#490

Описание: A playthrough of the final boss Nekron in Incredible Technologies' BloodStorm.

I'm not going to say much in these videos. BloodStorm is hands down my least favourite fighting game in existence. As the spiritual successor to Time Killers, it does try extremely hard. Ripping off Mortal Kombat in about a million ways (fatalities, stage fatalities, and hidden bosses in particular), there was some definite effort put into this game. All ten bosses in the game are playable through codes (although these codes must be reapplied before every match), and all bosses are unlockable no matter how broken they are, including the final boss Nekron.

I personally just find this game an abysmal mess though. It seems like they really tried, but this game is still one of the biggest chores in existence. It is one of the biggest examples of quantity over quality in fighting game history, where the developers just stuffed aspect after aspect after aspect in the hopes of making the game good, without realising that a good fighting game needs more than just features. If the gameplay is innately flawed and relies on arbitrary limb-detachment (as BloodStorm continues to do), then it will never be enjoyable or really taken seriously. If the music is awful, if the graphics are ugly, if the general presentation is tacky and pessimistic, then it just becomes an unenjoyable mess. Fighting games, despite how thin there stories are, need a protagonist. I'm not against games covering morally ambiguous issues (indeed, I am absolutely love I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, for instance), however a fighting game is simply too basic to cover moral quandaries, and hence tend to instead stick to a simple good versus evil format. This is to be expected of course, as most fighting games are inspired by martial arts films in one way or another. Our lovable badass protagonist/s fight off the goons of some nefarious villain, have a showdown, and eventually save the day. Could you imagine a Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan film where they were an unrepentent, downright evil asshole? Speaking of Jackie Chan...well, I'll get to him when I get to him.

The final boss of the game is Nekron, a strange mechnical overlord who threw the world into disarray or some such, I'm not really sure. He has one of the ugliest sprites in video game history, and when he fights he is locked solely to his horrible looking background. The hidden bosses of the game are known as the Agents of Nekron, and are mostly palette swaps of the game characters with switched around abilities. Each character also has a gauntlet which fires a projectile, and they can gain abilities from defeated foes, not that I ever used them much. Nekron however doesn't really need much of anything. His regular and special moves see him lunging forward, dealing ludicrous damage to the opponent and tearing through them in seconds. He's reminiscent in this way of Balrog in SFII: The World Warrior, though he's even more broken as his regular, basic attacks have the ability to lob off limbs and cause opponents to bleed out rather easily. He's a cheap, boring boss with a design that looks unfinished, and really helps to encapsulate how dis-likeable this game is. I know it has some fans here and there, though I think that's more out of nostalgia then anything else. Objectively it's a pretty bad fighting game, made all the more offensive as there's so much of it for me to cover.