Genre: 2d Fighter
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Universal Interactive Studios

The 3DO is capable of displaying high-bit color sprites, has a full meg of video RAM, and has hardware support for scaling, rotation, and blending. Way of the Warrior puts all of those things to full use, featuring incredibly large character sprites-- some the entire height of the screen!-- laden with special effects, and wrapped in some very smooth Samurai Shodown-esque dynamic zooming. Presentation is stellar, with very aesthetically pleasing menus and CGI. Character portraits are amateurish, but it's that very quality that lends great charm to the game's outlandish proceedings.

The first thing that becomes apparent upon loading Way of the Warrior is its fantastic music, which is none other than White Zombie's brand-new-at-the-time album, La Sexorcisto Devil music, Vol. 1. The music fits the game wonderfully, and the Naughty Dog duo of Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin do a fantastic job of remixing and fitting the songs into the game's various stages and events. Sound effects are downright hilarious-- especially the voice acting-- and are incredibly memorable.

Despite the game's Mortal Kombat-influenced aesthetic, Rubin and Gavin wanted to make a fully dynamic, hitbox oriented engine, ala Street Fighter II, of which they were immense fans. And that they did, although the engine is plagued by two things: first, they didn't make the move frame windows forgiving enough, making many of the special moves nearly impossible to perform; second, rather than going with consistent paper-rock-scissors and then balancing via move damage modifiers, they wrote a maze of nested exceptions governing the rules of individual move interactions. As such, the game is frustrating to learn, and occasionally infuriatingly inconsistent.

Way of the Warrior's ruthless AI and steep learning curve, combined with its amateurish aspects make this one of questionable appeal depending on with whom one speaks. But when one considers that the entire game was made by two people-- Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin-- filming their friends from the hallway and through the door to their apartment, the game is incredibly impressive. Even ignoring those facts, Way of the Warrior is a better game, straight-up, than Primal Rage, Ballz, and certainly Shadow-- making it the best B-tier fighter on the platform-- and it is indeed a riot to play against another human. Think of it as the 3DO's Eternal Champions; not the greatest engine, but there is a certain joy to playing a fighter custom-built for the hardware.