“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

I was looking through the rack of PS1 games and saw a title I had never seen before, Skeleton Warriors. There was no booklet and no back. All I had to go on was the CD itself, which featured a Skeleton Warrior. Assuming it was some sort of terrible fighting game, I grabbed it in the hopes of making fun of it in a FOG Review. I popped it into my PS3 and watched the barely comprehensible CG cutscene at the beginning and felt more confident than ever that I had grabbed a mediocre fighting game.

Instead, I had apparently left with a mediocre, side-scrolling beat-em-up.

If you played video games at the arcade in the early 90′s, then you know the drill. Walk to the right mashing on the attack button until everything is dead, then walk to the right some more. Every once in a while, fight a boss and then walk to the right some more. Repeat until end credits.

My exhaustive research (wikipedia) uncovered that not only was there a Skeleton Warriors game, there was a Marvel comic, a cartoon, and a line of toys. The toy company, Playmates, thought Skeleton Warriors was going to be the next He-Man or Ninja Turtles. They were wrong.

The main problem with the game is the way you defeat enemies. Sure, mashing on the circle button until they’ve been chopped into bits works fine, but if you don’t collect the power-up they drop, they will simply regenerate. On paper it sounds like an interesting mechanic, but in the actual game it is simply infuriating. “Awesome that guy I just killed managed to regenerate right as I was grabbing the power-up that makes him explode. Great! I get to start the whole level over, since there are no checkpoints.”

Why did I pick this game?

To be honest I picked this game because it looked like a terrible fighting game. I have made a career out of making fun of terrible fighting games, so I assumed this one would be right in my wheelhouse.

The fact that the game wasn’t as terrible as I was hoping was kind of a downer. It is way easier to make fun of a terrible game rather than a mediocre one.

How does it hold up with time?

The graphics still hold up fairly well. Characters sport a bit of detail and the backgrounds look nice. If anyone played this game back in 1996, they would have been impressed by all the fancy CG, but the main characters walk would have still looked lame. Time isn’t excusing that one. The main character looks as though he just got pec implants and wants everyone to know it.

Everything else about the game feels really dated. This whole style of gameplay was already wearing thinner than Ally Mcbeal (oh yeah, I went to the well for some mid 90′s humor) when this game came out. By today’s standards there just isn’t enough there to really hold your interest. You can only mash on the circle button so many times before it loses meaning.

In the end, the game serves as a harsh reminder that corporate synergy is useless with a dumb product. Some kid got the Skeleton Warriors Marvel comic, some Skeleton Warriors toys, and the Skeleton Warriors video game for Christmas. That kid then went on to design the blowout valves for BP.

Tags: Beat-em-up, Friday Old Games, PS1, Skeleton Warriors

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.