When Tradewest got their hands on the Drouble Dragon IP they were fully intent on turning it their own huge multimedia cash cow franchise. They made the cartoon, action figures, comics, the live action movie, the Battletoads crossover and this game. By the time Technos wrestled back the IP it was already too late, not only the IP had been ran through the mud and lost any relevance it had but they themselves were already struggling financially, putting out a few games on the Neo Geo before with what they had left before closing their doors for good.
And yet, somehow, the Kunio-Kun franchise overall is probably more popular today than it's ever been. In the west, at least, but I get the impression it's still doing quite well in Japan too.
Love that song. Game wasn't that bad either. Had some good tunes, and fatalities too and the combo system on the genesis once you got the hang of it was pretty good
Theory on the blood delay: The game checks to ensure any attack states or resulting projectiles are cleared before moving on to the routine to show the Round Winner. Makes sense, maybe you wanna make sure an errant projectile fired late isn't going to make for a draw/double KO, so you evaluate once all actions are complete. But perhaps the blood splatters are a "projectile" generated on successful hit, they just don't have any hurtbox or character interaction. Still, the game thinks there's projectiles on the screen until they expire.
the blood thing is very weird, and I'm guessing that ending the round before the blood dissipates caused some kind of fucky bug, like the blood staying on the screen in-between rounds until the next one, and they opted to just wait until the blood disappears instead of actually fixing the bug, likely due to time/monetary restraints
I was going to wager the blood counted as an "animation" and the game is set to wait until all animations (such as jumps and specials) end before calling the round.
@@Komaru.89 That's the most likely theory. If only the blood disappeared in a faster animation cell or the blood animation isn't tied to the round ending. Though the fact that even Bones has bleeding animations, show they didn't have too much foresight.
@@mysticmind4563 Yeah, I'm no programmer, but I'm familiar with how game design programming goes when you don't have an experienced game designer overseeing everything. I'd love if someone could dive into the code and give a definitive answer!
Or maybe the "Player 'x' wins" message is allocated to a particular sprite number that first gets used by a blood splatter, so the game waits for that sprite to be "empty" before it turns it into the win message. Bad programming, if so, but not out of the question.
I remember seeing the cartoon for the first time in the lobby of my Dentist's office when I was like 7. Even then I was like "There's a Double Dragon cartoon now? I'm too busy with the Street Fighter cartoon, Mortal Kombat Defenders of the Realm and the Earthworm Jim cartoon to pay attention to this show."
idk if i was just the exact right demographic at the right time, but i was around 8 or 9 during this time and i absolutely loved the double dragon cartoon and this game. hearing that awful dragon song sparked something deep within me just now and i almost started jumping on my couch and spin kicking around my living room.
Rage of the Dragons is amazing. Their redesigns of the twins and other characters was very well done. ROTD Jimmy Lee is probably my most favorite rendition of Jimmy yet, dude is so badass looking!
Probably due to a memory issue they had to eliminate 2 characters, and then in order to keep the third they would have had to remove Dominique as a sub boss, so to keep her as one they removed a third character and just added in programming to be able to control her.
Leland did have one major arcade hit with Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road. That machine was everywhere in arcades. They also published Ataxx (which was notable enough that other companies cloned the game) and Pig Out (which wasn't great but it's amusing enough that's it's worth playing a few times if you get the chance).
Suggestion for What Happened?!: WMAC Masters tv show. It was like live action fighting game with people dressed up like mortal kombat characters but very tame and totally scripted and choreographed fights using actual martial artists (some of them Olympic champions) who did a lot of choreography for tv and movie fight scenes!
@@brookswilliams5239 that's dope! i watched the show when it originally aired on saturday mornings (competing with all the cartoons) and i actually got into it, but it was cancelled after season 2 ended on a cliff hanger :( I must know what happened to the dragon star!!!
@@phoenixlich yeah I definitely watched a few episodes back in the day on Saturday mornings myself but don't remember much about the cliffhanger ending lol
As bad as the game and show was, I have fond memories of both in middle school in the 90s. Watching the show with my brother after school and sketching together. And playing the game at a cabinet at a local roller rink on school trips. Thanks for unlocking some good core memories Matt! 💜✨️
I'm going to be sad when this series comes to an end, but Matt could always do a follow-up series of "Greatest Fighting Game", which could be even harder than finding the worst fighting game.
I think you underestimate just how many poor quality fighting games came out in the 80s, 90s and even into the 00s. Not to mention messy ports of better games. Matt will be making these for years... and in that time there's always a chance indy devs will put out garbage to increase the lifespan of this series.
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley For fighting games, triple A hasn't really put out anything worthy of being in this series. Sure, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, DC vs Mortal Kombat and a few others were kind of lacklustre, but they're functioning games people would potentially choose to play over similar titles. Honestly, for how bad Capcom bungled SF5, I think I need it to be the absolute best fighting game of the past ten years or the absolute worst and a massive disaster, and nothing in between will satisfy me,
And right now he's basically only doing console games. If he ever managed to run out of those, there's an entire new world of pain in bad PC fighters. Prior to the 3D accelerated era when ports became more standardized, most of them were garbage. (As someone who was dumb enough to buy it, back in the day, I'd kind of love to see Matt suffer through "Metal & Lace: Battle of the Robo Babes." It was impressively awful.)
Another thing to point about this game is that most of the roster weren't even part of the cartoon and it's not like it lacked characters to choose from Lack of communication? Rush development? We may never know
Hmm... maybe the blood having to disappear is a result of it snapshotting the state of the character it spawns out of, so the blood sprites technically read as an "alive" opponent until they despawn, preventing the round from ending. Alternatively they ran into a weird bug where having blood sprites left over from the previous round at the start of a new round caused bugs and they just took the band-aid fix rather than fixing their code.
