violencefight.jpg" alt="Violence Fight screenshot from vgmuseum.com" width="320" height="224" />Hard as it may be to believe there was in fact an arcade game called Violence Fight. While this blog has mainly focussed on those golden moments from gaming history with a slew of wonderful and addictive titles Violence Fight is set to break that trend. This game was every bit as bad as it sounds and a long way from the beat ‘em up complexity of Street Fighter or even Mortal Kombat.

The best thing about Violence Fight was the awesome back story. The game was released by Taito in 1989 and it’s fair to say they didn’t spend a huge amount of time on translation.

"In the early part of 1950’s, in the USA, a game called Violence Fight was in vogue among Mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen. The Violence Fight was the game to struggle for No. 1 Quarreler with fighters who were gathered from all parts of the USA speaking boastingly of their strength. And of course a lot of winning money as well as the honor were given to the winner. Here in a downtown in LA a young fighter Bad Blue and his manager Blinks seek for the winning money eagerly. As a matter of fact can Bad Blue take the No. 1 place of the USA?”

What the brilliantly named Bad Blue needed the money for we’ll never know; perhaps he wanted to buy a shirt? Most of the rest of the character names were fairly normal, there was Ben Smith, Tony Won, Lee Chen, Ron Max and then there was Lick Joe. Not an invitation I’m keen to follow up on especially since Lick Joe was the tubby blond wrestler, although at least he had a vest on.

The graphics were pretty dire and the 2D characters were a great source of amusement. They show some artistic skill but the designs were incredibly silly. The backdrops included a cityscape and a pile of boxes with cheering scumbags encouraging you to kill each other. The environments were breakable, which was a cool, but pointless innovation.

Sadly the game-play sucked, it was painfully slow. You had an eight-way joystick and three buttons and you could play against the machine or a human opponent with the winner staying on for extra rounds. You could punch or kick and you could press them together to pull off a special move. You also had a jump button and you occasionally got the chance to pick up boxes or crates and hurl them at your opponent. The fighters did have their own unique moves but everything was horribly sluggish so it made little difference. The special moves did at least provide another opportunity for some more unintentional humour and they included the Stardust Punch, the Atomic Chop and the Health Head-Butt.

The game actually managed to spawn a sequel called Violence Fight II. It forms part of the history of the beat ‘em up genre which was slow to develop into anything particularly good. Violence Fight was just insane daftness and most of the humour came from the bad translation which it makes fun to laugh at now but it still isn’t fun to play. The only other thing about the game that is worth mentioning is that it gave you the chance to fight a tiger. Seriously, the bonus round was basically you kicking lumps out of a tiger. How times have changed.