Next up in our series “The Best Games You Don’t Even Know Exist” is The Outfoxies, a unique arcade game published by Namco in 1994. It combines platforming and fighting gameplay to create a distinctive style, and is a predecessor to some current fighting games such as the Super Smash Bros series.
The storyline for The Outfoxies is an absurd set up for the battles in the game. Mr. Acme has contracted a killer to assassinate a rich art collector. He sets each of the game’s assassins against each other as a way to avoid having to pay for the hit. The style of the game is a kind of cheesy parody of 80s and 90s action films and T.V. shows like the James Bond movie series and Mission Impossible.
The assassins in The Outfoxies are a varied set, and include a beautiful femme fatale, a chimpanzee wearing a tuxedo, a large man with metal hands, a mad scientist bound to a wheelchair, a pair of formerly attached Siamese twins, an ex-actress, and an every man action hero. There are some slight variations between these assassins, such as the chimp and the twins being smaller targets, while other characters are slower and stronger, but they all play pretty much the same. Their unique personalities are illustrated when they have eliminated an opponent and remove their image from a series of television screens, by punching through the T.V., merely changing the channel to a cartoon, or some other unique animation.
The true stars of this game, and what makes it stand out from other fighting games, are the environments. Each one is an interactive platforming level, where both fighters can move wherever they want to, evading their opponent, chasing them, or going after the best weapons. These levels include a skyscraper, a moving train, a mad scientist’s factory, an aquarium, a yacht, a circus, and an airplane. The scenes change as the fighting takes place, with explosives being set, platforms collapsing, and the gravity changing as stage vehicles plummet or climb. The designers include a very good scaling mechanism to accommodate this, so the camera pans out or zooms in depending on how far away the characters are from each other.
This setup leads the two players to scramble around the map, searching for the best weapons to use and then chasing each other down. Weapons run the gambit from traditional firepower, including pistols, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades, and rocket launchers, to less conventional weapons like katanas and bowls of hot soup. The energy bars are fairly generous, but even with a 200 second timer, one player is usually wiped out by the end of the round.
All in all, The Outfoxies is a fairly entertaining game. It has excellent action, unique weapons and level design, amusing sound effects with a great digitized voice for the narrator, and a scaling feature that gives players a lot of freedom for how they want to destroy each other. This is an excellent game to play if you want to explore the roots of current fighting game franchises like Super Smash Bros. and is also an entertaining arcade experience in its own right.