I doubt that the blood in a 16-bit fighting game would be anything more than sprites that spawn when characters get injured, but I do believe that those sprites could cause odd bugs in some situations since the amount of them on the screen can vary significantly, so I'm betting the second one.
The worst thing about the Jaguar version of DDV was actually missed out on, which is that not only are all three kicks mapped to the keypad, specifically 3, 6, & 9... but you can't remap them to anything other than 3, 6, & 9! So if you have the Pro Controller which added three more face buttons & two shoulder buttons (which map to 7, 8, 9, 4, & 6, respectively), you can't actually take advantage of it to turn DDV's Jag port into something at least remotely playable! Sure, you could use one of the extra face buttons & the R button, but that's cold comfort.
To add insult to injury, I heard that in some magazine, the original Double Dragon was originally going to have a Jaguar port too, but it was later cancelled and so, this was made to that console. Funnily enough is that there’s a prototype build of that version which was supposed to be like the Genesis and SNES versions of the game, as if it was going to have the “quest” mode and maybe the 3 missing characters (I haven’t seen a preview of it yet though).
I remember seeing this in GamePro magazine and thinking it looked pretty decent then a kid in my class got the game and returned it the next day. It wasn't until years later I found out that the magazine's reviewer never even played half of the games they had covered.
This just reminded me how much i loved the double dragon cartoon as a kid It was one of those shows before cable and syndication varied widely ,it was on TV Saturday mornings in my area, along with stuff like swat cats and street sharks.
Oh damn! One of my brothers had a toy of Billy from the Double Dragon cartoon! I never knew there was a cartoon, so I always thought it was weird that the toy looked so different from the game. This video actually solved that mystery for me
I didn't realize SNK made a legit Double Dragon Fighter. One stage even had stills from the movie on a background screen! It's not what I want in a Double Dragon game, but it's exactly what I'd want if I wanted an SNK Double Dragon... and looking at it I think I do want that!
As a child I was a big fan of the TV series. Double Dragon was one of my favorite childhood games, I spent several coins without being able to beat the first level and I had Atari and NES games. I really enjoyed trying to force myself to believe that the show wasn't sooooo bad. When in Club Nintendo magazine, I saw the ad for this game, I was very happy: I liked Street Fighters, Fatal Fury, World Heroes, and the Double Dragon TV series... what could go wrong??? Well, what you're saying is what went wrong. XD
Always love to see these videos pop up in the feed. They're both an interesting look back on lesser-known, terrible fighting games to learn from, but they're also usually really funny. _Point and laugh at the big stinky game_
Just wanted to mention that your covert grassroots campaign for Shaolin Monks has not gone unnoticed, and I bought a copy based on your frequent namedropping. Did not regret.
I liked the cartoon as a kid and didn't know about the arcade games, so I came at this from the opposite direction. The only thing I remember from renting this game is that Jawbreaker could eat and spit out opponents, which was pretty cool.
the battle toads/double dragon crossover definitely didn't need to happen, but it's definitely a good thing that it did, since it's one of the best battle toads games out there, even if the double dragon characters are completely out of place.
Used to have the action figures and everything for this show. It really wasn’t that bad. I got mad on the last day I had this rental in 6 grade because that’s when I realized there were “fatalities” but my rental came with no instructions and the internet wasn’t a household “thing” yet in 94/95 for me to look them up.
Yes; please do a "Worst Fighting Game Announcers" and "Best Fighting Game Announcers" video. One of my picks for "Best Fighting Game Announcer" is the one from Street Fighter Alpha 3. He gets every match hype. That guy is awesome.
I remember being into the cartoon as a kid but really loving the figures that came from the show. But after watching this video I was kinda surprised you didn't mention in the special moves area how the whirling flying body attacks that Billy and Jimmy do are an exact rip off of what Hanzo and Fuuma do in the World Heroes games. After seeing that move very quickly in this video, I was expecting SNK had something to do with this game but I guess not.
9:37 Speaking of that, one of the characters (Sickle) has a different death animation between the Genesis and SNES versions, in case if you are wondering.
I watched the show as a kid, but never played the game. I heard about it, however. What I don't understand was why only villains were used alongside Billy and Jimmy. They gained a number of allies during the show's run, and any of them could have been used to balance it out.
Talking about how this game was marketed as DDV despite not really being immediately related to the main series reminded me of Japan having a similar deal with Hokuto no Ken of all things where it had a number of game releases on the Famicom and Super Famicom with different numerical iterations, but most of them not really having to do anything with each other as far as I remember (a good handful of them just roughly adapted the manga/anime which makes it even weirder). With that said the 6th and 7th iterations just so happened to be fighting games and both were...also kind bad, 7 in particular I recall being literally unplayable.
As one of the six people who actually liked the cartoon, I was excited when I heard they were turning it into a fighting game..... then utterly disappointed when it turned out to be this. At least I was only out the cost of a rental.
FWIW - In faint defense of the Jaguar version, the Jaguar Pro Controller was a 6 button controller (you know, for all the awesome Jaguar fighting games) with the extra buttons mapped to the keypad 7, 8, and 9. That's why those buttons are used in the game. The controller had two shoulder buttons too, for... something. By the way, I nominate the Sega arcade game Holosseum. A weird and very unappealing fighting game.
I didn't think the Lynx port of Double Dragon was bad, I kinda like how they didn't scale the sprites down, felt more like Final Fight or a game with large sprites, and it was ComLynx compatible so I played it with a friend all the time (owning two copies). Also, MS Paint didn't have a blur/soften feature so the Jaguar game was definitely touched up in some software like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
The cartoon was even more hilarious. Whenever they screamed "the shadow falls!" then would fall in defeat, I'd agree that they didn't falsely advertise
I can't wait for the strategy turnbased jrpg Street Fighter 7. If you go-through all the dialogue options on your first play through, You unlock a new Chun Li costume on New Game +
I swear, after seeing Criticom, I have a different perspective on many of the games I played in the past. Also, I got this game from the rental store when I was younger and was extremely disappointed since I could only play games on the weekend.
