The making of Weapon lord

[Bastard Mami]

found this article linked at mmcafe:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/forging-weaponlord-6409025/

[GMSpectre]

I remember renting this back in the day for the Genesis.  The game had a lot of potential.  The atmosphere was really dark and I was interested in some of the advanced techniques like the thrust blocks and guard crushes, but the special move controls felt unnecessarily complicated and that really turned me off.

[Bea]

That was a pretty good read.
That game suffered greatly from over-designing. They made it needlessly complex, and with that poor sales happened.
It is a bit of a pity that they ended doing that. They had some pretty nifty ideas that worked well. If they didn't go that far down with the design, that game would still be a househood name nowadays.

[Bastard Mami]

an overly complicated game system does not ruin a game, overly complicated command inputs do; I have had friends who barely play fighting games play stuff like omk that has a pretty complex system, but the command inputs are very standar and they tend to enjoy the game a lot mvc seems to function similarly.

[Magma MK-II]

Apparently they were thinking about online play when they designed the commands.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/weaponlord/weaponlord.htm

["Bad News" Hoffmann]

Some more infos from one of the developers himself.

http://weaponlord.djamesgoddard.com/

Personally i loved WeaponLord, it was one of the Super Nintendo games i imported from the USA for the damn expensive price of around $220 to play it with the help of the Action Replay 2 Import peripheral by Datel (does anyone remember them?) . This game was great, but it got one of the worst timings for a 2d fighting game ever, with it being released when the new 32 bit consoles were out and everyone looked at Battle Arena Toshinden, Tekken and some people at Virtua Fighter and the upcoming Killer Instinct 2.

WeaponLord had good graphics for its system, the stages were phenomenal and all of them had something unique to them. But the goddamn timing + that this game could only be interesting for a relative small part of the fighting game fans destroyed any hope for a big success and building it up as a series. The gameplay was ahead of its time with so many more commands than the typical quarter circles from SF or the even simpler Mortal Kombat moves. There were only 7 characters and they were all looking like protagonists and antagonists from a Conan movie..only Arnie himself was missing :-)

The character designs were all well thought of...from Korr to Zorn and the playable villain of the game Zarak and his spider-like mask/helmet. But as good as the character designs were..they missed the big varity of a Street Fighter or MK cast with its sexy girls (chun li, Sonya/Kitana), typical heroes (Ryu, Liu Kang) typical martial artists based on real ones (Fei Long,..again Liu Kang). I think those are the reasons why WeaponLord never got a sequel.

Maybe it lived on at least a bit through SoulCalibur if its true that WeaponLord inspired the SoulEdge developers or that they took one or another idea and concept from WL.

It was a great game..and like with Killer Instinct and so many damn other good and goofy fighting games from the nineties it sucks that they could not be continued from the financial standpoint it seems.

RIP WeaponLord.

[MellyInChains]

i thought the characters and setting were interestingly different but i didn't really have fun playing it

they missed the big varity of a Street Fighter or MK cast with its sexy girls (chun li, Sonya/Kitana), typical heroes (Ryu, Liu Kang) typical martial artists based on real ones (Fei Long,..again Liu Kang). I think those are the reasons why WeaponLord never got a sequel.

i think it's a GOOD thing they didn't go the standard route. not every game needs to, and i think all games should try to do their own thing rather than have to follow that structure. for that i applaud them

besides, why is there like a need to be attractive people in fighting games where people get the shit beat out of them, or in some cases, horrifically mutilated? i never got this mentality

["Bad News" Hoffmann]

I agree with you totally, and did not mean to critizise the WL cast designs as i liked them a lot, i meant that the "average joe" gamer ..in other words..those people who looked at the back of a game cover back in the nineties did not see the stereotypes there, and those characters are (sadly) the most appealing ones to a lot of people. Today, thanks to the internet..a bigger market for games than ever before and the rising of the indie developer market even niche games for a special markets have the chance to make a good dollar but back in 1995 it was more important to get games released which would be interesting for as many gamers as possible instead of focussing on a niche totally. Thats one of the reasons why WL failed while it was a good game

[MellyInChains]

ohh okay, gotcha. not sure if that'd be a major aspect but i could see that being a part in it. it did seem a lot more of it's 'own game' than the other fighters, but it is probably the best barbarian-esque fighting game, if that means anything. i mean, the other game is battle blaze, and...ugh

["Bad News" Hoffmann]

Oh there were a few other fighting games with the "babarian" theme but yes WL was the best of its kind for sure..Golden Axe: The Battle (Arcade,Saturn) was pretty good but also quite generic.

