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Your Weekly Kusoge
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The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |
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Pray for Death - IBM PC (1996) |
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Pray for Death |
Pray for Death |
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The PC was never really known for its selection of fighting games, and there's a few reasons for that. For one thing, keyboards tend to not work out so well when you're playing a fighter, even though there were always alternatives like the Gravis Gamepad. While we got quite a few Street Fighter II ports and the first four MKs, most PC developers had to rely on making their own fighting games. This tended to be a bit of a crapshoot, as Pray for Death shows nicely. Pray for Death was made by a small Italian company called Lightshock Software, who had previously made another fighting game called Fightin' Spirit for the Amiga. Fightin' Spirit was a colorful, good-looking game with a very SNK-style look, that also happened to play pretty well. So it's a real shame that they suddenly lost every ounce of talent they had while they were working on this game. As the story goes, all the game's characters are stuck in Hell, when Death decides to hold a fighting tournament, where the winner will get to come back to life. It doesn't entirely make sense, seeing how apparently a robot and Chulthu are stuck in Hell, too...it's never explicitly stated, but the great Elder God probably doesn't believe in Christian lore, but whatever. The other characters are pretty boring, not counting Cthulhu (seriously, you have to admit that's kind of awesome) and the big robot. You've got your Bruce Lee clone, required by law to be in every fighting game made after the year 1993, Anubis (somehow he ended up in a game worse than War Gods), a knight, a demon, some kind of techno-themed serial killer dominatrix, a viking, and a magician. They're all lacking in much visual flair or personality, although to Lightshock's credit, they all have their own unique, if poorly written, pre-fight banter on the VS screen. When it comes to actually playing the game, what Pray For Death actually DOES is try to rip off Killer Instinct as hard as it possibly can. You've got two pre-rendered fighters, standing in front of an FMV background, and most of the fighting is done through strings of auto-combos. Unlike Killer Instinct, PFD manages to screw up everything it ever did. Characters tend to hang in the air for a second after you jump, and the game pauses for about a full second every time you land a hit on somebody. Combos are as easy to do as any of the game's special moves, and are used by hitting three directions and a button. How long your combo tends to last is entirely dependent on whether you've memorized your character's three combo moves, and getting out of them if you're tired of watching your guy getting pummeled rests entirely on if you've memorized his breaker. Not even the fatalities, one of the few things that redeems one of these sub-par MK style games, are any good, because they all involve your character hitting your opponent, which causes him to shake around a lot, spew blood, and then fall over. At least the "Idiot Moves", which are basically a cross between Friendship and Fatalities have some amount of creativity. Pantera, the serial killer techno dominatrix creates two giant speakers, which play out so much noise it kills the opponent, I-No style. So, Pray For Death is definately not a good fighting game, even on the limited selection. One Must Fall, the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo port, even Time Slaughter manages to play better than PFD ever does. It's an unabashed Killer Instinct ripoff with poor controls, a set of mostly lame characters, and terrible fatalities. On the other hand, however, you can have Cthulhu fight Bruce Lee. And isn't that kind of sheer unintentional comedy what these Mortal Kombat clones were made for? |
Pray for Death
Pray for Death
Pray for Death |
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Tag Team Wrestling / The Big Pro Wrestling - NES (1986) |
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American Cover |
Tag Team Wrestling |
Tag Team Wrestling |
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The NES played host to numerous professional wrestling games, ranging from mainstream fare like WWF Wrestlemania to oddballs like M.U.S.C.L.E. Falling somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is Data East's Tag Team Wrestling. While the version of professional wrestling it presents strives for realism, its ill-conceived controls and comically small roster make it a disappointment to anyone who comes in hoping for another great NES wrestling game along the lines of Pro Wrestling. Tag Team Wrestling was developed for arcades by Technos Japan in 1983, and was originally released under the title The Big Pro Wrestling. Over the next few years, it was ported to Commodore 64, IBM PC and Apple II by Quicksilver Software, and was finally brought to the Famicom by Sakata SAS in April of 1986. By that time, Technos had already