Author: dtm666

Around August 2008, I picked up a used Dreamcast and several games along with it. Among the crop of games I got was Fighting Force 2. Of course, when I saw the game, I was ignorant of all the bad press it got… So I pop the game in the Dreamcast and for some reason the bloody thing didn’t read. It just kept going to the Dreamcast menu screen thing. So in any case, for reasons I have yet to comprehend (and yes, the disc was thoroughly cleaned), I couldn’t play the game. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise or divine intervention. Doesn’t matter now. All I know is that among the small library of games, I had one dud in my collection.

Now as luck would have it, someone had a working copy of Fighting Force 2. And given that I really wanted to see for myself if I missed anything despite the bad press, I borrowed his copy and gave it a go. A couple days later, I returned the copy of the game and offered my friend a box of matches and a small container so he could burn the game away as well as the sin of having picked it up.

Yeah, that should tell you everything about my thoughts on Fighting Force 2 and I could end the review right here. But I’ll keep going.

For the most part, Fighting Force 2 takes the rather harmless-but-ultimately-boring gameplay mechanics of the original Fighting Force and shoves it down the proverbial black hole of doom to regurgiate the awful mess we’re stuck with today. Instead of four different characters with varying stats and attacks, you’re stuck with one character and he moves like a turtle… quite possibly slower than that. To make up for the slow speed, your character has the ability to make everything he touches explode into a ball of flames after a few hits. What sense does this make? Absolutely none. Does it help my chances? Of course not.

And for some odd reason, the exploding chairs yield weapons such as pipes and guns which can be used against your enemies, who are easily subdued by these weapons that are literally laying all over the place. Indeed, your only real difficulty in Fighting Force 2 lies in the awkward controls, jittery camera (not too bad in large rooms, but problematic in smaller ones), and overall generic gameplay that proves to be a fine test in how long you could fend off boredom.

Looking for a game with great sound? Look elsewhere. While the sound quality on Fighting Force 2 is admittedly crisp and clear for the most part, there’s very few bits of music to be found here and what’s there isn’t all that memorable. The only real positive I could give this game is in the graphics. Aside from some clipping issues, the game looks fairly good… by Playstation standards. By Dreamcast standards… it’s tolerable at best… Perhaps I’m being too critical. The models and environments are neatly rendered, but not much more than that.

It’s truly unfortunate that Eidos and Core dropped the ball in porting over this game over to the Dreamcast. It seems like they just copied-and-pasted a Playstation game onto a GD-ROM disc, did a couple minor touch-ups, and BOOM! Brand new game. Now, I understand a number of Dreamcast games that started off as Playstation games were like this, but it’s hard to believe that the quality was just THIS bad. It seems like whoever was working on this simply didn’t care about the final product.

Anyone who is looking for a good Dreamcast game should not be picking up Fighting Force 2. Anyone looking for a further fix of Fighting Force should just play the first game again. Anyone looking for a fun activity should just stare at the wall… yes, staring at a wall is MORE FUN than Fighting Force 2.

BREAKDOWN
Story: 2/10 (the story is unmemorable and dull – not much to it)
Graphics: 5/10 (the graphics are okay – slightly higher-resolution version of a Playstation game, but that’s about it)
Sound: 2/10 (little music, repetitive grunts and explosions, please make it stop)
Gameplay: 1/10 (touchy, awkward controls – boring gameplay – unstable camera)
Challenge: 2/10 (weapons all over the place make this a cinch to beat – if you want to)
Replay Value: 1/10 (just play the original Fighting Force instead)

OVERALL:1/10

Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 is considered to be the single most disappointing home conversion of an arcade machine in the history of video computer electronic entertainment. No matter how bad any other home port turned out, it didn’t contribute to the near-decimation and annihilation of the North American video game market. Is that a bit of stretch? I’d like to think so, but others do believe this statement and looking at Pac-Man as ported to the 2600, it’s not hard to see why.

While the original Pac-Man was something of a disaster, the same cannot be said for Ms. Pac-Man, which got a fantastic port on the Atari 2600. It still got that strange color scheme with the blue background, but the game somewhat resembles Ms. Pac-Man as it appeared in arcades. The sprites are a little more refined (even though there’s still that flickering issue), the mazes are almost similar enough, there’s fruit bouncing around and not vitamins, the sound effects are fairly close to matching the original sounds (as opposed to the previous port’s strange deviations), and the gameplay and functionality is similar to the arcade version. Everything still looks blocky, there are no dots but dashes, but that’s to be expected considering the system. The important thing is that when you pop this in and you look past the visual differences, you know that you’re playing Ms. Pac-Man and not some perversion of computer programming that tries to pass itself off as genuine.

Much like the arcade version, Ms. Pac-Man sports up to four different mazes, which increases the variety and challenge in the game and is an overall improvement over the original Pac-Man, which only had one static maze. Your main goal is to eat all the dots, lines, whatever the case may be and move onwards. You don’t have the intermission sequences that play every couple levels or so, but the core elements are there and… again, it’s a huge improvement over the previous port… which wasn’t very good.

There’s not much more I can add to the matter; it’s Ms. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 and it’s the port that people wished Pac-Man got. Everything that went wrong in that game is done right here and you can’t ask for more than that. Not mention that this is just a fun game to play. Ms. Pac-Man is a game you can find all over the place and deserves a good home among your Atari library if you have one. Great game, give it a go.

BREAKDOWN
Graphics: 8/10 (more refined sprites, closer accuracy to source material)
Sounds: 7/10 (sounds closer to what you’d get at the arcades)
Gameplay: 8/10 (plays and functions similarly enough to the arcade game)
Challenge: 8/10 (four mazes provides more variety, challenge)
Replay Value: 6/10 (plenty of fun to be had here)

OVERALL: 8/10