I picked up Shadow Warriors, also named Shadow: War of sucession, by Tribeca Digital Studios and TE Soft.
I've only had it for a day, so this isn't very detailed.
It's a Mortal-Kombat style digitial video character type fighting game, with play-area zooming, and MK-esque blood droplets. The CD box looks nice, matt black booklet with "Shadow" written in smoke, and "warriors" in small letters. Looks good. There are 8 characters, the last is a mystery one you cannot choose, until you defeat the other 7 I guess.
The characters include a jean-clad street thug, a dude with a sword, a raincoated guy with a shotgun, a martial-arts girl, etc.. At least two or so of the characters are Japanese I think, so this must be some joint venture with Japan? The manual is Japanese, but the talking and on-screen text is all english.
Unlike WOTW, all fighters are very much human, except they have various special un-human abilities, ie, fireballs, teleportation etc.
Usual thing: winner is first to two wins out of three rounds, 9 continues. The backgrounds are ok, but are like SFII, just horizontally scrolled strips, not very 3D and you can't move into or around in them. Actually worse, because they are not animated (so far).
Since jumping seems a big issue right now, I am pleased to report the jumping seems earth-like, well, earth-fighting-game-like anyway.
Slow loading time for each fight, characters look Ok, but not amazing (being just video of actors thats not surprising I guess). The edge of the characters has that awful chunkiness that the 3DO seems to have problems with when imposing on sprite on a background. Pixel interpolation must be off I guess, probably looked bad with it on. Enough animation frames to look OK.
Each character has a unique spoken insult at fight-start, but I could hear no other talking, just the usual grunts and battle noises. There is some kind of electronic applause track going in the background, maybe linked to the action, I am not sure. No visible audience anyway. Couldn't see any fatalities, but then I was getting trashed so maybe when I start to win things will get more interesting.
michel.buffa@cmu.edu