Weird Fighting Games That Nobody Played

Sausage Legend

The one game on this list that’s closest to getting our channel demonetised due to its phallic resemblance, Sausage Legend is a mobile fighting game that mixes floppy sausage physics with gacha mechanics to create a fighting game you’ll probably download, laugh at for about 5-10 minutes and then delete in fear of any potential malware. Not to be confused with Genital Jousting, which is fighting with a different kind of sausage, Sausage Legend sees players fighting each other with sausages plonked on the end of a fork, with the goal being to smash the other person’s sausage to smithereens. It’s like conkers but with pig meat, which is probably the grossest way to describe this game.

Because this is a mobile gacha game, players can unlock new kinds of sausage of varying rarity, including a fair few non-sausage options too. Some of the weirder selections include bacon, pepperoni pizza, a “small sausage wrapped in a larger sausage” and a tornado potato. It’s a potato that’s been spiral cut, if you’re wondering. Like some of the other games on this list, Sausage Legend isn’t the most technically proficient or even the most fun fighting game ever made, and the fact that it’s a mobile gacha game means there’s adverts and aggressive monetisation tactics loaded up the arse, but it definitely fits the criteria of weirdest fighting games ever made.

 

Lethal League Blaze

Lethal League Blaze is unmistakably a fighting game, but it’s also unmistakably a weird 2D cross of dodgeball and squash and somehow that unholy pairing combines to create one of the most exciting yet still weird fighting games out there. The gist of Lethal League is that up to four players are plonked into a rectangular arena with a ball. Each player uses some kind of weapon or attack to hit the ball, and the more that players hit the ball, the faster it goes, until the ball is breaking the sound barrier and becomes a deadly threat to anyone caught in its trajectory.

Despite the ludicrous speeds though, hitting a return ball isn’t impossible, and every stage of an intense rally leads to a steadily escalating amount of hype that’s almost incomparable. That’s just a basic level description of Lethal League too, as you’ve got moves like a bunt to control the speed of the ball to your favour, while each character also boasts their own special moves and traits that give them an edge over the competition. Even if you can’t find the players to square off against, Lethal League Blaze even has a story mode to sink your teeth into. LLB is weird, unique, and awesome all at once.

 

Shrek Superslam

Making a licensed fighting game out of the Shrek series of films probably isn’t the weirdest starting concept ever conceived. The films have a decent enough action focus, while the comedy elements and diverse cast of characters inspired by classic children’s tales lends the series well to party brawlers in a similar vein to Super Smash Bros. With that in mind, Shrek Superslam isn’t that weird, but the weirdness comes from the fact that this game is actually decent. Hell, decent is undercutting this bad boy: Shrek Superslam is arguably among the best fighting games on the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. We’re not joking, and we will not be taking questions at this time.

A brawler for up to four players in a similar vein to Power Stone 2, players pick one of several iconic Shrek characters and do battle in interactive, isometric arenas. In order to win, instead of KO’ing your opponent, you need to use your super moves to hit your opponent, which will pinball the enemy into the environment to cause some pretty impressive destruction. Basically, the scoring and gameplay is like PlayStation All-Stars but good, and what’s even more baffling is that Shrek Superslam, which could easily be considered a throwaway meme game, ended up with a thriving competitive scene.

 

Toribash

Odds are, if you’ve been on the internet or just YouTube for long enough, you’ll have caught at least a passing mention of Toribash somewhere. A free-to-play fighting game that’s been around since 2006, yet still maintains a semi-regular community of players, Toribash is a physics-based fighting game that gives players total control of their character. That’s not an exaggeration either, as Toribash allows players to mess with around twenty different articulation points across the character’s body, turning what could have been a simple but fun physics brawler like Gang Beasts into one of the most complex yet satisfying to learn games ever made.

Fights in Toribash go by set frame intervals, with players able to tweak different parts of the body after every set of frames to try and perform certain moves, while also trying to counter whatever your opponent is aiming to do. If you’re an inexperienced player, most matches boil down to someone forgetting to engage their leg muscles properly, leading to their character flopping on the floor, but those who have sunk the time into Toribash can turn their avatar into what feels like motion captured martial arts. Watching Toribash highlight clips from skilled players can be a bit of a YouTube black hole, so if you’re curious, beware that your productivity may suffer. You’ve been warned.

 

Waku Waku 7

On the surface, Waku Waku 7 doesn’t seem like that much of a weird fighting game, becoming one of the many 2D fighting games that’d launch in arcades and the Neo Geo back in the 90s. However, dig a little deeper into the game’s characters, world and story and you realise that Waku Waku 7 is a loving parody/homage to video games, movies and anime of the time period. Perhaps the biggest target of Waku Waku 7’s gags is Dragon Ball, with the game’s roster of characters drawn into conflict in an attempt to gather the 7 Waku Waku balls. Wouldn’t you just believe it too, but the person who gathers them together even gets their wish granted. What a concept.

As for the characters themselves, the majority of them are fun send-ups that players might recognise. Rai Baikoh has parts of Sie Kensou and Roddy, featured in SNK’s King Of Fighters/Psycho Soldier and Top Hunter respectively, while Dandy-J’s character, aesthetic and background gives players a blend of Indiana Jones and old man Joseph Joestar from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Personally, we’d take 17 million plushies of Mauru, a Totoro parodying forest creature whose moveset bears more than just a passing resemblance to Sasquatch from Darkstalkers, though the final boss Fernandeath is also the cutest evil black ball ever made. Hilarious parodies along with decent gameplay makes for a weird yet wonderful fighting game.

