BloodStorm

BloodStorm is an arcade fighting game that was released in 1994, developed by Incredible Technologies and published by Strata Software, exclusively for arcades, and it's another infamous "Mortal Kombat killer."

It is the spiritual sequel to Time Killers.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The control scheme is a copy of Mortal Kombat's, but clunkier, less responsive, and with no combos.
 * 2) Cheap difficulty, the CPU is incredibly aggressive and has a decent chance of dismembering your character, and if you get stunned, say hello to the Continue Screen.
 * 3) Boring, generic and unlikeable characters, since almost all of them are completely evil, with the only exception being Tremor.
 * 4) Awful graphics, especially the sprites that are poorly drawn and have CGI gauntlets that clearly clash with the rest of the game.
 * 5) * Also, the bosses Chainsaw and Nekron are purely CGI and they look even worse than the rest of the characters.
 * 6) * Some of the backgrounds look dreadful, most notably the ones that are rendered. Obsel is the worst of them all.
 * 7) Just like Mortal Kombat, this game has secret characters (eight in total). Some are really hard to find since what you must do is really cryptic (one in fact makes you throw yourself into a death trap in an extremely precise way).
 * 8) * Also, all the secret characters are pallet swaps of all the characters of the roster, but even more stupid-looking and twice as cheap in terms of gameplay.
 * 9) Awful-looking stages. Some of them have the same problem of the clash between CGI and drawn sprites.
 * 10) The stages have deathtraps (like a pit with a giant spike or a vat of toxic waste) that don't work too well in a 2D fighter and just frustrate the players.
 * 11) The gameplay, while better than Time Killers, still has the annoying dismemberment and decapitation mechanics that left you unable to use some moves, move freely, and in some cases will kill you immediately.
 * 12) * And just like Time killers, the dismember mechanic seems to act at complete random, most of the time, in the favor of the AI.
 * 13) Awful music, is extremely repetitive and reused constantly.
 * 14) Three frustrating and overall awful final bosses.
 * 15) * When you fight Sin, you fight her in a room where walls with spikes close on the characters during the round, the unfair part is that, if the walls get close enough, it kills you instantly, but not her, and it doesn't matter if you have more life than Sin. She also counts as a secret fighter for some reason...
 * 16) * Chainsaw, is sometimes hard to hit, as he can be in places you can't reach, plus he only has one attack, charging at you.
 * 17) * Nekron constantly abuses his massive range, loves trapping you on corners, and it's very easy for him to rip one of your arms by just punching and kicking you constantly, also his moveset is incredibly basic and boring.
 * 18) Underwhelming storyline, the endings involve these scenarios; 4 of the 8 characters are psychos that take over the world, 3 are idiots who wind up dying or causing massive damage to the planet at the end, and only one is an actual hero who solves all the worlds' problems.
 * 19) The game had an interesting concept, of getting a weapon of your opponent after you defeat them, but after losing a match, you lose all the weapons, making it pointless.
 * 20) * Plus the game doesn't tell you how to do the special move that you just earned.
 * 21) The AI can be extremely annoying or extremely dumb, however, most of the time is the first.
 * 22) Despite the signature moves being more useful, they are still less useful than your normal moves.
 * 23) If you get stunned, you are basically a goner, since your opponent would have an opening to behead you.
 * 24) Lame and tasteless gore without the finesse of Mortal Kombat.
 * 25) * If you dismember someone, their legs disappear, even if you used a fatality.
 * 26) * And if you did a fatality in one round, in the next, the opponent will come back as if nothing happened.
 * 27) The explosion effects look terrible.
 * 28) * The explosions that appear when you defeat a boss look pathetic.
 * 29) Dreadful fatality moves with the exception of Hellhound's and Freon's, and all have similar effects too.
 * 30) A lot of glitches such as if you managed to make your opponent fall into the huge spike in that level and if you have two perfects, then blood will appear in between the gaps!
 * 31) The worst of all, the flyer itself shows Daniel Pesina in Johnny Cage's Mortal Kombat II attire. Pesina however, had already departed from Midway because of a rocky royalty dispute.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Some of the ideas are pretty good. It's just that they were poorly executed.
 * 2) It is better in every way than its predecessor, Time Killers.
 * 3) Even with gameplay similar to G.U.T.S and Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown, it is addictive to play against other people.
 * 4) This game was somewhat ahead of its time. As it was one of the first arcade games to utilize a "password" system and the first to support a 16:9 widescreen resolution.

Trivia

 * At the time of the game's release, there were a few small hints of a sequel.
 * One such hint is that if the player manages to defeat all of Nekron's agents before fighting Nekron himself, beat the game, and let the credits finish rolling, the game would give the player a secret code with a message saying that if they were to call one of the producers, Leif (also the creator of BloodStorm, not to be confused with the Time Killers character of the same name), and tell him this code and what fighter they beat the game with, the player "may appear in BloodStorm II". However, these plans were scrapped once Strata went out of business.
 * If two female fighters are pitted against each other, even in a mirror match, the fight start phrase is changed from "ENGAGE" to "CAT FIGHT!"
 * Obsel, a stage in the game, is Lesbo spelt backwards.
 * There were plans to port this game to the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation the following year but were cancelled, because, again, Strata went out of business.

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