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Post by Fryguy64 on Nov 6, 2010 4:29:02 GMT -5
Yet I have some good memories of me and my brother punching each other into manholes. How did I miss this?!
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Post by parrothead on Dec 18, 2010 3:31:41 GMT -5
They might be clones, but they were clones of popular games. While they themselves might not have been popular due to being misjudged releases, they were still enjoyable. Urban Champion is a clone of Game & Watch game Boxing, which IMO is one of the most boring Game & Watch titles... Urban Champion is just very slow. But then compare to other fighting games at the time (of which there were very few). It may not have been a good game, and it may not have garnered many fans, but it laid some foundations for the genre. It was the first one to have a power meter. That's pretty significant, right? Yie Ar Kung Fu, released the following year, also had a power meter, but it was a significantly better game due to fast action and variety of moves. Urban Champion deserves the stick that it gets, as while it injected a few ideas into the genre, it did nothing to make the genre more enjoyable. That was passed on to Konami and later Capcom. I wouldn't say it's the worst game Nintendo has ever published, but it's quite probably still the worst game they've ever made themselves. They've learned a lot since then. Perhaps the worst game Nintendo created was released before Donkey Kong, which was their Radar Scope arcade. After it became popular (for a short period) in Japan, Minoru Arakawa ordered thousands of units for North American release, but most North Americans found its high-pitched chirping to be quite annoying (perhaps as annoying as the GB Mega Man II's music many consider), and arcade operators were unimpressed. Because of them, Miyamoto and a few others converted the unsold Radar Scope arcade machines into the successful Donkey Kong. One person on YouTube said "Thank God this sucked. If not for this, there would be no Donkey Kong. Yay Jumpman!", but I'm not sure if that's true or not. Radar Scope was never re-released, but Urban Champion was re-released several times. Urban Champion being a clone of the Game & Watch Boxing game? That's like saying some of Capcom's platforming Disney games for the NES (and Game Boy) are clones of their main NES Mega Man games. What's the point you might ask? Well, calling a game a clone of another game by the same company doesn't sound right, but if the "clone" was created by another company, then that would sound right; however, even several companies take ideas from games by other companies and help differentiate them by adding new ideas and/or superior versions of the ideas they took from others. To differentiate itself from the Game & Watch Boxing, Urban Champion would include things like people dropping flowerpots on any player (which is an environmental hazard like the cars in the Onett stage of SSBM) and background music played during fights (instead of just during intros and victories), which were very new at the time. Of course, Konami's Yie Ar Kung-Fu was more successful, Urban Champion was more affordable and convenient back then, due to being a home console game; however, the first home versions of Yie Ar Kung-Fu were also released the same year the original arcade version was released. Although it still makes it play like Boxing, Nintendo making the two characters look like street fighters instead of boxers makes Urban Champion count as a versus fighting game and not a boxing sports game. Some people consider Sega's 1976 Heavyweight Champ to be the beginning of versus fighting game history, but it's a boxing game. If boxing games count as "fighting games", then the fighting genre would be flooded with every boxing game you could think of, which most of the side-viewed ones have a lot of similarities. People who think Urban Champion sucks most likely played Capcom's Street Fighter II (or any other modern-fighting game) first before playing Urban Champion. Back then, it was all about being simple. Some people think point systems are stupid, but in the old days, people didn't try to "beat the game" to "see the ending", people tracked the game things called "points" and they used these "points" to add up to a "high score" and people tried to get the "best high score". Still not good enough? What helped many fighting games is multiplayer.
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Post by Manspeed on Dec 18, 2010 16:51:00 GMT -5
Er, Parrot, you're talking about a game being the "worst" as if it were an objective fact rather than a subjective opinion. People say Urban Champion sucks simply because it's a clunky game that isn't even that fun to play. Fry was merely pointing out that despite this, the game still had a few notable points about it.
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Post by The Qu on Dec 19, 2010 3:09:06 GMT -5
Furthermore, by the time Urban Champions came out, people expected just a tad bit more in their home entertainment, even pre-Super Mario Brothers. Considering that SMB was a launch title with the NES in America, it's no surprise that a clunky game indicitive of an era that was already dying by the time it was released, let alone a few years later, was not especially well received, especially in hindsight.
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Post by 8bitretroshit on Dec 19, 2010 5:16:14 GMT -5
I still like the goofy music though. In fact I'd say this game's better then a lot of other NES games because the music doesn't make your ears bleed
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