Budokan : the Martial Spirit
Too funny game #6
Type of Game
Not really a game, but rather a programme that tries by every means possible to dissuade us from loving martial arts.
Release date on our machines
December 1990, the Mega Drive was still new in Europe, and already corrupted by this awful video game.
Developer
Electronic Arts, Inc., who were seeking to sabotage themselves, no doubt to avoid growing too quickly.
Publisher
Electronic Arts, Inc. and its mysterious cartridges with a small yellow corner that have led to countless conspiracy theories.
Budokan : nowhere to be found, even on EA's website, which chose to ignore it.
When I started secondary school, PCs and PlayStations had been invading homes for quite some time. Nintendo 64s too, for that matter, although in my circle of friends, only my cousin Walter Valise had one, along with one or two other mates, at whose houses I played it twice at most. The Saturn? I never saw one in real life at anyone's house. All this to say that kids who were fans of video games, namely 98% of the children in my neighbourhood, already crazy with joy over the 16-bit generation, had reached a new level of euphoria. While my best mate Randall Geyser and I dove headfirst into revolutionary games like Heroes of Might and Magic II and Soul Blade, we also experienced a sort of Mega Drive revival. It must have been around mid-1997. The console had been sitting in a cupboard for about two years, so yes, it was a big revival from the perspective of pre-teens who see video games evolving faster than their hormones. We had a lot of fun playing Ghouls'n Ghosts, just like in our glory days in second grade, still without being able to finish it. But for this trip down memory lane, I borrowed a few cartridges from my neighbours Nelson and Mortimer Paprika that they hadn't lent me yet.
Retrogaming before its time
Among them was Mortal Kombat, which had our belly torn laughing. In the pile was also something more obscure, and a thousand times more hilarious, which is nothing short of a miracle. The obscure thing itself did not know that it was a thousand times more hilarious than Mortal Kombat.
Martiapathetic arts
First of all, there's the name, which encourages us to take the game seriously: Budokan: The Martial Spirit. It's pretty cool, right? The cover shows a samurai who looks like a G.I. Joe that Randall and I both had (Bushido, for those in the know). He's got a moustache and a squashed face, but that doesn't matter. It's cool too. And then the cartridge had that Electronic Arts style, bigger than the classics, with a little yellow cube on the side. For me, EA was still synonymous with incredible wonders, the company having delivered timeless entertainment gems such as Populous, Jungle Strike, John Madden Football, James Pond, Syndicate and Theme Park... all games that I loved to varying degrees. Of course we were going to try Budokan! Feeling rather confident, I turned on the console that day and, um... how do you say you were disappointed, but a thousand times more vulgar?
It started off well, though! A martial arts master, wandering aimlessly through a seedy alleyway in the middle of the night, recruits a guy after seeing him fighting some thugs. And he decides, just like that, to turn him into a world champion in the noble art of combat. Because no one else had anything better to do with their lives at the time, I guess. And because this kind of pitch doesn't even pale in comparison to the fighting movie scenarios of the same era. In any case, we didn't understand English, and there weren't enough images to explain it to us any other way. So whether the story was cool or not, we never knew. Then the game begins, and our little avatar finds himself catapulted into a single-screen setting representing different dojos where we train in the four martial arts featured in the game (Kendo, Nunchaku, Karate and I don't know what else).
To say that the graphics have aged badly is the biggest understatement in gaming history, but I had already endured some pretty awful things on this console, so I put up with it. So we enter a room to face an opponent, and a duel begins. Cool! Okay, we're struggling to move the character and throw punches, but that must be because we're out of practice. We expected to get the hang of it and have fun in two seconds flat, like in International Karate +, but it doesn't seem to be the same kind of fun. After an hour of persevering, we've come to terms with the fact that there's a big problem with responsiveness here. During the golden age of 16-bit machines, you could grasp the mechanics and physics of a game in three strokes of the controller. In Budokan, no matter how much time you spend on it, nothing works. The character reacts too late, if at all, and performs moves we didn't ask for.
