Simply Amazing

Urban Street Fighting packs a pretty impressive page on the eShop, and as soon as I read what it had to offer I had to buy it. Now, I wasn’t prepared for how the game actually played, upon trying it, I can’t remember being this hooked on something since the first time I tried heroin at 8 years old.

So when you fire the game up, it drops you to this menu. You want an intro? Intros are for chumps that need to impress their audience with a bunch of flash and hype. When you’re the real deal, you don’t need all that nonsense.

After deciding whether you’re playing against the computer or another player, with instructions that I didn’t understand but am confident it’s totally my fault somehow, you get dropped into the player select screen. To say the character selection is amazing is doing it a disservice.

I mean look at what’s here. This game takes your preconceived notions about the types of characters you want in fighters and turns them on their head. You want Ryu? You don’t need Ryu. Sub-Zero? He’s clownshoes now. Get his weak shit outta here. You don’t need those posers when you’ve got Mike. Mike throws fireballs and can dragon punch.

Or maybe you want to mix it up a little bit with Soccer Boy and his lightning leg. Or hypothetically speaking, maybe you don’t like Soccer Boy. You like his one special move and maybe that jersey’s a collector’s edition but for a team you don’t like. Maybe you don’t even like soccer and you’re a lacross fan instead (show a picture of Whore Island Ocelots). Lucky for you you’ve got 2 other characters who have the exact same moves as Soccer Boy: 1st you’ve got Mecanim bot, a rockin’ sockin’ android that acts as a special move for 2 other characters. His armor is icy blue because he is in fact cool as ice (pic of vanilla ice). Right? My mind was blown too.

Next, if you’re like me and enjoy playing with chicks, then I’ve got good news because Suzan has joined the battle. That’s right – play 1 match with her and I promise you’ll be saying “Chun who?” And she’s got a nose ring and a Z in her name which everybody who grew up in the 90’s knows that means she’s extreme.

To round off the AAA roster you’ve got Boxer, who’s also a skilled kicker with flying – uh – kicks, and Ethan, a techno-futuristic badass with the exact same moveset as Boxer. Both of these guys also call in Mecanim Bot for a quick assist, whose attack is so fast I never actually saw it connect whenever I used it.

This game would melt the faces off the spirits at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I know I’m making you claw your eyes out with how great this masterpiece is, but there’s more. You want a stage select? Boom. 5 photorealistic stages that look like they were all taken from the same factory. You also get a super bar that builds up as you fight. They went the opposite direction of those *other* Brand X fighters and decided not to make the supers look any different from the normal moves, and damage was only slightly larger. They clearly want to keep the fighting raw. The nuclear cherry on top a physics engine so deep that it would impress Tesla, Einstein and Hawking.

So Urban Street Fighting takes all the very best of every successful fighting game from the past 30 years and delivers an unblockable, 75-hit ultra-super-critical-v-gauge-sucker-punch-to-the-sack-that-travels-up-the-gooch-then-the-spine-to-explode-the-brain-then-travels-down-to-explode-the-heart-because-it-forgot-to-do-that-on-the-way-up that none of its competitors can come back from. This game is the Once And Future King of Fighters.