The first fighting game produced by Nintendo (way before the 1991 Japan-only fighting game Joy Mech Fight released on the Family Computer), Urban Champion was developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1984 and it took two years for release in North America and Europe. Later it was released on arcade machines, more specifically the Nintendo VS. System under the title Vs. Urban Champion. It was inspired by the game Boxing (known as Punch-Out!! in North America), which was released five months before Urban Champion for the Game & Watch.
In this fighting game, the player faces the opponent on the right. The two rivals that appear in this game, from left to right, are Ron Imhoff and Alan Mussman, suggesting from a 1989 interview by Shigeru Miyamoto explaining that the names of these characters were a joke during the game development among designers from Nintendo. Before deciding on the Ice Climbers to join Super Smash Bros. Melee, Masahiro Sakurai mentioned that the Urban Champion character was one of the proposed retro characters to join Melee alongside others like Bubbles from Clu Clu Land and the Excitebike Racer from Excitebike.
The player's task is to reach the rank of Champion by attacking the opponent, who should fall into the open sewage manhole. Every three fights won, the player gets a specific symbol, and after five symbols are earned, they go to the next set of symbols. After 45 symbols, which will cost 138 fights, they get the rank of Champion.
The duel time is 99 seconds and the player has a maximum of 200 stamina points, when each one stamina point is consumed by punching an opponent. The game features two types of attacks: a light punch and a heavy punch. Light punch, as the name says, is light, meaning that the strength itself will be weaker, but it surpasses heavy punch in terms of punch speed and is more difficult to block player's punch. Heavy punch works quite the opposite, because despite the fact that the attack will be stronger, it will result in slower punching and the opponent would have no difficulties with blocking.
Occasionally, the flower pot can fall from the window, intended to be thrown on the head of one of the attackers, in order to make it difficult to fight the opponent by taking 5HP. In addition to the obstacle of falling flower pots, a police car will appear in some rounds, designed to stop a fight between the attackers by returning to the starting position. When the round time is up, the police arrest the player closest to being knocked off of the pavement, resulting in a more difficult victory for the other player for that round.
Urban Champion is already suffering one thing before the gameplay itself, there is the cover art itself which is extremely ugly, especially the Japanese/European one. No, really, here it is, so take a look.
It brings to mind a cartoon from the 80s (or late 70s, not really sure), only on a low budget, making the appearance of characters that look like children, which is inconsistent with what they really look like, not to mention a bit hideously nightmarish faces, due to art-style with a sense of low budget. While North American cover art is no better either, just look at it.
Admittedly, instead of the hideous cartoon style, it was replaced with the 8-bit style, which was common in the North American cover arts of early Nintendo Entertainment System games; however, the real problem is that in-game attackers look very different to the cover art, causing incredibly false advertising.
Nintendo always guarantees a sense of fun in their games due to the great gameplay, but this game is an absolute exception. This fighting game is not only pointless, repetitive, slow, but also unimaginably boring; the four adjectives that are never seen and heard in games from this company. The game is still about the same task, which is beating your opponent every three rounds to make him fall into the sewage manhole. So that it wasn't enough, the backgrounds and buildings are alike, making the game even more boring and devoid of replay value.
The combat is horrendously slow, boring, and extremely poor in content. It contains only two types of attacks, distinguished only by strength, speed of attack, and the chance to defend this attack, depending on how the rival attacks. It is clearly visible that Nintendo wanted to try to create a game based on a different genre for the first time, but due to the minimal knowledge related to the mechanics of those games, and inexperience of development of a fighting game, hence the effect that everyone couldn't expect from this company.
Nintendo games usually have nice, colorful graphics, but Urban Champion is mediocre in this regard. Admittedly, even passable by the standards of this platform, but it has a few things that make it the sheer poverty. The character sprites look terrible due to the primitive, and weird body color choices, especially the lips, reminiscent of being made up by lipstick, and the characters themselves contain a meager color palette, where for every one type of body part only one color is present, and the most interesting thing about it is that the attackers that appear in the North American cover art, look incomparably better than in the game itself. The city, played as a game background, is repetitive, but also boring to watch, because not only there is absolutely nothing going on in them (apart from buildings close to rivals in some rounds), but also every round, there is barely any change; the only variation is the appearance of shops, which are buildings close to this duel that are limited only to the Book Store, Barber Shop, Snack Shop, and Discount Shop, which are devoid of details, differing only in the color of the buildings.
The animations are awfully cheap. Not only are they stiff, they also consist of its too few frames, making the game less playable. The worst of all, however, is that they are slow, which means that attacking can take a little longer than anyone might expect, and overwhelming boredom is expected.
The soundtrack for this game is really abject, and because it repeats itself every round makes it less bearable. Every fight features the same three inaudible cacophonies that are repeating each finished three round fight, consisting of random beats to remind music, and it is more audible, as if a small child without talent tapped random buttons on a given instrument, not sure what song it was creating.
The controls are extremely sluggish, comparable to the speed of a turtle. Even pulling off the quicker punches feels far too unresponsive and pulling off a strong punch is more a matter of blind luck than any type of real playing skill. The sensation of moving the attacker is also ruined by its pathetic combat system.
As I repeated several times, the game is devoid of any content. Due to how quickly this game could be made, it is limited to only one boring city and one task over and over again. If the creators spent more time on production, it would be possible that they would introduce more characters, locations, more obstacles, thoroughly improve the combat system, not to mention adding a few small details, for example around walking people or animals, so that the game would not be an empty shell.
The game lacks any depth to force the player to play, and the goal of the game is meaningless. No matter how many rounds you win, including its pointless rank of Champion, the game constantly loops with its repetitive and exactly same looking backgrounds and charmless gameplay, which is very similar for the much later released game Dark Vampires: The Shadows of Dust.
Even worse the game has received a completely unnecessary remake that has improved absolutely nothing for the original except for the 3D effect in the 8-bit-looking game. Everything is exactly the same there, and the worst part is that Arika has not tried to improve fundamental things, such as animations, combat system, and overall gameplay. Due to the lazy effort they put in, luckily it was only $5.
All I can say positively is that the game is surprisingly well-polished, so encountering bugs is practically non-existent. Even so, this won't save this game, due to the more powerful weapons, including an overwhelming boredom and widespread repetition.
Overall, this game should have never even existed. It was never meant to be made. It sold really poorly and was forgotten about very quickly. Why? Because it sucked major ass big time!