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The PC Engine is my favorite video game system ever. Why? I'm an
RPG kinda guy and for RPGs
 that
was your system - great music, the storage power of CD, plenty o'
speech, awesome animated cinemas. And the fact that it was relatively
unpolluted by American and Brit Pain Games was a major favoritism
factor for me as well. The 32-Bit big brother of this true joy-system,
the PC-FX, was released in Japan on Dec. 23rd and the first two
games have made me a very happy guy. Both represent tried-and-true
genres, but both break an immense amount of new ground. For Team
Innocent, the ground broken is practically the entire game; in Japan
it's labeled a digital comic (The category games like Snatcher fall
into), but its 3-D environments and action elements are like no digital
comic I've ever seen. For Battle Heat, it's the game's unbelievable
presentation.
Battle Heat plays (In concept, at least) like
any other fighting game. What's different here is that every attack,
every counter is rendered in beautiful, 30-frames-per-second movie-quality
animation. Yeah, it's FMV. But don't think for a second it's conventional
FMV during which you have two choices every 30 seconds or so...
you have complete control at all times. Each fighter has high and
low fierce and light attacks, a myriad of special moves, throws,
and counters, jumping attacks,
variations on all of these while near and far, and a taunt... basically
the same as a regular fighter, but on a much grander scale. "Great,"
you may think, "I get to wait for a few seconds while it loads
the next FMV sequence." Ain't gonna happen! No matter which
of your fighter's moves you perform, it comes out INSTANTLY - absolutely
no waiting whatsoever, at any time! This makes for a phenomenally
original and addictive fighter, especially in the two-player mode.
One of the most interesting traits of Battle Heat is its unique
countering system - every move can be countered with one of your
own, you simply have to discover which it is.
Battle Heat's
animation is fantastically Japanese - insane camera angles, impossibly
contorted physiques with a generally hyperkinetic, explosive feel.
In fact, much of the animation blatantly copies Hokuto no Ken -
(Fist of the North Star) Kai is obviously based on Kenshiro, Alamis
on Shin... even their moves are the same. But hey... that's fine
by me! Hokuto no Ken is one of the best action anime ever made.
In fact, there's such a volume of animation in Battle Heat that
Hudson Soft
 enlisted
the aid of over eight animation studios... each character features
over 25,000 frames of animation in his or her repertoire!
This CD's only downfall is the music... the opening track, complete
with excellent vocals, is so great that you expect that type of
quality throughout the game when in fact most of the music is poorly-executed,
yet well-composed PCM. This seems to be the fault of the programmers
rather than the hardware, as Team Innocent's PCM is quite good.
Battle Heat is an excellent and a completely, even disorientingly
original first game for the PC-FX, not to mention extremely addictive.
With eight utterly different characters, all with entirely different
attributes, you should be kept busy for a while... but will this
and Team Innocent keep you busy until the next batch of FX games
are released in March/April? Let's hope so. -Nick Rox
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