I know the phrase "worst ever" gets thrown around a lot when it comes to video game critique. It's great clickbait material and an easy way to gaslight a fanbase. That's not what happens here at Retro Reboot, where the incendiary comments are clean-burning and free of fossil fuels. Sums up my takes on practically anything; generally harmless and evaporates into the atmosphere without anyone noticing.

Speaking of bad for the environment, it's time to talk about Pit-Fighter for the Super Nintendo, the fighting game equivalent of your most annoying uncle who tries to get you to look at their laptop to check out a 144p video of an ebaumsworld clip of Afro Ninja every two years. If that sounds oddly specific, my therapist told me this exercise is soothing.

Developed and published in arcades by Atari (Konami in Japan and the home ports done by Atari's subsidiary Tengen), Pit-Fighter was an early effort to establish what on-on-one fighting in a video game could evolve into from a western company. Preceding Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, Pit-Fighter used digitized actors in front of a blue screen. It's be a fascinating look that's definitely indicative of its time, and at least for the arcade version the sprites look good. The Sega and Super Nintendo ports, holy hell, did they get mangled and chewed up. Is it fair to pick on legitimately inferior hardware? Well, considering the gameplay (which already wasn't much to write home about), didn't translate at all, I'm only left to nitpick on the many other things that bother me. The Genesis version is a little more playable than the SNES, much in the same way that it's more soothing to stick your hand in highly concentrated hydrochloric acid rather than smashing your fist into a bucket of broken glass.

I use "fighting game" in the loosest sense of the term with Pit-Fighter. What every bout mostly results in is a feckless mashing of attack buttons. There's probably a block button, but you'd have better results praying for the sheltering sky to produce rain before hoping the block/counter/grab/give up button works effectively. It's the same general concept, deplete your opponent's health bar before they hurt you. You have three selectable fighters with different combat backgrounds. There's Kato, the third degree blackbelt (in...something. He's a blackbelt, so he's scary regardless). Ty, the kickboxing champion, and probably the most balanced of the three in terms of feats. And Buzz (if that is indeed his real name) an ex-professional wrestler who hits really hard, but lumbers around the slowest. Fight your way through 15 different matches before fighting the final opponent, the Masked Warrior, who looks like a lost member of the WWF tag team Demolition. The arcade game, he laughs and taunts you. On the Super Nintendo version, he just points at the screen after every third fight and screams "JUST WAIT!!". The variety of enemy fighters are limited, you'll fight Eddy, C.C., Angel, and Executioner, all who look like opening match prelim tryouts for an indie wrestling show in Blackwood, New Jersey. 

Trying to play this game is agonizing. The very moment you try to get a read on the controls, it goes downhill immediately. First, if you're playing as Ty or Kato, they do a little pre-match shimmy or bow while the opponent just saunters up to your face and drops you on your ass, unless you have the mind to mash an attack or try to clumsily hop out of the way. From there, it goes downhill fast. Punches and kicks have no weight behind them, barely any read on start-up or active frames, and the hurt boxes are an absolute disgrace.

Every attack feels like it just goes through whomever you're trying to hit, they barely sell any of your strikes, and I'm confident every time I've picked someone up, it was by total accident. Despite the fact that Buzz, Ty, and Kato all have different foot speeds, any effort to get out of the way of a barrage of attacks results in taking damage with little ways to escape the loop. The enemy will just hover over you and mash just as much as you are and bleed your life points away. The only other "fighting game" on the SNES that lacks this level of information that can be gained from playing it is UltraMan: Towards The Future. Pit-Fighter can be played with a broken controller and I'd probably have the same result.

Whatever special moves Kato, Buzz, and Ty have feel like they can be easily avoided, if they can even be effectively executed. Up to three specials can be stocked, I guess that's like an early version of Super Specials before SNK coined the practice with command inputs for Desperation Moves. Good luck hitting anyone with them.

The music would probably be okay, were it not for the fact that it's just the same 1 minute and 35 second loop over and over again to the point that it has been soldered into my subconscious. Very little in the audio department, a lot of the same grunts and groans are copy/pasted. This is another problem I have with striking. There's no audible clue to indicate that you've hit your opponent, vice versa, or if your attack has been blocked, so you're at the mercy of choppy animation that makes stop-motion animation from a Gumby short look like Pixar.

Pit-Fighter is as futile as a fighting game as a petition is used to illicit actual change. I'll be forgiving for the visuals, as I do have a little bit of a soft spot for the style. Once you've seen the gargantuan sprites from Fatal Fury or the detail in Samurai Shodown, Pit-Fighter's washed over miniature backyard wrestling federation actors just look boring. The gameplay may be primitive, but how did Atari not look at the success or brawler games and implement more of its philosophy? Hell, Double Dragon's goofy Vs. mode plays more cohesively, even that EIGHT BIT GAME included weapons. The fun gets old fast, you mostly fight the same three combatants in some different order before taking on the final boss, providing you hate yourself enough to indulge. 

There's zero redeeming qualities to Pit-Fighter and it fails in every conceivable category. It doesn't even tease with being so bad, it's good. it's just bad. Pit-Fighter is where fun goes to die, and children in the early 90's garnered more enjoyment burying their pet gerbils than placing this game in their SNES. Once Mortal Kombat was released, this was rendered even further irrelevant than it already was. Despite being an arcade juggernaut (granted, their name and reputation meant less by the early 90's) Atari just never could nail it with their efforts in the fighting game department. When Primal Rage is your standout 90's fighter, there's some serious problems. And I like Primal Rage.

To end on a positive note, there were images of some of the actors who portrayed the fighters in the game. That's always neat, at least, though some like Heavy Metal didn't make it into the SNES port. I like to believe these people continue to live healthy lives. And if any of your read this and feel the need to beat me until I fall into a black and white heap on the floor, then it'll just be another Thursday afternoon.