G.A.S.P!! Fighters' NEXTream

GASP? More like a wet tuberculosis-ridden WHEEZE! More than six months after the Japanese version struggled onto our shores, the official PAL release is here, and the time lag has done it no favours at all.

GASP! Fighters' Nextreme, to give it its full, ridiculous, title, is a beat-'em-up that is very much in the style of Sega's Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers games. The main - well, just about the only - interesting new feature is a character creation screen. Once created, the fighters can then be trained by pitting them against the eight built-in combatants and learning their moves.

This sounds like fun, and the character creation part certainly is (we tried in vain to create a Roy lookalike, but couldn't get anything odd enough), but actually training a custom character up afterwards is a drag, since they always start off with only two feeble moves to their name. Getting them to a point where they've got a decent set of attacks can take a while.

Combat, unfortunately, is where GASP! is knocked down - rather a problem for a game that revolves around fighting! Even with the enormous borders, which are as chunky as Fergie's thighs, all around the screen (not just at the top and bottom) GASP chugs along like a tractor holding up holidaymakers. Fighting moves aren't so much animated as sculpted, the fighters popping from one position to another with nothing in between.

Pitted against Fighters Destiny or Mortal Kombat 4, GASP is left bleeding on the pavement. It's very much a second-division fighter, a poor copy of Sega's titles, and these days you could probably pick a Saturn and Fighters Megamix for the same price as this!

AFTER THE TOTALLY awesome... well, okay, the pretty damn good Fighter’s Destiny, I was quite excited when the newest N64 beat-’em-up turned up in the 64 Magazine offices. Everything was fine as I hooked up an NTSC machine, popped in the cart, and turned on the power, preparing myself for some top one or two player martial arts action.

Sadly, it was not to be. Something had gone horribly wrong. GASP looked great initially, but the more I played it, the worse things got. It soon became apparent that far from building on the new standard set by Fighter’s Destiny, GASP looked to be starting a downward slide back towards the horrific spectacle of Clayfighter. Could it really be that bad? Well, okay, it’s not that bad, but it’s definitely not the best.

So join me now, as I set aside my disappointment, my shattered dreams and my dashed expectations, and attempt to relate to you in a totally calm, unbiased and not at all ‘fed-up-with-naff-beat-’em-ups’ way, exactly what it is that GASP is all about. Here we go. GASP is a beat-’em-up. Okay, you already knew that, but we had to start somewhere, didn’t we?

Jackanory Time!

As with most beat-’em-ups GASP probably has some convoluted storyline which explains exactly why a large group of mismatched fighters have gathered together to spend their time kicking hell out of one another. I say probably, because with the whole game being in Japanese, it’s difficult to actually understand what’s going on. The various characters do waffle something from time to time, which might be top dialogue explaining exactly why it is they’ve decided to kick your butt, or they might just be talking about their favourite TV show. Only interpreters – and, I suppose, the umpteen million people who have Japanese as their first language – will ever know.

However, this doesn’t matter, because beat-’em-ups, no matter what the software companies say, do not live or die on their storylines. A nice plot is a bonus, but what really matters is the quality of the gameplay. Which in this case is a little unfortunate, but what can you do?

Combat in GASP takes place in a number of different arenas, and each one has its own unique interactive elements. The scenery in each area, far from being just something which is there for show, can influence the way in which the fight is fought. Or at least that’s the theory. Walls can be knocked down, for instance, allowing the fighting to progress into previously inaccessible areas. Flat surfaces and crates can be used as part of complex techniques to make the fighters perform spectacular new moves. In certain areas the scenery conceals huge drops out of the ring, and the wall or fence must first be destroyed with a powerful technique before knocking the opponent out of the ring.

Gosh!

These interactive arenas are an excellent idea, but unfortunately their attraction is only limited. Most of the ‘interactivity’ comes down to an aesthetically pleasing effect, but doesn’t actually help or hinder the combat that much. The bamboo poles in the first arena can be chopped down for instance, and the level itself is very reminiscent of that excellent PlayStation chop-’em-up, Bushido Blade. But after a while the novelty wears off. Even the extremely nice burning tripods in the cave level, which when knocked over set fire to the floor in a spread of burning fuel, don’t really affect the gameplay very much. The flames do injure your fighter once the fire’s been started, which is quite a clever effect, but this is the most ‘interactive’ that the scenery gets. Take the water you’ll find on certain levels, for example – it doesn’t seem to affect the speed of your fighter. Players standing in water move as if unimpeded by the fluid, even the really small ones.

The arenas seem to vary in graphical quality too, from very nicely drawn with neat little details (such as the burning tripods for example) to a lot more shoddily drawn with little or nothing to break up the monotony. One of the levels had rocks with the most appalling texture I have ever seen – you would almost be forgiven for thinking that the textures had been produced on the antique Sinclair Spectrum.

