Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Bloody Roar

Yup. Bloody-mothereffing-Roar. This one originally went by the name Beastorizer, which probably tells you all you need to know about the kind of badassery that's coming at your faces right now. Buckle up, gentlemen.

1997 was a good year for fighters. Tekken 3 arrived, and is still regarded by many as one of the biggest and best nad-punching games of all time. On top of that, it was also the year of... Bloody Roar. Because if there's one thing Tekken was missing, it was the chance to turn into a werewolf and beat up a six-foot bunny guy.

You may also know it as Bloody Roar: Hyper Beast Duel. Whatever you want to call it, Hudson Soft's brawler hit the PS1 that year, ported from the original chunky-ass arcade machine. Let's take a look.

The title's story (not that fighters are particularly assed with story) centers on a band of ‘zoanthropes.' At this point, I'll have to drop some fake science on your asses and explain than these are warriors with the ability to transform into a kind of half-animal at will. They're being hunted by some kind of unscrupulous government bastards, who hope to use them as biological weapons. It's all getting pretty damn heavy around here.

To cut a fairly long and balls-out bizarre story short, some zoanthropes work for the shady Tyron Corporation and others against it. All we need to know is that Yugo (the wolf one), Bakuryu (the mole one), Alice (the bunny one), Mitsuko (the hairy-assed pig one) and a couple of other freaks are all pissed at each other. Which is where the fighting comes in.

At its heart, Bloody Roar is a fairly conventional fighter. It's got throws, combos, jump-ins and all that stuff out the wazzoo. It differs, of course, with the beast mechanic. Astride your health bar on the HUD is a another meter, which fills as you duke it out. When this process is complete, you can hit the button to transform and unleash your inner whup-ass can.

In your half-human, half-creepy-thing state, your abilities are greatly heightened. Your attacks are more powerful, you jump much higher, and have access to a lot more moves. This, needless to say, is where it's damn well at.

But hey, as grandma always said, you can have too much of a good thing. Unleashing the devastating ass-rupturing power of nature's most fearsome creatures (the... bunny and mole, obviously) is a fairly fleeting experience. As you're damaged in this form, the meter will empty again, and you'll revert back to normal when it's fully depleted.

Bloody Roar is a novel fighter, which looks great and plays as smoothly as a baby's ass (whatever that means). It tried a little too hard to be 'cool' and 'edgy,' with its gory attacks and wanktastic metal soundtrack, but let's not hold that against it. It was the late nineties after all.

Header: GameFAQS.