Attack of the Street Fighter Clones

No, not clones as in alternate versions of the game, but clones as in a million clones of all the Street Fighter 2 characters attacking you for hours.

Maybe the idea of Street Fighter characters in a side-scroller isn’t a terrible one, but after the 1,000,000th time you’ve killed a palette swapped version of E.Honda it kinda drags on a bit, especially when the game offers absolutely nothing but hours of repetition.

There are good beat ‘em ups, and there are bad beat ‘em ups, and then there are beat ‘em ups which are physically painful to play because they’re so badly designed. This game, known as “Jue Zhan Tian Huang” is definitely the latter. The entire game consists of either 4 enemies on screen at a time, all being clones of Street Fighter 2 characters, with seemingly random amounts of health, and an occasional boss fight against cyborg type enemies and a token SF2 character who will respawn until the boss is dead. There are no weapons, there appear to be 2 types of destructible objects throughout the entire game. The background are as generic as you can get, with an unhealthy liking for lift levels, it’s buggy, feels half finished in places, and will have you screaming ‘stop, stop right now’ by level 4, but luckily for you there are 8 levels broken into even more stages.

The game is also full of foreground elements which will obscure your view, some of the train levels mess with your eyes in ways which make you feel like they’re going to fall out by rapidly scrolling the foreground and background leaving you with what can only be described as a grid like pattern through which to view the action.

The hardware is Megadrive / Genesis based (the same board as Puckman Pockimon) and had the game been based off the Streets of Rage code it might have been good, but it looks like this is an original creation, or at least if there is any Streets of Rage code in there it’s so well hidden behind poor design you’re not going to notice it.

Here are some screenshots, including the ending, or at least I hope it’s the ending. There are protection checks throughout the game so I had to play until the end to make sure things were working. There’s a sound bank needs hooking up too, but the samples are so poor I’m not sure what’s right and wrong.

This could possibly displace Dragons Lair as the worst ever arcade game I’ve played …. I’m not making a video because that would involve playing it again.


Thanks (I think) to Yohji, Mr. CAST, B. Stahl, Smitdogg, The Dumping Union


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