Shaq Fu

Shaq Fu Longplay (Mega Drive) [60 FPS]

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• published: 08 Jul 2014
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Developed by Delphine Software International and published by Electronic Arts in 1994. Shaq Fu is a game so oft-maligned that it famously became the target of a campaign to seek out and destroy every copy in existence. The game's back-story involves Shaquille O'Neal, inventor deadly martial art "Shaquido", getting sucked into a parallel dimension known as the "Second World", on a mission to rescue a child called Nezu from the clutches of some mummified deity called Set Ra. Quite how or why the developers came up with this story is unknown, but it would be fair to say that this was probably a commercial vehicle for Shaq. I played this game on both the Mega Drive and SNES when it came out and, this may be something of a surprise, I don't think it's as terrible as a lot of people make out. I completely agree with the fact that this is a poor fighting game when compared with the likes of Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat and SNK's King of Fighters series. However, I certainly wouldn't consider this to be as bad as Rise of the Robots, which genuinely deserved all the criticism it received. Delphine put a lot of work into the technical and artistic side of the game; the animation of the sprites is superb. They even went to the trouble of drawing proper shadows for the characters, including the combat animations; there's too much attention to detail in the characters and general presentation to make this feel like a game where nobody cared about the final product. Unfortunately, even though it's not a total loss, the game still deserves criticism on many levels. Despite the flashy animations, it's the gameplay mechanics that really let this game down. The speed of the combat suffers because of the number of frames of animation in each move and the full animation must play out before the characters can move again. Jumping, in particular is especially protracted, since the jump carries the player almost the entire length of the screen, almost as if they were gliding rather than jumping. Each character has a number of special moves that can be executed, but there is little point in executing them as they are ineffective. For example, Shaq's "shuriken" move takes so long to animate that the opponent can easily leap out of the way and land a counter-attack, thus making it pointless. Similarly, the flaming round-house kick sails over the heads of most opponents, so it's only effective if the opponent is in mid-air at the time, but timing the kick to connect is near impossible. Landing successful strikes on an opponent will increase their rage meter. Once the meter is full, they become enraged, doing more damage in the process. This isn't a bad concept, apart from the fact that all characters generate rage at differing rates; Beast enrages after a couple of hits, whereas other characters must be beaten to near-death before they even get slightly grumpy. Perhaps one of the most curious things about the game is the disparity in the number of fighters in both the SNES and Mega Drive versions of the game. The SNES has significantly fewer fighters (and less stages) than the Mega Drive and is something that I could never understand; SNES owners were significantly short-changed compared to their Sega-owning counterparts. Ultimately, I think that Delphine were so preoccupied with maintaining their reputation for creating games with gorgeously animated characters that they completely forgot to make the game fun to play.