Keeping up with my endless quest to flood the site with obscure 3DO games, I give you Shadow: War of Succession. Quite possibly the biggest shit biscuit ever launched out of the 3DO’s ass. A fighting game that reaches the shittiest of shit depths, almost to the point where it becomes something more along the lines of sad comedic value. Like laughing at the cripple with the small arm trying to feed himself; you know you shouldn’t laugh at something so degrading, but goddamn it’s so hard not to.

Shadow is a fighting game at it’s core, and that’s about where any semblance that this is actually a playable game ends. The high production values should be readily apparent as soon as the game attempts to lurch on the screen, as the opening CG movie is so oppressively bad that you may have to reset the game just to confirm what you saw really was on par with something you could easily produce with a workstation from 1981. And even then, the opening movie would still have been considered a giant fart sandwich of epic proportions. You can see for yourself with the embedded movie below.

If you try to follow it through, you can sort of see that Shadow is about hobo gangsters or something. And they’re all pretty mad at each other I guess. I am going to imagine that all them hate each other, and would like to beat each other into submission via several rounds in some fighting tournament. The reward…I don’t even know. Perhaps being the successor to the Shadow corporation. I really can’t tell you, as I’m generally making this up on the fly. So if I’m correct at all on anything I’ve said about Shadow’s story so far, then you can chalk it up to some pretty lucky guessing, and general apathy.

The character select screen. No, I'm not kidding.

After you wake up five days later from the stroke the opening movie has given you, you can use your one good arm to move onto the game itself. A mismash of characters jump on screen for you to pick that simply have to be some sort of joke played upon the developers. Only no one seemed to catch onto the joke, and instead actually used them as the game’s characters. Your selection of random people you would easily find in the grocery store on the bad side of town asking for change is readily at your hands to wobble forth. Wobble forth with all the grace 10 frames of animation can provide anyway. And I don’t mean 10 frames of animation just for the walk. No. I mean the characters are lucky to be pushing 10 frames of animation TOTAL. I think I just lost the feeling from my hips down even trying to fathom that.

Once you wake up from your second stroke, you can attempt to use what little of your facial responses are left to actually make the character do something. Each character has a solid list of moves that basically boils down to one of the below actions:

• Jerk forward

• Jerk backward

• Crash the game

Some characters also have projectiles, but actually seeing one produced will make you realize your terrible, terrible mistake. Forever being content with making your character have seizures and crash the game instead.

BEHOLD, THE PEDO HAND PROJECTILE

If you can manage not to tear your eyes from your face with the bloody nubs that have become your hands, you’ll notice that Shadow: War of Succession actually expects you to play it. No words can describe the “fighting” that Shadow produces. To use the word gameplay to describe what Shadow is attempting to do would be like using some forbidden phrase that would bring forth a great Krakken that would devour the Earth and all within.  In short; the controls don’t work, the characters don’t work, and the game barely attempts to function. Though pressing start will in fact pause the game and not cause the 3DO to reset or catch fire, so that’s a plus I guess.

Does this look like anything you'd want to play? If you said yes for any other reason than to be ironic, then you should probably just lay down and die right now.

I realize by now that I haven’t offered up much actual info on Shadow, and have simply relegated this article to random hyperbole. It’s not that I didn’t try. After all, I wrote about 1000 decently informative words about Ballz. Shadow is simply so god awful that it’s hard not to devolve into senseless yelling. To put it in perspective, Shadow: War of Succession makes Rise of the Robots look like a finely polished fighting game. It is so bad, that it readily made me wonder if the game had even been finished. I still can’t give an answer to that.

So there you go. Shadow: War of Succession is more of a horrible crime than a game. Someone should suffer for this mistake. Just don’t let it be you if you see it sitting in a used game store.