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Violent Storm review

Game: Violent Storm
Platform: Arcade
Genre: Fighting Action (Brawler)
Developer: Konami

Staff review by Jackie Curtis

October 19, 2008

What is the point of Violent Storm? I don’t know.

Usually when creating an entry in a genre this repetitive one would try to deviate from the rulebook in some form or other. Which I suppose Violent Storm does, in some respects, but dressing your cast in pastel colors and giving them all eighties haircuts doesn’t seem like the best route to me. Picture psychedelic punk thugs J and Two.P of Final Fight lore. This is the beat ‘em up they would play. Hell, this is the beat ‘em up they would make, a groan-inducing retelling of the chronicle from their perspective.

J is now named Jaxom and Two.P is now Talcus. Fat men Bill Bull and Wong Who are now – seriously – Lollypop and Lollypop Jr., and they don’t wear shirts anymore, so you’ll be treated to full view of their gushy, lumpy cellulite covered girths. There’s not a single original character here… the most ingenious thought Konami had in copying the Capcom classic was to mold the knife-wielding El Gado and scantily clad Poison into a pocketknife-armed femme fatale dubbed Liza. In short, this really is Final Fight with ugly clothes, dumber names (meet DR. HOGUN and GIGADEATH) and less action; these goons attack in sets of two or three all the way up to the final stage.

Here to take on the criminal dispatching job is the ragtag crew of WADE, KYLE and BORIS. If their names weren’t a dead enough giveaway, they all wear kneepads, which makes them roughly the same level of badass as everyone else in the game. I don’t mean to sound rude or insult people visiting this site named Wade, Kyle or Boris, but I’ll be honest, you’re probably not a fledging vigilante. You probably draw cartoons or teach math classes or something that provides an important service to all, but just doesn't require the skill set necessary retrieve your girlfriend from a criminal syndicate.

Yep, they reused the captured girl storyline too. Her name’s Sheena.

If all of this isn’t absurd enough, get ready for some boss battles. Your first encounter, DABEL, wears a white potato sack over his head. The second boss you’ll fight on the top of a moving locomotive; his name is merely JOE, and this menacing engineer has a giant electric ticket puncher! It copies Final Fight again when a trapdoor inside a restaurant gives way and you fall to… yes, an underground wrestling ring where you’ll fight not SODOM, but DRIGGER, a fat guy in a tiger mask that landed at best two hits on the denim-adorned Wade. In the tropical gardens of stage five – why is a beat ‘em up in a tropical garden at all? – a statue of the legendary homoerotic emperor MR. JULIUS comes to life. The sixth boss, SLEDGE, never took off his hammer brother Halloween costume.

Playing this game was all too bizarre for me, like watching the adapted version of your favorite show or movie for a foreign audience. Only the version your watching is an adapted version of an adapted version of an adapted version… it’s at least three levels removed from the original source material. This is Final Fight for some remote portion of Siberia, some culture that just couldn’t comprehend the mean streets of Metro City ruled by crooked cop EDI E. Some culture that wanted guys named DRIGGER and MR. JULIUS and men dressed in garbage can lids.

Jackson Brown tells this great story of one of his songs – Take It Easy – being translated into Spanish. That version goes a little something like this:

Well I’m running down the road trying to loosen my load, got a world of trouble on my mind.
I’m looking for a lover who’s not religious, not dangerous and will eat me like a lobster in pink sauce.

And maybe that works for some people. But I’ll take the lover that won’t blow my cover. I’ll take Final Fight. Because games like Violent Storm just aren't that hard to find.

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