Hot blooded youths talking with their fists! Punch a dude in the gut OR the face! Get plant pots dropped on your head! Avoid the cops! Revel in being a public nuisance! Street Fighter VI?! Smash Bros. Ultimate?! You better send those baby brawlers packing son, ‘cuz we’re fighting for our lives on the mean streets of Urban Champion!
Urban Champion was one of the earliest games released for Nintendo’s gray box, originally fisticuffing its way onto the Famicom in late 1984, and then on the North American NES in ’86. Over the years it’s been re-released as an e-Reader game, on the Wii Virtual Console, and was given a 2.5D face lift for the 3DS in 2011. You can even buy the nearly identical arcade version for 8 of your hard earned bucks on the Switch’s eShop today, so someone at Nintendo must really love this thing.
Fighting games were in their infancy in the 80’s, but even for the time, Urban Champion is ridiculously simple. You get a punch and…a slightly stronger punch, with the goal of the game being to knock your opponent all the way to the right edge of the screen. If successful, your opponent will tumble into the next level, and your fight rages on. Occasionally a patrolling police car will drive by, which will cause both of the fighters to stop their brawling and starting acting all innocent and whistling like they haven’t been smacking the stuffing out of each other for 17 rounds in a row. Sometimes, a disgruntled guy will try to drop a flower pot on your head from above, which will stun you in place for a few seconds. These little touches do add a spark of memorability to Urban Champion, but these two events are the only things that happen in the game besides the mindless fist swinging. It’s pretty boring.
Every three rounds, instead of knocking your opponent into the next screen as usual, you can send your green doppelganger tumbling down an open manhole. Your character is then showered in confetti, meaning you win! Congratulations, you have now officially seen everything Urban Champion has to offer in the span of about two minutes. From that point onward, the game starts looping forever, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it increases in difficulty along the way. There’s no change in scenery, events, or anything else for that matter. Yawn.
As is the case with many early NES games, Urban Champion has no official ending, so the internet’s had to make up their own rules. If you consider the third round’s loop point as the ending, Urban Champion might be the shortest NES game of all time. I wasn’t joking about the two minute run-time; you can easily beat this thing two or three times in the time it takes a kettle to boil. Some people consider the 99th round the ending, since the round counter doesn’t go past 99. Others consider the 138th round the game’s ending, as once you suffer through all of that senseless brawling, the word “CHAMPION” will appear beneath the round counter. There’s no fanfare of any kind if you achieve this, and the game continues on as it did for the previous 137 rounds into infinity, making the whole excursion feel a little pointless. Personally, I made it to round 47 before I stopped paying attention and ended up being knocked down a manhole. That’s 15 loops of Urban Champion under my belt. My champion belt, if you will.
Urban Champion is not exactly what I’d call a great way to spend an afternoon. With only two attacks, one opponent and not much else, it gets old fast. I don’t even hate it; it’s just really, really, really dull. The game isn’t a total waste of time to check out once, but paying any amount of money for it would be pure madness. As with most things in life, it’s apparently more fun with another person, but where am I gonna find someone who wants to 1 v 1 me in Urban Champion in this day and age? I’m not about to force my wife to play it. That would just be mean.
All in all, Urban Champion serves as a poignant analogy for the senselessness of real, raw violence; the grim truth that the vicious cycle will never be broken, no matter how hard you may struggle against fate can be felt in every pixel. Or maybe not. I don’t know, I just write the blog posts. At any rate, falling down a manhole in real life is free, and infinitely more exciting.
Final Score:
NESJunk 
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