Urban Champion

Fighting

June 1986 (Nintendo)

Ah, Urban Champion. It’s almost not fair to even look at this game. On one hand it’s a fighting game on a system that essentially has 2 buttons. Sure, you could use Start or Select but somehow I don’t think that would have helped much. On the other hand you had a genre that just wasn’t really developed well yet. Street Fighter hadn’t even hit arcades yet.

In all honesty, I hesitate to even call this a fighting game. It’s more of a beat ‘em up where there’s only one enemy and it takes a lot of time to get rid of him. There’s no choice of characters except for the fact that you can have two players, then you can pick between a guy who looks just like the regular character but with different colors. You don’t win by depleting the opponent’s health meter necessarily. You could knock him into a man hole and have him fall down.

But you’re not just fighting against the other fighter. I’m not sure if I like this or not, but there’s a woman who obviously doesn’t like what’s going on down on the sidewalk and drops pots on you. Thankfully you can see her early enough to get out of the way. You also have to take a break when the cops come by. So you get worked up enough to fight with some other guy but you both care enough not to get caught by the police. That makes a lot of sense.

I know I shouldn’t be too hard on this game. It is the first fighting game on the NES. It didn’t exactly have Street Fighter to go against when it came out¹.

That being said, I can’t help it. I felt like the entire game had to go through a molasses filter between my pressing buttons and stuff actually happening on the screen. I didn’t hear anything when I hit the other guy. But that can be passed off as something I notice now that wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time, sort of like not having the screen scroll left in Super Mario Bros.

The fighting is the big problem though. This is a fighting game. I want to hit people. I want to kick people. I only get to do one of those. Really, would it have been so hard to have one button punch and the other kick? I don’t think so.

Really, this is probably better than I’m giving it credit for. But not by much. And that doesn’t mean you should actually play it either.