Retro Review: Shaq Fu

Reviewed Platform: SNES

Release Year: 1994

On his way to a charity basketball event in Tokyo, Shaquille O’Neal wanders into a kung fu dojo. There, an old man says he is ‘the one’ and sends him through a portal to another world to rescue some kid called Nezu from some baddie or something. There you get to fight with various people, such as someone who looks like Catwoman and another who looks like The Prince of Persia. Oh, and cyborgs. I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me either.

Gameplay is what really holds a game together. You can deal with average graphics, sounds and plot but if the gameplay is bad then there’s really no point in playing the game at all. Unfortunately for Shaq Fu, the gameplay is poor at best and head-bangingly awful at worst. So, where do I start?

The main aim of a fighting game is to be able to land hits, so it’s not exactly helpful when the hit detection in SF is woefully poor. For a hit to register it has to make perfect contact with the centre of your opponent, and if it lands anywhere else at all then you won’t damage your opponent. This causes you to be up close and personal all the time – even long range kicks won’t register unless they hit the sweet spot. This is where the second flaw comes in, which is the range attacks of the opponents. The enemies have the distinct ability to damage you at range, which is really annoying considering you have to be literally on top of them to damage them. Of course you have dodge moves, but this is where the third flaw comes in – controller lag. Sure, you can see that an attack is coming, but that’s a whole different story to being able to dodge them. The time it takes for you to execute a move is hair-tearingly long. You can hammer the buttons all you want, but Shaq just doesn’t move fast enough for the moves to be any use.

If, after the first battle, you haven’t already thrown the game out of the window then you will do when you learn that the entire game is composed of these battles. No variation, just different looking opponents with slightly different attacks, and every one as frustrating as the last.

So, with ‘credit where credit is due’ and all that, I have to say that Shaq Fu looks nice, at least. It’s nice and colourful, and the areas that you fight in all look good. Both Shaq and the enemies you fight against are all nicely animated, and any moves that you manage to pull off flow together nicely.

The sound in Shaq Fu is only really slightly above average. The music during the fights is themed and good enough to not make your ears bleed, but won’t win any prizes. The sound effects are the usual deal of canned fighting sounds, all complete with that muffled-static effect that sounds like they’re being played through a set of blown speakers.

To say that Shaq Fu is the worst game ever made would be a lie, but it’s not far off. The basic premise of the game makes no sense, and the gameplay is just so infuriating that you’ll hate the game after the first round of your very first fight. It makes it no better, then, that the inclusion of Shaquille O’Neal was probably just to boost sales. The hero of the game could have been any made up character of the developer’s choosing, but by sticking Shaq onto the game (who at the time wasn’t long into his Professional career) they were guaranteed sales. This game is so bad that there’s a website dedicated to destroying every single copy of it. Hell, Delphine Software should have just streamlined the process and shipped the game with a hammer.

Originally posted in TheSixthAxis forums on June 14th, 2009.