10/22/20 Tough Guy (1995)

Tough Guy (1995) developed and published by Panda Entertainment Technology for DOS. It’s a fighting game, on DOS, and it’s called Tough Guy! How could I not check it out? It’s… good? Maybe? Tough Guy is clearly trying to fill the fighting game hole that existed (and, to be frank, still exists) on home computers. It apes the formulas of Street Fighter and SNK to a T– an international cast, fantastical special moves, and heck, even the UI looks pretty similar. The friction really lies in the controls, which is one thing that really needed to be adapted for keyboards. Instead of a WASD or arrow key set up, it mimics an arcade stick, using 8 directions mapped to the E, R, T, D, G, C, V, and B keys. If that sounds like a lot, it is, although thankfully the developers didn’t seem to implement standard motion inputs for specials, opting for a Smash Bros. style tilt system. All the basic hallmarks of a fighting game are here, though. If you practiced enough (or remapped the buttons in DOSBox), you could do mix-ups and combos like it was King of Fighters, although the option to grab seems missing, but that may have been the lack of information, as it is entirely in Taiwanese save for a few things like character and location names, for some reason. It’s worth noting that it has a good amount of polish for the era, the music is pretty catchy and the spritework and backgrounds are well detailed with strong animations. This isn’t a terrible game by any means, I just don’t know why you’d put time into it when there are any number of other classic fighters with bigger rosters and more community resources. There is one great thing to come out of this game, and I won’t lie, it’s Madiesha.