Blood Storm (Arcade 1994)
I played a lot of arcade fighting games 1 VS 1, like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, The King of Fighters, etc... , and except for some particular franchise, like Dragonball, them are almost all the same.
Lately I found out about Blood Storm, and damn, it's genuinely full of cool ideas that I never seen before in games of the same type !!
Seems like it's the last game made by the software house "Incredible Technologies", they tried with this game to beat the Mortal Kombat domain, but they failed and closed down ... it's a pity ...
Some of the cool stuff this game offers:
- Arms and body parts can be cut off during combat, this not only makes impossible to do the combat moves related to those parts, but if you still try to use the "missing" parts them will spit blood and you will lose health in the process !!
- With the right moves it is possible to finish off almost instantly an adversary, like severing the head or cut in half the whole body ... it's not just a "Fatality" because this happens during the combat session.
- Every character has many particular super moves and skills ... and that's the norm ... BUT when you win you will COLLECT the main skill of the character you have beaten !!! The more encounters you win, the more skills you can use !!
- The arenas are very different between each other !! There's one with a pit, if someone falls down it's instant death, another one is really small, so it's impossible to take distance... also the walls will close even more as time passes, etc ...
It is visibly inspired by Mortal Kombat, even the 5 buttons required are similar, but the difference here is that instead of "High-Punch" / "Low-Punch", you have "Left-Arm" / "Right-Arm", and the same for the kicks, so you need to use the right part of the body for the move you want to obtain.
Even the humor is very similar, and there is also a "not so secret" character called "Shadow" that appears in particular conditions, it's invisible except for its shadow.
Every time I play it I find out some new cool stuff, and every time is fun !