Thursday, December 10, 2009

Scarred for Life: Weird Fighting F

Most college campuses are pretty big. And during a long day of classes, you're likely to unwind in a place that will become a regular stop. For me, one of those places is the study lounge, known as the cyber lounge by the regulars. Many of the regulars have laptops, and several of the friends I've made in there play a lot of games. But one day, one of them brings in a Japanese homebrewed fighting game which roughly translates into Weird Fighting F. Good luck finding any other information about it besides that link. As it's Japanese, it'll be hard to find more information as most searches (since I assume you're reading this in English) will turn up zero information.

Weird Fighting F has 10 extremely weird characters, though two of them are guys dressed as Mario and Luigi, so they're recognizable. But everyone else is so weird, I actually regret playing the game to a certain extent. Actually, the weird characters aren't the source of my regret, but rather the fact that I got so damn good at this game with weird characters and stupid mechanics.


This is as normal as it gets


There is no story as far as I could tell. Just a bunch of weird characters, each weirder then the last, beating up each other in assorted locations across Japan. Here are the most normal characters: guys dressed as Mario and Luigi, a guy cosplaying as Detective Conan, a photographer, and Buddha with antlers. Here are the weird characters: a naked cyclops wearing a ladybug as a thong (who fights like Marvel comics' Cyclops), a masked pervert wearing a g-string, two guys wearing jumpsuits, one of which has fireballs come out as he does pelvic thrusts, and green man in his underwear who's attacks heavily imply masturbation.


See that green guy getting impaled? Be glad there are no other pictures of him. He. Is. Frightening. In motion.

The mechanics are a mixed bag of stupidity and madness. Right off the bat, you find out your fighter faces in the direction he's facing. In a traditional fighting game (made by humans) the characters always face each other, and turn around when their positions are switched for whatever reason. In this game (designed by Satanists, apparently) you have to manually face the direction you want to attack. This leads to a lot of confusion as you jump over and try attack but instead punch the air in front of you instead of your opponent behind you. Characters also have a lot of health, making matches quite long though you only fight one match. When your health drops to zero, any super bar you had built up is drained to resurrect you. And of course, you have super moves, which range from traditional (a barrage of projectiles) to off the wall (using Mario's trademark super star power up) to plain frightening (a deluge of... well... I'm talking about the green guy).


It's-me! Mari-what the hell am I doing here?

So this game is free to download. Almost free. I suppose it'll cost you something to play this game. Your innocence, your sanity, your soul. Seriously, this game is messed up. It's fun for an hour with friends, but past that, you'll come to realize you've made a mistake. Still, fun is fun, right?



NO. NOT REALLY.

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