365//365: Day 129 – Urban Champion (NES)

Worst Games Ever Week will be a “celebration” of some of the worst video games I have ever played. Over the years, there have been quite a few stinkers that I came across – a few that I’ve already ran down during the first four months of the 365//365 review project (Double Dragon 3, George Foreman’s KO Boxing, Simpsons Wrestling), as well as a handful during this week. There will be quite a few titles that people would expect to see, but will not be featured, due to either my tastes of crap (for lack of a better term) stink a bit more than others, or some of these games will be done later on in the year. In either case, these games are THE cream of the crap! While there’s plenty of titles that could kick this week off, there’s one in particular that never seems to get enough recognition as one of the worst games out there — Urban Champion.

An early Nintendo Entertainment System release, Urban Champion can be best described as a fighting game without depth, moves, proper controls, intelligence, foundation, and so on. The sympathy card will not be played here — Karate Champ had a better foundation than Urban Champion. Even games that didn’t feature one on one battles outside boss fights, like Kung Fu, had rhyme and reason to its gameplay and structure. Urban Champion has nothing.

Yep. This is Urban Champion. Yay?

It loops the same goofy track throughout your experience, which wasn’t a foreign entity within the confines of a Nintendo game, especially when the game was released, however, it’s an uninspired melody that does nothing but bore the player. The sound effects and visuals don’t help either, as they are also the same, Flintstones-esque looped shenanigans. Your enemy seems to be your green haired twin throughout each “stage”. Each “stage” is a set of four screens that change over once either play is knocked over to either side of the screen.

Not only is the audio and video presentation stuck in a tight circle of redundancy, but the gameplay is as well. The goal of the game is to punch our opponent past two screens and into an open manhole, finally defeating them. Your method of attacks consists of a high punch, a low punch, and that’s it. Diversity is as flowing as the good times Urban Champions provides. The difficulty never really changes much throughout each fight. You either land attacks, miss attacks or hit them, and it magically doesn’t register with the game. Every so often, someone from a window above the action will throw a potted plant down towards the action, stunning whomever it hits. But that’s about it. It’s so boring, so lifeless, so devoid of intellect, variety and entertainment, that you’d swear you were playing rock, paper, scissors with your shadow.

Urban Champion isn’t the worst video game ever, but the fact that it’s missing basic fundamentals, such as actual gameplay, makes you wonder who green lighted this crap in the first place. When Pong has a deeper gameplay mechanic than Urban Champion, you really have to wonder what these developers were thinking. It’s bland, has absolutely no core and suffers from extreme repetition in every aspect of its being. I guess you can consider Urban Champion the calm before the storm, as the next batch of games coming up this week will more than likely leave mental scars deeper than you’ve ever experienced.

Congratulations, Player One! You are an idiot for playing this game! Now drown yourself in this confetti!

Rating: 0.9