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By Contributing Writer Jimmy Payne Rating: Average After playing a countless amount of fighting games in my lifetime, I can honestly say that 90% of them have brought nothing new to the table. After Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, it seemed for a while that every fighting game out there was just a weak attempt to perfect the genre without actually adding anything to it. The good news is that now you, the gamer, can tweak a fighting game to perfection. The bad news is that you have to buy the very flawed Fighter Maker to do so. The backbone of the game is the editing mode, and every other little thing they added should be considered wasted space. In the editing mode, you design everything about a character, from his or her looks to the actual kicks and punches that he or she will throw (unfortunately, you can’t create projectile attacks). Creating the look of your character is fairly easy. You just find a face you like and paste it right on the virtual dummy. The hard part is making your own unique moves. The way this is achieved in Fighter Maker is by molding a wire-frame character frame by bloody frame until all the frames, put together, make one fluid motion. This is easier said than done. Most of the time I found myself having to re-make a move over and over again because one frame was out of place and it looked like the fighter was having a knee spasm. Also, you can’t see what directions different parts of your fighter's body are facing when looking at the game's wire-frames. I can’t tell you how many times I worked on a move for hours and when it was finished I found out that my fighter's head was pointed in the wrong direction and I had to start over from scratch. The game has a huge library of pre-made moves that you can use if you’re having a hard time manually creating them. Unless you know some exotic fighting style and want to create "The Flying Donkey" or something like that, then I suggest looking into this stress-free alternative. On the other hand, it seems counter-productive to me in a way. I don’t understand why anyone would bother with the frustrating wire-frame mode at all if they can take the easy route and create their fighter with a few button presses. Here’s what might have gone on during a developers' brainstorming session: Developer #1: Okay, so we have this wire-frame mode which will allow players to design their own totally unique characters! It’s gonna sell millions! Developer #2: Why not make an even easier mode? We could take a whole slew of pre-made moves that we can rip off from other fighting games and let the player just point and click them right onto their fighter! We can have so many that it will pointless for the player to design his or her own moves for hours! Developer #1: Sounds great, but we can still keep the wire-frame mode in the game just to make it look bigger and give obsessive kids something to waste their time with…and it’ll still sell millions! If the editing mode isn’t what you’re craving, you can always fall back on the arcade mode, but it's not much to fall back on. First of all, the characters you have to choose from are bland, unimaginative, and have no personality. A lot of the characters look the same as characters, with their only differences being their stats. The graphics suck as well (they're only slightly better than Virtua Fighter 1's graphics). The actual in-game fighting is average as well. The moves are all rip- offs of the Tekken series, and it’s almost as slow as a Quake 2 deathmatch running on my old computer. To top it all off, there are only six stages, no bonus rounds, and get this, no end boss! If this game didn’t have an editing mode, I don’t think it could be classified as a full game. I felt like I just got done playing a demo disc of a 50% complete Fighter Maker when I finished the arcade mode. Finally, there’s the music. As is the case with most fighting games, the music isn’t good, but it isn’t bad either. In other words, it’s nice to have, but I’d rather be listening to something better. Thankfully, there is no annoying music at the character select screen. Fighter Maker only gives you music to listen to when it’s necessary... if listening to annoying techno tunes is ever necessary. If you’ve got the time, patience, and mental stability to sit through hours of tweaking just to find out that the moves you spent days creating are nothing like you wanted them to be, you might be able to enjoy Fighter Maker. Otherwise, save your money for the barrage of hot-looking fighting games coming to the Sega Dreamcast this fall. Send your thoughts on this review to jimmy@mastergamer.com
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