Turbo Played: A - Andre Panza Kickboxing

Developer: Futura

Release Date: 1991

Alias(s): The Kickboxing (Japan), Kickboxing with a No Name AssClown
Game Type: Fighting / Sports

Gung Ho from G.I. Joe...err Panza.

In order to truly understand Futuras Andre Panza's Kickboxing.. I mean REALLY understand it, we need to understand the man, the myth, and the legend presented in this games namesake, Andre Panza himself. We ask ourselves, just who is Andre Panza? After a quick google search.... I found absolutely nothing, well, aside from choice pictures like the one shown there to the left. Classy.

Faces only a mother could love

From the back of the game box:

"Forget the movies. Forget the make-believe. This is the master, 3-time World Kick Boxing Champion Andre Panza, and the reality will stun you!"

And to the three of you who actually follow kickboxing (or followed the "sport" in the 90s), that might mean something.. to the rest of us, it means absolutely zippo. Actually this game did stun me though, some of the art is actually quite good (not to mention the top notch rotoscoping of the various moves), but some of it is stunningly bad. Like W T F bad, just look at the mugs of some of the player characters you can choose to play as there to the right. Wow, looks like that artist was bored to death... or high.

Steely Flint... in the flesh.

Hug it out... HUG... IT... OUT!

After picking the seemingly only normal face out of the bunch I created my career boxer, Steely Flint. Flint wasn't exactly a force to be reckoned with at first, but after some training and a nice montage... who am I kidding, he still sucked after several training sessions in the game. Speaking of training, yes, you can level up / train your personal boxer throughout their career.. and... drumroll please...even save your boxer. Unfortunately, this training boils down to button mashing thus making it no fun at all in my humble opinion. Once you pick your opponent (which can be another player should you wish to subject friends to this horrid fighting experience), you're off to endure the slowest and most clumsy fight you've ever encountered in a game. The gameplay itself is slow, overly complicated, and far more confusing than it should be thanks to strange controls which boil down to holding button I or II and then pushing a direction on the D-Pad to punch, jump, and kick your way to vitory. To make things worse, sometimes it's possible to line up with your opponent as such that your kicks and punches don't even connect. Even more entertaining is the fact that if you get too close you and your opponent grapple one another in the heat of the moment... which may or may not be something that happens in the actual "sport" of kickboxing, hell if I know. Either way, it looks questionable and quite humorous.

Its time for a montage...

Not in the face! Its how I make my mula

Ted Small.. one way or another, you're going down my friend. GOING DOWN! So back to training (read: mashing buttons) I went. Again... and again... then one more time. Eventually my stats were high enough that I felt like I could actually knock Teds lights out, and I'm not kidding here. The health bar for each player is represented by the lights in the left and right sides of the screen respectively... so you actually knock the other players lights out to get a K.O. Very cute Futura. As stated earlier, the rotoscoping / animation on display here is actually pretty solid, and the graphics themselves are fairly vibrant. It's just a shame that the actual act of fighting is so slow and tedious. The sound, woah, is that ref actually talking? Yup! Digitized speech and some solid digitized sound design going on here too. Now that's actually pretty cool since most TG 16 games never added real sound.

Eventually Steely Flint proved victorious over Ted Small and was finally ranked. Too bad I just don't feel like going back into the fray to fight my way up to the man himself, Gung Ho... I mean, Andre Panza. Regardless, victory is mine! Well, some sort of victory anyway...