Kasumi Ninja by Handmade Software and Atari
Stop the Evil Ninja Lord Gyaku from opening the Dragon Cloud temple's portal to Hell and unleashing his demon minions upon Kasumi Island and the world. Battle it out in this bloody brawler in one player Story mode or Two Player versus mode as one of the 8 all-time greatest warrior-fighters. Gain fighting skills and master special moves from bout to bout as you journey through the Underground Labyrinth to the Dragon Cloud temple where you'll face your ultimate opponent: the Evil Ninja Lord Gyaku himself!
Overview: This game was released right along side the extremely cool Iron Soldier. Atari representatives had told me over and over on the phone that Kasumi was better than MKII. Well, it isn’t. At the time I didn’t have a big problem with the game. Shortly after, I realized what the game could have been. The graphics of the game are excellent. Cleanly digitized characters and background objects. The backdrops are by far the biggest highlight of the game’s graphics. Shiny, smooth, animated, and texture mapped backgrounds. These backgrounds include TONS of parallax scrolls. I can’t count how many there are! The effect is truly sweet. The animation on the characters looks to be cheapened up. Looks like they took shortcuts. It’s not smooth like Ultra Vortek, and that sucks. When you hit an opponent, blood will fly; even if you hit him/her in the stomach or foot! Now that’s taking it a bit far, eh? This blood stays on the ground and doesn’t disappear. This is somewhat of a novelty to my friends, but it can’t help the bad gameplay. On the subject of blood, I will comment on the death moves. The death moves are pretty cool. Most of them are just regular special move animations that achieve a different effect. Some of the cooler ones include: sticking a stick of dynamite their mouth, kicking through their chest, and kicking their head off and then headbutting it. The bad news about these death moves is that each character only has one. The sound package is weak. Most of the ingame music is composed of dull bass melodies and is fairly lame. There is a lack of cool drum rhythms to pump up the action. Some attempts are better than others, but for the most part, the music doesn’t hack it. The sound effects are OK. There aren’t individual character voices; they share grunts and groans. There are some cool groans in there though. If you get popped in the gut a few times, you’ll bend over and let out a painful groan. The other punching and blocking sounds are average. The announcer is some hyper-cheesy sounding voice actor. I believe that if they changed this to be a darker sounding annoucer, the whole mood of the game would be changed, and Kasumi wouldn’t suck so bad. Take a look at FFL and Ultra Vortek. They have a darker setting, and I think it would’ve been very appropriate here considering all of the blood and gore. The controls are pretty sad. There are quite a few moves you can pull off. This is done by pushing different directions with buttons. What were these guys thinking when they designed the special move controls? You have to HOLD the C button while making movements on the D-pad. This makes it hard to pull off moves in a hurry. You usually have to be a full screen away to even think about using one. This also makes it a pain to block while attempting one. Jump kicks are also messed up. You must push the kick button at a certain time in mid-air to pull it off. You can do a hesitation jump kick because of this annoying flaw. The gameplay is flawed. The game becomes a competition of who can push the buttons faster or use their special moves in the cheapest way. The game doesn’t play smoothly. There is a delay factor when you try to pull of a move. Push the button and then wait. The characters only have about 3 special moves a piece...pretty bad compared to the current crop of fighters out there.
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