not the best of anything, nor championship karate
Written: Jul 12 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: ha
Cons: it tricks fans of the movie, and its crap
The Bottom Line: I wouldnt recommend this to anyone.Its slow, poor controls and horrible sound, coupled with the misleading title make for one of the worst fighting games on the Snes
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| flash-hammer's Full Review: Best of the Best: Championship Karate for Super Ni... |
Best of the Best:Championship Karate is a pretty funny game. Despite taking its name from the movie starring Eric Roberts and Phillip Rhee, it really doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. In fact, the fighters in the game actually seem to be more Kickboxers than anything else, and the game seems to want to have been a based on the films of Jean Claude Van Damme, with the first fighter being a Thai Kickboxer called Tsong Po (in Van Damme’s Kickboxer, his enemy is a Thai kickboxer called Tong Po), and you receive invitations to the ‘Kumate’ (the Kumite is the contest Van Damme takes part in in Bloodsport
).
The game is a martial arts fighting game, but not in the mould of Streetfighter 2 or Mortal Kombat. this is more of an attempt at a fighting simulator, or a sports fighting game. You see, to win matches you must first train your fighter in a few exercises to improve Strength and speed and such, like in latter day boxing games like Ready 2 Rumble or Rocky . you also have to choose which kicks and punches you want in your arsenal, and then set out to defeat all of the opponents for a final showdown with Cogneur (a Belgian, coincidentally, Van Damme is Belgian…) if you are a good fighter, you may even get an invite to the mysterious underground full-contact competition of the Kumate.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a let down. While the fighters look decent enough, they also all look the same just different colours. They also suffer from being far too small for a Snes game, but on the plus side, the animation of them is nice enough. There are only two arenas with major differences, with the one you face the regular fights in being a ring surrounded by a crowd, which actually looks quite good, and the other being the Kumate arena, in which your life is displayed in the flaming torches that line the walls. It has to be said that the Kumate arena is awesome, and really captures the feel of the one in the movie it seems to be inspired by.
Aurally the game is disgusting. The music had me reaching for the mute button, and the sound effects are just plain muffled and poor.
The controls for the game are a bit of a mess really. I have to admit I do not have the manual, so I cannot be 100% certain on these, but the diagonal’s of the D-Pad seem to control some attacks, while the face buttons and shoulder’s control other ones. Due to the fact you choose your own moves, listing them off with my moves would be pointless.
It doesn’t really matter, because the controls respond to such a disgustingly low degree of satisfaction that any variety of tactics when it comes to attacks is completely futile, and mashing the face buttons seems to be the best bet to win anything.
So, does the game stand up in the gameplay way? Not at all. The fights are slow, uninspiring, and always end up in the same slugfest of punches.
The training is incredibly tiresome, so actually building up your fighter becomes a chore. In fact, actually fighting in this game becomes a chore once you realise how dull and boring it actually is.
While credit has to be given for trying to be one of the only games post SF2 that tries to be realistic, but the game just fails. The Virtua Fighter games did realistic properly, as did the legendary Karate Champ, but this is just an uninspiring hunk of rubbish when you compare it to the other fighting games on offer at the time.
There is a multiplayer mode, but I’m not enough of a sadist to force this game upon anyone I hold as a friend.
I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. At all. Admittedly, its been years since I have seen the movie, but this game actually doesn’t appear to have any links to it at all, and the name was just thrown on to try and trick people into buying it.
Best of the Best is a game that had a good idea, the whole training your fighter and getting invited to the Kumite thing might actually have been great had it been in a game with a much better engine, but as it stands, this is a game to be skipped by everyone.
If it’s a good Snes fighting game you are looking for, I can name you a handful better than this. Mortal Kombat 2,Streetfighter 2,Streetfighter 2: Turbo,Fatal Fury,Fatal Fury 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters… and you get the picture, near on every Snes fighting game is more exciting than this.
If you want a realistic martial arts game, I suggest picking up a Sega Saturn and a copy of Virtua Fighter 2 .
Recommended:
No
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flash-hammer
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