Slaughter Sport (Sega Genesis)
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 Welcome to the Fight Palace!"
— Mondu
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Tongue of the Fatman is a fighting game developed and published by Activision for MS-DOS, Commodore 64 (as Mondu's Fight Palace), and Sega Genesis (as Slaughter Sport). This article will cover the Sega Genesis port, which is known as Slaughter Sport in North America, and Fatman in Japan.
Development
A port of the original game for the Genesis was meant to be an early title for the system, but due to financial problems of Activision (which ended with the purchase of it by a parent company, which appointed Bobby Kotick as the CEO) at some point the game ended at Razorsoft's hands who released it in 1991.
Why This Fight Palace Is Not Welcoming
- The game is an incomplete version of the original game for MS-DOS, which had more features, mechanics, lore, characters, items, and had a more unique art-style.
- The graphics look poor for 1991 standards, as it has dull backgrounds with minimal detail, which contrast with the colorful sprites.
- The game also reuses a lot of assets constantly, for example: the backgrounds reappear constantly but with different colors and half of the characters are just palette-swaps.
- The blood effects are lame.
- The controls are absolute garbage:
- Jumping feels extremely heavy, and hard-to-control, as it covers and enormous distance.
- Movement is slow and stiff as a metal pole.
- Attacks that use combinations of a direction + A/B force you to be really precise with the direction you press, so it is very easy for them not to work.
- The combinations are also inconsistent, as they sometimes require a button/direction press and others the combination requires you to hold the button/direction.
- Attacks are also really sluggish and somewhat delayed.
- In order to change the item you want to use, you need to press the B button, which is reserved for special attacks.
- To make matters worse, the animations are really slow, which makes the controls even more heavy and unresponsive.
- Infamously, it is really hard to turn around when facing away from an opponent, which means your opponent will have a chance to land free hits on you.
- The sound design is awful.
- Music is repetitive, boring, forgettable, and uses a small amount of instruments.
- The music is not programmed to loop normally, which means the music stops suddenly and restarts.
- The sound effects are way too similar and lack impact, making combat feel unsatisfying.
- As previously mentioned in the 2nd reason, half of the sixteen characters are just palette swaps.
- To even play as any characters other than the main fighter (Rex), you must perform individual cheat codes for each one of them in the title screen.
- The character designs range from generic (a simple goth girl, a dude in shorts) to idiotic (a gorilla's head with 2 arms, a literal robot chicken and Mondu himself).
- The difficulty is a nightmare, the CPU is just brutal and loves to abuse specific moves and, if you try to fight normally, they will anihilate you, your only chance is to find a move you can abuse and use it to counter your enemies.
- As an extra, you only have three lives and no continues.
- Your health isn't replenished after finishing a match. To get it back, you must buy it before a match, needless to say your opponent always starts with full health.
- The fighting itself is terrible.
- The balance of the characters is a disaster, here are some examples.
- The human character has a fire breath attack that is way too slow and gets interrupted constantly.
- The gargoyles have a fart attack that doesn't seem to work very often.
- Buff and Stump (they are the same character) are, by far, the best characters in the game as they actually have way a decently robust moveset with moves that you can abuse, most notably his crouching projectile.
- The character constantly bounce against each other every time they touch each other in the air.
- Attacks are awkward and have misleading range, and this is only worsened with characters having strange animations.
- The hit detection is a calamity, as attacks for most of the time don't register at all unless they come on contact with the opponent in a very specific way.
- Characters don't react to attacks unless they knock them down, which not only leads to the combat being unsatisfying, but also means that you will never know if your attacks are dealing damage unless you are constantly looking at the health bars of each character.
- Attacks deal very low damage, which leads to fights lasting an eternity.
- The item system is more of an annoyance than anything, the items can really screw with a character, and this will always be against you because your opponents will always have an item or more, but you don't unless you buy one before the match.
- The balance of the characters is a disaster, here are some examples.
- You can buy more attack power after winning a fight, but your attack power resets after each fight, which is really annoying.
- Crappy ending, is just a "You Are Winner" screen, what's worse is that before it, there is a chance that the sharks that eat the loser of each match, will eat you despite winning against Mondu.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- Mondu himself with his design is very memorable, so much so that Kim Justice even uses him as his avatar.
Reception
While the original game by Activision was well received at release, in retrospective it is considered the opposite. The Genesis version has been panned, specially in retrospective, often being called one of the worst games in the system's library, mostly citing its poor controls and absurd difficulty. YouTuber Kim Justice put this game in the 2nd place in his "Top 20 Worst Sega Genesis Games" video. He also said that is this game was in the slightly bit competent, if would had probably been fun, but it wasn't, also said that until he recorded the video he hadn't won a single fight. This is also the game where he got his YouTube icon from, more specifically, the game's mascot, Mondu.