Fighter’s Megamix Review (Tiger Game.com, 1998)

I genuinely wanted to like the Tiger Game.com. I have yet to find a genuinely good game for the platform. The hardware was severely lacking and while there was some big name software for the thing nothing seemed to pan out. While continuing my search I discovered there was a port of one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Fighter’s Megamix, released on the Tiger Game.com. I’ve always been a big fan of seeing how developers managed to fit their massive games on archaic handheld hardware, and curiosity got the best of me here. Unfortunately this too was a huge disappointment. Fighter’s Megamix retains almost nothing of what made the console version special. It’s not even a decent game. Let’s take a look, but strap in because this is going to be a rough one.

Let’s start off by talking about what Fighter’s Megamix is. True to it’s name this is a combination of Sega’s biggest fighting franchises of the time. It blends together both Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers into one neat package. The mechanics in both of these are quite different but it worked surprisingly well. At least on the Sega Saturn. Plus the game was filled with some hilarious ‘joke’ characters which were good for a laugh. It was like a love letter from Sega to AM2 fans. Some may say that this is Sega’s version of Super Smash Bros but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Fighter’s Megamix was very traditional for the genre with deep and contrasting mechanics. It’s a more traditional fighting experience with mechanics fans of the genres will instantly click with. Simply combining franchise characters it’s enough reason to compare the two.

On the Tiger Game.com the spirit remains, but there’s a lot missing. Obviously the developers weren’t going to cram an entire disc worth of data on to such a small cartridge. Additionally the Tiger Game.com was a 2D only machine. It had no polygonal processing power. That means this one is entirely sprite based. I wasn’t expecting miracles here. It actually looks kind of nice in screenshots. At least you can tell who most of the characters are even at a glance. Fighter’s Megamix is even somewhat ambitious for a handheld fighting game at the time because it attempts to create the illusion of 3D space. The backgrounds will actually rotate occasionally. This is probably the best part of the game.

Like it’s big brother edition Fighter’s Megamix is a traditional fighting game. The goal here is simply to drain your opponent’s life bar with a series of well landed punches, kicks and special moves. You move on to the next opponent when you’ve won two out of three matches. Each character can also jump and attack from an aerial perspective which has its advantages as well as disadvantages. The characters from Fighting Vipers still have their armor, and this is displayed at the top of the screen near their life bar. While they take damage normally breaking a piece of their protection causes them to take further damage. That was the most interesting part of Fighting Vipers and I’m glad to see this made it into even the Game.com version.

Unfortunately Fighter’s Megamix completely falls apart once you start playing it. The game suffers from the same issues as so many other Game.com titles. First of all the framerate is far from adequate. The action moves with all of the grace and beauty of a slideshow. I can handle a bad framerate but this one starts giving me headaches when I play for more than a few minutes at a time. Furthermore Fighting Vipers suffers from tremendous input lag. It takes too long for your character to react to button inputs which makes it even more of a chore to play. Because of this I struggled to perform even the most basic special moves. The system struggles to keep up enough to even recognize more complex inputs.

Another issue is that the game is just plain too hard. You have various difficulty settings but I always opt to start with normal. It usually takes a few matches in any fighting game for me to get the hang of things but I never felt like I did here. Your opponent isn’t even the biggest enemy. It’s the lag and framerate. The CPU seems to know just how to strike you to overcome most of your strikes. It also benefits from the terrible collision detection. It’s like Fighting Vipers always gives the CPU opponent the benefit of the doubt in each hit. I shouldn’t need to spend so much time in a fighting game blocking, but alas, that was the case here. I attempted to play on hard mode once, and after getting utterly stomped into the ground opted to never make that mistake again.

Now let’s talk about the character roster. On the Sega Saturn this game had an astounding roster of thirty four playable fighters. That was insane back then. While it would be unfair to expect anything near that here I’m still a little disappointed. There are twelve selectable fighters, and only eight unlocked by default. To their credit the developers made some decent choices here. You have four characters from the Virtua Fighter side (Akira, Jackie, Lion and Pai) and the same number representing Fighting Vipers (Bahn, Candy, Mahler, and Sanman). The last four are the ‘joke’ characters like the kids version of Sarah, Janet from Virtua Cop, the Hornet car from Daytona USA, and the old prototype character Siba. Overall I think the game has a decent roster, and I’m more than happy that even some of the gag characters made it in.

Fighter’s Megamix even has a fair number of options. The basic single player game has you choosing from one of four groups of opponents to fight. Generally these are based either on Virtua Fighter, Fighter’s Megamix, a blend of the two, and the gag characters. Everyone is represented here. There’s also a versus mode. This allows you to select your fighter, opponent, and set parameters to the fight. It’s pretty basic, but if you have a friend that also made the mistake of picking this up (as well as Game.com) and have a link cable there’s multiplayer support here. I haven’t had the opportunity to test this, but I can’t imagine it’s particularly fun. Rounding out the package is a survival mode where you face off against all of the opponents in the game and try to defeat them with just your one life bar.

I feel bad even including screenshots in this review because they’re deceiving. At a glance Fighting Vipers looks really nice. The characters and backgrounds are surprisingly detailed for a handheld title. Best yet it’s easily recognizable as Fighter’s Megamix. As I mentioned things are all bad in motion. The hardware simply cannot keep up, or maybe just the programming was bad. Regardless Fighter’s Megamix is borderline unplayable. The framerate is exceptionally terrible. The game animates at a snail’s pace. It’s so bad that it significantly affects the gameplay. On any other platform I’m sure this one would never have been released because it just makes the system look bad. The audio fares better, but not by much. There is very limited music and I couldn’t recognize it at all. It’s okay I suppose, but doesn’t really fit a fighting game. At least there are some voice samples.