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Fighter Maker

3D 格闘ツクール

Developer / Publisher: ASCII Corporation
30 July 1998
Glitchwave rating
2.71 / 5.0
0.5
5.0
 
 
#391 for 1998
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Releases 2
Filter by: All 2 PS1 2
1998 ASCII  
CD-ROM
JP 4 988606 101887 SLPS-01434
1999 ASCII Agetec  
CD-ROM
XNA 0 93992 08710 4 SLUS-00641
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Title
An ambitious but ultimately misguided concept.
By the late 90s, advancements in video game engines allowed players to make games within games. One ambitious project in particular was Fighter Maker. Imagine, a game where you can customize every single movement of characters in a fighting game in great detail... in real-time 3D. That sounds amazing, right? You could make characters busting moves that would make those shonen anime protags proud. Heck, give Namco and Capcom a run for their money in the kick-and-punch industry. But unfortunately, Fighter Maker fell short of their own ambition.

The game's concept was already self-contradictory from the start. When you hear "Fighter Maker", what comes to mind? Making your own character from scratch, right? Customize their body shape and appearance to your liking with their own unique voices and the like? Wrong. The limitations of the PS1 hardware and storage memory means that you have about ten preset models to work with, who all frankly look like poor imitations of characters from notable franchises (most notably the Skull-o-Mania clone from Street Fighter).

Now that your dreams of creating a truly original fighter has been shattered, we move on to the bread and butter of the game: the customization process. This is where the game gets interesting... but fail to execute properly.

Fighter Maker leaves no survivors in their attempt to cover everything you need to build a fighter. From winning poses to idle movements and the simple right hook to complex throw sequences and hit logic, you could make just about anything. Each action is meticulously sequenced in singular frames where you can edit a character's limb movement and even ragdoll position in the game field. Not only that, you can also modify the hitbox frame, limb positioning and damage ratio of each attack move and even set the AI's behavior for custom fighters. Sounds dangerously close to actual game development.

With so much power on your hands, what could possibly stop you from making the zaniest, most powerful and most absurd fighters whose only limits are the human imagination? Sadly Fighter Maker was developed with an extremely cumbersome engine that even for late 90s standards is outdated. Top that off with some poor design decisions and you got yourself a bust of a game.

Considering that you have so much detail to work with, the PlayStation controller is clearly not suitable for this game's interface. The customization interface is filled with so many sub-folders and pages that you have to manually open and exit which makes navigating through the menu itself very tedious. Even if you work fast, making a proper fighter can take 8-10 hours if you want to go through every single detail. The game's data is also a space-guzzler, taking up to EIGHT BLOCKS (and a lot of your precious time) to save one custom fighter in a memory card.

The combat system itself is a hard toss between engine limitations and lazy mechanics. On one hand going to extreme levels of detail can certainly make things interesting if you have precious hours of your life to spare, but on the other hand the combat system is as cookie-cutter as fighting games can get. Smack enemies with kicks, punches and throws until their health bar drops to zero. As they lay dead as they will see your fighter celebrate their triumph by flying around and flailing their limbs to impossible angles, half in embarrassment and half in terror. Once you get past the novelty value of creating body horror and lewd throws, the game gets old. Fast.

Not much to say for the graphics and sound. Fighter's Maker's graphics are poor, to say the least. The character models, pasted on a static background, look even worse than Virtua Fighter's horrifying plastic block humanoids (and keep in mind VF was released five years earlier!) while the BGM are mostly just 40-second boring midi loops like the one you hear in shittymidi remixes.

Fighter Maker can be seen as an interesting experiment with custom fighter engines in the late 90s. But its flawed execution caused it to collapse under the weight of its ambitious concept, and it never saw the light of the day.
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Lazlo77 2016-05-28T08:31:36Z
2016-05-28T08:31:36Z
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Catalog

Theboombringer1 3D 格闘ツクール 2023-08-31T03:31:30Z
2023-08-31T03:31:30Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
PS1 Piracy
edvardmunchremix Fighter Maker 2022-08-26T16:05:21Z
PS1 • XNA
2022-08-26T16:05:21Z
1.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
NDJA Fighter Maker 2022-06-29T14:39:00Z
PS1 • XNA
2022-06-29T14:39:00Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Trichechus 3D 格闘ツクール 2017-10-12T01:02:45Z
2017-10-12T01:02:45Z
1.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
GreenYoshi Fighter Maker 2017-10-05T22:47:30Z
PS1 • XNA
2017-10-05T22:47:30Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
MorpheusKitami Fighter Maker 2016-05-28T18:02:18Z
PS1 • XNA
2016-05-28T18:02:18Z
2.5
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Cubbierill 3D 格闘ツクール 2016-05-28T12:00:26Z
2016-05-28T12:00:26Z
3.5
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Lazlo77 3D 格闘ツクール 2016-05-28T08:31:36Z
2016-05-28T08:31:36Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Player modes
1-2 players
Media
1x CD-ROM
Multiplayer options
Local
Franchises
Also known as
  • 3D Kakutou Tsukuru
  • Fighter Maker
  • View all [2] Hide

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23 mar 2015
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