[Saikoro]

WeaponLord is one of those unfortunate games that I overlooked when I was younger. I had my cousin Kevin to tell me all about it. Yeah, he was hooked hardcore. If I would have known more about it, or listened to Kevin more about how awesome this game was, I would have been all over it back then. I really love the designs and overall darker and brutal tone. Just as the article says, the game has that death metal feel all over it. And I couldn't agree more.

Weaponlord also goes to prove that being different doesn't always work. Yeah, the game was amazingly ahead of it's time and was very good on multiple levels, but everyone was hooked on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and all of those other SF2/MK clones. Thus, WeaponLord was unfortunately stuck in the shadows. This situation immediately reminds me of the Dreamcast: The system was phenomenal and different, but the looming shadow of the PS2 crushed it.

I think this game kicks some serious ass and it is very unfortunate that proper attention wasn't given when needed. I immediately read the entire article upon stumbling upon Gamespot a week or so ago. I felt bad for the dev team because of all of the hard work paid off, yet not too many people caught on to the game and sales were lower than what should have been. For shame!!

Now somebody cook up some badass Weaponlord Mugen conversions, quick!!

[GMSpectre]

The thing about the character design is that I thought Weaponlord had a perfect theme.  In the 90's, fighting games seemed to take the design of martial arts and action movies/animes.  A game with characters that look like something out of Conan the Barbarian was perfect, yet the theme hadn't really been done before.  I thought the roster looked great.  I really wanted to like this game.

Also forgot, it was cool that Simon Bisley did some great cover artwork, and I thought it was cool since I recognized his name from some of the darker comic books and some Danzig albums I had.

[Magma MK-II]

Weaponlord was indeed way ahead of it's time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SEbKQWyE9Y

[FeLo_Llop]

I have this game for a SNES Emulator !!

[Markpachi]

This game is so fucking metal. I love it.

[Saikoro]

Weaponlord was indeed way ahead of it's time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SEbKQWyE9Y

BEFORE IT EXISTED!! Fantastic video.

I have this game for a SNES Emulator !!

As do I, but the sound is all messed up. Still, I have had this game for quite a while on my HDD and it is fucking epic.

[Σaxβeta]

This is the HEAVY METAL version of fighting games...and yes, it had sooo  much fucking system depth.

Also, it is hard as fuck to beat.

I gotta find this game again and pick it up...I am buying old games now before I purchase my very own RetroN5. 

[Jango]

I have this game for a SNES Emulator !!

As do I, but the sound is all messed up. Still, I have had this game for quite a while on my HDD and it is fucking epic.

Probably a dumb question, but you're not using ZSNES are you? Because that emulator is pretty much only good for getting savestates to use in VSNES for sprite-ripping. I didn't test any other emus yet, but IIRC higan has the highest compatibility rate among SNES emulators, so maybe that one?

Also I remember Psicoso introduced me to this game when I was ripping sounds from Kirby Super Star for Bonkers. He wanted to convert one of the characters over to MUGEN, so he asked me to download it and rip sounds for him.

I thought it was pretty cool, but definitely not a very easy game to get into. If I was going to convert a char from that game, I would probably make a lot of changes to the system (like easier commands) so that it would be easier to pick up and play.

[Bastard Mami]

I alwats felt like making the obvious-joke-name , but sprite size and frame rate were turn downs; though at least I know why they are like that.

[Websta]

I want this game now :|