SNES Game Review: Shaq Fu

 Shaquille O'Neal is one of the greatest basketball players of all time and one of America's most notable people.  The legend came into the NBA with a force and instantly was one of the biggest megastars in the 90's, helping propel the Orlando Magic and Los Angeles Lakers back to greatness.  His story off the court is well known as well, as he was a part of music, movies, and even a video game, Shaq Fu.  This game was very much critically maligned and excoriated for a number of reasons, of which may be discussed today.  However, was this game really, truly the worst game on the SNES (Quick Answer: No.) So what was a positive, if any, for this game? What were the negatives? All that and more below!

Positives:

1. The graphics in this game, even without a graphics card are actually quite good.  EA did a really good job on this aspect.  Unlike a lot of games in the fighting style where graphics were not great, this game actually was done well.

2. The sprite movements, also done quite well.  You can tell when the attack is big, and it's also fluid and well done.  The parries are also done in a good way.  Overall the movements are fluid, not too jerky and the moves and parries are good in this game.

3. If you want a quick to play, get it out of the way, type game, this is for you.  The story is not going to take you long at all, and it is progressively more difficult with all the different modes.  So it's a decent pick up and play quick game, with also a play now mode so you can just play against a different character without really jumping into story mode (Note, the Genesis version of this game has three more stages and five more characters, so it's more in-depth there.)

Negatives:

1. Story mode is just..bad. Just honest, it's bad, and it's deserving of criticism.  It's not done well at all, and done with the purpose of being quick with no good dialogue whatsoever.  It's just go place, trash talk each other, then fight. Which leads me to..

2. The fighting combat controls are just.. so bad. They are all over the place and wonky and it's just not a great thing, especially when the game is made for *checks notes* FIGHTING! Yeah.. as much as the positives brought it out, the main thing of this game is bad.  The controls are all over, it's almost impossible to set them to what you want, and the special moves are meh at best. Definitely not what a good fighting game should be.

3. The characters themselves leave a lot to be desired. They are just.. meh at best and seem to play at stereotypes of them from the 90's (which lets be honest, haven't exactly gone away 30 years later.) But overall, stereotyping aside, they just leave a lot to be desired and its just a let down. 

Rating:

This is at best a below average fighting game with it's main thing just bad.  However, this is not one of the worst SNES games, and it's far from it.  IT's below average at best, bad at worst, but no where near the terrible games like Pit Fighter, Race Drivin, Waialae Country Club and much more. This isn't even in the 100 worst categories, because there are FAR, FAR worse games.  With this game, a 4.5 out of 10 works, and honestly, it would probably rank between 500th-550th in the SNES scale.