machines that we all know now really sucked.

I gawked at the cool screen shots of the 'Jag' in action. AvP looked like and awesome riot of a game, shooting aliens and even playing as one, what wasn't there to like? I was a Doom fan in those days and was dying to play it on a system and was in awe of seeing that it was a Jaguar title. Another great shooter was Wolfenstien 3d and that made it to the system. It seemed like all the great first generation FPS's were being made for Atari's new 64 bitter.

I won't lie I wanted one of these things. I believed that Atari's new system was 64 bits. I was young and stupid and as it turns out... that was the kind of consumer Atari wanted. I, however was also a poor consumer unwilling to shell out $300 dollars for a system when I already owned an SNES and a Genesis (both bought from pawn shops). As time went on I heard less and less about this machine and I never really knew why until now.

I've done my homework on this system recently, I don't know why but I was curious after all these years as to know just WHY this thing didn't move. The most well known and talked about reason is that this gaming system might NOT have been truly 64 bits and the worst part is that its debatable even all these years later. In the 90's of gaming people cared about BITS. Bit were like inches on the dick of your gaming system, the more the better. Atari's 64 bit system had 2 32bit processors inside it that worked together, but according to many of the Jag's critics that doesn't cut it as being truly 64 bits. The system really performed at a level of a 'cart based' 32 bitter. As a result, Atari had an ad campaign called "Do the math" and the company worked with that slogan thinking that companies like Sega, Sony and Nintendo would never strike back. Boy did Atari screw up.

Games continued to come out for this system and they got reviews that would make Simon Cowell cringe. Look at a 'worst games ever' list and expect a few or more Jag titles to show. Many of the games suffered from poor graphics that didn't look all that better than what an SNES could do. To make matters worse for Atari and its feline system, Sony was getting ready to unveil a finished product that was on their drawing board since 1986, The Playstation and Sega was already making some waves with their Saturn System.

Sam Tramiel, Atari's president and CEO in those days must have been getting desperate and he should have been. Their Jag wasn't doing well and just because you have a few good shooters doesn't mean you have success. The system was currently on life support in terms of sales, and it games were not the prescription to help heal it. They hadn't sold as many units as they had wanted, even when the price was dropped to $149. Sam decided to put his foot down... too bad it was onto a nail.

He was interviewed shortly before the release of the Sony Playstation. Maybe it was the desperation, maybe it was the lack of sales but he had to say something to appease the industry into thinking he was going to win come hell or high fuckin water. The interview is available (go ahead and google it) but in short, its all overly optimistic crazy talk. it’s a funny little thing to read, something that gaming geeks can chuckle over.

Here is a little gem quote from it, straight from Sam's mouth:

"The PlayStation, I must say, is a little, little bit more powerful in certain areas -- but not in others -- it's a little bit more stronger machine than Jaguar. A little, little bit."

A video of this interview would be something to see. I wonder if this man's nose grew. Anyways, he even gave Atari's potential future customers something to look foward to, the Jaguar 2 system that was in the works at the time of that interview. The rest of it is fancy talk and touting about how the future looked for the Jag. One thing was certain and was going to happen regardless of what mr.Tramiel said: The Playstation was ready to stomp a mud hole into the Jaguar's ass.

Sony debuted the Playstation, Sega released its Saturn and Nintendo came out with a 64 bit system that was believably and undisputedly 64 bits. Atari's fate was sealed. It didn't matter WHAT game it made, it made no difference, they were competing with the big boys. Atari came out with a CD drive that attached to the Jag, but it was like trying to revive a skeleton. 13 Jaguar CD games exist, I haven't played or even really seen them but I’m sure they suck.
Atari closed shop and ditched the Jaguar 2 project, rumor has it there are probably prototypes of that 'Jaguar Duo' floating about but screw that noise, its just a damn rumor about a shitty system. Atari has left the console market, and I must say its kinda sad. Atari's console days had a traveled a long road only to swerve off of it and hit a tree due to it being drunk on 'bad marketing' rum or 'bad idea' gin. Atari’s 7800 got outdone by Nintendo when the NES came out. Atari would have been the distributor of that now classic and famous NES but when a CEO working for Atari back in the early 80's blew his stack in rage at Nintendo's suits during an electronics convention and accused Nintendo of double dealing when he saw that another company called Celeco got the rights to Donkey Kong, Nintendo cancelled the deal and went into the US market without Atari's help and became the new kings in home video gaming. Atari may have missed out on billions (billions with a ‘B’ ). The Atari Lynx- a handheld with a full color screen- got creamed by the less powerful green-and-white-screened Nintendo Gameboy, and it could be blamed due to the Gameboy being cheaper at the time to appeal to a parent when shopping for their kids' holiday gift. It might have been easier for Atari in the 1970's when your competing against PONG machines but innovation- the father of invention- must step in eventually and another great electronics company will try to strike you out.

There is no chance that Atari will go back to consoles but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the greats that they once made. Go to a wal-mart and you'll find plug and play devices that allow you to relive the classics like Pitfall or Space Invaders and more for around 20 bucks. You can also find roms now on various online emulation websites for free. There is even Jaguar emulators that play the Jag games (if you simply just can't let go). Atari made games for everyone, and there is still even a homebrew scene of people that make games. Atari isn't dead to the world yet, and to this writer, I am glad.

Atari is now a publisher, making games for the companies that handed their ass to them. Atari's mark is on games like the 90's dino-fighting hit Primal Rage and the over-hyped Enter the Matrix, and the multiplayer FPS Unreal Tournament series. There is even a band called 'The Atari's'.

So maybe the industry is wrong, maybe there is a chance for Atari to make a comeback. No one would see that shit coming, an Atari system competing against Microsoft! No doubt it will be named after an animal. The Atari Marmoset?

Don't hold your breath.

I still want a Jag. I've got a Jaguar emulator on my computer and I’ve played AvP and to be honest im not impressed, nor would I be at the age of 13 or even 6. I'll have more on that game later but at least I got to experience the best the Jag could offer and I now know why it flopped. Perhaps I’m just a man looking to collect something that I grew up hearing about, and maybe in about 40 years from now- I can be on Antiques Roadshow and have an appraiser of electronics tell me that my 1990’s relic ain’t worth squat. There is a chance for some gaming systems to be worth money, like the Commodore 64, and the Neo Geo (granted the Neo Geo still rocks after all these years) they’re people out there that would sell their car for a Neo Geo. Someday when I’m at a Goodwill I'll find a Jaguar in a stack of 8 track players I’m still gonna buy it, after all its Goodwill and its for a good cause.