I’d be curious to see an episode on Justice League Task Force (1995), an early Sunsoft/Blizzard (!) fighting game that was raked across the coals when it came out.
I don't remember it being exactly terrible, but in those days fighting game options were extremely rare. You'd finished Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, World Heroes etc - and some of the more obscure games in the genre were just not easy to find in game rental stores, others were arcade only, so you ended up giving every game a chance. I do remember finishing this one, but I'd just call it bland at best. I tried to enjoy it, but it was only there to fill the hole that those other games left once you'd finished them. It was very different gaming in the nineties. You just didn't have every game at your fingertips, like today where people have thousands of untouched games in their libraries.
Thanks Matt! I love this series. I remember I had some alien fighting game on the 32X as a kid. It was pretty interesting, you could wear different armor on different parts of your body. It wasn't very fun though.
Cosmic Carnage would probably end up in the "close, but not quite" area of the tier list. It's pretty bad. But not, y'know... Mortal Kombat Advance or Criticom.
I remember being pretty interested in 5 since I really liked Super Double Dragon, but when I learned it was a tournament fighter I forgot about it. Still I assumed it was probably a decent game, comparable to Turtles Tournament Fighter, I would have never guessed it was much more comparable to Street Fighter The Movie The Game.
I am old enough to remember the cartoon, so maybe people my my age might still remember it. The game itself I kind of liked. My brother bought this game and since we were fighting game fans, we bought almost any fighting game that came out. I was a Blade main, so I would’ve been screwed with that other version, but we had SNES version which was cool. I’m trying to remember the music, but I can’t. I do remember liking it. For whatever reason, I don’t remember the fatalities in this. Totally forgot it had them. Cool video. Brings back memories.
I remember playing this game emulated, it was most likely the Sega version because I don't remember seeing blood. Seeing Jawbreaker and Bones is what resurge that memory.
My thought process when seeing the title of this vid is as follows: "How can a Double Dragon game be in the running for *Worst* Fighting Game?" "Wait, how is Double Dragon a fighting game, anyway?" "What'd you mean this is the *fifth* game in this series!?" Anyway, thanks for the vids as always!
Fun fact in the pilot Jimmy was set up as the main villain of the show only for this to be completely thrown out in the second episode. The show was terrible but a Bimmy vs Jimmy rivalry would have been more interesting than the bloody Shadow Master.
Shadow Khan was even worse. They hyped this guy to be some major threat when in reality he was a pennystore knockoff of The Scarecrow with an even lamer weakness: Cats and Dogs. Not mystical versions, just simple cats and dogs.
I'd push the Amiga's "Capital Punishment" into the suggestion box. That game came out in '96 and had no real excuse to be what it was by then. On pretty much any count.
Play Cyber Gladiators. If the weird scream effects and bedlam of flying objects in each arena don't aggravate you, the input lag from the keyboard constantly getting you beaten will. That is, if you don't jump off the edge while dodging the enemy attacks AND those flying objects first.
STILL waiting for Shadow: War of Succession, Dangerous Streets, and Iron And Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft. I'm certain one of those HAVE to top Criticom.
Oh man, I almost forgot this game existed. I randomly had a strategy guide for it as a kid, but never actually owned the game. Had no idea there was a Double Dragon cartoon until now...
I was obsessed with all things Double Dragon as a kid. I watched the cartoon, played the crappy fighting game, and had the toys! I tried going back and watching the show last year...it's so bad. Here's something random! Issue 67 of VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine (Aug 94) gave the SNES version of this game the same score as Fatal Fury 2 on Genesis.
I find Matt's reaction as somebody with no connection to the cartoon interesting. Me, I loved it. It was like my NES games plus they had swords and could transform like Power Rangers. This was obviously a revolution in entertainment. It got to the point I asked for this for Christmas instead of Mortal Kombat II, a mistake that still haunts me to this day. God, it was just so bad.
The way I see it, Double Dragon TAS is sorta meh. Sure, it's not like the original Arcade game and yeah, I didn't grow up with these games but it did follow the NES version of DD1 so it was somewhat faithful, it had a great theme and the morphing stuff was silly but it works at times and I kinda wish Battletoads had a good pilot just so those two shows would crossover. LOL
Love this series! Have you looked at Cosmic Carnage for the 32x. I got caught shoplifting that game when i was 13, and the embarrassment of being caught by the cops pales in comparison to the embarrassment that i got caught with THAT game. It's so awful.
I dunno if you ever got it but I think Dino Rex could be a contender. It never got released out of Japan but from what I've seen and heard from some people who've played it is mighty dire.
Very enjoyable video as always!, really I didn't know this game existed. But I have to admit that I was super confused with the title because Double Dragon 5?, but there was a fourth game that was released some years ago on modern consoles, for a moment I thought that I was in a time paradox, lol!. Also for the 10:14 question: Not going to lie but I actually liked that weird announcer mechanic, either if is a glitch or was intentional, it feels like if the announcer is so uninterested in his job and has a "whatever" attitude, it would be nice to see something like that in modern fighting games.
Discotek released the cartoon it was based on a few months back, and even they pretty much treated the show as a giant joke, something to have on hand for riffing with friends and to remember it exists, not because it was any good. 2:45 - Also because Double Dragon’s plot at its core is just Fist of the North Star with less exploding heads.
The Neo Geo one is pretty solid and has some pretty cool presentation if you wanna check that out. It was also actually made by Technos, and has characters from the games.
I wonder if they were required to make an exclusive fighter for the other console version, but didnt have enough time to retexture the other three characters.
