Fight With Photos: Photo Fighter X Impressions

Put yourself into the brawl with this quaint DSiWare title. Video and impressions inside.

Announced earlier this week and released just the other day, Photo Fighter X is a new game from Nintendo on the DSiWare service that puts you into the fight. While the fighting in the game is quite simple and bare bones, it’s who’s fighting that is the most important thing. You see, you put yourself into the game by taking about 10 photos of yourself in various fighting poses.

There are poses like kicking, punching, blocking and so on but you can also take photos of cats, mustard bottles (see video for more on that) or whatever you like. Taking photos is quite easy as there are two options for taking photos, get someone to hold the DSi and take photos of you or set the DSi down somewhere and take it that way. Either way requires you to “fill” yourself into a silhouette so that the game can use you in the space.

The other parts of the game that are customisable are the audio you put onto moves and punches and kicks and the like. There are also special attack and defence moves to put sounds on as well. You can also put an ‘intro’ noise for when a fight begins, like a taunt. These sound clips for each more are only a few seconds long, if that, so you’ll want to be succinct.

You can also customise the stage you fight on; in fact you will need to have at least one fighter and one stage before you fight. If you only have one fighter you’ll just be fighting yourself as well.
The game itself is pretty simple: There is one button to use apart from the directional controls but you can mix up the moves by using combinations of directions and the buttons to pull off fireballs or uppercuts and the like. There is a block move on the touch screen that activates a ‘block’ around you and after a while that block will turn into a super special move to take down a huge version of yourself or the person you’re fighting. There is also a mini version with a high pitched version of your recording thrown in at random times, punching them in the face and hearing a high pitched ‘eeeeeee’ like Mini me (or whatever you’ve recorded) is quite fun.

The main mode is two players on the one console sharing each side of the DSi, there is no multiplayer over wireless or anything of the like. Don’t have anyone to play with? There is a single player mode as well which has you square off against a barrage of enemies that get harder and harder as you go on. There is a high score but no leader boards or anything like that.

The game is pretty value packed for what it is, at only 200 points, though it would have been nice to see some features like the sharing of characters and sound sets online. The fighting model is also very, very bare bones, but for 200 points you can’t expect much more. (Although Flipnote has tons of features and it’s free.)