First off: I will get this out of the way real quick, I am a huge street fighter and SNK fan so if you have similar interest or have even played any fighting games from Capcom or SNK then were on the same page.

Story: To tell you the truth, do we need to know what the story is in a fighting game? It may set the mood a bit, kill everyone take there soul then kill the boss, soul collection sums it up. This game is in vein of the loved or hated Mortal Combat franchise. The characters are all of human form and digitized to look like real people.

Starting thing off: Like many of you I always look at the back of the box before I fire up the game to look at the screen shots as well as to read the description of the game. I put the kart in my jaguar and I was ready to kick some butt or get my butt kicked. The game starts out with showing you pretty much the same pic as what is on the box then shows you a nice looking mountain background with the story and credits scrolling. You can play Kasumi ether one or two players, since most of my gaming time is alone I’m usually playing the 1P story mode. The game starts you off in a 3-D doom like room where you have a choice of 2 fighters for starters; as you win the defeated are playable (does that make sense?).

Graphics Show: The graphics are very cool looking in Kasumi with tons of Parallax scrolling (2D layer and scroll to create the feeling of 3D) The backgrounds are very interesting and well drawn as well as the fighters. The fighters in the game are so good looking you might not want to see them move because it seems the animation is a bit off. The animation is not that bad but it was the first thing I noticed when I started playing Kasumi.

Controlling Forces: So far everything seems to line up, If you turned your jag on with this kart in it and let it play on demo you might sell this game as a pretty good fighting game. I made the mistake of picking up the controller, oh my…. When I mentioned above that the animation wasn’t to hot it started me thinking. The best way to describe Kasumi is to say that the controller is not in sync with what you’re seeing on the TV/ Monitor. This is the number one thing you want to avoid in a video game and it spoils what would other wise have been a nice MK clone. The game’s A.I. seems somewhat cheap; I can walk my way to the boss just by using foot sweeps. There is some humor though as punches and kicks produce copious amounts of blood that falls from your fighter onto the ground and stays there until the end of match (each fighter hold 50gallons).

Scores:

Graphics: 8 Very cool backgrounds, Nice parallax.. bad animation.

Fun Factor: 3 Better than clipping your toenails but not by much.

Sound: 4 Oh show no mercy. Some very bad sound effects and music.

Final thoughts: Unless you’re a hardcore collector that must own every single jaguar game or you like the humor the gore factor brings you may want to pass on this game.

-RayNET, RayNET@IX.NETCOM.COM