I was one of the 5 people that loved the double dragon TV show and was so excited for the terrible movie. I loved teenage mutant ninja turtles and street sharks as well. Pirates of dark water as well. Something about cartoons of early 90's like xmen, Superman, and batman shows. Gargoyles and spiderman as well. Cartoons were so much better back then.
Blood Delay: I don't think the game waits for the blood to disappear before showing the screen. The blood clears during state transitions. When the character's health hits zero, a state change occurs: dying > dead. During the "dying" phase, time slows down, so the blood remains visible until the state shifts to "dead" and the k.o. text appears.
Why's the blood have to clear before a round can end? Could be anything from an oversight to they couldn't get it to clear when the round ended or faded out, or even that if the blood was on screen and it went to round two, it would stay there, eating up VRAM. As other comments have mentioned, this was probably the easiest solution to get the blood to clear out.
Wow, finally a Worst Fighting Game contender I've actually played! Though this is probably one of the most played games featured on the show just because it was sold as a sequel to a successful franchise that everyone knew about (instead of a spin-off of the cartoon loosely based on the license). I did rent this one back during the day, and I actually was familiar with the cartoon, having seen maybe six or eight episodes on Saturday mornings while waiting for the shows I actually cared about to come on. Maybe it's because I was technically more familiar with that show than with the original games that this one didn't slap me so hard in the face. I had a fair amount of fun with it, not really having any understanding of what made a fighting game "good" at the time, and as a kid who could never pull of the Fatalities in the MK games, I felt super accomplished having figured out the whole "overkill" mechanic completely on my own. So yeah, Fairly Stinky is probably a fair ranking for it. Not good, but not offensively bad. Definitely could've done with more time in the oven, but that's pretty much every licensed game ever made, so Leland aren't alone in that particular sin.
I played this game back in the 90's after watching the cartoon. Which I will admit it was way better for me watching the cartoon than playing this game.
10:31 my theory as you asked is that the the testers noticed that people like talking to eachother after fights. So to save on code spacing and make it look like a feature they decideded "Hey lets give people 4 seconds thats enough for anyone to go back and forth. " Oh and in Single player this will give people the chance to actually go over moves and stuff i heard people sometimes check moves in between fights. Also its got that slow mo 90s martial art death sorta thing so people will dig it right... Me at that time playing solo : Did the game freeze?
![Double Dragon Gaiden - Rise of the Dragons [Bumbles McFumbles]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/u1VjT1nQq-4/mqdefault.jpg)
![[FREE] Jersey Club Type Beat "Baddest" 2024](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/sqVaZ0y1TS0/mqdefault.jpg)
When Tradewest got their hands on the Drouble Dragon IP they were fully intent on turning it their own huge multimedia cash cow franchise. They made the cartoon, action figures, comics, the live action movie, the Battletoads crossover and this game. By the time Technos wrestled back the IP it was already too late, not only the IP had been ran through the mud and lost any relevance it had but they themselves were already struggling financially, putting out a few games on the Neo Geo before with what they had left before closing their doors for good.
@@franciscor390 I mean, it’s not like Star Wars and Marvel weren’t ALREADY multimedia cash cow franchises before Disney got them
And yet, somehow, the Kunio-Kun franchise overall is probably more popular today than it's ever been. In the west, at least, but I get the impression it's still doing quite well in Japan too.
The battletoads crossover is the best game of the bunch anyway.
The Kunio-Kun metaseries (which includes Double Dragon ) was bought by Ark System Works while Tradewest died in obscurity.
Worst part for Technos was the movie was a flop and they didn't get a cent from it.
"To be a Dragon, you've gotta be strong! Humble, never braggin'."
Words to live by in 2023
"Always fight for right, battlin' wrong. With the power of the dragon."
More words to live by
Love that song. Game wasn't that bad either. Had some good tunes, and fatalities too and the combo system on the genesis once you got the hang of it was pretty good
"The Code of the Dragon is never battle if you can avoid it!"
(immediately gets into a tournament with a dominatrix and a skeleton with shades)
this comment made me laugh far more than it should have.
Ahhh, Tuesdays
Theory on the blood delay: The game checks to ensure any attack states or resulting projectiles are cleared before moving on to the routine to show the Round Winner. Makes sense, maybe you wanna make sure an errant projectile fired late isn't going to make for a draw/double KO, so you evaluate once all actions are complete. But perhaps the blood splatters are a "projectile" generated on successful hit, they just don't have any hurtbox or character interaction. Still, the game thinks there's projectiles on the screen until they expire.
the blood thing is very weird, and I'm guessing that ending the round before the blood dissipates caused some kind of fucky bug, like the blood staying on the screen in-between rounds until the next one, and they opted to just wait until the blood disappears instead of actually fixing the bug, likely due to time/monetary restraints
need somebody who's good at editing memory addresses to get the round to end with blood still on screen and see what happens
I was going to wager the blood counted as an "animation" and the game is set to wait until all animations (such as jumps and specials) end before calling the round.
@@Komaru.89 That's the most likely theory. If only the blood disappeared in a faster animation cell or the blood animation isn't tied to the round ending. Though the fact that even Bones has bleeding animations, show they didn't have too much foresight.
@@mysticmind4563 Yeah, I'm no programmer, but I'm familiar with how game design programming goes when you don't have an experienced game designer overseeing everything. I'd love if someone could dive into the code and give a definitive answer!
Or maybe the "Player 'x' wins" message is allocated to a particular sprite number that first gets used by a blood splatter, so the game waits for that sprite to be "empty" before it turns it into the win message. Bad programming, if so, but not out of the question.
Billy? What kind of name is Billy? Everybody know that the true name is Bimmy.
