Urban Champion
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Apparently Nintendo spent too much time in the sewage manhole during production.
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Urban Champion (アーバンチャンピオン, Āban Chanpion) is a fighting video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Later it was released on arcade machines, more specifically the Nintendo VS. System under the title Vs. Urban Champion, and eventually on the Nintendo 3DS as 3D Classics: Urban Champion, a part of the label applied to remakes of old games for the Nintendo 3DS.
Gameplay
Urban Champion is a fighting game in which the player faces the opponent on the right. The player's task is to reach the rank of Champion by attacking the opponent, who should fall into the open sewage manhole. Every three fights won, the player gets a specific symbol, and after five symbols are earned, they go to the next set of symbols. After 45 symbols, which will cost 138 fights, they get the rank of Champion.
The duel time is 99 seconds and the player has a maximum of 200 stamina points, when each one stamina point is consumed by punching an opponent. The game features two types of attacks: a light punch and a heavy punch. Light punch, as the name says, is light, meaning that the strength itself will be weaker, but it surpasses heavy punch in terms of punch speed and is more difficult to block player's punch. Heavy punch works quite the opposite, because despite the fact that the attack will be stronger, it will result in slower punching and the opponent would have no difficulties with blocking.
Occasionally, the flower pot can fall from the window, intended to be thrown on the head of one of the attackers, in order to make it difficult to fight the opponent by taking 5HP. In addition to the obstacle of falling flower pots, a police car will appear in some rounds, designed to stop a fight between the attackers by returning to the starting position. When the round time is up, the police arrest the player closest to being knocked off of the pavement, resulting in a more difficult victory for the other player for that round.
Why It's Not Champions
- Urban Champion is already suffering one thing before the gameplay itself, there is the cover art itself which is ugly, especially the Japanese/European one. It brings to mind a cartoon from the 80s, only on a low budget, making the appearance of characters that look like children, which is inconsistent with what they really look like, not to mention a bit creepy faces, due to art-style with a sense of low budget. While North American cover art is no better either. Admittedly, instead of the hideous cartoon style, it was replaced with the 8-bit style, which was common in the North American cover arts of early Nintendo Entertainment System games. However, the problem is that in-game attackers look very different to the cover art, causing false advertising.
- Nintendo always guarantees a sense of fun in their games due to the great gameplay, but this game is an absolute exception. This fighting game is not only pointless, repetitive, slow, but also unimaginably boring; the four adjectives that are never seen and heard in games from this company. The game is still about the same task, which is beating your opponent every three rounds to make him fall into the sewage manhole. So that it wasn't enough, the backgrounds and buildings are alike, making the game even more boring and devoid of replay value.
- The combat is horrendously slow, boring, and extremely poor in content. It contains only two types of attacks, distinguished only by strength, speed of attack, and the chance to defend this attack, depending on how the rival attacks. It is clearly visible that Nintendo wanted to try to create a game based on a different genre for the first time, but due to the minimal knowledge related to the mechanics of those games, and inexperience of development of a fighting game, hence the effect that everyone couldn't expect from this company.
- Nintendo games usually have nice, colorful graphics, but Urban Champion is mediocre in this regard. Admittedly, even passable by the standards of this platform, but it has a few things that make it the sheer poverty.
- The character sprites look terrible due to the primitive, and weird body color choices, especially the lips, reminiscent of being made up by lipstick, and the characters themselves contain a meager color palette, where for every one type of body part only one color is present. And the most interesting thing about it is that the attackers that appear in the North American cover art, look incomparably better than in the game itself.
- The city, played as a game background, is repetitive, but also boring to watch, because not only there is absolutely nothing going on in them (apart from buildings close to rivals in some rounds), but also every round, there is barely any change. The only variation is the appearance of shops, which are buildings close to this duel that are limited only to the Book Store, Barber Shop, Snack Shop, and Discount Shop, which are devoid of details, differing only in the color of the buildings.
- The animations are awfully cheap. Not only are they stiff, they also consist of its too few frames, making the game less playable. The worst of all, however, is that they are slow, which means that attacking can take a little longer than anyone might expect, and overwhelming boredom is expected.
- The soundtrack for this game is really abject, and because it repeats itself every round makes it less bearable. Every fight features the same three inaudible cacophonies that are repeating each finished three round fight, consisting of random beats to remind music, and it is more audible, as if a small child without talent tapped random buttons on a given instrument, not sure what song it was creating.
- The controls are extremely sluggish, comparable to the speed of a turtle. Even pulling off the quicker punches feels far too unresponsive and pulling off a strong punch is more a matter of blind luck than any type of real playing skill. The sensation of moving the attacker is also ruined by its pathetic combat system mentioned in WIBITSM#3.
- As has been repeated several times, the game is devoid of any content. Due to how quickly this game could be made, it is limited to only one boring city and one task over and over again. If the creators spent more time on production, it would be possible that they would introduce more characters, locations, more obstacles, thoroughly improve the combat system, not to mention adding a few small details, for example around walking people or animals, so that the game would not be an empty shell.
- The game lacks any depth to force the player to play, and the goal of the game is meaningless. No matter how many rounds you win, including its pointless rank of Champion, the game constantly loops with its repetitive and exactly same looking backgrounds and charmless gameplay, which is very similar for the much later released game Dark Vampires: The Shadows of Dust.
- The game has received a completely unnecessary remake that has improved absolutely nothing for the original except for the 3D effect in the 8-bit-looking game. Everything is exactly the same there, and the worst part is that Arika has not tried to improve fundamental things, such as animations, combat system, and overall gameplay. Due to the lazy effort they put in, luckily it was only $5.
