Eight Man

When I first walked up to Eight Man in the arcade I honestly thought it was going to be a kick butt pool game ... but to my amazement Eight Man is actually a pretty fast and fun, though tried before, action game.

For some odd reason, a reason I either missed, or was to lazy to learn about, the city has been demolished. And there's only one man that can save the day ... while not true, since I'm sure a pack of wild lawyers could have done the trick with some civil servants ... and his name: 8 MAN! Why is his name 8 Man? As far as I can tell it's because he can pick up an eight ball (it's actually a ball with an eight on it ... not a drug) and become extremely reckless and powerful ... come to think of it, that ball might be a drug.

The graphics are a bit sub par for the Neo Geo, which is odd since it's not a first generation title. Eight Man does play better than it looks, though. The game goes by extremely fast. In fact, 8 Man reminds of me of a strange cross between Ninja Spirits on the TurboDuo and Sega's multi platform Shinobi series.

This is a bit short, though. Even though the levels are broken up into several sections (ranging from three sub sections to six), the game still only takes about thirty minutes to go through. The bosses are interesting, though nothing spectacular. They are just kind of there ... and you get the feeling that while the game goes on they ran out of bosses, so they recycled them. This, however, is not uncommon with these types of games.

Regardless, the game is a small title that was lost in a wash of fighting games. Perhaps not the game to buy the system for, but surely a game to take a look at.