The janitor has to mop up the blood first before the round can be declared over
I think he's also the announcer, which explains his voice too. "Hurry up and fight so I can clean the arena and go home."
I remember seeing the cartoon for the first time in the lobby of my Dentist's office when I was like 7. Even then I was like "There's a Double Dragon cartoon now? I'm too busy with the Street Fighter cartoon, Mortal Kombat Defenders of the Realm and the Earthworm Jim cartoon to pay attention to this show."
Double Dragon? Who cares?! It's KOMBAT TIME!!!!!
idk if i was just the exact right demographic at the right time, but i was around 8 or 9 during this time and i absolutely loved the double dragon cartoon and this game. hearing that awful dragon song sparked something deep within me just now and i almost started jumping on my couch and spin kicking around my living room.
The neo geo Double Dragon and Rage of the Dragon are the prime example that a good Double Dragon fighting game could be done.
Exactly
ROTD is criminally overlooked, imo.
Rage of the Dragons is amazing. Their redesigns of the twins and other characters was very well done. ROTD Jimmy Lee is probably my most favorite rendition of Jimmy yet, dude is so badass looking!
@@Kenoji8 Love that game combo system. Kinda like how Kizuna Encounter works.
When I discovered that people in US didn´t liked the first neo geo DD game, I was perplexed.
7:45 Oh come now Matt. Not every fighting game announcer can aspire to the godlike level of "BEET CHEW UP".
Probably due to a memory issue they had to eliminate 2 characters, and then in order to keep the third they would have had to remove Dominique as a sub boss, so to keep her as one they removed a third character and just added in programming to be able to control her.
I gotta say the original double dragon theme is one of the single best pieces of video game music in history. That is all.
No joke, when I heard the theme in River City Ransom for the first time I got chills.
The first two Double Dragons both have awesome soundtracks.
TRUTH. That whole NES soundtrack is phenomenal and catchy!
It's one of the game's only redeeming features.
That solo is perfect
Leland did have one major arcade hit with Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road. That machine was everywhere in arcades.
They also published Ataxx (which was notable enough that other companies cloned the game) and Pig Out (which wasn't great but it's amusing enough that's it's worth playing a few times if you get the chance).
Suggestion for What Happened?!: WMAC Masters tv show. It was like live action fighting game with people dressed up like mortal kombat characters but very tame and totally scripted and choreographed fights using actual martial artists (some of them Olympic champions) who did a lot of choreography for tv and movie fight scenes!
As a matter of fact someone from the Mortal Kombat movie was in that show...(the guy who Liu Kang fought on the beach)
@@brookswilliams5239 that's dope! i watched the show when it originally aired on saturday mornings (competing with all the cartoons) and i actually got into it, but it was cancelled after season 2 ended on a cliff hanger :( I must know what happened to the dragon star!!!
@@phoenixlich yeah I definitely watched a few episodes back in the day on Saturday mornings myself but don't remember much about the cliffhanger ending lol
As bad as the game and show was, I have fond memories of both in middle school in the 90s. Watching the show with my brother after school and sketching together. And playing the game at a cabinet at a local roller rink on school trips. Thanks for unlocking some good core memories Matt! 💜✨️
There was absolutely no cabinet for this, so you might be thinking of the much better neo geo version.
@@MattMcMuscles thank you! 💜
@Matt McMuscles finally was able to find the right one. No idea why this one looked familiar? Maybe a regrettable past rental as a kid 😅
I'm going to be sad when this series comes to an end, but Matt could always do a follow-up series of "Greatest Fighting Game", which could be even harder than finding the worst fighting game.
I think you underestimate just how many poor quality fighting games came out in the 80s, 90s and even into the 00s. Not to mention messy ports of better games.
Matt will be making these for years... and in that time there's always a chance indy devs will put out garbage to increase the lifespan of this series.
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley For fighting games, triple A hasn't really put out anything worthy of being in this series. Sure, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, DC vs Mortal Kombat and a few others were kind of lacklustre, but they're functioning games people would potentially choose to play over similar titles.
Honestly, for how bad Capcom bungled SF5, I think I need it to be the absolute best fighting game of the past ten years or the absolute worst and a massive disaster, and nothing in between will satisfy me,
@@Joe90h ...or big name devs!
And right now he's basically only doing console games. If he ever managed to run out of those, there's an entire new world of pain in bad PC fighters. Prior to the 3D accelerated era when ports became more standardized, most of them were garbage.
(As someone who was dumb enough to buy it, back in the day, I'd kind of love to see Matt suffer through "Metal & Lace: Battle of the Robo Babes." It was impressively awful.)
@@jasonblalock4429 That game can't seriously be a thing. You HAVE to be making it up.
Another thing to point about this game is that most of the roster weren't even part of the cartoon and it's not like it lacked characters to choose from
Lack of communication? Rush development? We may never know
they simply didn't care and only wanted the money.
Hmm... maybe the blood having to disappear is a result of it snapshotting the state of the character it spawns out of, so the blood sprites technically read as an "alive" opponent until they despawn, preventing the round from ending.
Alternatively they ran into a weird bug where having blood sprites left over from the previous round at the start of a new round caused bugs and they just took the band-aid fix rather than fixing their code.
I doubt that the blood in a 16-bit fighting game would be anything more than sprites that spawn when characters get injured, but I do believe that those sprites could cause odd bugs in some situations since the amount of them on the screen can vary significantly, so I'm betting the second one.
2:33, you take that back right now, Battle Toads and Double Dragon is a childhood treasure and I won't stand for this slander.
I remember seeing "Dic" at the end of certain cartoons, and dying as a kid.
