Kart Fighter (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Yoko Soft's 1993 unlicensed versus-fighter for the NES, Kart Fighter.

Played through as Mario.

Everyone's favorite NES-lockout circumvention artists at Taiwanese company Hummer Soft (developers of the unlicensed 1992 Street Fighter II NES port) brings us an original fighter, this time featuring the cast of Super Mario Kart!

The cheesiness of brazenly ripping off another company's IP aside, it's clear that the devs learned a lot from their previous project: put alongside SF2, Kart Fighter is undoubtedly the superior game. It makes far better use of the NES hardware with huge character sprites and better animations, fun and familiar music, and the controls are much easier to come to grips with. The whole thing feels much more polished, and favorably compares to Konami's NES TMNT Tournament Fighters, which is no small feat.

But isn't that mushroom background from Little Nemo? That was a bit unexpected, I've gotta say.

The game got a lot of internet attention awhile back when people began drawing comparisons between it and Super Smash Bros. And, while it's clearly not on par with a first-party Nintendo release, there's no denying the similarities between Kart Fighter and the N64 Smash Bros. game.

I really like this game. It looks great, the sound is a big improvement over SF2's, and who can deny the appeal of beating a friend to a pulp with their favorite Mario characters, all in strangely charming 8-bit graphics? Especially when you can knock around a "fun-size" Bowser, or nail the princess with a Shoryuken as payback for the number of times you've have to save her?

Some of these character names are pretty classic botch jobs too - who doesn't love Yossy the dinosaur?!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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