Urban Champion

One of the earliest games on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, Urban Champion is a pitiful early attempt at bringing a one on one fighting game to the home console. While there was nothing particularly wrong with Urban Champion in 1984, fast forward another twenty- five years and this is just embarrassing.

Essentially the whole game consists of you and some random guy having a fight, if you knock him off the right hand side of the screen you progress to the next round where you get to fight the same guy again. This literally goes on forever. You can knock him down as many manholes as you like. He'll just keep on getting up again. And that in a nutshell is the problem with Urban Champion.

It's fun for a few minutes, if that, and then the sheer repetitiveness of it will drive you insane. The only interesting thing about it is that occasionally cop cars drive by. In the right circumstances they may arrest a fighter, but usually they just drive by as both fighters whistle innocently on the pavement.


Mercifully the controls are simple and responsive, you can move left or right with the D-pad. Your fighter can throw a heavy or light high punch or a low punch and also block low or high and errr ... that's it. That's your entire move set. For the whole game.

You start off with 200 stamina in each round and for the life of me I honestly can't figure out what the point of the stamina reading is, because even if you somehow manage to get it down to zero your fighter will still move around as normal. If your time limit runs out you will get arrested and lose a life, however it's very unlikely you'll ever run out of time unless you do it on purpose.

Urban Champion isn't totally without merit, it is kind of enjoyable for a few minutes just to see how far you can get without losing, but you won't want to play it more then a couple of times. If you get knocked off the left hand of the screen three times the game will mercifully end and let you get back on with your life.


Apart from dealing with your opponent, you'll also have to contend with residents helpfully dropping plants from upper story windows, which stuns you if they hit you, leaving your opponent the chance to land a free hit on you.

I can't really recommend this unless you're really, really, really interested in Nintendo's history. Beat-em-ups have thankfully come an awfully long way since the dark days of Urban Champion and I would go so far as to say that almost any fighting game made in the last 15 fifteen years is more enjoyable then this. Old doesn't always mean gold!

Oh and if you feel like sharing the misery with someone there's also a two-player mode! Good times!