Eternal Champions Challenge From The Dark Side, 1995 Sega (20 From Sega/Mega CD #11)
7Brutally difficult but richly rewarding vs. fighting game. The graphics and music are great (especially those backgrounds!), though the battle dynamics themselves aren't terribly smooth or polished. In order to have any success in this game you must either tweak the settings to "Neophyte" to make the game tons easier, utilize the cheat codes (of which there are many), get the cool hack that decreases the overall difficulty, or LEARN TO CHAIN COMBOS OVER AND OVER SO THE OPPONENT GOES DOWN WITHOUT A CHANCE TO RESPOND! That latter part is a bit of a broken system that can work in your favor if you learn when to start a new combo. A ridiculous amount of settings are available to you to enhance your gaming experience like amount of falls, amount of opponents to face before taking on the final boss-- the Eternal Champion, time per round (or infinite), and so much more. And that only scratches the surface.. the absolute best part of the game is the crazy finishing moves that result in messy, gory deaths for your opponent (or you if you really suck)! Vendettas are finishing moves with the traditional controller/button input, Sudden Deaths and Overkills are dependent on your opponent standing in a certain place in front of the background and/or being dizzied and having a certain amount of energy or less, and the Cinekills require much more factors to properly pull off but are also very cool. And on top of that, there are also tons of hidden characters to unlock and play as.. most are joke characters, like a dog, a chicken, a monkey and a snake (!). The morbid sense of humor and awesome gory kills (that clown car falling on the victim and tooting blood out of the horn is one of my favorite) shoot this to the top of the Sega CD vs. fighting game list. Hope you had a great weekend folks! I will try to be less tardy with the next entry.