Archive for Reviews
Super Smash Bros Brawl Video Review Roundup
You may have heard about a little game that got released on the Nintendo Wii yesterday. What was it called again? Oh yeah. SUPER SMASH BROS BRAWL! I picked up a copy myself and my initial impressions are that they’ve kept pretty much everything you’ve come to expect from Super Smash Bros and stepped it up a notch or three. The character count is bigger. The graphics are prettier. And you get to play as Solid mother-f*cking Snake!
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is probably the best Wii game to be released to date and it doesn’t even make use of the so-called gimmicky controls. You might even enjoy it more by playing on a GameCube or Classic Controller. In either case, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. You could say it’s the new best fighting games king. Check out these three video reviews for further evidence of our never-ending praise for this fantastic fighting game.
GameSpot: 9.5
IGN Wii: 9.5
GameTrailers: 9.4
Hilary Clinton is Kitana from Mortal Kombat
OMGWTFBBQ! Mortal Kombat is one of the coolest fighting game franchises of all-time and now it has been used as the backdrop to a political spoof. Kung-Fu Election starts you off with a really cheesy video (which you can skip), but then it totally sends you into hilarity with a fun Flash-based fighting game that is completely online. There are eight “characters” to choose in all, each representing a US Presidential candidate.
Each candidate has been outfitted in full battle garb, complete with weapons and special moves. And oh yes, there will be blood. The character list is split evenly between red and blue.
Representing the Democrats are Hilary Clinton (as Kitana), Barack Obama (as some sort of generic samurai), John Edwards (as a hybrid between Ryu and Sub-Zero), and Bill Richardson (as some fat guy).
On the Republican side of the equation are Rudy Giuliana (as Wolverine or Freddy Kreuger), Mike Huckabee (as Raiden, sort of), Mitt Romney (as I don’t know what), and John McCain (as a Shaolin monk).
I personally think the funniest aspect is that Barack Obama’s projectile move is a set of doves that suspend his opponent in the air. Great stuff.
Review: Art of Fighting on the Wii Virtual Console
The Wii Virtual Console is opening up the floodgates to some exceptionally excellent classic fighting games. We’ve seen the re-introduction of titles like Fatal Fury, but what about that SNK Street Fighter II clone that got everyone worked up? Art of Fighting, I found, was pretty lame when it hit arcades the first time around, mostly because it was such a blatant rip-off of what Capcom was doing with the Street Fighter franchise. Guess what? Re-introducing Art of Fighting to the world via the Wii Virtual Console doesn’t change much.
IGN had the opportunity to take the VC version of Art of Fighting out for a test drive and they were equally unimpressed with just about every aspect of the game. Characters? Hah!
Art of Fighting’s character roster leaves something to be desired, and especially so in single-player mode – there, you can only choose to be one of two different heroes. Fatal Fury was the same way, restricting the selection so the story would continue to make sense, but it’s not much of a selection process when your decision of who to use could be made by flipping a coin.
The rest of the picture doesn’t get much better. They say that it is “lacking any depth in its fighting engine.” The vocalizations for the fighters are “weak” and gameplay is “very bland and basic”, despite the introduction of taunting and a spirit meter. The only positive is the elimination of invisible walls in Art of Fighting, favoring a new “zooming, scaling effect that was very impressive for its time.” In the end, they give Art of Fighting on the Virtual Console a paltry score of 4.5 out of 10.
So, yeah, save your money for something else. Like Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting. Check out the full review here.
