It’s a tiny little detail, but this lack in timing a power shot does make mindless monkey spamming the top tactic of the sport. Instead, your character just loses movement speed, making that anticipation of a shot with an open arm feel empty and somewhat impractical. The ball will begin to speed up during a rally, but holding the paddle button down doesn’t seem to power up a shot like I would naturally expect it should.
The problem is, it just never seems to really deepen any further from there. The Ultra moves as a whole can tend to feel a bit unbalanced between certain characters, despite some effort made to distinguish their strengths and weaknesses. Take Yayuk for instance, setting up a duo of moving shields that reflect the ball back while closing in towards the opponent’s side, or Robin’s doppelganger that splits herself into two to become twice the threat.
The characters’ Ultra moves are used as an advantage to manipulate the ball in some way. There are a few mechanics in place to set up some basic strategies such as the Dragon Ball Z-style dash move to reach the ball faster, or hitting the ball at a certain angle for mind games and pot shots. Unsurprisingly though, Ultra Space Battle Brawl is very shallow in regards to overall depth and gameplay features. It’s an obvious, yet fun way of varying up the gameplay as you duke it out across rounds while throwing out all the complaints and excuses under the sun for losing. Other stages may be a matter of two smaller gems to protect or even an orb that has the same job as a gem but gets smaller every time it takes a hit. The Earth stage, for example, will house a tall gem that fills each side of the screen while accompanied with the row of chickens holding up the front line. In Versus mode, you have a selection of stages based on planets that change the way that the gems are positioned. It is simple, traditional fun that should easily please any casual guests looking for some friendly rivalry.
ULTRA SPACE BATTLE BRAWL FIGHTSTICK FULL
As crazy as it sounds, this leads to agonisingly tense matchups as each player has full freedom of the screen while desperately spamming that paddle button to open up cracks in each other’s gem. Every combatant has a paddle of some unconventional form to reflect their personality, followed by an Ultra move that works as a sort of comeback mechanic when some of the player’s chickens have been eradicated. Although in this case, each precious stone is protected by a flock of stupid chickens. The gems themselves contain a health bar located at the top of the screen like any usual 2D fighting game. The main aim of the game is to protect your gem from being smashed to pieces by the opposition.
10 combatants, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, must all work against each other to smack a ball about in space while orbiting various planets of the Solar System. The game doesn’t disappoint in regards to the addictive nature of its lineage. After all, its reliance on a tried and tested formula does span back literally generations of entertainment. So, with that said, it shouldn’t need too much tweaking in terms of providing that basic, yet addictive rivalry set up. Even Nintendo themselves crept into the gaming industry with their own versions of it in the form of the Color TV-Game 6 console. The simple competitive structure of bat and ball was so influential that many takes on the concept soon surfaced. Stripped down to its code, it is a modern incarnation of Magnavox Odyssey’s table tennis – a game released on the first home console ever built and providing heavy inspiration for Atari’s much more popular Pong. Ultra Space Battle Brawl is nothing new in terms of ideas and gameplay. The end result? Ultra Space Battle Brawl, apparently. One that sees three decades worth of arcade classics such as 1972’s Pong, 1984’s Warlords and a string of 90’s Capcom fighting classics collide. Now, instead of people carrying out this bond, imagine an intergalactic tournament bound in close association with a reality full of Burts from Sesame Street, setting out to compete against one another to improve upon their somewhat depressing livelihoods. Using organised sport, or games, to feed the chemical hunger that’s still hard-wired into each and every one of us. Humans, on the other hand, have only merely evolved from such primal necessities. Whether it be in the form of vegetation fighting its way closer to the sun, or animals in the wild proving dominance over food and mating rights for survival. The nature of competition spans way back to the beginning of time.
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