Nes

God, this is so upsetting. Here's hoping the best for Jess, Jason, Justin, and everyone else involved!!

Jeff's review is a goddamn masterpiece, and I want to believe that he did that ending just because Metacritic would put that up!

I picked up both of these games from a local shop nearly a year ago as part of my "try out N64 fighting games" thing. Both of these games play as awkward as they look, no matter how much time is put into them. I also can't find any scanned manuals or anything, so I don't know if there really is any hidden depth to them.

One interesting thing about Deadly Arts is the create-a-character system, which allows you to fully-customize a character's appearance and movelist from scratch. You start with no combos or anything and have to "train" against CPU opponents to learn new moves (one at a time, and only by defeating them). I have no idea how this works, as I remember learning a move or two and suddenly not be able to learn any new moves (only moves that replace the other one).

Can't wait to see them try out other N64 gems, like Dark Rift and Dual Heroes.

Bloodstorm is a great example of how not to do game design. There's a lot of deep mechanics in the game (some of which I don't think are in any other fighting game) that's hidden away due to jank controls, bad presentation, and no mention. People just mashed buttons for a shitty time and went back to MK.

I mean, everyone has a "gauntlet" weapon that has its own universal special move and "throw" mechanic (where you can throw the gauntlet and pick it back up, even picking up your enemy's gauntlet), which sounds cool as hell, but you wouldn't know that firsthand without reading a FAQ. Hell, the RoF crew had a huge-ass FAQ and they still had trouble understanding how the game works.

The password system is probably the best example of this. You just randomly press buttons after picking a character, seeing "Password" on the screen, have no idea what's happening, and then hear "Stored".

It's a bad fighting game, but I'd like to see a new better fighting game with a lot of its gameplay mechanics.

BLOOD WARRIOR HYPE

I don't know if the same team made the Jackie Chan fighting games, but that is also a Kaneko fighting game that needs science.

Other games of note: Magic Beast Warriors was made by some of the same team (but not as good). Shogun Warriors (predecessor to BW, also not as good).

I remember Street Combat from my childhood. The first jank fighting game I've ever played and I wanted to go back to SF2 shortly after playing it.

Ranma Romhack

THE BATTLE IS NOT
ALWAYS TO THE STRONG

Question for the ages: Atom-is-wave or Atomis-wave (as in "atomic")

In the name of science, I have to ask: Does the use of the N64 controller in multi-platform games work against those games? Would Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. have received a higher score (yeah, that's a bit of a stretch) if it was played on the PS1 instead?

RoF without Jason? I'm not sure if this is legit science.

Also someone needs to hack N64 fight sticks for these guys, there are still more quality N64 science!