Expect No Mercy (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
283A playthrough of Microforum's 1995 license-based versus-fighting game for PCs running Windows 3.1, Expect No Mercy.
Based on a movie that nobody ever heard of, Expect No Mercy is an arcade-style fighter that makes use of digitized sprites and background graphics. I remember seeing the box for this one store shelves and it looked awesome - not only did the screenshots impress, but the whole box was made up to look like it was covered in blood. Needless to say, despite the number of absolutely scathing reviews the game received, that box still made for a tempting proposition. I suppose the title was enough of a warning though - if you bought this, you'd realize quickly that you hadn't been shown any mercy whatsoever. I remember this going for £44.95 at my local games shop when it was new. Oof.
Expect No Mercy clearly wanted to be the next Mortal Kombat: even the trailer (that i inserted in the intro) makes it hilariously obvious:
"Do you know what to expect?"
"I expect pain. Blood. A mortal combat." The master looks down at faux-Ryu wearing Ken's clothes in pained disapproval.
"Senpai, this is beyond Mortal Kombat." Slow fade and cue the 90s dance music.
Oh yeah - it's pure 90s, including the completely wrong choice of Japanese words. You play as the random martial artist-turned-government agent set on fighting in a VR fighting tournament with real life consequences, where you should, of course, Expect No Mercy!
As far as fighting games go, this one is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The graphics looked incredible in pictures, but seeing it in action reveals just how painfully limited the animation is - Windows 3.1 was not a platform well-suited to fast-moving action games, and ENM makes its limitations abundantly clear. There is a ton of red that splashes across the screen, though, and some of those fatalities are cool. The FMV cutscenes are generally lame, though, and I really don't get why they included the head-squishing minigame.
The control scheme is also virtually unusable on a keyboard (and good luck if you want to try Win 3.1's joystick calibration... ugh) - the diagonals have their own dedicated keys which makes some inputs extremely difficult to pull of consistently. The controls are only vaguely responsive, and that is when they feel like working at all. You end up flailing ineffectively as often as you make contact, meaning that you'll get trashed regularly by a CPU player that, even when on the easiest setting, goes all out and rarely misses.
And oh my God, I hate that stupid stamina bar!
The characters are all pretty amusing - you get things like clowns and women in fishnets, in addition to three palette-swapped ninjas that are each considered different characters. Totally not Mortal Kombat. The moves are pretty much the same between all of them, though they each have one or two character-specific special moves in addition to the "No Mercy" fatalities.
For whatever reason, I liked Expect No Mercy. It's a terrible game, no question, but it does have a lot of cheesy appeal that makes it entertaining. I just wish it wasn't quite so frustrating to play. I saw very little in the way of gameplay of this one on YouTube so I figured I'd make a contribution.
I added in a few fatality moves at the end for anyone that might like to see them!
*If anyone has difficulty running it properly, I played this through DosBox with Windows 3.1 installed. It's very sensitive to the hardware its running on - I found that 11-12k cycles and 12 megs of RAM was the sweet spot to have it run it as intended. The game will run too fast on anything higher than a low-end Pentium 1, so if that's problem, just slow down the speed of the emulated machine.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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