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Ballz - 1994
“To be the champion, you gotta have Ballz!” So says Accolade’s exceptional marketing campaign for Ballz. Ignoring the obvious double entendre (har har, nards), this statement is completely correct in the sense that it takes chutzpah to participate in something awful, e.g. “It takes a man to beat up Grandma.” Ballz is one of those cutting edge 3D fighters in which you play as a combatant made up completely of spherical shapes. Smell the novelty!
Even though all nine of the characters lacked a face, they made up for it with personality... which in this case means different color schemes. Also, their names were different. In Ballz’s defense, it at least tried to get a head start on this 3D business (they hadn’t seen what Virtua Fighter looked like). It’s just too bad that each battle resembled what happens when you take action figures and mash them together. In your head, the characters might be locked in an epic battle, but to everyone else, it’s a jumbled mess of shapes.
Rakugaki: Show Time
Playing more like an action game with fighter elements, Show Time’s characters look like they were colored on a piece of paper, ripped out of the notebook and tossed into a 3D world, making it kind of like Dreamcast 3D fighter Power Stone meets Paper Mario. However, the gameplay is more akin to Whizz-Bang-Cartoon-Explosion Battle. From what we can discern, you control a little guy and mash on the Square button to toss objects at your enemies, who are other little guys and - in one instance - a dog).
As soon as a battle begins, you apparently have to hop toward an orb that looks like the sun with a grumpy face. Once you pick it up, a crayon-colored line extends to the enemy you’re heaving the orb towards. Bouncing the sun orb off your enemies sometimes results in special attacks, like shooting a powered-up blue laser or a green spray paint attack… thing. Hell, it was all in Japanese, so the only indicator we were winning was seeing new loading screens and stages.
