Limited move sets are my biggest pet peeve with this genre and the Punisher beats that handily. You can’t block attacks but you can roll in every direction and use the momentum to alter certain attacks. Body slams, knee bashes, even izuna drops are all at your command. The controls have been modified over the arcade version in some instances but they remain intuitive. In addition to the standard combos you have a variety of different grappling moves at your disposal. This entire port comes across as amateurish but the presentation is the least of its problems.Īs either Frank Castle or Nick Fury you have a large arsenal of moves, one of the largest for the genre at the time. Other enemies have been redesigned such as the stage two Guardroid boss but for the worse. Because of the limited color palette most enemy groups lack variety and are uniform in appearance which is lame. The sprites are smaller and are missing frames of animation as well. Considering Final Fight CD and Sonic 3 released the same year this is embarrassing. The replacements color choices are uniformly bad.
The overall color palette is incredibly dark and loses the vividness of its arcade counterpart. The backgrounds have been simplified to a comical degree. The graphics are heavily downgraded and it isn’t entirely the system’s fault. The Sega version is a shadow of that great game. With its huge move set and high production values the Punisher was one of the better brawlers on the market. The Punisher pulled from Marvel history with several cameos from a lot of his rogue’s gallery. The game’s graphics were stunning, with larger sprites than even Final Fight and spectacular animation. As such it has a lot in common with their other brawlers at the time like Warriors of Fate and Final Fight. The Punisher was originally released in the arcade in 1993 on Capcom’s CPS hardware. But the reality is that this is a mediocre version of a great arcade game. When a home port was announced for the Genesis I was ecstatic. It was also one of the few arcade games I managed to finish, a feat in itself. It might be because I am a lifelong comic book fan so seeing the Marvel characters combined with Capcom’s gorgeous art was a match made in heaven. Of the many beat em ups that graced the arcade the Punisher was one of my favorites.
THE PUNISHER GAMES SOFTWARE
Developer: Sculptured Software Publisher: Capcom Released: 1994 Genre: Beat ’em up Platform: Genesis