The worst thing about the Jaguar version of DDV was actually missed out on, which is that not only are all three kicks mapped to the keypad, specifically 3, 6, & 9... but you can't remap them to anything other than 3, 6, & 9! So if you have the Pro Controller which added three more face buttons & two shoulder buttons (which map to 7, 8, 9, 4, & 6, respectively), you can't actually take advantage of it to turn DDV's Jag port into something at least remotely playable! Sure, you could use one of the extra face buttons & the R button, but that's cold comfort.
To add insult to injury, I heard that in some magazine, the original Double Dragon was originally going to have a Jaguar port too, but it was later cancelled and so, this was made to that console. Funnily enough is that there’s a prototype build of that version which was supposed to be like the Genesis and SNES versions of the game, as if it was going to have the “quest” mode and maybe the 3 missing characters (I haven’t seen a preview of it yet though).
I remember seeing this in GamePro magazine and thinking it looked pretty decent then a kid in my class got the game and returned it the next day. It wasn't until years later I found out that the magazine's reviewer never even played half of the games they had covered.
This just reminded me how much i loved the double dragon cartoon as a kid
It was one of those shows before cable and syndication varied widely ,it was on TV Saturday mornings in my area, along with stuff like swat cats and street sharks.
Oh damn! One of my brothers had a toy of Billy from the Double Dragon cartoon! I never knew there was a cartoon, so I always thought it was weird that the toy looked so different from the game. This video actually solved that mystery for me
I didn't realize SNK made a legit Double Dragon Fighter. One stage even had stills from the movie on a background screen! It's not what I want in a Double Dragon game, but it's exactly what I'd want if I wanted an SNK Double Dragon... and looking at it I think I do want that!
As a child I was a big fan of the TV series. Double Dragon was one of my favorite childhood games, I spent several coins without being able to beat the first level and I had Atari and NES games. I really enjoyed trying to force myself to believe that the show wasn't sooooo bad.
When in Club Nintendo magazine, I saw the ad for this game, I was very happy: I liked Street Fighters, Fatal Fury, World Heroes, and the Double Dragon TV series... what could go wrong??? Well, what you're saying is what went wrong. XD
Always love to see these videos pop up in the feed.
They're both an interesting look back on lesser-known, terrible fighting games to learn from, but they're also usually really funny. _Point and laugh at the big stinky game_
Just wanted to mention that your covert grassroots campaign for Shaolin Monks has not gone unnoticed, and I bought a copy based on your frequent namedropping. Did not regret.
I liked the cartoon as a kid and didn't know about the arcade games, so I came at this from the opposite direction.
The only thing I remember from renting this game is that Jawbreaker could eat and spit out opponents, which was pretty cool.
Also Icepick could freeze opponent similar to Iceman from X-Men.
the battle toads/double dragon crossover definitely didn't need to happen, but it's definitely a good thing that it did, since it's one of the best battle toads games out there, even if the double dragon characters are completely out of place.
Used to have the action figures and everything for this show. It really wasn’t that bad. I got mad on the last day I had this rental in 6 grade because that’s when I realized there were “fatalities” but my rental came with no instructions and the internet wasn’t a household “thing” yet in 94/95 for me to look them up.
Yes; please do a "Worst Fighting Game Announcers" and "Best Fighting Game Announcers" video.
One of my picks for "Best Fighting Game Announcer" is the one from Street Fighter Alpha 3. He gets every match hype. That guy is awesome.
I remember being into the cartoon as a kid but really loving the figures that came from the show. But after watching this video I was kinda surprised you didn't mention in the special moves area how the whirling flying body attacks that Billy and Jimmy do are an exact rip off of what Hanzo and Fuuma do in the World Heroes games. After seeing that move very quickly in this video, I was expecting SNK had something to do with this game but I guess not.
It wasn't the only think they ripped from World Heroes, check out the "on fire" effect, it's basically a copy of the one in WH1, lol.
9:37 Speaking of that, one of the characters (Sickle) has a different death animation between the Genesis and SNES versions, in case if you are wondering.
I watched the show as a kid, but never played the game. I heard about it, however.
What I don't understand was why only villains were used alongside Billy and Jimmy. They gained a number of allies during the show's run, and any of them could have been used to balance it out.
Yeah, there were at least two other good guys they could have used. Marian and the break dancing fighting guy who wore green.
@@MattMcMuscles Turbine. Who I only know from that compilation vid of stupid/weird moments from this show.
I saw this cartoon. Being a very old person, their swords _confused me._ Great Stuff, as always!
Well, that theme song is gonna be stuck in my head for the rest of the day, thanks Matt.
Talking about how this game was marketed as DDV despite not really being immediately related to the main series reminded me of Japan having a similar deal with Hokuto no Ken of all things where it had a number of game releases on the Famicom and Super Famicom with different numerical iterations, but most of them not really having to do anything with each other as far as I remember (a good handful of them just roughly adapted the manga/anime which makes it even weirder). With that said the 6th and 7th iterations just so happened to be fighting games and both were...also kind bad, 7 in particular I recall being literally unplayable.
As one of the six people who actually liked the cartoon, I was excited when I heard they were turning it into a fighting game..... then utterly disappointed when it turned out to be this. At least I was only out the cost of a rental.
FWIW - In faint defense of the Jaguar version, the Jaguar Pro Controller was a 6 button controller (you know, for all the awesome Jaguar fighting games) with the extra buttons mapped to the keypad 7, 8, and 9. That's why those buttons are used in the game. The controller had two shoulder buttons too, for... something.
By the way, I nominate the Sega arcade game Holosseum. A weird and very unappealing fighting game.
My standards as a kid must've been pretty low. I rented this game so many times and loved it. Both the game and the cartoon
I didn't think the Lynx port of Double Dragon was bad, I kinda like how they didn't scale the sprites down, felt more like Final Fight or a game with large sprites, and it was ComLynx compatible so I played it with a friend all the time (owning two copies). Also, MS Paint didn't have a blur/soften feature so the Jaguar game was definitely touched up in some software like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
Cutting characters from the roster is something expected for a handheld port, not a "64-Bit" console.
