A few weeks back, I wrote an unpublished piece called "Ten Things Wrong With Final Fight Streetwise", which I thought would make for an interesting special. I have been reading thoroughly about the game since its announcement at last year's E3 event and even had some hands-on time with it, and came away with the feeling that the thing was going to be a train wreck. No, make that two train wrecks with a carrier airwing carrying some oil tankers crashing on top of them. It just didn't really appear to have any kind of appeal in the modern beat-em-up genre, something that was getting a push from Rockstar's The Warriors. But I left it unsubmitted, hoping that the final product would in fact have something to offer. But when you give so much in graciousness and get stomped on as a result...whoo, nelly.

Final Fight Streetwise has been released and, as expected, fails on all front. I now want to write "TWENTY Things Wrong With Final Fight Streetwise, but, quite frankly, I don't feel the game is worth that much attention. So let me just lay this out as plainly as possible.

In the game, you take control of Kyle, Cody's younger brother. Time has passed since the events of the first game, and Cody, who was convicted and locked away for God-knows-what, and now he's in trouble. So, instead of Kyle calling upon other people who have different beat-em-up style controls, he decides to handle the urban jungle all by himself. Sure, he can recruit other thugs to help in his cause, but over the course of the game, you control Kyle. And that's it.

That's part of the game's biggest flaw right there- it's BORING. The gameplay never revolves into anything interesting, not even with the myriad of objects you can use to pound enemies. It tries to build up a combo system with its attacks but they never really get off the ground. I can understand if the original game didn't have the biggest gameplay quirks in the world, but it was enough to get by. Not to mention more functional than this crap would ever become.