CHOOSE AN ENEMY
Original Release: Russian Soft, 1991, PC
Simplistic first-person street boxing that allows you to fight Dennis Leary among others
Choose An Enemy (PC, Russian Soft, 1991)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
This early '90s Russian title attempted to contribute to glasnost by way of cultural exchange, showing foreigners the world of gopniks and teaching us that though we may be different, our drunken tenement-dwelling trash is all pretty much the same.
As the label promises, you immediately get to choose your enemy from a lineup of four rowdy Slavs that are ready to rumble. The setup, illustrated with still digital pictures, is that these hooligans are putting hands on your girlfriend and no doubt aim to Blyat all over her unless you violently intervene.
The action is sort of a primitive Punch-Out (though Punch-Out came out years before this) ... you press each of the Shift keys to swing the corresponding fist at the foe, you press space to dodge their attacks. It's really not much of a system, though, as it lacks any sort of feedback. The enemies just sort of randomly dodge some of your punches, and there's no visual indication to tell if you're dodging at the right time other than the incoming punch doesn't hit you.
This being produced in the DOS days, there was also no way to foresee Windows and its obnoxious "Sticky Keys" prompt that STILL can't be disabled easily. Press Shift a few times to fight, at least while in an emulator like DOSBox, and here comes Windows cutting in screwing up your whole brawl.
Apparently this was actually supposed to just be a playable demo, a full version was promised that would allow one to paste any JPG face over the enemies. I don't know if they ever actually got to this, but I can't find any further mention of it. While the gameplay was pretty bad even for the early 90s, that kind of gimmick actually probably would have gone over big at that time, I mean it didn't take a whole lot technology-wise to impress us then if I'm being honest.
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