created the far more refined arcade wrestling game Exciting Hour, but sadly none of its advances made their way into the console port of their earlier game. Chief among Tag Team Wrestling's flaws is its central control mechanic, which has more in common with RPGs than other wrestling games. Rather than initiating moves from a grapple, you start by trying to land a punch on your opponent. If successful, you're presented with a menu of the moves your character can execute, and three seconds to scroll through it and select one. There's one upside to this: the game has a pretty big moveset when compared to its contemporaries. However, that's where the praise ends, as the menu-based system fails in every other way. The most obvious downside is that you don't feel any of the visceral thrill of watching an actual wrestling match. But that's only the beginning. Worse is the fact that placing such a high priority on landing strikes encourages button mashing and, wouldn't you know it, the punch button is also the button you use to select moves. As a result, you'll frequently find yourself picking the first hold on the menu by accident. Finally there's the fact that the move names are poorly localized. Many are rendered as unintuitive abbreviations, and some aren't translated at all. It's barely possible to scroll to the end of the list in three seconds, let alone make sense of choices like "B BRIK" and "TECCHU". And this is to say nothing of the fact that when playing against the CPU, your opponents can become invincible at will if you get too much of an advantage. Even if Tag Team Wrestling were otherwise fun to play, its roster of two teams would still be a source of consternation. In the single player mode, you control a babyface team called The Ricky Fighters on their quest to win titles by repeatedly defeating a heel team called The Strong Bads. (This, of course, created Strong Bad in Homestar Runner.) Every few matches, the teams get a palette swap, and the mat displays a different pattern. But that does nothing to hide the fact that you're essentially wrestling the same match over and over, ensuring that boredom will set in just a few matches into your career. Tag Team Wrestling's problem isn't that it failed to innovate; rather, it's that the ideas it introduced to the wrestling genre just weren't worth pursuing further. Technos clearly knew that, as the radically different controls they adopted for Exciting Hour remained the standard for years to come. Meanwhile, Tag Team Wrestling's menu-based system was rightly consigned to the wastebasket of wrestling game history. |
Tag Team Wrestling
Tag Team Wrestling
Tag Team Wrestling |
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Don't Buy This: Five of the Worst Games Ever - ZX Spectrum (1985) |
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Fido |
Fido 2: Puppy Power |
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Released in the UK on the 1st of April 1985, costing £2.50 and coming on audio cassette tape, Don't Buy This is actually a compilation of games - apparently five of the worst ever submitted to the publisher Firebird for consideration. The inlay for the cassette box proudly proclaims: CAUTION: This cassette contains five of the most uninspired games ever to disgrace the 48K Spectrum. This is probably the beginning of the end of games as you have known them. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Firebird even goes as far as disowning all copyright, encouraging people to "copy it at will", and then asking you to write in and complain, for a chance to win a badge or a sticker. The entire shtick behind this tape is that you're getting a pile of crap. It seems wrong to grant a hallowed place in the HG101 Hall of Kusoge Fame to something which intentionally sets out to be rubbish, but the fact remains that over 25 years ago (long before kusoge was common parlance in the west), a company was attempting to capitalise on people's fascination with trash, making it an important historical footnote. Furthermore and rather ironically, even in the context of bad games for the ZX Spectrum it still fails at being the absolute worst. Uninspired, dull and lazy - perhaps - but not quite defining the barrel's rather round bottom. The best is Weasel Willy, which is a bit like Snake, and a great example of why randomisation is bad. Instead of collecting things you avoid randomly placed trees and your tail never disappears; touch the paws left by the rotund weasel, any tree or the outside walls and you die. Progressing to the next level is entirely random (it just suddenly happens for no reason whatsoever). Subsequent levels increase the number of trees and, thanks to their random placement, you can start off in an unwinnable situation. Perhaps it's attempting to teach kids a valuable life lesson? Next is Race Ace, which looks vaguely like Namco's Rally X but plays more like Big Rigs. The controls replicate real driving with specific buttons for turning left and right, but this only makes sense when travelling up the screen. You don't actually have to win the race either, just get ahead of the pack, whereby the race ends. Fido is a single-screen arcade-style game, where you move left and right and wag