Mom, can we play Street Fighter?
No, we have Street Fighter at home.
Urban Champion is among the most maligned of Nintendo's early-era Famicon games. Designed by Wild Gunman author Makoto Kano and released in the U.S. in 1986, it was, like Wild Gunman, already outdated and quickly forgotten as so many others in Nintendo's first wave of stateside launches had. I myself hadn't heard of it until it arrived on Virtual Console in 2007 and enjoyed little revived attention. Nevertheless, even a forgotten Nintendo game is still better recognized than most obscure works, and this one's infamous enough to make the 1984 whaling log.
As Urban Champion is meant to be played two-player, I had a test session with "B," but before playing it, we tried out the earlier Game & Watch: Boxing, which Wikipedia claims is an inspiration.
Game 344: Game & Watch: Boxing
One of the few Game & Watches to support two-players simultaneously, Boxing, while hardly complicated, nevertheless shows more complexity than what would be possible on the finite state machines that I once incorrectly described the Game & Watch machines as. As it turns out (revealed apparently thanks to the reverse-engineering efforts of Soviet computer scientists), these toys were running software under the hood, albeit just a few hundred bytes of embedded program ROM, and on a 32khz 4-bit Sharp CPU. You've got multi-conditional branching logic and integer accumulation governing this bout of punching, blocking, weaving, stamina, and footwork.
Of course the rules are only sophisticated in comparison to other G&W titles, and dead simplistic by any other standard. Getting punched costs you a hit block and a point of stamina. You can defend against a punch by blocking, which requires guarding the correct zone, by dodging, which requires precise timing, or by punching first. Get hit too much and you get pushed into your corner or even knocked down, costing you even more stamina. When a round ends, the fight pauses for a few seconds and then resumes in the center of the ring, giving you a bit of leeway if you found yourself in a corner prior. Run out of stamina, and your next knockdown is a K.O.
GAB rating: Below average. The Game & Watch format is meant to be a simple time waster, but it doesn't translate well to a competitive game. Simple goals with binary failstates, as in most Game & Watch titles, can be entertaining for a few minutes at a time, but when the goal is to outperform another player, you need more complexity for competition to be satisfying. Boxing doesn't succeed at this, nor does its 4-bit CPU make for an engaging opponent. "B" was a little kinder in his assessment, but I'm sure he'll be just as content as I am to never pick it up again for a rematch.
Game 345: Urban Champion
In the above video, I play the J.D. on the left, "B" on the right.
Wikipedia wasn't wrong in suggesting Boxing as an ancestor to Urban Champion. It's practically a beat for beat remake, but with an inner city theme. There are a few rule changes that improve the flow and help make the fight feel more like a contest of skill than of button mashing, but nothing so significant as to change the fact that this is a very simplistic fighting game without much substance or replay value.
We both enjoyed the sense of character and humor, such as peevish citizens that drop flower pots on you from overhead windows, the manhole knockouts, and how the cops sometimes drive by, causing both fighters to stop fighting and retreat into their corners to act suspiciously nonchalant, and will eventually arrest the more poorly performing player, serving the exact same functions as Boxing's referee.
Like in Boxing, you still advance toward victory by punching high when your opponent blocks low, and low when he blocks high, but two tweaks discourage you from just constantly flailing without regard for defense - punching now drains your own stamina, and after getting blocked, your next punch will come out just a bit slower, giving your opponent an edge if they counter-punch with the right timing. Stamina plays a different role too - rather than winning by depleting the opponent's, now the winner becomes the first player to knock down the other three times, and stamina for both players refills after each knockdown, instead of depleting for the victim. Running out is uncommon, but the consequence is that the exhausted player becomes fatigued and fights ineffectively.
GAB rating: Below average. Urban Champion is an improvement over Boxing, reasonably well polished and balanced, and we even had fun playing it. Nevertheless, this is a game that Nintendo once thought was worth paying $30 to own, and I feel I have to judge it by that standard. I don't hate it, but this is a dumb, one-note game whose novelty would wear off before the afternoon was over. Had I been evaluating as an arcade game, and indeed, it had been converted to Nintendo's "Vs." coin-op format as its first stateside release, I'd be more lenient, but couldn't rate it higher than average.
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