Golly!

One rather clever thing that the GASP programmers have attempted to implement here is the temporary translucent scenery. Because there are such a lot of objects on some levels, it would be very difficult to see the fighters a lot of the time. To counter this, the scenery automatically becomes translucent when the one of the fighters is at risk of getting obscured by it, and a semi-intelligent floating camera helps out too. Unfortunately, the use of this translucent effect sometimes means that your fighters spend a lot of time being viewed as if through a rather dirty fishbowl. On one level, for example, you’ll spend virtually the whole of the round watching the combat through a wall. Oh, and the arenas are also rather small. The fighters in GASP are varied and quite nicely drawn, although they can’t really compare to beat-’em-ups on other formats. They range from a huge bald guy with a tattooed head to a small girl with pink bunches, and have a variety of unique moves in addition to the standard kicks and punches.

A welcome feature is the in-game move lists which can be accessed during play – as in Fighter’s Destiny – and do away with the need to juggle between the manual and the control pad.

The highlight, and the saving grace, of this game is the ‘create your own player’ function. Using the in-game edit facility, you can create a fighter defining height, weight, sex, hair colour, hair style, facial characteristics, clothing and name. Once you’ve created your fighter, you can then train them.

Training involves pitting your combatant against the original fighters, and winning new moves from them. Each time you beat an opponent you can choose one new move from a choice of four. Manage to defeat the opponent perfectly, without getting hit, and you’ll have the choice of up to eight new moves, the latter four being the more complex but also the most effective. You can take several moves from one fighter, or for variety take a couple of moves from several different fighters. In this way you can adopt something of every different fighting style into your repertoire.

Once you’ve trained up your chosen character, they’re ready for combat. And here’s where it gets really interesting. By the simple expedient of having two memory cards, it’s possible to pit your fighter against a friend’s fighter. This opens up a vast array of possible combatants, with friends training up different characters with specific abilities, swapping fighters, starting their own league – the possibilities are almost endless!

Good Grief!

The only flaw with this whole idea is the gameplay. This is the one major flaw in the entire game, both the player-created fighters and the original ones – they’re just not that much fun. At first, it’s difficult to say exactly what it is that’s wrong with the combat, after all, the characters are fast and colourful with a nice range of moves. But then why are the characters so fast? Is it because of the totally smooth, ultra fluid animations? Er, no. It appears to be that the characters move fast because the animation is, to be frank, ‘incomplete’. To decrease the time it takes for a foot to rise into an high kick, instead of speeding the animation up, GASP simply uses fewer frames of animation. This means you don’t actually see the foot move from A to B via C, it’s just at A and then at B.

Obviously it’s not quite as bad as all that – no-one would dare to bring out a game that bad, would they? But what it does mean is that the fighters’ techniques often appear to be a little jerky, and unnatural.

Slowing Down?

The response time isn’t good either. No matter how hard or how fast you hammer the joypad buttons, there always seems to be a time lag in your fighter’s response. This can prove incredibly irritating.

Finally there’s the problem of normal movement. Although the fighters can jump and kick with the best of them, when it comes to any kind of non-combative movement, they’re limited to side-steps and minute shuffles backwards and forwards. With all the interactive scenery, it would be useful to be able to move around more freely to make use of it, but this isn’t practical. You find that if you do try to shuffle your way backwards to get to somewhere, you’ll inevitably get thumped by your opponent.

Although jumping can cover some distance, it’s obviously not as versatile as running would be. In fact, you tend to find that most of the time the fight gets concluded in a fairly flat fight with the players finishing not very far from where they started out.

Basically, GASP is a bit of a disappointment. The unresponsiveness and annoying inability to move very freely around the not-very-interactive backgrounds can prove very tiresome, and if it wasn’t for the player edit feature this game might very well be looking dangerously like another Clayfighter. As it is, the game is reasonably fun, if you can get over the annoying handling problems, and the edit function should hopefully have you going back to it for quite a while to come. Don’t show it to any PlayStation Tekken 3 fans though, or they’ll probably hurt themselves laughing.

This N64 game is still very early. In fact, the name of this Konami 3-D fighter isn't even set in stone! The game puts players in a variety of three-dimensional environments ranging from the back streets of an inner-city to the aisles of what seems to be a church. The arenas have items scattered about them, but instead of just being stagnant background objects, players can use them to bash the opponent's head in. Another nice feature is customizable characters which you can save onto a memory pak and then challenge friends with your very own fighter.

Bog-standard Virtua Fighter knock-off with the twist of a character creation section. Sadly, it doesn't make things any less jerky.

A stinky old fighter, sneaked out without anyone noticing. Or so Konami thought. We sprang out on it and punched it in the face.