Maximum Letdown: Blood Warriors (Arcade)

From the ‘so bad it’s good’ department comes Blood Warriors. Developed by Japanese company Kaneko, Blood Warriors was one of the many fighting games that sprung up during the 90s that attempted to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. Now granted, it’s still a pretty crappy game, but it’s like Super Street Fighter 4 compared to games such as Way of the Warrior and Survival Arts. It does the “digitized actors and bloody graphics” routine as expected, and of course the localization, to say the least, is lacking. Playing as one of 9 stereotypical Japanese warriors (the cast features such ground breaking character designs as a samurai, a ninja, a female ninja, and a Kabuki Warrior, who, like all other Kabuki Warriors in fighting games, attacks enemies with his hair), you beat the crap out of each other in 2 rounds. If you win the match, you can pull off a fatality by the press of one button! Hay, one-button fatalities! That’s one improvement Blood Warriors has over Mortal Kombat! Too bad there isn’t much else to rave about. Well, the character costumes are improved over all the other Mortal Kombat ripoffs at the time. That’s not saying that they are very good, but at least they are better than say, Blood Storm’s mongloid Running Man characters. It’s one of the rarest arcade games in the world, so however you can play it, you should play it. It’s almost like the fighting game equivalent of an Ed Wood movie.