 

BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles

There have been plenty of fighting games over the years that see combatants use some heavy machinery to do battle instead of their fists, though typically that heavy machinery tends to be some kind of giant robot. If that robot happens to come with some kind of 20ft tall laser sword, then that’s even better. This robot normalcy is exactly why BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles is such an interesting concept for a fighting game that’s exactly what it sounds like. A game that mixes anime style cutscenes and characters with big ass construction vehicles you’d find on your local building site, BCV is a wild game.

Honestly, there’s not much we can say about BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles that the game doesn’t already say for itself. It’s a 1v1 3D fighter with people getting behind the wheel of different construction vehicles to decide who is the best building company in the land, or something. There’s a story mode in here with fully voiced cutscenes, but the voice acting is so atrocious that you’d probably want to end up under the wheels of a bulldozer before the end of it. Is BCV any good to play then? Absolutely not, but it’s a curio that deserves to be checked out all the same. Just make sure if you’re American, you sail the high seas in order to do it, considering it never came to America at all.

 

Arm Joe

If you had to think of all the intellectual properties ever made to be turned into a fighting game, the musical Les Miserables would probably be the last thing you’d think of. What next, Joseph and the Technicolour Dragon Punch? The Phantom Of The Option Select? West Side Shoryuken? Apparently a Japanese developer by the name of Takase decided to not let their memes be dreams in the late 90s though, creating the Les Mis inspired Arm Joe as a result. If you’re wondering where the hell Arm Joe comes from as a name for a Les Mis fighting game, apparently it’s derived from the Japanese translation of the musical’s name, Aa Mujou, which sounds kind of like Arm Joe.

Interestingly, Arm Joe was developed using 2D Fighter Maker 95, a PC application different to the PS1 Fighter Maker games, as users could import their own graphics, characters and sounds. As for Arm Joe itself, the roster includes 10 characters, most of which are either from or semi-related to characters from the musical, like Valjean, Thenardier and Enjolras. However, Les Mis didn’t have a robot Jean Valjean, an alternate universe tea-loving bunny by the name of Ponpon, or a police officer simply called Police that has the same moveset as Akuma from Street Fighter. If you ask us, the film would’ve been much better if half the cast got hit with a raging demon.

 

Fight Crab

The rule about Fight Crab is that you should tell a lot more people about Fight Crab, because it’s a bunch of daft, brilliant fun. While far from a traditional fighting game, Fight Crab is everything you’d expect it to be and more, as you control almost kaiju sized crabs and crustaceans wielding improbably massive weapons in an attempt to establish who is the strongest crab of them all. Unlike other fighting games though, where you win by dealing as much damage as possible to your opponent, Fight Crab’s whole gimmick is physics-based, with players using their weapons in an attempt to flip their opponent over so they can finally hit the finishing blow.

What makes Fight Crab so interesting is the sheer variety of crabs and weapons you can choose from, and while functionally none of them make a real difference to the gameplay, it’s a great way to learn about some sea critters in a way that’s actually fun. Granted, crabs in real life aren’t going to attack each other with two-sided lightsabers, hammers and broomsticks, but where else are you going to see this many types of crab in one video game? Plus, if Fight Crab really tickles your pickle, there’s a sequel that’s currently available in early access on Steam if you feel like even more crab battles.

 

Spitting Image

It’s generally agreed upon that Street Fighter 2 in 1991 was the first fighting game that really managed to nail what the gameplay of that genre was supposed to feel like, so what do you think a fighting game from 1989 based on a British political satire TV show that involves puppets is going to play like? If you guessed “like crap”, you’d be right of course, as the video game edition of Spitting Image is miserable to play. However, it’s the only officially licensed video game where Margeret Thatcher can have a fist fight with Ronald Reagan. Do you think Street Fighter 6 has the balls to make Keir Starmer part of the next season of DLC? Didn’t think so.

Developed for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and the Amiga personal computer, Spitting Image begins with the news that a prophet has declared there’ll be a world ending war in the next seven years. To stop it, six world leaders, including Reagan, Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Jean Paul II, then-Iranian “supreme leader” Ruhollah Khomeini, and P. W. Botha, then South African state president and ardent supporter of apartheid. MOVING SWIFTLY ONWARDS, each fight in the Spitting Image game is ref’d by Queen Elizabeth II, and if you manage to get through the game’s arcade ladder and reach the end, you’ll find that the whole affair was the machinations of John Rambo in a bid to take over the world.

 

Dong Dong Never Die

Anyone who has even the smallest bit of knowledge about weird as hell fighting games has probably spent this entire video wondering when Dong Dong Never Die was going to be mentioned. Don’t worry, we got you. Developed and released in 2009 by a team of Chinese game developers with low budget but an incredible amount of passion, Dong Dong Never Die uses the same technique as the original Mortal Kombat games to create its characters and moves, with thousands of still images of people in costumes digitised and placed into the game itself. For a game released in 2009, that’s pretty daft in itself, but then you actually see the characters themselves.

The majority of the game’s characters are parodies or rip-offs of characters from pop culture, with the game’s story basically retelling the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, just with the added pretense of it taking place in a street fighting tournament in China. Look, the characters are ridiculous, the gameplay is fast and loose, making it fairly easy to play while also being incredibly busted, and for whatever reason, this game also has someone doing the Akuma model. Why is that character a 3D model of Mario? We don’t know. Frankly, we’re scared to ask, but if you’re interested in playing the majesty that is Dong Dong Never Die for yourself, there was a fan patch released last year that rebalanced the whole game, added a new character even chucked in online play.

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