20: Extreme Sports With the Berenstein Bears

19: Bible Adventure

18: Kriss Kross: Make My Video

17: Bubsy 3D

16: Bad Street Brawler

15: Total Recall

14: Rapjam Volume One

13: AIRCARS

12: Night Trap

11: Heroes of the Lance

10: Revolution X

9: Custer's Revenge

8: White Men Can't Jump

7: Superman 64

6: Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon

5: Virtuoso

4: Captain Novolin

3: Fight For Life

2: Club Drive

1: E.T. The Extraterrestrial





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#3: Fight for Life (Jaguar)

Sometimes when a group of people try to come up with a great idea for a video game, they instead decide to give up and take a tired idea and make it stupider. That's what happened here. It's the story of eight dead people fighting in the "Spectre Zone," where the winner gets to face the son of the devil for a chance to come back to life. And judging by how well they fight, they're hoping to rise from the dead, so they can get back to their old jobs as Special Olympics equipment managers.

Due to what I'm assuming was some kind of error, nobody told the guy in charge of making the backgrounds that the game was set in hell. The fighters will go from tropical jungles to Manhattan as if Satan was announcing the tournament, "Fight for your soul in the deepest bowels of HADES!!! And also... beautiful scenic Arizona!"


You can tell it's hell because their outfits were clearly designed to torture any nearby eternal souls...


...and you can tell it's Fight For Life because the game's brilliant programming doesn't seem to notice when you kick someone in the chest.
Most of your time in Fight for Life is spent waiting for your dead karate man to hobble across the screen to get close enough to throw a clumsy punch at the other dead karate man. The game is so slow it looks like the fighters glued their feet to the floor before the tournament, and have been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. The camera has its problems too. If the fighters ever manage to cross paths, it frantically flies around trying to keep your character on the left side of the screen. And when I say frantically, I mean over the course of 2 to 3 minutes. That means that when you finally manage to waddle over to your opponent and they decide to jump over your head, you get to take a nap and wait for the camera to finish before you can start the long walk over to where they landed. It's like watching two legless sleepwalkers play tag.

Here's one more unique combat feature: if you push the attack button while you're crouching, and you're lucky enough for the controls to notice, your character will first stand up, and then try to hit the area six inches in front of their own face. Crouching is just a useless option you can use if you want to look like a duck before you stand up and punch. And since we've already established that you're stupid enough to be playing Fight For Life, that's entirely possible.

Graphics: 1/10
If the Jaguar has 64 bits, then they used 60 of them for crap, and four for someone to step in that crap spread it around with their shoe. I found a handheld football game in a dumpster in 1979 that looked better than this.

Fun 0/10
Have you ever stepped on a nail during a seminar about trends in hydraulic pump insurance? If so, then keep doing it. It's more fun than this electronic wasteland.

Contribution to a Failure: 9/10
There are so many video game systems that failed for subtle reasons like marketing or sunspots. That's not the case with the Jaguar. The Jaguar deserved to fail. In fact, the Jaguar didn't fail hard enough. If any of the people responsible for the Atari Jaguar are not currently begging for cigarettes at a bus station, there is no justice in the world.

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