Fighter Maker for PS1 lets you be your weird self

destructoid.com:

If you want to see what procrastination looks like, put 1998’s Fighter Maker in front of me. If you ever noticed me miss a week with these Kusoge articles, it’s probably because I planned to cover Fighter Maker that week and just couldn’t bring myself to play it. Never has a bad game asked me for so much commitment.

Blame The Industry’s Chris Moyse. It was his suggestion. Considering he’s the leading expert on all things fists, I trust him when he tells me a fighting game is going to be bad. And Fighter Maker is… Well, maybe not bad, but it’s extremely misguided.

Fighter Maker is part of the ASCII Entertainment “Maker” series. That kind of makes it sound like it covered a lot of genres, but really it was just rail shooter, fighting game, and RPG. The RPG Maker games had the most longevity, and we even got a bunch of them over here in the West. I even tinkered with RPG Maker 2000 on PC back in the day. It’s just funny that the fighting genre seems much simpler on the surface but is infinitely more difficult to do well.

I had big plans for Fighter Maker, and the moment I saw the creation system, I threw them all away. First of all, you can’t edit the look of the combatants. Secondly, my hopes for a butt-centric arsenal of attacks were dashed the moment I found out how much effort it takes to create a single move.

Backing up for a moment here, Fighter Maker is sort of a Virtua Fighter setup. It’s 3D, and you can move in and out of the background. It’s not a terrible-looking game. It also subscribes to Virtua Fighter’s more minimalistic control method. There are three attack buttons for high, mid, and low. That’s one more attack button than in Virtua Fighter. These can be partnered with the block button for grabs and fancier