Shaq Fu (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
263A playthrough of Electronic Arts' 1994 fighting game for the Super Nintendo, Shaq Fu.
Played through the story mode on the default difficulty level. I also used the "blood code," indicated by the red flash on the options screen. And by the blood effects.
The 90s sure were an odd time, if video games can serve as a reflection of the time and culture from which they hail. Take basketball for example. Sure, we had the "realistic" recreations of the sport, but we also had 1-on-1 in FMV with Slam City with Scottie Pippen, hilariously terrible and inappropriate movie adaptations like White Men Can't Jump, burning people and smashed backboards in NBA Jam... we even had Michael Jordan platforming to save his friends from a mad doctor.
And then we had Shaq Fu.
It garnered far more publicity and attention than any of those other games... well, okay, not NBA JAM. Duh. But in the months leading up to Shaq Fu's release, we were inundated with magazine articles that featured interviews with Shaq, "behind-the-scenes" looks at how the graphics were done, Q&A's about how they created the "flowing" gameplay. The forces that be were lobbying surprisingly hard for it.
Seriously. I'm still talking about Shaq Fu.
And when it came out, I seem to remember it getting reasonably good reviews. I have no idea what they were thinking, but I never had any interest in it, no matter how close it came to the coveted NP 5.0, nor however many bright red screaming face icons Scary Larry awarded it. I thought it sounded lame as h-e-double hockey sticks.
Turns out I was right. The game sucked.
You play as Shaq, who randomly wanders around a deserted street in the middle of the day in Pepsi-sponsored downtown Tokyo. For no real reason, he stumbles into a building that looks like a tool shed. Is he looking for a Pepsi?
Inside the vaguely spiritual tool shed, he finds himself harangued by an old man into stepping through a random door that leads to an island populated with stuff that wants to chew him apart.
"But oh no! What about the charity basketball game that I have later on?" Because that's the natural thing to worry about. You're in some weirdo alternate dimension with belligerent, gross teacup-poodle sized but nicely-animated creatures that all want to savage you. And you're worried about your basketball game.
Shaq Fu isn't terrible in all regards. Just most. The graphics are pretty nicely done. They're too small for a fighting game, and the fluid animation doesn't really add anything to game play (it actually hinders the ability to time your hits) so we end up with tiny-but-nicely-animated sprites as an aesthetic choice. I personally would've been far more pleased with SF2 quality animation and sprite size, but I suppose that graphics aren't everything. But not once did I ever feel like a 7ft giant towering over my opponents. Not once.
So that's where the game play comes in. It's way too fast, it's virtually impossible to jump and land next to your opponent, each character only gets a couple of special moves, and most of the moves have extremely short range, so you end up flailing at thing air as often as you make contact. The buttons also like to just not work when you need them the most. I'm guessing that's a byproduct of the excessively long animation cycles.
What's more, the SNES version got shafted on a fair amount of content that appeared in the Genesis version. The Sega game has more stage backdrops and characters, and a longer story mode as a result (maybe the SNES did luck out then... less is more?), so not only did SNES owners get a game that played quite poorly, but they also got a game that was missing a significant chunk of its content for a price tag similar to what Sega guys paid for theirs. Or didn't pay, if they were smart.
I'm sure that Shaq Fu has its fans, but it's a lot easier to be "charmed" by the weird concept than it is to be "entertained" with this game play.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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