your tail to bash moles' skulls in. When your food meter is low you need to eat from the bowl. It sounds almost OK, as OK as the awful Donkey Kong 3 anyway, but the execution is dire. The dog actually increases in height when sitting down, making him the target of flying birds, so he needs to stand up in order to "duck" and avoid them. For fans of the original there's also the sequel, Fido 2: Puppy Power. It's a lot like the first, except the dog can now walk up and down, and shoots lasers out of his face. Fruit Machine is a one-armed bandit simulator and as uninteresting as you'd expect. There's a couple of truly atrocious ideas which warrant this as kusoge material, but otherwise it's not really worth bothering with. Unsurprisingly critics of the day utterly panned it, from Crash through to ZX Computing. The ironic thing about all this though is that it still sold extremely well, according to the Back to the Eighties column in Retro Gamer issue 15. It would seem that five mediocre games costing a mere 50 English pennies each was too good to ignore, despite all protests to the contrary. |
Fruit Machine
Race Ace
Weasel Willy |
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Ganso Saiyuuki: Super Monkey Daibouken (元祖西遊記 スーパーモンキー大冒険) - Famicom (1986) |
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Super Monkey Daibouken |
Super Monkey Daibouken |
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"Nagai tabi ga hajimaru..." ("The long journey begins...") proclaims the opening text of Super Monkey Daibouken. And boy, are they not kidding. As one of the many versions of The Journey West, you control Son Goku the Monkey King as you lead the monk Genjo and his steed from China to India. This quest appears to occur in real time, seeing how some have estimated the game world to contain approximately 700 screens. It consists of many small, isolated islands, and your caravan moves at approximately a square a second. The landscapes seem to have been designed with no real coherence, and the gates to the next area are often invisible until you're right on top of them, forcing you to tediously comb each and every square until you're warped somewhere else. Worse, just because you find another area doesn't mean that it's the correct one - it can just as easily send you to a section which appears to be a dead end. Time passes on a day-night cycle, which is impressive for a console RPG from 1986, but certain gates only appear at certain times. It is maddening. Every once in awhile, the game will appear to glitch up, and all of a sudden you'll find yourself in the middle of a sidescrolling action sequence. These are impenetrably designed and programmed, as sprites move around the screen in ways that are only comprehensible by madmen and game rules like "hit detection" cease to have meaning. Son Goku is the primary warrior, if only because he seems to have the most health, but upon getting killed, the other party members - the king and his horse in the early stages of the game, and later a pig and a kappa - will resume in his stead. But not only are both of the other initial characters utterly useless, but the developers neglected to create a unique sprite for the horse, so it just takes on the form of one of the enemies - particularly, the dragon. Apparently it is a transforming horse - which actually is less ludicrious than it sounds, considering that it's faithful to the original story. Then, just as quickly as the battle begins, the game seizes you back on to the overworld without any warning, usually long before any of the enemies are actually dead. This process repeats until your party either starves to death or you stumble across a town to replenish your supplies. Given the overall quality of the experience, the former is most definitely preferable, where you're solely greeted with the text "Aa! Shinjatta!" ("Oh no! I've died!") before returning to the title screen. For a game that initially billed itself as an "ultimate role playing game", it doesn't have a proper save game feature. It does use a password, although it never outright tells you this. Instead at various points, you'll be given messages that say things like "AB A A", which is the code you're supposed to enter at the title screen to skip ahead. It's also one of the few cartridge based games that has noticeable loading times. Disregarding the famously poor quality of Super Monkey Daibouken - it might be one of the worst on the Famicom, and isn't as widely known amongst the non-Japanese crowd because it's not referenced as often as Takeshi no Chousenjou or Transformers: Convoy the Nazo - the most sadly hilarious bit is a message hidden in the ROM, which details a lonely programmer's desire for some loving, written in a form that it somewhat less eloquant than a traditional sonnet. ("I want a perverted girl. I love vagina! I love clitoris!") Maybe if the dude had gotten more tail he would've been in a better state of mind than to produce something as heinously wretched as this.
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Super Monkey Daibouken
Super Monkey Daibouken
Super Monkey Daibouken |
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The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |