When I was a wee little lad, I've had a fascination with Dragon Ball and video games. More like a fascination along the lines of "wouldn't it be great to play out this battle in video game form?" Dragon Ball GT was shit, and the last DBZ game I played with any semblance of being good was that fighting game for my cousin's SNES. Then, Destrega came.

Way back at around 1998, Koei released a little fighting game known as Destrega. It's premise is simple: two fighters are inside an enclosed arena, firing projectiles at each other with the sole intent of reducing the other's HP to zero.



The gameplay is also quite simple. Each of the face buttons are assigned an attack, plus a jump button. Square releases a fast attack, Triangle releases Power (strong) shots and Circle releases homing missiles. X is your jump button. There is a constantly recharging bar underneath your health bar, which denotes how many attacks you can pull off. Each attack has a very small delay time, so that combination presses could be accommodated. At a full bar, you are restricted to three button presses. Pressing each attack button once in any sequence results in your character firing off the biggest and baddest powers he or she can muster. When the combatants get near each other, the game switches into melee mode, which turns your energy bar red.

In its story mode, it had some rather nasty cutscenes. Nasty, because they're unskippable, and if you're like me, you can't be arsed to watch a bunch of polygons spouting gibberish (my copy was Japanese) before going on another epic battle. It was also unheard of at the time, since only RPG's has such a gameplay feature.

Success lies in clever usage of powers and creative dodging. You can't stay still in this game. Every time you try to attack, you leave yourself exposed and defenseless, so you have to make each attack count.

It was a very fun game to play with friends, as trashtalk flies if someone gets hit from a rather large attack. If you can track this down, give it a whirl. It's a surprisingly fun (if rather simplistic) game.