Gonna keep asking for Heavy Nova until you comply.
The cartoon was even more hilarious. Whenever they screamed "the shadow falls!" then would fall in defeat, I'd agree that they didn't falsely advertise
I can't wait for the strategy turnbased jrpg Street Fighter 7. If you go-through all the dialogue options on your first play through, You unlock a new Chun Li costume on New Game +
I swear, after seeing Criticom, I have a different perspective on many of the games I played in the past. Also, I got this game from the rental store when I was younger and was extremely disappointed since I could only play games on the weekend.
Let's all remember the poor kid at the end of every episodes credits having to wake up with a giant dic logo out side his window.
The Double Dragon cartoon is a genuine guilty pleasure-one that has stuck with me for thirty years-and I will die on this hill!
It was just rereleased (and upscaled?) on Blu-ray by Discotek Media! Or is coming soon? Discotek announced it last year.
I’d be curious to see an episode on Justice League Task Force (1995), an early Sunsoft/Blizzard (!) fighting game that was raked across the coals when it came out.
The "V" stands for "Very Bad".
I don't remember it being exactly terrible, but in those days fighting game options were extremely rare. You'd finished Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, World Heroes etc - and some of the more obscure games in the genre were just not easy to find in game rental stores, others were arcade only, so you ended up giving every game a chance. I do remember finishing this one, but I'd just call it bland at best. I tried to enjoy it, but it was only there to fill the hole that those other games left once you'd finished them. It was very different gaming in the nineties. You just didn't have every game at your fingertips, like today where people have thousands of untouched games in their libraries.
Thanks Matt! I love this series. I remember I had some alien fighting game on the 32X as a kid. It was pretty interesting, you could wear different armor on different parts of your body. It wasn't very fun though.
Cosmic carnage?
@@doriandavies5140 that's it, thank you.
Cosmic Carnage would probably end up in the "close, but not quite" area of the tier list. It's pretty bad. But not, y'know... Mortal Kombat Advance or Criticom.
I remember paying $4 clearance price for Cosmic Carnage. Then I knew why…
Battletoads double dragon most certainly needed to happen
I remember being pretty interested in 5 since I really liked Super Double Dragon, but when I learned it was a tournament fighter I forgot about it. Still I assumed it was probably a decent game, comparable to Turtles Tournament Fighter, I would have never guessed it was much more comparable to Street Fighter The Movie The Game.
Double Dragon V shadow falls over the valley of the shadow of death.
I am old enough to remember the cartoon, so maybe people my my age might still remember it.
The game itself I kind of liked. My brother bought this game and since we were fighting game fans, we bought almost any fighting game that came out. I was a Blade main, so I would’ve been screwed with that other version, but we had SNES version which was cool. I’m trying to remember the music, but I can’t. I do remember liking it. For whatever reason, I don’t remember the fatalities in this. Totally forgot it had them.
Cool video. Brings back memories.
I remember playing this game emulated, it was most likely the Sega version because I don't remember seeing blood. Seeing Jawbreaker and Bones is what resurge that memory.
I absolutely remember the Double Dragon cartoon and even watched a few episodes, but I had no idea this game existed until now.
And here I'm the opposite growing up only having watched the cartoon till I played Double Dragon Neon.
Blasphemy! Battletoads Double Dragon absolutely had to happen!
My thought process when seeing the title of this vid is as follows:
"How can a Double Dragon game be in the running for *Worst* Fighting Game?"
"Wait, how is Double Dragon a fighting game, anyway?"
"What'd you mean this is the *fifth* game in this series!?"
Anyway, thanks for the vids as always!
you can't go to the gym expecting to lift less than 330lbs in the bench without the intro theme of the cartoon
Fun fact in the pilot Jimmy was set up as the main villain of the show only for this to be completely thrown out in the second episode. The show was terrible but a Bimmy vs Jimmy rivalry would have been more interesting than the bloody Shadow Master.
Shadow Khan was even worse. They hyped this guy to be some major threat when in reality he was a pennystore knockoff of The Scarecrow with an even lamer weakness: Cats and Dogs. Not mystical versions, just simple cats and dogs.
*Jammy
I've been waiting to get my Dragons doubled
@@somerandolad 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...
...wait, there was no Double Dragon 64... :,3
I'd push the Amiga's "Capital Punishment" into the suggestion box. That game came out in '96 and had no real excuse to be what it was by then. On pretty much any count.
I loved the show growing up, and the intro was fire 🔥 👌
Yeah, I remember enjoying it, too. Street Sharks and Biker Mice were awful (as an aside)
Play Cyber Gladiators. If the weird scream effects and bedlam of flying objects in each arena don't aggravate you, the input lag from the keyboard constantly getting you beaten will. That is, if you don't jump off the edge while dodging the enemy attacks AND those flying objects first.
I watched the tv show
One thing that stood out was the dragon masks, which I always felt looked more like fish masks
STILL waiting for Shadow: War of Succession, Dangerous Streets, and Iron And Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft. I'm certain one of those HAVE to top Criticom.
7:51 I’ll watch it,I’m actually intrigued Matt.
What were they thinking?
Oh man, I almost forgot this game existed. I randomly had a strategy guide for it as a kid, but never actually owned the game.
Had no idea there was a Double Dragon cartoon until now...
I know they arent bad games, but I really want you to look into the Gundam Battle Assault series
I was obsessed with all things Double Dragon as a kid. I watched the cartoon, played the crappy fighting game, and had the toys! I tried going back and watching the show last year...it's so bad.
Here's something random! Issue 67 of VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine (Aug 94) gave the SNES version of this game the same score as Fatal Fury 2 on Genesis.
This explains why you have this one so fresh in your mind in the lastest Triple KO hahaha. Cheers
15:02
Ah, Jonathan Joestar. Glad to see you here
Double Dragon wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon, FYI. It aired on Sundays in syndication.
The sad part was I remember playing all the double dragon fighting games, and I still have a lot of them
I find Matt's reaction as somebody with no connection to the cartoon interesting. Me, I loved it. It was like my NES games plus they had swords and could transform like Power Rangers. This was obviously a revolution in entertainment. It got to the point I asked for this for Christmas instead of Mortal Kombat II, a mistake that still haunts me to this day. God, it was just so bad.
The way I see it, Double Dragon TAS is sorta meh. Sure, it's not like the original Arcade game and yeah, I didn't grow up with these games but it did follow the NES version of DD1 so it was somewhat faithful, it had a great theme and the morphing stuff was silly but it works at times and I kinda wish Battletoads had a good pilot just so those two shows would crossover. LOL
Love this series! Have you looked at Cosmic Carnage for the 32x. I got caught shoplifting that game when i was 13, and the embarrassment of being caught by the cops pales in comparison to the embarrassment that i got caught with THAT game. It's so awful.
I've found You recently and, to be honest, I LOVE Your work. Keep it up! Good job! :)
I remember my friend had this on super Nintendo with no blood and when I rented it on Sega I was like WHAAAAA.
I dunno if you ever got it but I think Dino Rex could be a contender. It never got released out of Japan but from what I've seen and heard from some people who've played it is mighty dire.
No, its awesome
Very enjoyable video as always!, really I didn't know this game existed.
But I have to admit that I was super confused with the title because Double Dragon 5?, but there was a fourth game that was released some years ago on modern consoles, for a moment I thought that I was in a time paradox, lol!.
Also for the 10:14 question:
Not going to lie but I actually liked that weird announcer mechanic, either if is a glitch or was intentional, it feels like if the announcer is so uninterested in his job and has a "whatever" attitude, it would be nice to see something like that in modern fighting games.
I'm thinking they went with 5 because they were counting Super Double Dragon on the SNES as "Double Dragon 4" at the time.
I think Tongue of the Fatman or Xenophage probably have the best chances at unseating Criticom.
At least it's not as bad as the 90s Double Dragon movie.
The blood has to leave the screen cause those few seconds are a chance for the blood to fight back. C'mon blood step it up!
Discotek released the cartoon it was based on a few months back, and even they pretty much treated the show as a giant joke, something to have on hand for riffing with friends and to remember it exists, not because it was any good.
2:45 - Also because Double Dragon’s plot at its core is just Fist of the North Star with less exploding heads.
The sad thing is a Double Dragon fighting game sounded like a good idea on paper.
As for the results... They were anything but desirable.
At least Rage of the Dragons is fun despite not having Double Dragon license
Double Dragon on the Neo Geo is quite solid though, and that's also a fighting game.
There is a Neo Geo DD game that is a fighter that is pretty decent.
The Neo Geo one is pretty solid and has some pretty cool presentation if you wanna check that out. It was also actually made by Technos, and has characters from the games.
I wonder if they were required to make an exclusive fighter for the other console version, but didnt have enough time to retexture the other three characters.
I was one of the 5 people that loved the double dragon TV show and was so excited for the terrible movie. I loved teenage mutant ninja turtles and street sharks as well. Pirates of dark water as well. Something about cartoons of early 90's like xmen, Superman, and batman shows. Gargoyles and spiderman as well. Cartoons were so much better back then.
Street Sharks was pretty terrible, but I loved the action figure.
Blood Delay: I don't think the game waits for the blood to disappear before showing the screen. The blood clears during state transitions. When the character's health hits zero, a state change occurs: dying > dead. During the "dying" phase, time slows down, so the blood remains visible until the state shifts to "dead" and the k.o. text appears.
Why's the blood have to clear before a round can end? Could be anything from an oversight to they couldn't get it to clear when the round ended or faded out, or even that if the blood was on screen and it went to round two, it would stay there, eating up VRAM. As other comments have mentioned, this was probably the easiest solution to get the blood to clear out.
Wow, finally a Worst Fighting Game contender I've actually played! Though this is probably one of the most played games featured on the show just because it was sold as a sequel to a successful franchise that everyone knew about (instead of a spin-off of the cartoon loosely based on the license).
I did rent this one back during the day, and I actually was familiar with the cartoon, having seen maybe six or eight episodes on Saturday mornings while waiting for the shows I actually cared about to come on. Maybe it's because I was technically more familiar with that show than with the original games that this one didn't slap me so hard in the face. I had a fair amount of fun with it, not really having any understanding of what made a fighting game "good" at the time, and as a kid who could never pull of the Fatalities in the MK games, I felt super accomplished having figured out the whole "overkill" mechanic completely on my own.
So yeah, Fairly Stinky is probably a fair ranking for it. Not good, but not offensively bad. Definitely could've done with more time in the oven, but that's pretty much every licensed game ever made, so Leland aren't alone in that particular sin.
The worst experience while doing my double dragon retrospective was this game
Double Dragon II "remake " on the 360 was another level of stinky crap.
I played this game back in the 90's after watching the cartoon. Which I will admit it was way better for me watching the cartoon than playing this game.
10:31 my theory as you asked is that the the testers noticed that people like talking to eachother after fights.
So to save on code spacing and make it look like a feature they decideded
"Hey lets give people 4 seconds thats enough for anyone to go back and forth. "
Oh and in Single player this will give people the chance to actually go over moves and stuff i heard people sometimes check moves in between fights.
Also its got that slow mo 90s martial art death sorta thing so people will dig it right...
Me at that time playing solo : Did the game freeze?
Definitely watched the Cartoon as a kid. It definitely fell under just entertaining enough not to turn off the TV.