Welcome to the Fight Palace
Max here.
Well, sheesh, I had no idea so many sensitive gamers frequented Gravity Beetle. I’d like to take just one more moment to pretty much reiterate what Sammi said in the comments of my last post: This blog is a fun thing for us, not some soapbox we use to instigate others. We’re old, agitated classic gamers and we need some catharsis, here, whether it’s through elaboration on subjects we remember fondly, or a seething rant about what we feel is wrong with today’s gaming. Take anything and everything we say with a grain of salt, or a mouthful. I went ahead and deleted the Touhou dig because I’d forgotten how stupid it is to needlessly get fanboys all riled up.
Sorry, fanboys, for somehow attracting you to this otherwise completely obscure blog. Sorry, Sammi, for suddenly garnering GB an impressive amount of negative attention. I’ll go back to exposing obscure games and only ragging on the ones that are already unloved anyway. Which brings me to tonight’s game!
Some people that know my gaming habits should be aware of a certain Genesis game I was fascinated with for a time, by the name of Slaughter Sport. It was bare-bones, utterly unplayable, and only allowed the ability to play as other characters via password input. However, one of the more interesting elements, one that pulled the game together into one sort of morbid shit-masterpiece, was the artistic direction. The characters were downright grotesque and the sprites had that sort of lovable “my creators are bad artists” charm about them. Most memorable was Mondu, whose anatomical splendor was proudly displayed right after the Sega logo.
It goes without saying, nothing that followed such an intro was nearly as interesting or entertaining, which is really kind of sad when the Genesis library was absolutely brimming with ridiculous, raunchy gems, mostly spurred by developers’ creative and explicit freedom after being freed from Nintendo’s draconian, 8-bit grasp. The fighting system is god-awful; You have three buttons available for offensive maneuvers, those being regular attack, special attack, and use item. Actually getting your character to attack was a chore, as all three of those inputs were extremely mashy and often required multiple presses before your character bothered to do anything. The situation is not at all helped by the fact that there is no blocking. If you hold back on the D-pad, your character fucking turns around, wasting a good half a second, preventing you from attacking, and allowing the merciless AI to walk forward and punch your helpless palsy ass over and over until you die and are eaten by land sharks.
Through nothing but sheer stupidity and perseverance, I did manage to beat the first opponent, who was nothing but a palette swap of Rex, the default character and easily the most boring and useless pud of the entire cast. The next character, an Amazonian superbitch, remains impassable to my weeping psyche. There are people on Youtube who can beat this game if you’re interested in seeing the battles that last upwards of three minutes each, chock full of cheap tactics to confound the otherwise hellish AI.
It still blows my mind that this was a full-blown title, a cartridge. This was on shelves, not tabbed for destruction but for sale to the unassuming populace. Released in 1991, at first I deduced it was nothing more than a cheap cash-in by an unknown company (I’m assuming this Razorsoft doesn’t exist nowadays because someone bombed their offices for this abomination) on the Street Fighter fever that ripped through the country.
Recently I found out that the story of Mondu and his fight palace starts much earlier than this Genesis foray, and jumped deeper into the festering, cellulite-riddled rabbit ass hole.
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great displeasure to introduce you all to…
I’ve said this once, I’ll say it again, you guys are lucky to have me so you don’t have to play these yourself.
I have next to no information on this disservice to mankind. Apparently published by Activision in 1989 for DOS, Tongue of the Fatman was one of the somewhat rare one-on-one pre-SFII fighters, back when they weren’t popular because the controls were baffling and unintuitive, and the systems jerky and unpredictable.
As much as I’d want Mondu and his candy corn fingernails to be an exception to this unfortunate stereotype, instead this game is pretty much the poster boy of stinkers. With gameplay even worse than SS and graphics six times as terrifying, I’m sure I’ve found another title worth its weight in gilded cat turds. At least now you have a variety of characters to pick from.
For today, I’ll leave this entry as it is, as I make pathetic attempts at learning how to play and what the fuck to do to actually knock out the opponent. During my first session I literally stood still and held down a far-ranged punch for three minutes as the CPU ran into it over and over again, falling to the ground occasionally. Believing I had to try another method of attack, I relented and experimented with different inputs… Unfortunately the input registry is just as abhorrent as Slaughter Sport’s and the CPU proceeded to lay into me. In seven seconds I was dead.
This new voyage, I think, will be full of more tears than that of Hard Head.
On a somewhat positive note, I’m positive I have found the website and email of one of the main developers. As of this typing I have just sent him an inquisitive email concerning Tongue of the Fatman. With all hope I may actually get a response and shed some light on this mysterious, dimpled, sweaty title.
TO BE CONTINUED, and Max out.