Redeeming Qualities
- The game is surprisingly well-polished, so encountering bugs is practically non-existent. Even so, its polishment won't save this game, due to the more powerful weapons, including an overwhelming boredom and widespread repetition.
- The arcade version is better and looks like it plays smoother than the NES version.
Reception
Urban Champion was met with an extremely negative reception by critics and players, considering as one of the worst Nintendo games, and is cited as one of the worst Virtual Console games of all time. In the special edition Pak Source included on the January/February 1990 volume of Nintendo Power, the game received scores of 2.5/5, 2.5/5, 1.5/5, and 1.5/5 for the four categories evaluated. On the same magazine, it was the second game along with Chubby Cherub that received a score below 2/5 in one of four categories.
1UP.com's Jeremy Parish after he was aware that Urban Champion made its debut in Virtual Console, said "It's no secret that last week's retro rerelease lineup was absolutely terrible. It would have been better to have gotten nothing at all than to be handed crappy crap like Urban Champion and NES Baseball."[1] On the same website, the game was classified as one of the worst games on the Virtual Console.[2]
On Metacritic, the Nintendo 3DS remake received "generally unfavourable reviews", holding the critic score of 37/100 based on 7 reviews[3], making it the lowest-rated Nintendo game according to the website,[4] with Tenchu: Dark Secret, which holds the same aggregated score.[5]
French gaming website Jeuxvideo.com gave for Urban Champion a 7/20, mainly criticizing the combat system, lack of content, and repetitive gameplay, while they praised a simple and accessible title, colorful visuals, and for the fact that Nintendo produced a fighting game. In summary, they said "Urban Champion clearly relies on the simplicity and accessibility of its mechanics. A few games are enough to tame the beast. But that's without counting on the fact that we quickly go around in circles and that boredom ends up gaining the upper hand... In question: a poor combat system, weak content and an interest that does not renew. As a joke, you can always try out two-player mode for a fight. And then, we end up unplugging the console to fall back on another safe bet made in Nintendo. It is probably better this way."[6]
Corbie Dillard of Nintendo Life, reviewing the Wii Virtual Console release, gave a rating of 2/10, mainly with a word of criticism of its controls and gameplay. In conclusion, he said "The beat'em up genre of games has come a long way since its humble beginnings and no game better highlights that fact than this early effort.", calling this game as an "inherently uninspired stinker".[7] On the same website, other reviewer under the Thomas Whitehead name, while reviewing the Wii U e-Shop release, gave the exact same rating as Corbie Dillard did, concluding "When Urban Champion was released it would surely have been mediocre even for its time, but played in the modern era it's painfully bad. It's rubbish, and we'd rather take to the streets and pick random fights — which we'd in all likelihood lose — than play this again. Ding ding, let this be the final bell for this one."[8] The Nintendo Life publication wrote several reviews of the same game, but the latter, Philip J Reed, this time reviewed the Nintendo 3DS remake. The reviewer gave a 3/10, summarising "The 3D Classics versions of Urban Champion does everything it can to give you new reasons to play Urban Champion." However, due to a low rating, Reed said "Urban Champion wasn't very fun in the first place, and the last thing we wanted was a reason to play it again. No amount of additional polish - impressive though that polish may be - can help this one. It's easy to appreciate the effort, but we certainly wish it was effort made toward updating a superior game."[9]
Video Game Critic, among all the other reviewers, was the most strict, giving the second lowest rating, which is F. In his review, he honestly asked that Nintendo was really involved in the production, criticizing every possible aspect, starting with the graphics, soundtrack, controls, criticism of attackers, how they look and play, the combat system, ending with an overwhelming monotony. The reviewer briefly summed up that he would rather play a game with more depth, with Pong being an example than Urban Champion.[10]
According to ScrewAttack, the Wii owners shouldn't waste any money on it, due to its too slow and simple gameplay.[11]
Trivia
- Urban Champion was inspired by the game Boxing (known as Punch-Out!! in North America), which was released five months before Urban Champion for the Game & Watch.
- This is the first fighting game produced by Nintendo, before the 1993 Japan-only fighting game Joy Mech Fight released on the Family Computer.
- The two rivals that appear in this game, from left to right, are Ron Imhoff and Alan Mussman, suggesting from a 1989 interview by Shigeru Miyamoto explaining that the names of these characters were a joke during the game development among designers from Nintendo.
- Before deciding on the Ice Climbers to join Super Smash Bros. Melee, Masahiro Sakurai mentioned that the Urban Champion character was one of the proposed retro characters to join Melee alongside others like Bubbles from Clu Clu Land and the Excitebike Racer from Excitebike.
Videos
References
- ↑ http://www.1up.com/features/virtual-selection
- ↑ http://www.1up.com/news/retro-roundup_4
- ↑ https://www.metacritic.com/game/3ds/3d-classics-urban-championalong
- ↑ https://www.metacritic.com/company/nintendo
- ↑ https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/tenchu-dark-secret
- ↑ https://www.jeuxvideo.com/test/665598/urban-champion.htm
- ↑ https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/vc/urban_champion_nes
- ↑ https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/wiiu-eshop/urban_champion_nes
- ↑ https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/2011/08/3d_classics_urban_champion_3dsware
- ↑ https://videogamecritic.com/nesuz.htm#Urban_Champion
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwPCgjr95M0
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