Supreme Warrior

"For shame Digital Pictiures... For shame..."

When compact disc technology started to become affordable to the average household, systems and games transited from cartridge based to CD. CD's were able to hold much more information, including better audio and video. When this new media became available to the gaming world, game companies were not quite sure what to do with it, but went all out in trying new things. Once such company was Digital Pictures. They are known for their full motion video games on the Sega CD and the 3DO. Supreme Warrior is one of the best examples of how far and wide this new technology could take the video game industry. However, as evident today more than ever, this path was a terrible way to go fifteen years ago.

Supreme Warrior is conducted entirely in the first person. The camera shot is to be from the player?s eyes. It takes place in China, near the end of the sixteenth century. You walk into a village that is in disarray. People are fleeing left and right while at the same time there are groups of people fighting in a martial arts style. Suddenly a guy with a very bad hairdo walks up in front of you just as you meet with your old martial arts teacher. He demands to have a mask that would give him insurmountable power and vows to kill and 'put hearts on steaks' if he does not get this mask. It is your charge, as holder of one half of this mask, to fight the guy, his minions and bring peace to the world in an over used cliche of a storyline.

Before you even start the game you are presented with a video introduction similar to any movie you would watch in theaters. While it can be skipped with a press of the P button, this is where you learn all the crucial elements of the story line. During this video, and all subsequent videos, you quickly see that despite this game being set in China over 500 years ago, everyone speaks perfect English, most without any accent at all. The game box states that the entire game was filmed in China, but one would have to call into question the validity of this statement. That being put aside, there are some interesting aspects to this game.

The first thing that this game has that is out of the ordinary, but actually a good concept is that you can watch the game entirely in Cantonese or in English. The Cantonese is dubbed over the English spoken dialogue, but with it, it does help one feel as if perhaps this game really is set in ancient China and not some film studio in California in 1993.

The second good thing about this game is that it is presented in wide screen format, so you actually get the perspective of a true first person view. Unfortunately, the video does not even come close to encompassing the entire screen. When you are watching the introduction and essentially anything that is not a fighting scene, there is a massive black border around the screen. The video does not even stretch to the left or right edge, despite being in wide screen format.

Perhaps the best way to describe the game's viewing aspect is that it is like playing Doom with no weapons. You may only use your fists and feet to fight. You must fight three warlords before you can fight Fang Tu, the main bad guy. Before you can fight each warlord, you must fight two body guards. Each warlord and underling has an element of earth, fire or wind, which basically correlates to easy, medium, and hard respectively. Your master, who it turns out also trained Fang Tu, charges you with selecting who you want to fight and in what order. Yu Ching, who is another of your master's students leads you around after each choice and basically speaks on your behalf. She cannot act. Neither can anyone else in the game.

Through a menu selection you choose who you want to fight and you are on your way, with Yu Ching guiding you. She will explain the warlord's history and why he is angry at the world as you walk and will instigate the fight, but then quickly run away, leaving you to battle. Remember that this game is presented in the first person view the entire time, even during fights. One of the body guards will come after you and start doing overly ostentatious actions of flips and spinning kicks, that bring him or her closer to you until you get decked. You fight back using the controller to either punch or kick. Blocking is also an option, but it is seemingly worthless. By pressing A for punch or C for kick along with left or right, you will swing your appendage corresponding to the directional key you pressed.

While this might be an innovating and exciting twist on the fighting genre, the execution was completely and utterly botched. You are supposed to attack the side of the opponent that is left unblocked and vulnerable, but the response of the controller is so slow that you cannot do anything. There are small icons that appear on screen to let you know if you should punch or kick and which side to do it on. These icons are so small that it is nearly impossible to see whether a kick or punch is required and are seemingly delayed or somehow not in sync with the video being shown, so even by following them, you still will not perform an adequate attack. The rate of a successful attack is greatly increased by blindly pressing buttons rather than trying to follow the on-screen directions.

The game will periodically say that you need to watch your opponent and plan your attack before exciting it. To help in this planning process, there are three 'training' videos. The term should be used loosely, because it does nothing but frustrate the player. You do not actually take part in the training. You essentially stand off to the side and watch two guys kick or punch one another when an opening in defense is exposed. Anyone with half a brain can determine that if an opponent is blocking his right side, you should punch his left side. Completely worthless.

A player can spend hours fighting and not win a single round, not to mention an entire battle. While there are three modes of difficulty on top of the fighter difficulty, even the easiest setting against the easiest fighter presents more difficulty than any other game from the past thirty years of gaming. You will be lucky to get more than one hit on your opponent in any given fight.

One of the most frustrating things about the fights is that despite the little kick icon coming up indicating you should kick your opponent in the chest, the action cannot be performed eighty percent of the time. Instead you get an error sound indicating that you cannot perform the desired action, despite being told to. I got so frustrated that I thought perhaps my controller was dirty and did not work. I took it apart in the middle of the game and cleaned it hoping to improve my success rate, only to be met with more error sounds and a lot of swearing from my lips.

In addition to all the aforementioned atrocities committed by this game, the actors and actresses are beyond terrible. Lines are delivered with such a monotone and feel so forced that the mere thought that this game could create an illusion where you are actually in the game is laughable and highly dubious. Perhaps the tiniest amount of retribution comes in the fact that martial artist appear to be fully trained and actually performing real moves.

Another abysmal quality of the game lies in the fact that the video is grainy and does not sync up properly from time to time. There is not a single scene in the game that is not without some sort of pixilated video. Should you actually manage to land a successful attack on an opponent, the video of him or her taking the blow is far different from the previous scene. He background will instantly switch from one with people watching to one of an empty room. The actors do not sell the punches well. When you become beaten to within one hit from defeat, the screen turns to a monochrome red, perhaps to signify blood in your eyes. Whatever the reason, it is more obnoxious than mood setting.

The sounds in this game also lack in every department. As previously stated, the voice acting is terrible. The Cantonese voiceovers fell more like a Godzilla move than a martial arts movie because the lip movement comes no where close to matching up with the speaking elements. There is absolutely no music presented during menu navigation nor any other time in the game. The supposed panting you do when beaten to a bloody pulp is annoying and far too loud to be feasible.

What is the most redeeming quality of this game? The fact that it has a memory manager built into it. The 3DO did not originally have a way of being able to manage saved games on the internal memory and it could only be accessed by games that had a memory manager in it. This is by far and wide, the only reason to hold onto Supreme Warrior. The game play is so bad that you cannot even enjoy this game as a satirical comedy element, like many other full motion video games.

This game spans across two discs of total and utter crap. There are only two reasons anyone should own this game: You are a collector of 3DO games or you have no other game with a memory manager. That is it. Terrible game play combines with awful acting and atrocious acting to present Supreme Warrior. While blaming the failure of the Sega CD and or the 3DO solely on this game in unfair, you can be assured that this game did not help prolong the longevity of those systems it appeared on. Do your self a favor and do not buy this game. Ever.

Pros
1. Has a memory manager

Cons.
1. Terrible game play from a first person perspective
2. Unresponsive controls
3. Terrible acting
4. Poor video quality
5. Insanely high difficulty due to 1-4.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 12/19/07

Game Release: Supreme Warrior (US, 1994)