Tom and Jerry: Fists of Furry
We've got six new videos of these animals in action. Check it out.
October 23, 2000
Yes, of course it's a Power Stone clone, with massive combo attacks and brutal fisticuffs. By golly, what else would a Tom and Jerry game be?
Standing by and large as my biggest surprise from E3 this year, Tom and Jerry in Fists of Furry (and no, that's not a typo -- the game will have fighting and puns) is an arena-based grappler with more than a sneaking resemblance to Capcom's zany grappler Power Stone. But the fact that this is a Nintendo 64 fighting game wasn't the least of my surprises -- with Fighter's Destiny 2, we have two N64 fighters for you readers today... OK, the only two N64 fighters left, but that still more fighting coverage than the system has ever seen. But no, seeing a N64 street fight wasn't so striking. The big shocker was that Tom and Jerry in Fists of Furry might actually be good.
Features
- Based on the slapstick shenanigans of the cartoon duo
- Eight characters straight from the show, including Tom and Jerry and all their friends
- Power Stone-type battle engine, including interaction with environments
- A fighter... on the Nintendo 64 (amazing, eh?)
Gameplay in Tom and Jerry in Fists of Furry is street fighting in one of several zones from the TV show (including the famous kitchen, complete with mouseholes, and an outdoor garden with all kinds of garden tools to whack each other silly with). This is slapstick fighting gameplay, and in keeping, anything in the arena is fair game. Smack a box and it will shoot across to smash your opponent. Push the cookie jar off the kitchen refrigerator and it will come crashing down on their head for death from up high.
But there's also plenty of standard fist fighting game, which may take some adjustment for those not used to seeing the cat and mouse put up their dukes and knocking about Irish-style. Each character in the game (Tom, Jerry, Butch, Spike, Tike, Tuffy, Toodles or Duckling) has his own attacks and moves, as well as skills for handling the game's weapons. The personalities have also been captured in rendered form for each fighter -- you wouldn't think that the pip squeak Tuffy mouse would be such a bruiser, but he rolls his sleeves up just like in the show and goes to town like a regular Tyson, while glass joes like Duckling are weak punching nuns, but move quick enough to spring traps and get the drop on opponents. It's not the size of your bulk, it's what you do with it.
Outlook: Good? We didn't think it could be possible, and, in fact, we still have our doubts. The lack of four-player fighting is certainly a disappointment, and the gameplay may twittle away just over the few minutes we were able to play the game at E3. But these screenshots are not renders, and the gameplay that we briefly battled through measured up to at least our bottom-of-the-barrel expectations (Hey, you don't come off an Elmo unscathed, boys). There's promise in this game, and the zany slapstick play fit the characters well. It played fast, it looked sharp, it seemed fun... Something funny's going on around here!
*Note: This information was taken from http://ign64.ign.com/ many, many moons ago.
