97. Way Of The Warrior

(3DO, Naughty Dog, 1994)
Early to mid 90s, excitement on the horizon, video games are hitting a new wave of CD technology, not only that, but fighters are back! and they're more violent than ever before! Death moves and digitised graphics! MOORRTALLL KOMBAAATTT!

Holy crap....

Riding the wave of MK's success, Universal and Naughty Dog unleashed this TRAVESTY of a game onto Panasonic's fledgling 3DO console. Whilst I have no problems with games that blatantly copy other games, I have a real problem with BAD games.
WOTW is a bad game.
A cool intro has a talking skull tell of a book containing eternity's fighting knowledge (The book incidentally is a rip off of Evil Dead's Necronomicon) The winner of an upcoming tournament will fill in the book's last page and tip the scales for good or evil.

Nine fighters battle out across bizarre, multi level backgrounds in a glitchy, button-mash fest in an effort to face a dragon at the top of a temple or something.
The characters are unlikeable, unoriginal, badly digitised and beyond controllable. (Urban legend has it that Naughty dog friends and families play the roster)
The engine is unreliable, unbalanced and confusing, with unusable jumping attacks and piss-poor special moves. Now add to that the fact you have to play this on a 3DO controller, arguably one of the worst gamepads ever designed and its not looking good for 3DO's exclusive fighter.

Featuring a few decent White Zombie songs doesnt cut it when all your voice overs sound like the same two guys putting on their best racist Australian/British/Deep South/Chinese etc accents. Commentary (presumably from the talking skull) hits you repeatedly with lines like "Ooh that's gotta hurt!" and "That's all folks!" When a fight to the death ends with sleigh bells whilst your score tots up, something's wrong.

If the game is intentionally tongue in cheek in style, that's fair enough, but it also sucks hard to play, which kills any and all attempts at "comedy" it may have been going for. Bar the intro and the admittedly cool lava pit fatality, WOTW is simply one of the worst fighters to come into existence and a good example of all that was wrong with that "difficult early CD console" period; Graphics and sound that were only passable even at the time and zero gameplay.