Fur Fighters

"Obligatory Review Title: Let the Fur Fly!"

Ever wanted to shoot a rocket point-blank at a teddy bear’s face? Well, have I got a game for you! It’s Fur Fighters for the Sega Dreamcast. In it you play a crack team of cute animal commandoes hell-bent to blow away an army of cute/nefarious shotgun wielding teddy bears. At least I think they’re teddy bears. When you shoot them they explode into a flurry of white floating things, but that could just be the Fur Fighter version of the “sweat” that flew off of the combatants in the home versions of the early Mortal Combat games. This is the kind of game that really appeals to grade school kids: the cover looks innocent enough that Mom could mistake it for some kind of next generation Stickybear, while the actual game is of the ultra-violent, blow people’s faces off variety. Just don’t tell Mom about the level where you travel into the depths of teddy bear Hell.

Fur Fighters is a 3D puzzle platformer like Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, or Ape Escape. Only this one is pretty fantastic. Chalk it up to the Dreamcast’s hardware. The levels in Fur Fighters absolutely dwarf those in its Playstation and Nintendo 64 counterparts, and The Dreamcast allows for a level of detail and that sweet high resolution that an older system couldn’t handle. The incredible violence is pretty original for this kind of game, too. Beats jumping on mushrooms, I guess. But beyond the graphics and violence, Fur Fighters plays very much like its predecessors. As always, you have one set of important things to seek out and solve puzzles for, in this case your offspring, and a set of less important tokens, in this case gold pyramids.

Some people have a problem with the camera in games like this, but they just haven't gotten used to this kind of game. I admit that it’s a little frustrating when the camera chooses to pull into an arbitrary ultra close-up of Mario’s crotch while you’re jumping over a pit of lava, but it’s nothing to condemn a game over. The camera work in Fur Fighters is so solid that you never really mind not having a first-person button.

The big problem with Fur Fighters is that some of the puzzles are close to impossible for a human being to complete. The ones that come to mind are the button mashing puzzles. In one you mash a button to beat a beaver at arm wrestling, and in the other you mash a button to pump fuel into a rocket. I was only able to beat the arm wrestling match by slamming the controller into my face as fast as I could so that the button was pressed by my lower lip. Don’t ask me why my lower lip is faster than my thumb or how I ever thought to do it in the first place. The rocket fuel puzzle is simply not possible. The only way a person could beat it is if Merlin Jones, protagonist of the classic Disney movie ''The Monkey’s Uncle,'' were to build them a zany robotic hyper-thumb powered by the brainwaves of a coked-up chimp.

The voices in Fur Fighters are handled, like in many other games, by having the characters make an appropriate mumbling sound when their dialogue box appears. Imagine the teachers from the Charlie Brown cartoons with closed-captioning turned on. While the Dreamcast disk has enough space to hold human voiceovers, I suppose it would have been quite an undertaking to cast the dozens of actors it would take to play every beaver, duck, and bear. The strangest part of the pseudo-voices is that the beavers, with their long front teeth, talk in Japanese accents. Racial slur hearkening back to WWII political cartoons or innocent coincidence? I don’t know. Still made me cringe.

Summation: If 3D platform games appeal to you, you’ll probably give Fur Fighters a hearty thumbs-up. But don’t come running to me when you bruise your lip arm wrestling a beaver.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/09/02, Updated 09/09/02