Blood Warrior

Mortal Kombat was supposed to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme game. No JC in the end, so they went for guys in pointy hats and balaclavas pulling each other’s spines out. And lo, born was a multimedia franchise up there with Care Bears and My Little Pony.

Seriously: 92nd Biggest Thing The World Has Ever Seen, according to the Wikipedia list, nestling between the Bears and the Ponies. They should do a tie-up. A Smash Bros competitor.

Anyway, Kaneko – a Suginami publisher as once was – dodoed by ‘07 – dug the realistic imagery of MK and got copying. Kaneko’s production line had already shat out such illustrious turds as Gals Panic and Gals Panic II*, but this was going to be even better.

They needed a twist to update their 1992 also-ran Japanese folklore fighter, Fujiyama Buster. So 1993’s Ooedo Fight had you control photographed sprites and lots of blood comes out. That’s the Mortal Kombat magic, right?

Ooedo was retitled for the West, getting straight to the point: Blood Warrior. (Fujiyama Buster was Shogun Warriors.) Blood, Japanese stuff: nuff said.

Ooedo Fight is now classified by Japanese Wikipedia in the genre Bakage. Ge is short for game; baka means stupid. This genre includes games that are stupid by design. I don’t think Kaneko qualified via that route. Here, the guy’s controlling digitised photos of a model stone statue. Not the greatest use of the rotoscoping technology.

And in 1995, unperturbed by the Ooedo bakage debacle, Kaneko took us full-circle. Think: if Jean-Claude Van Damme was the American Jackie Chan, Jackie Chan was surely the Japanese Jean-Claude Van Damme. Finally, the world got its digitised superstar martial arts fighter: Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire: the Legend of Jackie Chan.

Games press in ‘95 accused Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire: the Legend of Jackie Chan of being “obsessed with Jackie Chan”. Not entirely fair: is it “obsessed” to mention Jackie Chan twice in the title? Or to have three different playable Jackie Chan characters? Or to make all the characters killable by fatalities except the Jackie Chans, who will only ever crouch briefly, stand, then thumbs-up at the camera?

Anyhow, 25 years on, Ooedo Fight’s getting some hard-earned love in Taito Hey. Wasn’t the coolest kid back in school, but it’s still one of the guys, hanging in the arcade, leaning on the cabs, watching muscle-memory gamers passing the thousandth afternoon. Fair enough.

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* First 2 of an 8-game soft-porn puzzle series