Okay, we didn't read the instructions, we didn't listen to anything the nunchaku teacher told us, and we just pressed all the buttons without thinking. Hey, in any other game, when you do that, it at least makes your avatar frown and snort! Seriously, you have to see it to believe it! It feels like you're trying to control some kind of stupid cyborg programmed to do the opposite of what you tell it to do. I really got that impression. Apparently, the gameplay is meant to be realistic, close to what might happen in real-life confrontations. Eeeeeeh, okay! But when do we get to have fun? A quick look at reviews written by other people later taught me that the problem wasn't on our end. Good news for our mental health. For the game, not so much.
Mawashi in your ears
Okay, so it has the worst graphics in the world and the most poorly designed controls in the universe. But surely there's something else to enjoy, right? Nope! All you can do is participate in the championship, beat ten opponents, and that's it. Or train before going to the championship. Oh, boo-hoo! It's so boring! Our master even announces it during the intro, saying that training may seem boring, but we have to get past that stage, or something like that. So is Budokan some kind of therapeutic fantasy designed to transcend our consumerist side? We're twelve years old, we want easy, intense, non-stop fun in our veins as soon as we turn on the console, OK? What do you mean, we're not allowed to have fun in Budokan? Damn, the game itself doesn't believe in its own entertainment potential. What's the point of doing practice sessions to perfect techniques that are impossible to use in official fights (or even in training, for that matter)? Our avatar is supposed to fight like crazy, since he beat up a bunch of ICE thugs (who didn't exist yet in 1990, but you get the idea), but he reacts like a piece of concrete crushed under a container carrier at the bottom of the ocean. Imagine two cinder blocks in versus mode: even more indigestible, or hilariously funny, depending on your point of view. For a project that claims to be a martial arts simulation, it's pretty bad. With Randall, we increasingly leaned towards the second option, which was to snigger a little, then laugh out loud, before crying with laughter at the mind-boggling situations that this miserable gameplay allowed. The pathetic cries of the fighters, their barely contained grunts when they take a hit that took eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds to land, yeah, it gets hilarious once you reach a certain level of despair. When you stop taking Budokan seriously, it immediately becomes much easier to appreciate, to the point where you end up getting attached to it, without going so far as to enjoy playing it, let's not kid ourselves. But wasn't I supposed to be talking about music? Well, no, that doesn't work either. If we based our opinion solely on this OST, we might think that the Mega Drive can only produce grating, painful and exasperating sounds. But that's not the case. Come on, Rob Hubbard. I know you already composed the intro music for Populous in the same style, but now it's time to move on.
Martian arts
The game received fairly good reviews when it was released, which surprises me greatly. Gen4 even gave it a 94% rating, but where did that come from? I don't understand. Even in 1990, I really don't understand. Especially coming from magazines, where testing a game for ten minutes was enough to write an article about it. Impossible to do with Budokan and its chaotic gameplay. Anyway, I returned the cartridge to my neighbours pretty quickly, for once. I really hated this game, even as a kid, despite my tendency to be a very, very good audience. I've tested some rubbish games, but this one beats them all. I know that some players appreciated the vibe of normal people competing while respecting physics and gravity. But here, it just feels like we're fighting while carrying 100-kilo weights, on a planet that puts 10G of force on our heads, and without the possibility of activating Kaioken in the middle of a match, as in Budokai 3. One letter away, and we go from a horrible bore to a mega-stylish fighting game. Others appreciated the atmosphere, the kind of serenity that emanated from the dojos, the placid scenery visible through the open windows, the authenticity of the tatami mats and the thin walls that you vaporise when you sneeze.
And yes, I admit that it could have worked for me too, having tried Budokan when I was six or seven years old. There is still some potential hidden beneath the layers of mediocrity. Unfortunately, it's too well hidden, and discovering it after Street Fighter II, or even Rise of the Robots, well, no. Not possible. The game was also released on PC. Maybe it's less flawed in that version, maybe not, I'm not going to check. Eurke! Shoo! Pschitte! If you're going to embark on an experiment where you enjoy doing nothing, Populous seems like a much better choice. And if you want to stick with martial arts, IK+ is the way to go. Boo-hoo, EA decision-makers. You have much bigger problems to deal with today. And you brought them on yourselves.
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