365//365: Day 175 – Ultimate Fighter (SNES)

The UFC has become a huge draw over the last decade or so. Two men bashing each others faces in, while trying to lock on random submission holds that could break a persons limbs, in order to achieve victory. Some of those fights are some of the most action packed pieces of entertainment you’ll encounter on a television set, while most of the others just put me to sleep. Overall it has its ups and downs, but manages to have that one big fight that everyone will clamor on about. It wasn’t until Brock Lesnar entered the UFC that I began to take noti–

….what’s that?

….

Oh that’s embarrassing — I thought I was reviewing an Ultimate Fighter game on the Super Nintendo.

….oh wait, I am reviewing an Ultimate Fighter game on the Super Nintendo, but it’s not the Ultimate Fighter that we’ve all come to know?

If that’s the case, then why the heck is the first thing anyone sees when booting the game up is this –
Unraveling this paradox of perplexity is a lot more complex than you may think. You see, Ultimate Fighter has a fighting component to it, although it’s mostly convoluted and makes absolutely no sense. You can select a tournament mode in which you can select a generic character and fight an opponent in a completely half ass fighting game-like way. You can throw a fireball in the typical shotokan way, but that’s about it. All of your other moves are restricted to punches, kicks and sweeps. Knock you opponent down 2-3 times and you win your match. There’s no thought, strategy or intelligence needed to pick up a victory. On top of that, the controls feel robotic, with a jump that just needs to be seen to be believed.

Then there’s a story mode of sorts, which, to be honest, is so idiotic that its not even worth mentioning. The jist of it is you’re moving from left to right, very much like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on the same system, killing waves of unintelligent henchmen with zero variety within each stage outside their color attire, fighting mini bosses along the way. Occasionally, you’ll tune into the Power Rangers aura and morph into some silly looking character in which you’ll fight the same mini boss you defeated, who also transformed into some mildly hilarious looking character. Once you defeat your opponent, you switch back and carry on, like nothing happened. What?

The backgrounds have absolutely no rhyme or reason to them. Just take a look at the businessmen cheering you on!

The audio and video are below average for a Super Nintendo game, featuring some uninspiring backgrounds and barely passable character models. The animation lacks quite a bit, which is very much noticed when you jump. The same music bits and music stings are present way too often, with some generic, not to mention overly weak sound effects across the board. Never at any point do you feel that your blows are making an impact, thanks to the unusual sounds your blows make.

Finally, while battery backup saving started to become the norm during the SNES days, why, oh why is the password system so tedious? This isn’t River City Ransom blasphemy, where you had what seemed like dozens of characters you had to fill in. But what River City Ransom and Ultimate Fighter share in the password department are the fatuous additions of semicolons, apostrophes and other characters that did not feature letters or numbers. Seriously, it shouldn’t be rocket science to program a password system that’s brief and elementary. Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures had just that — a four character password system that worked effortlessly. Why couldn’t other companies adopt such a system? Instead, Ultimate Fighter gives you this –
Outside the misleading title, Ultimate Fighter is nothing more than an extremely shallow 2D beat ‘em up game, with little in the way of innovation, genius, entertainment and integrity. If you want a 2D beat ‘em up title done right, by all means check out Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on the Super Nintendo, where at least the redundant enemy character models are augmented with the fact that each different color Putty will attack differently. Ultimate Fighter is a tremendous failure as a fighting title, and a substandard 2D beat ‘em up title.

Rating: 3.5