Toughman Contest (32X)

I never thought there'd be an EA Sports game on this blog, but it's game that's long forgotten, on a console that no-one cares about, featuring a sport that wasn't really popular for very long (and even when it was, it was never massive). Toughman Contest is an amateur boxing tournament that's been going since the late 1970s, but the only time I've ever heard of it was in the late 90s, though it apparently continues to this day. This game is vaguely based on that competition, though all the boxers in it are fictional caricatures with silly names.

Presentation-wise, it's a bit of a mixed bag in many ways: though the graphics are all competently drawn, the game has an ugly pseudo-realistic aesthetic, and the menus look cheap and low-rent compared to the game itself. The character sprites are all massive, taking up most of the screen, though whoever you pick will always be represented by a green outline. A nice touch is that there are four tounaments in which you can compete: North America, South America, Europe/Middle East and Asia/Australasia, and each of them has their own (heavily stereotyped, in a Street Fighter kind of way) arena.  As for how it plays, it's kind of like Super Punch-Out, but worse in every possible way.

Like Super Punch-Out, you view your boxer from behind, and you've got to dodge your opponent's punches and hit them back with the right timing. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well as Nintendo's game, since in the name of realism, there's no tells when any of your opponents are going to attack or dodge or block, and it just feels like everything happens at random. Sometimes you won't get a single hit on your opponent the whole match, other times, you'll pummel their face in by simply holding up and C. There's also times when your opponent's health will just randomly drop to nothing, a mechanic which I assume is supposed to represent a lucky suckerpunch? Another problem is that I've played plenty of matches, and have never won nor lost by knock-out. Every match has been decided by judge's decision, which also feels slightly random. The final result usually makes sense, and the most successful boxer will win, but it could be a fight where you didn't get a single hit in, and you'll just barely lose by one or two points. Conversely, you could batter your opponent into paste, and just barely scrape a couple of points ahead of them.

I saw screenshots of this game, and gave it a shot, hoping it might be a diamond hidden in the substantial rough that is the 32X library. But it's just another ugly, boring game that's outshined by better titles on less powerful hardware. Oh well, never mind.

Kozure Ookami (Arcade)

So, Lone Wolf and Cub, sometimes known as Babycart or Shogun Assassin, is a very well-known comic and series of movies about a guy named Ogami Itto and his three year old son, who goes around violently killing lots of people. I have to admit that I've never actually read any of the comics or seen any of the movies, but I do know that much about them, but doesn't everyone? This game's a beat em up based on that story.

Obviously, you play as Itto, and you go about with your son in a backpack, slashing lots of guys to death. Though it's a belt scrolling beat em up, in terms of mechanical complexity, it inhabits a kind of middle ground between the simpler single plane beat em ups that came before it, like Spartan X, My Hero, et al., and the more complex belt scrollers that would come later, the Final Fights, the Streets of Rages, and so on. There's no comboing, but you do have a block button, and can perform a couple of different slashes with your sword by holding a direction as you press the attack button.
There's very few power-ups, with the most exciting being the famous babycart itself, which will appear for a short time, giving you increased movement speed and a projectile attack. Interestingly, if you press the block button while the babycart is present, you'll instead dismantle it to create a halberd, giving you slightly greater attack range for a short time instead. I assume there must be some advantage to doing this, though I'm yet to have figured out what. Another one is a little piece of paper (I think?), that does nothing until you collect three, at which point, you're whisked away to a duel mini-game. Be the first to attack after the counter reaches zero, and you cut your opponent down, and get a big points bonus. You don't lose a life if you fail, you just get sent back to the main game without a bonus.

Other than that, the game's structured pretty traditionally: you go along the stages killing enemies until you get to a boss, then you kill the boss and go onto the next stage. Starting with the second stage, though, the game does commit a heinous design crime: there's platform sections, with instant death pits, while you also have to avoid enemies jumping out of the pits and the game doesn't even have a dedicated jump button (you press block and attack together to jump). It's unfair, it's no fun, and it's an awkward break from the constant disembowelling that makes up the rest of the game. I'm not going to say it totally ruins the experience, but it's definitely a significant detractor.

That one big flaw aside, though, Kozure Ookami is still a pretty great game, and it does an especially good job creating a mood and forging its own identity through the way it looks and sounds. I'd say it's definitely worth a look.