 SEGA DRUNK Everyone's had those moments with certain video games where you hear about a game, you read about it, you see the gameplay footage and it looks fun, it looks like it'd be a blast to play, then you sit down and play it and it sucks. There's no way around it, it just sucks. I know that most people come to this channel to find out about games that are worth playing today but I just wanted to share my experience with Fighting Masters for Sega Genesis because I really wanted to like this game. It totally looks like my kind of thing, it looks fast, the characters look ridiculous, but uh yeah, this game sucks out loud. I was excited to do a video on this one because I felt it'd be a decent compliment to the Primal Rage video that posted earlier this week but instead I feel like the bearer of bad news. Or maybe not, it seems like just about every review of this game is negative so maybe I'm just late to the party or more like late to the funeral I guess. Anyway Fighting Masters was developed by Almanac in 1991, the same folks who made Mazen Saga Mutant Fighter, also for the Genesis, as well as the mega ambitious title Evo Search for Eden for Super Nintendo. Those two games are at least interesting for one reason or another but Fighting Masters unfortunately is just not good. It starts promising with an absurd and ridiculous story layout, we get this sweet looking pixel art and dramatically scrolling text that tells the story of 12 star systems that will be destroyed by a star going supernova but there's one omnipotent race that wants to use their power to save one of those 12 dying planets and how will that be decided? Well by a fighting tournament of course. You know just once I'd love there to be a game with a premise like this only in order to prove your worth to the gods or whatever you must demonstrate your superiority in badminton. Or you must prove your intellectual worth by knowing more about ant colonies or something or defeating the 1986 Hartford Whalers in a game of Press Your Luck with the final boss being Ray Ferraro. Anyway at this point you get to see 12 different fighters you get to choose from. Hey that's pretty cool. You've got everything from a kickboxing horse, a boxing goblin, a lobster, a bird man, a mastodon, a blob with feet, a venus fly trap, and the most dangerous enemy of them all, a generic random white guy named Larry. Come on Larry, what was their second choice for a name? Harold Eugene? So anyway you pick Gerald here and you're quickly introduced to the gameplay which uses C to jump, B to attack, and that's it. The A button does not do anything. You can do quote unquote special moves by pressing B when you're crouching, or when you're in midair, or just by pressing up when you're near enough to your opponent, but that is it. And every character has the exact same moveset. There's no fireballs, no spinning heel kicks, no moves specific to a character, that's all this is. Even worse is that the actual physics and fighting mechanics here are so bad. It's like the video game equivalent of having two action figures fight by mashing them together. Sure the action is fast and the characters are weird looking, but that's seriously all this game has going for it, because the actual combat here is awful. I think one thing they wanted to stand out here is how each character absorbs damage. When you actually are able to do a move in this game, the game will pause for a sec as your opponent flashes. Hey cool my opponent is vulnerable and nope, nope not happening. Okay I'll see if I can come up with a few nicer things to say about this one. I like the simple bare bones presentation, there's no extra clutter on the screen. It's kind of neat how players take damage from hitting walls and hitting the ground. The music is kind of cool, all three backgrounds look okay. And the music, oh I already mentioned the music. Well the background, you know I mentioned those already too. Oh well here's my dog Clyde. There the video has been salvaged. So yeah I just wanted to share this experience. We've all been there, the game sounds cool on paper and you go to play it and it's just not. The hit detection is terrible, the computer AI is ridiculously overpowered, there's no strategy at all. Actually no scratch that. There is a strategy, pick the kickboxing horse and power bomb the bejesus out of everyone until the computer decides that you can't anymore. Oh and have I mentioned that one of the buttons on a three-button controller is not even used at all? But hey at least the music is kind of cool and the bio for each character lists them as somehow being over 50 feet tall and 2000 pounds. So hey that's neat I guess. This is one of those games where if you had this growing up and nothing else then well yeah you might find it charming or whatever. But playing this today, no friggin way. Not when there's stuff like Eternal Champions and a perfectly good port of Street Fighter 2 right there on the Genesis alone. I mean jeez they're fighting games on the NES that are more in depth than this game. There's just no excuse why this has to be such a broken mess. Avoid this game. Alright I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.