Fighting

Jedi Power Battles was a strangely difficult game to review. Dale and I on some level enjoyed the game, but you must wonder if our patience wouldn't have ran out a lot quicker if we weren't professionally obligated to play it. All the major problems that Dale mentioned in his review are very accurate and very serious.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Mild Language, Violence

You'd have to search pretty far and wide to find bigger Jackie Chan fans than the two reviewers of Midway's latest. Like Chi, I was waiting with baited breath to play this game as soon as I heard it was in development, however since then my interest has waned severely. This was mainly due to the lack of industry buzz about the game and the fact that early demos of the game made it look like just another Final Fight clone with Jackie Chan's name plastered on it.

Game Description: International stuntman, martial artist, and filmmaker extraordinaire Jackie Chan leaps onto the PlayStation in an action-packed game of his own. Featuring Chan's signature moves, voice, and humor, players guide the stuntmaster through 15 levels of martial arts mayhem to save his grandfather and retrieve a stolen package from a gang of crooks. Jackie Chan Stuntmaster focuses on both Chan's martial arts expertise and his agility as a stuntman. The fighting system is based on his signature fighting style—in addition to throws and combos, specialized moves are incorporated to allow players to use chairs, boxes, ladders, bottles, and even a fish. At the conclusion of the game, players are treated to a "making of" video, which showcases footage of Chan at his motion-capture session.

So the question that begs to be asked is that if Jackie is already an impressive videogame in of himself, does the world really need a videogame in his likeness? Probably not, but that didn't stop the developers of Radical Entertainment from trying.

When I first learned about the Dead Or Alive series, it was while perusing the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly Magazine; the editors were openly salivating at the overtly 'jiggly' nature of the female fighters in the game. This was a few years back when the first game hit the arcades and was then ported to the Sony PlayStation.

Nearly a decade later and dozens of other entries into the genre, things have changed quite a bit. In Tecmo's newest Dreamcast fighting game, Dead Or Alive 2, the gender of playable characters has shifted dramatically to a near equal five to seven ratio; still in favor of males.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Animated Violence, Suggestive Themes 

Game Description: Dead or Alive 2 brings more phenomenal fighting action to the Dreamcast with the gorgeous graphics and incredibly fast gameplay that Sega fans expect. Dead or Alive 2's character-against-character action takes place in gorgeously rendered locations ranging from a cathedral to a moving elevator cage. In a special twist, characters can battle in multiple locations in many of the areas and interact with the environment. This means that the cathedral window is more than just a pretty background—it's just waiting for an opponent to be hurled through it and onto the fighting platform below. Perhaps the coolest feature of all is the Tag Battle mode—available to one-, two-, and four-player games—that enables fighters to summon a teammate into the action. A total of 12 male and female fighters are available, each boasting a slew of basic and special attacks, tag-team combos, reversals, and throws.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Animated Violence, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes