Shaq Fu

So you all know who Shaquille O' Neal is right? Big tall basketball that used to player for the Lakers but now plays for the Miami Heat, you know him right? Ever thought what it would be like if he, for no reason at all, started fighting zombies, cat women, and other assorted mythical creatures? No? Neither did I, but apparently someone did as they made the horrid piece of trash that is Shaq Fu.

Now, to truly understand the horror that is this game take a look at the picture that is showcased on the cover box:



Any game that shows a picture of a popular basketball player trying to do some sort of Kung Fu pose is doomed to be a really bad game, and so this game is one of those games: a really bad one.

This game starts off as you, Shaquille O' Neal. You are the worlds greatest basketball player, you're tall, you look menacing, and to top it all off you somehow have learned to fight Kung Fu style in a matter of about 2 seconds.

Shaq frequently walks into pawn shops being run by Chinese philosophers, and it so happens that this particular one sends him to an alternate dimension which needs his help.

That's right the stars have predicted that a large man who is particularly skilled in the art of Basketball must save a totally different dimension from cat women, zombies, and arabian princes. Shaq accepts his quest to rid the other world of evil.



The gameplay in this game can only be described in one way and that's god-awful. Since it's a fighting game, there are simple controls but this game just takes it to the next level by making the controls as hard as they possibly could be. While they are simple in theory, the combos to do any kind of special move (Shaq has one where he throws a basketball on fire) require you do a crazy combination (i.e. hold down B and back at the same time, wait for the person to be approximately 3 feet from you, tap X twice then quickly hit Y soon after. If done successfully, you should crouch).

When you play a fighting game and press the Right arrow on the D-Pad (Directional Pad) and then let go of that arrow, you want your character to stop immediately right? Street Fighter did this well, Shaq Fu did not. If you press right, you will proceed to stumble across the arena even after letting go. This is cause the animation to walk right or left can't be stopped when you let go. So if you wanted to quickly move backwards cause you see a big dragon coming your way, too bad Shaq has to finish his motion before he can even think about moving backwards. This pissed me off greatly.

The characters in this game consist of Shaq and some other people. All I remember was there was a mummy guy, a cat woman, a crazy skeleton ghost dude, an arabian prince, some old man, and maybe a zombie/mummy/cat/prince hybrid. Very unoriginal characters, none of them stand out at all and one of them (The Mummy Guy) has a large advantage over the other characters. Why this is true is because he can hit you all the way from the other side of the arena by inserting his mummy wraps into the ground and they later reappear on the other side of the arena.



While I hated this game, I still seemed to play it a lot. I was really hell bent on trying to figure out how to throw a flaming basketball (My brother figured it out, that's how I know. Also the computer seems to know how to make Shaq do like somersaults and drop kick you in the face) at my opponents, but I never learned. I finally gave up after I realized that I was playing a game revolved around a guy who probably didn't even know what he was posing for when they took the box art photograph.

The game is awful and is a sin against all mankind, if you see this game somewhere (Most likely in a dumpster) I sincerely urge you to take it home, pour it in gasoline, light it on fire and throw it at one of your enemies. If the flames don't get him, the fact that Shaq Fu just smacked him in the face will brand him as yours.

This game gets NO stars.

0 star(s) out of 5

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