It had been a while since I last updated MAME, but a couple of months ago, Fearless Pinocchio caught my eye, and got me to finally undertake that minor chore. A previously unknown 2D fighting game by IGS with cute, stylised graphics suddenly appearing on the landscape would naturally get my attention. It's kind of a bittersweet game to learn of, though, as it's not actually a fighting game, but a machine for dispensing the tickets that are so important to all the depressing seaside arcades that have replaced fun games with low-quality prizes.
Still, it's at least pretending to be a fighting game, and there are some things worthy of mention. It's single player-only, and there's only one playable character, the eponymous Pinocchio. He's on a quest to rescue Geppeto, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook, for some reason. Hook's the last boss, and to get to him, you've first got to fight two of his henchbeings, randomly selected from a pool of five. There's a genie, a witch, a grim reaper, the Queen of Hearts' card army, and the Big Bad Wolf. All the characters are well-drawn and animated, and full of personality.
The stages are also full of cool little details, even if there's only four of them shard amongst the six opponents. The woods have a little mushroom/candy house where Little Red Riding Hood and the three little pigs apparently live together, the graveyard has the witch's hut (I guess she and Death are neighbours?), plus a beanstalk with a depressed-looking giant watching the fight. Wonderland's the weakest stage, looking a lot like it's cobbled together from clipart, and Hook's ship has his pirate underlings, and far in the back, a Peter Pan who looks dangerously close to Disney's version standing around and doing nothing to help.
You fight using a joystick and one attack button, and while you do have specials and supers, they just seem to be activated by holding a direction and pressing the button a lot. I do really like the super where Pinocchio does the samurai movie thing where he dashes past his opponent while drawing a weapon, with the opponent taking damage after a second or two's delay, but his weapon is a big wooden mallet rather than a sword. The fights have only one round, and no matter what the situation is, if time runes out, you lose. I guess, true to its nature as "not a proper game", it just exists to have the shortest possible time between coin inputs.
It's really a shame there's no "legitimate" version of this game. A lot of work clearly went into designing and animated the characters, and six playable characters plus a boss wouldn't be too bad for a first entry in a series, especially if they added a background for each one, and especially if the characters looked as good as they do in the game that exists. I guess the best we can hope for is that someone rips all the sprites and puts something together in MUGEN or something. As always with this kind of shady gambling game, I think it's worth playing a few credits in MAME just to see it, though I don't think it's worth putting any money in if you encounter it in the wild. Or maybe it is? I don't know if this is some kind of emulation error or something, but every time I played, no matter how well or how poorly I did, I always got a screen telling me I'd won ten tickets. If a real machine is the same, it might be a cheap/quick way to grind for that cheap plastic tat upon which you've got your eye.
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