- complete with original sleeve and instructions.
Product Description
-------------------
Scientific advancements have put Earth on the brink of mental
warfare. Your job: to take down mechanical terrorist Dr.
Bilstein. To do that, though, you must fight your way through a
legion of agile warriors using your character's unique attack
moves, combos, and such dazzling weapons as plasma field, plasma
strike, and plasma reflect.
Plasma , sequel to Star Gladiator, is a surreal
weapons-based fighter that features 22 3-D rendered fighters
against colorfully illustrated backgrounds and fast
60-frame-per-second gameplay. You can choose to play in arcade,
versus, group battle, and training modes, the last of which shows
you each character's combo attack.
.com
----
Capcom has a reputation for making great fighting games, with
the Street Fighter series crowning its list. Plasma , yet
another fighter from Capcom and the sequel to Star Gladiator for
the PlayStation, gives players 22 characters, each with his or
her own plasma weapon ranging from s and s to rings and
oversized yo-yos.
The game is set in the future, with neo-cities, dead planets,
and outer space filling the backgrounds. The characters range
from cyborgs to lone smen, each with a slightly altered
double. Characters can use pent-up energy to perform
superpowerful plasma combos that are a visual treat.
For those familiar with fighting games, Plasma 's controls
should be a quick study, while those not familiar with fighting
games can switch to easy mode, which lets you perform special
moves with just one button.
Like other fighting games, this game centers on brawling, yet it
isn't as violent as Mortal Kombat or Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style. One
drawback of Plasma is that graphics are rendered in 2-D as
sed to more cutting-edge 3-D fighters like Namco's must-own
Soul Calibur. Still, for a game with slightly dated graphics,
it's a solid fighting game. --Robb Guido
Pros:
* 22 characters each with his or her own plasma weapon
* Special-effect enhanced plasma combos Cons:* Mainly for fans of
fighting games
* Not as complex as other Capcom fighters, for better and for
worse
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Review
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Capcom's first foray into the world of 3D fighting was a
futuristic weapon-based fighter called Star Gladiator. For its
time, Star Gladiator was a slick little PlayStation game - it was
never the best fighting game in your collection, but it was
interesting just the same. Star Gladiator 2 (the title will be
changed to Plasma upon its release in the US) captures some
of the same aspects that made the original game interesting, but
a severe lack of technological upgrades and cookie-cutter
character design make this a tough game to recommend. Most of the
first game's characters have returned, including Hayato, June,
Gerelt, Gore, Blood, and Bilstein, the original game's boss. But
each character now has an alter ego of sorts, or, to put it
another way, Capcom doubled the character lineup in an extremely
cheap way by making almost all of the new characters clones of
existing ones. The standard fighting-game modes, including group
battle and training, have been included. Training mode shows you
each character's branching tree of combos. Graphically, Star
Gladiator doesn't look bad until you consider how much better
just about everything else on the Dreamcast looks. The characters
aren't very smooth looking, and the animation just seems jerky
and almost unfinished. The static 2D backgrounds really give the
game an almost ugly look, and the effects that surround most of
the special moves and counters are quite plain. The one nice
graphical effect is the lighting. The weapons, all made of some
wacky form of plasma, give off a nice glow, and this glow lights
the characters up pretty well. The gameplay has become a little
more Street Fightery: using back to block, and containing lots of
dragon punch-style moves. There are lots of little special
attacks, such as Saturn's Doll Bomb, which causes little Saturn
dolls to run at the sing player, exploding on contact.
There's also a reflect counter that lets you stun your nent
for a second or two so you can get in some quick damage. The game
is juggle-friendly, but the damage resulting from being juggled
is relatively low. Star Gladiator 2 isn't a bad game, but it's
not a very good game, either. The Dreamcast is capable of much
better graphics, but even if the game looked like Soul Calibur,
it still wouldn't be terribly exciting. You'd hope that Capcom
would try to put some work into the graphics before the game
ships in the States, but deep down, you know the company will
just translate it into English and put it on shelves. Save your
money and wait for the US release. --Jeff Gerstmann
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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