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Review: Fighter’s History Dynamite |
Part two of our ongoing “man-breasts” week
After the wonderful Tongue of the Fatman review on Friday - demand for more games starring sweaty, jiggling, bald man-mountains was immense; hence, Fighter’s History Dynamite, also known as Karnov’s Revenge.
Now if you’ve been playing fighting games for any length of time, it’s likely that you’ll have heard of the Fighter’s History games. For one, they were central to the infamous “Capcom vs. Data East” lawsuit of 1994 - where Cappy unsuccesfully sued Data East for allegedly copying Streetfighter’s characters and game features. (there’s a detailed report here.)
Secondly, while you were playing SF2T back in ‘93 - you probably will have looked over to the machine next to you, wondering what sort of stupid game has characters shouting things like “Baked Potato!” and “Live or Die!” and been amused by the blatant SF2 character rip-offs contained therein.
Amazingly, that same game spawned a CE-style upgrade; Fighter’s History Dynamite.
Released in 1994, at a time when the “fighting game craze” was at its peak, FHD was one of the more proficient SF cash-ins. It’s nothing special, but compared to some of the garbage that was churned out to profit on the popularity of the genre - it has its moments.
Whatever event that happened in the first game is now over (yes, I am the research king) - but now the “champions are back in town” according to the intro and now they’re looking for revenge. Such an excellent plot, why anything else happens is a total mystery - but I guess you wouldn’t know M. Bison was the head of an evil criminal organisation just by playing SF2 as Ken, what can I say?
So all these fighters are back together, the bosses from the first game are now selectable, and judging from the FH FAQ I found, new moves have been added (one thing I noticed in the lawsuit details; one of Capcom’s grounds for suing was that FH used the same 6-button control system … even though FH uses a KOF-like four-button system >_< )
However the game still takes a lot of its cues from SF2 .. moves are charges or quarter and half-circles and involve projectiles, anti-airs and rush/dash attacks. The "two-in-one" combo system is the same in theory, though most characters only have one or two combos. There are also such 'types' as big, slow grapplers, small quick characters, fireball/uppercut characters and so on.
If it was a perfect copy of the SF engine, it would be good, no, great - however there are several things that let it down both in terms of gameplay and also in design and execution.
One of the first things I noticed was how hard it is to hit the opponent. Not because they block and dodge so much, but because many of the normal moves are just stupidly designed. Jean Pierre's jump RH is a fine example of this - it only hits for a brief moment in the entire animation and if you connect either before or after this split-second, it looks like it should connect, but it won't. Annoying. Feilin's jump RH is the same. It's partially because the hit detection is suspect as well, jumping in often becomes jumping over; and it's actually quite tough to tell if you've connected or not, seeing as the hit sparks seem to randomly be pink, green, white, blue or yellow. Ugh.
The physics are slightly off as well. Jump arcs feel 'short' and the whole thing feels horizontally 'squashed' somehow.
All this makes it a frustrating game to play - never being sure you'll connect, or not being sure if it was a blocked strike or a successful one is not exactly condusive to fun. Nor indeed is the AI - just playing it on default level (4) becomes very hard after the second fight. It's not "good AI" hard either, it's difficulty borne out of attacks not hitting, cross-ups not crossing up, poor controls (charging is very unreliable) and physics ... it's the worst kind of frustration - the type where I, the player isn't at fault, but the game itself is. Boohoo.
There's also the suspect (though admittedly novel) 'dizzy' feature. Unlike other fighters, dizzying the opponent is not a matter of hitting them repeatedly within a certain period of time - in FHD every character has a "weak point" on their body - be it their headband, kneepads, chest armour, logo on their shirt or whatever. Hitting this enough times (three seems to be the minimum) will cause it to flash white, then "break" - causing a dizzy. Like I said, it's a novel idea, but not a great one. As with many things in the game it's execution is rather random - sometimes it's three hits, sometimes five, and of course there's the inherent gameplay problems it brings. Fighter’s History Dynamite doesn’t seem to have heard of “damage scaling” … so a three-hit combo that does 50% life and causes a dizzy, can be done again to kill. Woo. I’m torn between the novelty factor and the interesting idea of each character having to guard a certain point of their body, and the crapness of 8-second KO’s.
Playing FHD is boring. It lacks features, and unlike the older SF’s or KOF’s, just isn’t strong enough to get on without supers, EX moves, guard meters etc. Playing it by myself soon became tedious - and there are thirteen characters to fight through. Ten would have been fine, but thirteen is just too many.
It’s nothing special to look at or listen to either. Every time I play it, I just get the overwhelming sensation that the people who drew the characters, the backgrounds, the sprites — that these people just couldn’t draw. SF2 does better in every category. There’s so many animations that look totally wrong, so many poses that are out of proportion - so many backgrounds that lack depth,composition, imagination or originality.
Originality? Hah! Failed lawsuit or not it’s clear whose shoulder Data East were looking over when they designed the characters. We have a karate fellow with a headband, who does fireballs, a spinning kick and an uppercut. There’s a fast Chinese girl with muscular legs who says “yatta!” in her second win pose and has a rapid kick move activated by jamming on the kick buttons. We have a huge, slow, bearded grappler; a fruity, rose-wielding acrobatic European, a cocky blonde American guy; a spiky haired man with a somersault kick and spinning, boomerang-like projectile …. a Muay Thai master with bandages on his hands and feet with a RISING KNEE ATTACK FFS!!!
Needless to say, they’re pretty lame. Poor art styles, stupid moves, speech and poses … most of them are just crappy. I quite like Clown the uh Clown, with his deranged laugh and “Pick a card!” projectile …but he’s the only one with any real worth. Karnov himself is a dull final boss, puking fire and flying across the screen like a blubbery torpedo.
The music and voices are as uninspiring as the characters … sometimes vague attempts to match location with song (some stereotypical French-sounding music for example) but nothing really catchy or atmosphere-creating. The sound samples are delightfully inane … I mentioned “Baked Potato!” (Big Tornado) and “Live or Die!” (no idea) at the start - but everyone says stupid, barely comprehensible things, plus a lot of grunts, laughs and “YEAH!”s. And Mizoguchi says “Boo-Gee-Gah!” when he wins - fantastic stuff.
FHD has a fairly playable fighting game somewhere inside it, fighting to get out. It’s just it’s buried under layers of bad design, unoriginality, gameplay faults, control problems and wretched characters. In fact it’s buried so deep it’s not really worth digging up. So let’s leave it for future generations to laugh at.
One last thing thing I noticed - Lee has two moves that are identical to Yun’s from SF3:2i. The dashing punch and the rising kick - carbon copies. I think a lawsuit is in order…
