Gekido

Will someone please tell me what the name Gekido means? Is it street slang for when you get into a fight with someone while having an epileptic fit and then your opponent's buddies all jump in to simultaneously kick your convulsing ass as you whimper and drool? Or is it the name of that deadly martial art whose chiefest attribute is the ability to launch a devastating chain of attacks just to the left of your actual enemy so that it never connects? Or maybe it's just the code name of Interplay's most recent tax write-off.

Whatever it means, it's succeeded in cementing its name in my mind by way of totally failing to provide any sort of fighting-game entertainment. Sometimes I forget the names of truly excellent games because the gameplay wipes everything else out of my mind, but this game was so horribly bad that I go out of my way to invoke its name when I need that special burst of indignant anger while I'm working out; it helps me get those last few reps out of my set.

Let's talk about why it's so bad. At this late stage of the industry game, it's fair to say that games pass or fail by comparison to other, well-established games in their respective genres. Rare indeed is the product that presents a truly new gaming experience. So, by comparison, Gekido disappoints on many levels.

First of all, it plays roughly like a Final Fight-style brawler, wherein your character proceeds through the environments in stages, able to move on only after defeating multiple enemies. Pick your fighter at the beginning of the game, but don't dither too much about who your choice will be; they're nigh-identical, save for their differing chain combos. You are led to believe that uncovering different combos and mastering them is the key to winning this game, but if you keep flailing away on the buttons, the same end result is achieved, so don't worry about keeping track of what sequence works best. New combos appear seemingly randomly, with each sequence displayed inconveniently at the bottom left corner of the screen, where you can't easily see them because you're busy trying not to get your body "Gekido'd" by your multiple assailants.

And about that: Gekido has instituted a "helpful" little control: pressing R2 will orient your fighter toward the nearest enemy, which is meant to keep your attacks on track. But when you're scrambling around, mashing buttons and swearing at the top of your lungs, it's an easy feature to forget. More often than not, you end up missing your opponents entirely, while they slip up behind you, chuckling, waiting for you to finish posing so they can hand you your liver.

The usual item-carrying boxes, barrels and, well, vending machines, are in force here; you can carry them and use them as weapons. Most of them explode on contact, whether it's contact with the enemy or yourself. I'd never seen a car tire explode before, but perhaps I'm not "Gekido" enough or something. You can also pick up weapons that the bad guys hold, after knocking them down. I managed to get my bruised and bloody hands on a sub-machine gun once, and sprayed the whole area with bullets until it ran out of ammo, and not one baddie dropped. Not one, that is, until, spent of bullets, I decided to throw the useless thing away; and then it knocked someone down. Oh, and once I had guy throw a nothing at me, only to discover, right before impact, that it was a barrel, hidden from me by a bad display routine. "Gekido!" I shouted. I felt better.

Don't forget the horrible follow-camera: it runs on something I like to call the Retarded-Monkey Algorithm. You can cause it to zoom in and out, but it doesn't matter, really, because it waits until there are enough enemies to surround you, then zooms in on its own to totally exclude a whole side of the screen so you can't see the bad guys coming.

I can't even recommend the four-player mode, because I don't have enough friends to play it. And even if I did, after introducing this game to them, I'd be alone again. They'd find me eventually, in a depressed funk. I think the Danish call it Gekido.

Keoni Littlemouse

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