Fight for Life

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Fight for Life
A fitting end to such a dreadful system.
Genre(s): Fighting Platform(s): Atari Jaguar Release Date: NA: January 15, 1996 EU: April 19, 1996 Developer(s): Atari Corporation Publisher(s): Atari Corporation Country: United States

Fight for Life is a fighting game released for Atari Jaguar in 1996, being the last game officially released for the Jaguar and the final game published by Atari Corporation. It was also their attempt to make a response to the 3D fighting games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter.

The game is notorious for its troubled development cycle in which Atari Corporation only kept causing problems to the developer, and near the end Atari stopped paying Francois Yves Bertrand for his development, after which Mr. Bertrand decided to send them the unfinished build of the game which was only 60% complete and withheld the more advanced version until he was payed. However, Atari still released the unfinished build anyway.

In an already closed forum, Bertrand published the more advanced version of the game but in extremely limited units. There is a rumor that a finished build exists, but there is no evidence of this.

Why It's Dead

1. The graphics are hideous even for the system, everything looks extremely blocky and with few dull colors and a very low number of polygons, and the animations are really crude.
   • The characters also look terrible, the ninja looks like a janitor with a mask, the final boss (who is the son of the devil) looks like Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe and in his final form looks like a black Kamen Rider Amazon.
2. The combat is absolutely miserable. It tries to be like Virtua Fighter, but:
   • The controls are absolute garbage, it's hard to maneuver, due to the choppy movement and long jumps, and of course the response of the attacks feels extremely slow.
   • The game doesn't even have guarding and instead uses dodging mechanics that must be held for them to work.
   • When knocking down an enemy, it takes a really long time for them to get up again, but there are no attacks that can hit downed opponents.
   • Attacks barely deal any damage at all, this makes the game even more boring and tedious that it already was, with matches that can easily last up to 10 minutes.
   • The inputs for special moves are a disaster, as they seem to be poorly assigned to the actual attacks they produce. Ex: Pressing down twice plus dodge for a headbutt.
   • Pressing an attack button while crouching only makes your character get up and attack normally, and a basic move like a low kick works as a special move.
3. The main gimmick of the game is defeating characters to get their moves, but this translates in your character having very few moves at the start of the game, and there are barely any combos in the game, which leads to mashing the same combinations over and over and over again.
   • Also, due to the lack of moves, the characters all feel extremely similar.
4. If you are facing backwards to your opponent, you must press the backwards to him again to face him which is the opposite to every other 3D fighting game.
5. The camera is slow and faces the arena in weird angles. This is most of the time annoying, but it can lead to you touching the edge of the arena and instantly lose the fight as it is electrified.
6. The A.I is moronic and can be defeated by jumping back and then jumping forward with an attack, and most of the time, they just dodge your attacks without attacking.
7. Boring, generic and unmemorable music, which are simple rock tunes that are so lame that they're hard to notice that they are there in the first place.
8. As previously said, this game was released in an unfinished state, which shows the poor standards of Atari.
   • It also shows how terrible it was to work with them, as originally the game's developer, Françoise Bertrand, was promised a team, many resources and a good budget, but Atari did not keep their promise and never delivered what he wanted, forcing him to pretty much become the only developer during the entire development cycle. Worse yet, the deadline was constantly being pushed forward which gave him even less time.
9. Even worse, Atari sent out beta builds to magazines without telling them the game was in its beta stage and when it was received negatively by the press, Atari blamed Bertrand and made him restart the development of the game numerous times despite it being extremely close to its deadline. And of course, the cherry on top of that was Atari decided to not continue paying Bertrand.

Reception

The game was panned by most critics due to the atrocious controls, poor pace and garbage graphics. For example, Dave Halverson from Gamefan said "What an appropriate send-off for the Jag. A terrible system's terrible last hurrah", the game also made it into Seanbaby's top 20 worst games of all time list on number 3.

The flop of game was the last nail on Atari's coffin and Fight for Life became the last game ever officially released for the Jaguar and the last game ever made by Atari Corporation. After the catastrophic sales of this game, Atari Corporation was sold to JTS Storage, who closed down the company. The Atari brand name was later sold to Hasbro Interactive, which itself was sold to Infogrames and renamed themselves as Atari SA in 2009, where they continue their greedy strategy even to this day.

Retrospective reviews continue to be negative to this day, for example, Kyle Knight from Allgame summarized this game as "one of the poorest examples of 3D fighter you'll find anywhere".

Sources

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/fight-for-life/

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