Brian Jacks' Uchi Mata (C64)

 First, I'm going to credit Epsilon Eagle on Twitter for posting about this game and making me aware of it. It is another combat sports game, a genre I'm becoming more interested in as I discover more of them (on that subject, have you seen the trailer for the upcoming PC game Dojo Masters? It looks so cool!), and though it's a game that's been forgotten in the decades since, it also happens to be historically significant.

 

Before I get onto that, I'll give you some basic description. The sport in question is specifically judo, which means that there's no punching or kicking in this game, only throws, which is already pretty unusual. There is a move whereby you rudely shove your opponent to the floor, but performing it means you immediately lose the match via disqualification. Which makes you wonder why the developers even bothered to include it, it's obviously not something you'd ever do in a real tournament, is it? It's not like wrestling, where the referee might look away or be temporarily incapacitated to give you the opportunity for illegal moves. Also, Brian Jacks was a British olympic judo practitioner, and this game carries his endorsement. Which is nice.

 

Anyway, the thing that makes Uchi Mata noteworthy, interesting, and historically significant is its main mechanical gimmick: it was seemingly the first game to use command inputs for special moves, beating Street Fighter by a year! You approach your opponent, press the fire button to lock up, and when the time's right, hold the fire button, input a special motion (a quarter or half circle, for example), andthen release the button to do your move! The timing system also brings to mind the Fire Pro Wrestling games, though it's quite different, and a lot more mysterious and inscrutible.

 

When the two fighters are locked up, there will sometimes flash up a rectangle in one of the fighters' colours (red or white) at the top of the screen, near the clock. When your colour's up there, that's when you have the opportunity to land a move. The problem is that it's not really clear what causes the rectangles to appear or disappear. It seems vaguely related to who initiates the lock up, but if it continues past that point, its whims seem to be kind of random. It really puts a damper on how enjoyable the game can be, since it feels like your wins and losses are subject to the whims of this mysterious rectangle entity, and not so much on your own skills. Furthermore, going back to that disqualification thing, every match I've played has ended that way, either through my performing the move by accident, or through what I assume was a fit of rage on behalf of the CPU player.

 

All in all, Uchi Mata is a game that was clearly ahead of its time, and the developers really put some thought into how they could replicate a complicated fighting style on such primitive hardware with such limited control options. Unfortunately, they also saw fit to add in what is either a random element, or an element so mysterious that it might as well be random, and that really does ruin the game, to be honest. Give it a try out of historical curiosity, but don't expect it to be a game you'll come back to once that's been satisfied.