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The Untouchable

Demo review: 80%
reviewed by Frank Bernier

note on score: 90%+ (awesome , go get it !), 80%-90% (very good), 70% (good), -70% (bad)

Summary:

  • Pros: Has everything any decent 2D fighter game should have including team play, tournament, hidden moves etc. The excellent music greatly enhances the game. The use of full motion video is excellent.
  • Cons: 2D like and No 3DFX support. The graphics are comparable to Mortal Kombat for Playstation in some extent except that real life-like characters were pictured. While this game would have been awesome 3 years ago, the comparison fall short with new fighter game like Tekken 3 and Dead or Alive since it is essentially a 2D game.
  • Requires: 603e CPU at 180MHz or better should do fine. Turning off VM is also advised as well as using real RAM.
  • Cost: about 40$. Available in November.

The Untouchable from Powermedia breaks new grounds by being the first fighting game available for Macintosh. It is kind of odd that nobody thought of releasing a similar game before when we look at the success of this type of games on the Playstation, Nintendo or Wintel. Anyway, it is finally here and as you will see in the following paragraphs, The Untouchable has almost everything to become a classic 2D fighter game.

 

First look:

Disclaimer ! :I have to say first that I have experience playing a lot of fighter type games from Mortal Kombat to Tekken 3 and Dead or alive.Therefore keep in mind that my impression are in reference to these latest new hot titles on the Playstation.

Some of you may remember the demo found on the Power3D Voodoo1 CD called "RA" showing the potential of Voodoo 3DFX cards to render fighting scenes. When I first saw the demo, I was really optimistic. At last , I thought that fighting game on the Mac could become a reality. Almost two long years later, The Untouchable is coming out. I must say there was a lot of hype and reasons for being very optimistic were there , taking into acount the now growing popularity of 3D accelerator Card technology. But hold your breath...the Untouchable is NOT 3DFX accelerated. Forget the beautiful textures and all that. We're in here rather for what seems to be an improve version of Mortal Kombat. The Fighting scene are linear (you move from left ro right only), a lot also like Street Fighter which means that the game is essentially a 2D game with life-like characters.

When you start the demo , it immediately brings out a menu in which you can select limited options like Arcade mode orbattle mode, preference, etc.(The full version will have all features enabled)

Here are the available and disabled functions :

o Only three fighters (instead of nineteen).
These fighters (Prodigy, Li Kwai and Kingston) should give you a good idea of the different types of martial arts and fighting styles.

o Only two play modes (instead of six)
You can either play one player vs. the computer (single player arcade mode) or two players (arcade mode or battle mode).

o Only one stage matches in arcade mode.
Instead of working your way through stages, a match is only one stage (the longest full match would only be two stages with three fighters anyway). Furthermore, a player two "challenge" is only one stage as well, as opposed to "taking over" the loser's stage position.

o Only four songs in the soundtrack (instead of twenty-two).
Although we've included each fighter's song, we've removed the menu-mode song and the graphics loading song in order to conserve space for the download.

o No QuickTime movies.
The commercial version has various movies that play on startup and as bonuses. They have been removed from the demo to conserve space for the download.

o All "secrets" disabled.

o Only low-resolution fighters.
This was probably a tough decision. Since "The Untouchable" uses full motion video, the average move set for each fighter is 20MB in high resolution. Including high resolution moves wasn't possible for a reasonably sized download.

o No animation effects.
Some messages that appear during gameplay won't be animated in order to conserve space for the download.

o No game option settings.
You can't change any options concerning gameplay.

o No installer or CD-ROM play.
Only the commercial version includes an installer and allows play directly off the CD-ROM.

Getting to start a new game is real easy. Once you select Arcade for example, you simply chose a character and you are ready to play. As this is a demo, it only allows you to select between 3 Characters. As the readme indicates, the full game will include 19 different characters with special move for each ones. This should keep you interest for quite sometime. Also nice will be the presence of secret moves in the full version.

Second look:

After you digest the fact that it is not 3DFX compatible and simply 2D, I am sure that the game will nevertheless give everyone a good impression. Powermedia did a great job by putting life-like characters rather than simple animation in the game .The characters are very realistic and the skins are based on actual human beings.As an example, unless of following the actual trend of putting girls with oversized breast in fighting games, the lady character in the demo looks more realistic (maybe somehow her legs are too short? ). The game is very responsive. On my G3 330 Mhz accelerated 7600, I saw speeds of 39 fps. The game also offers the opportunity to use Gamepads so it should facilitate the control. I also appreciated that there is a great variety of moves we can perform.

Screen Shots:


(Click of larger image [62K])

Conclusion

The computer controlled opponents are really tough and it took me a while to win my first fight. Since the retail version will contain a lot of new features (high image quality mode), animation, more music and oponents, I can only predict good sales of The Untouchable. When the release version is available, I will be able to give you a more in depth coverage of the game. -Frank

 

Score : 80 %

Frank's recommendation: Buy

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