| paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Fighting; reg=JPN] |
| | | I always like to see a 3D fighting game that plays out in the standard 2D side view. That being said, this one has unusual controls for a 2D fighter: a dash/throw button, a normal attack button, a heavy attack button, and a taunt/weapon-switch button. Special moves are just a single stick direction plus an attack button and there's no such concept as super moves in the game.
A ton of modes open up as you play, most of them pitting your Kamen Rider armored bug-man guy (I know absolutely nothing about this classic Japanese live-action super-hero TV series) against a succession of actors in animal/monster costumes. The graphics really capture the "guys in plastic costumes" look brilliantly, with photographic backgrounds (the generic industrial settings in which fights in shows like this tend to take place) and very carefully modelled, motion-captured characters.
In most of these modes you and your opponent don't have the traditional fighting game health meters, instead there's a single meter, starting at zero, which goes up toward 100 as you hit the opponent and back down toward zero as the opponent hits you. Once you get it up to 100, a message at the bottom of the screen shows you which button to press to launch a cinematic finishing move in which your hero almost invariably stabs/slices/shoots or otherwise critically injures your foe, who staggers a few feet and blows up in a big cheesy explosion. Great stuff, I'd swear they even have the hero pop position ever-so-slightly just before the explosion, as you see in these shows when they stop the camera, switch the characters, and restart the camera.
There's also a standard single-player fighting mode and a Vs. mode, a gallery mode where you spend credits earned in the single-player modes to shoot passing picture frames and unlock viewable graphics, a mode where you spend credits to customize the G3 policeman character, and a couple modes I haven't opened up yet. Pretty amusing stuff, I'd think fans of the series would particularly enjoy this. The fighting system is a bit stiff but captures the cheap-live-action-hero-battle spirit very nicely. |
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| paleface 05:13:50 11/13/03 [title updated] |
| | | | "Kamen" means "masked," I think. |
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| | | Played some Vs. today, not bad but nothing too spectacular, certainly, and against a crafty opponent the stiffness and relatively small number of moves begin to tell against it. The characters, on the other hand, are fairly entertaining, especially the bad guys (turtle man, leopard man, snake man, etc).
In Vs., both opponents have a standard health meter. |
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