The Hall of Shame 08.06.08: Shaq-Fu

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 08.06.2008

I'd rather watch Kazaam again.

Shaquille O'Neal is one of the most well-known basketball players in history, and was getting very popular in the early 90's much like Micheal Jordan. Just like Micheal Jordan, Shaq used his popularity to branch out into other areas in order to make even more money. For example, he pursued a rap career that many people believe was a disaster, pretty much like Micheal Jordan in the MLB (and thank goodness the Looney Tunes convinced him to stick to basketball). Yet somehow of the five(?!) studio albums he created, one went platinum and two went gold. He also starred in the movie Kazaam as a rapping genie who helps a kid reunite with his family when he's not too busy trying to pursue his rap career, and it was considered one of the worst movies ever. Eventually Shaq would enter the world of video games with a licensed game based on him. That video game would be:

A: A basketball game, which would make perfect sense
B: A music game, which would likely suck
C: A platformer game based on Kazaam, which would definitely suck
D: A fighting game, which makes you wonder who are the adwizards that come up with this stuff.

Naturally in an industry where people are not hesitant to rush out the latest licensed piece of crap, despite the fact that doing that caused video games to go extinict in 1984, the answer is D. This is the infamous Shaq-Fu.


If Shaq can fight as well as he can free throw, he is seriously screwed.

So what exactly is the story of Shaq-Fu? It all starts with Shaq visiting Japan to compete in a charity tournament when some old guy says he's some mystical warrior and now he has to go rescue this kid that was kidnapped by an evil mummy for some reason. The old guy never explains why the kid was kidnapped or why he thinks Shaq is the "magic one." Maybe it's because it takes place in Japan and big black people seem to be extremely popular solely based on being big and black. It's either that or the dude has Alzheimer's. So Shaq gets transported into this mystical world where he has to fight several people and rescue the kid. What happens when he does? I'm not sure I'll get to the reason why and I'll explain that in a bit, but quite frankly I don't care.

Usually when I play a 2D fighting game I've never played before or just haven't played in a very long time, I'll just throw out random move combinations to see if I activate any specials. Of course this doesn't help me win but I pretty much expect that. Shaq-Fu, on the other hand, no matter how many times I play this game or perform the right moves, I'm always going to lose because the controls are THAT horrible.

First of all, with Shaq being the main character that you play as, I figured he would have the easiest special moves to pull off, but his specials are just outright horrible. His projectile attack requires you to press Forward, Back, Forward + Punch. It isn't done with a 2 second delay like Guile's Sonic Boom either. Why couldn't they just make it a quarter circle forward?! Down, Down-Forward, Forward + Punch is like the universal language of the projectile attack! Instead doing a QCF + Kick will unleash a flaming roundhouse kick that's nowhere as effective as the Hurricane Kick. Plus because the controls are so unresponsive, over half the time Shaq won't even perform the special moves you tell him to, so you're basically left to button mash while the opponent starts pulling off all these specials and projectiles on you like they were nothing. I hate it when CPU opponents do that. The game becomes too hard to play even when the opponent's difficulty is set on Easy.

Aside from the standard punches and kicks, you can jump, run, or taunt. Jumping is a pain in the ass because you barely have any control over your character while they're in flight, almost like they're trying to emulate Shaq throwing a free throw. The character's are able to run but that requires pressing the turbo button, and since the controls have a delayed response to them, this thing is utterly useless. Besides, when the CPU starts spamming projectiles, you don't want to run anyway. Then there's the taunt button which so far I've found serves no purpose other then to make you wide open for a beat down at the hands of the cheating CPU.

Now that we got the horrible controls out of the way, let's talk about the horrible graphics. You can barely make out the character's facial features because they all look so pixelated and outdated compared to similar 16-bit fighting games. Here's a series of screenshots of the games I took from various YouTube videos:

Ryu from Street Fighter 2, circa 1991


Liu-Kang from Mortal Kombat, circa 1993


Shaq from Shaq-Fu, circa 1994


Honestly, does he even look anything like Shaq? I mean the dude is over seven feet tall yet you can't really tell with that mess they call a sprite. I can barely make out the brown dot that's supposedly his face! Oh, and I got that screenshot from the Genesis version of the game, which you think for a console that bragged about blast-processing, it would a lot better then this. But I guess not even blast-processing can save crappy games from looking like crap. All the other characters look like crap as well.

Here are a couple minor annoyances I have with this game:

-The timer setting. Most fighting games back then let you set the time to 30, 60, 90 or 99, and infinite. Shaq-Fu decides to let you increment the time by every ten seconds, just in case you were bored of doing 120 second fights and want to do a 130 second fight instead. Holding the D-Pad doesn't make it go faster, hence this option is annoying.

-2 player glitch. I'm not sure if it was the emulator or not, but for some reason when I try to press start as Player 2 the game doesn't accept it, yet the game clearly shows it can have two players. In fact, with the tournament feature it can have up to 8 players, yet because of some kind of glitch it only actually allows for one player. I assume the game became self-aware and realized the pain it would cause, so the best it could do was to make sure that not more then one person would be horrified from playing it at the same time.

As you can see, it's no wonder Shaq-Fu is considered one of the worst video games of all time. In fact, this game is so bad that there is actually a website dedicating to finding any copy of this game and giving it the Atari ET treatment. There have been a lot of really horrible games over the years, but when your game is so bad that people are starting groups and making videos about wanting to commit genocide on it, you know you've really screwed up.

Here are some basketball players I would rather see in a fighting game:

Dr.J and Larry Bird. The two of them already faced each other on the courts, so why not settle the score with fisticuffs? I bet Dr.J has way better martial arts skills then Shaq, and Bird can use his LB Flyswatter as a weapon. The graphics could exactly like the Commodore 64 version of One on One and it would still look a lot better then Shaq-Fu.

Ron Artest. One cup of beer to the face and all of a sudden this dude starts a full-scale riot. How is that not grounds for a fighting game? Throw in all the other guys that got involved, some kind of super meter involving said beer, and there you go. Maybe that's stretching it a bit, but then again, Shaq-Fu was all about stretching.

Scottie Pippen. The main problem with his CD-i abortion Slam City (or as the rap song called it, the Slam Slam Slam City) was that there wasn't any slamming going down. Plus the characters looked and sounded so annoying that you'd rather punch them in the face rather then shoot some hoops, especially that ugly chick Juice. Seriously, one look at that face and it brings a whole new meaning to "I'd hit that."