Shaq-Fu

"Who hasn't played this game? Now who's enjoyed it?"

Everybody remembers Shaq Fu, but does anyone remember having fun playing it? I doubt it, the truth is, this is actually a pretty awful game, for many reasons.

STORY - 1/10

This story is just, bad... It starts out in Tokyo where Shaq is ''checkin out the sites on the day of his big charity game.'' When he stumbles upon a mystical kung fu dojo where this old man is talking about ''a man from the stars'' who is supposed to save Nezu, and somehow he has a portal IN his dojo to the ''second world''. I would think that they could have been a little more creative than that in naming it, something like ''The nether realm'' would have been nice, but just 2nd realm? pfft. And upon entering this second realm, Shaq somehow mysteriously knows kung fu, whats up with that?

GAMEPLAY - 2/10

OUCH, this hurts worse than getting your feet ran over by a car with snow chains on without any shoes. The control is very cumbersome, moves are hard to pull off, jumping lasts 20 minutes, so your opponent got sick of waiting for you to land, he went to the bathroom while you were up there. I find the response kind of slow too. Often your enemies will use the same move many times in a row, which is lame and aggrivating. The only reason that i gave this department a 2 was for the world map, the movement on there is pretty good, but you're only on it for a fraction of the time you play this game.

GRAPHICS - 5/10

The graphics on this game aren't too bad, the close up graphics that is, the motion of the characters in the fight scenes is pretty well done too, but they still seem blocky, even for genesis.

SOUND - 1/10

OWWW! MY EARS! everything in here is bleeps and bloops, if you can get voices on Altered Beast, and nice sound on Sonic, even though it was bleeps and bloops too, Sonics bleep-bloop music is better than this 50 fold. In the fighting, it sounds like they used one sound effect and changed the speed of it a little for EVERYTHING.

To buy or to rent:

Neither, unless you need a single coaster or your chair/table is off balance, don't get it. Maybe the only other reason that you would want this game is that you're trying to get every genesis game ever, and this one isn't the place to start, because odds are, you're going to want to play your collection, and this will just discourage you from buying any more games.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/03