#555 Violence Fight Bosses (1/2): Tony Won gameplay.
0Gameplay of the final boss Tony Won in Taito's Violence Fight.
Annnnd, we're back. I thought I'd cut my break a couple of days sure as I felt like getting back to uploads, which is usually a good sign. During my break, I experimented with a few more emulators, hacked a few more games (including finally hacking Raidou in Dead or Alive 1, which took me around a year) and doing some more recordings as well.
We now return to a short section covering hybrid fighting games; pre-SFII fighting games which are an odd mix between fighting games, beat-em-ups and wrestling games. The first of these to cover is Taito's oft forgotten Violence Fight. This game is, unbeknowst to many I suspect, rather special in the fact that it is the first proper tournament-style fighting game; there are four selectable characters, and players fight all other playable characters before moving on to fight two unplayable bosses, a system which would eventually be adopted by the next game I'll being covering, Mutant Fighter, as well as SFII itself. Before SFII standardised the genre, fighting games tended to have a boss gauntlet focus, including the original Street Fighter itself and of course its spiritual successors, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting.
Apart from that aforementioned distinction however, there's no denying that Violence Fight (which is a wonderfully redundant name, I might add) is a bit too simplistic to be really worth a go nowadays. It's a somewhat fun button-basher, with typically unfair opponents as you would expect of a coin-munching game of the late 80s. Tony Won, the leader of the gang who sets up this supposed Violence Fight tournament, acts as the final boss of the game, and he is clearly intended to be as broken as anything, dealing 4x as much damage as the playable character in the game and destroying them with relatively ease. Indeed, the only real way to stand a chance against him when facing him is to spam punches and kicks, which ultimately gives the game a very unrefined feel, I must admit.
As a game from the late 80s, it's probably not too much of a surprise that the game's coding isn't able to sustain playing as Tony Won or the other boss of the game, Ron Max, for very long. After being hacked, the end of a match proper, regardless of winning or losing, will cause the game to crash as it has no programming built in to allow it to let the characters progress further in arcade mode. Another problem is that attempting to hack the bosses on the character selection screen will itself crash the game; you have to select a character, pause the game, and then select a boss value if want to play as them. All in all, these are videos for the sake of thoroughness, but if it can be done it might as well be done, and shown for all to see, too.