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Guardians of the 'Hood (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

Published on Thu, Feb 13th 2020 Gaming Rectangular HD

A playthrough of Atari's 1992 arcade beat 'em up, Guardians of the 'Hood.

Played through on the machine's default difficulty setting.

After a good bit of success at the arcades with the release of Pit-Fighter, it seemed natural that Atari would capitalize on the game's popularity with a follow-up.

Pit-Fighter was an impressive game when it was released. The digitized sprites were completely novel for its time, the animation and scaling were surprisingly fluid (well, relative to expectations in 1990), and even though the gameplay was a bit on the rough side, the spectacle it provided drew a whole lot of quarters.

You can see my play of that one here: https://youtu.be/es4PIsvy_No

But by mid-1992, it felt more than a bit behind the times. Street Fighter II had been out for about a year already, and the first Mortal Kombat was just a few months away from release. To say that those two games raised gamers' expectations would be a massive understatement.

The creators of Guardians of the 'Hood, however, seemed to lack the foresight possessed by teams at Capcom and Midway, and did little to update the badly aging Pit-Fighter framework that their new game was based on.

The controls are barely functional, the hit detection is worthless, and the game makes a lot of desperate grabs for the coins in your pocket with unfair handicaps. The gameplay is a rough step down from Pit-Fighter, but nobody plays a game named "Guardians of the 'Hood" expecting AAA gameplay, right?

Guardians certainly has more variety and "flash" than its predecessor did, but the crude and jerky animation, grainy scaling effects, and the super-laggy controls beget the power of the hardware this was running on.

But so what? A lot like Troma movies, the visuals here are what makes it worth paying any attention to. They're ridiculous. Every character is a some farce of a stereotype, and it seems like the designers were laser-focused on making everything as tactless and as crass as humanly possible. It's a riot.

A few illustrative examples for your consideration:

-Feel like expressing disdain for the skinheads in the subway?
Introduce them to the flasher in the trenchcoat!

-Want to slap around a prostitute?
Go for it, but don't be surprised when she savagely retaliates with her purse!

-Don't want to deal with the rastafarian hanging out by the store?
Try throwing a sterno bum at him!

The gameplay is straight-up garbage water, but there is such an excess of tastelessness here that I couldn't help but enjoy it on some level. If you like your media to be politically correct, then this is clearly not a game for you.

Guardians of the 'Hood is a miserable excuse for a game, but it is prime viewing entertainment, and the soundtrack kicks ass...

...but did anyone else notice how the main theme blatantly rips off the music from the intro of Altered Destiny? That's awkward.

Just don't try to play it. Please.

If you want to see more like this, I'd recommend a look at the 90s PC game Expect No Mercy. It's another terrible-yet-entertaining fighting game with digitized graphics and FMV, and you can find my video it right here: https://youtu.be/de2_MmCG99M

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!