Wreck Some Virtual Boards With Crush King

I wasn’t able to catch Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph on opening night, or the opening weekend really but I did get a chance last night with the family. We all enjoyed it, it was especially neat to see a movie all about arcades for once and it was well-done overall. It was a little slow at some points and while mostly a comedy, it had a serious side to it where no one would laugh for a while, which I didn’t really expect – and of course I caught myself a couple of times being the only one to laugh at some esoteric arcade reference so kudos to the creators for those little “Easter Eggs” if you want to call them that. Quite a few references to candy as well, probably just as many as arcade games. Again, overall it was fun and its a kind of movie I could see again, and not just to try and catch some other obscure reference throughout. It also has brought attention to arcades themselves – yesterday I had a guy come in who brought the movie up and he sounded a little surprised to see an arcade, even though I’ve been in the mall for almost five years now. Such is business life at times.

Anyways, I found a video of a new arcade game on Youtube that has appeared in what seems to be perfect timing with Wreck-It Ralph – a game that makes you punch downwards to break stuff. It doesn’t have anything to do with WIR itself but I’m sure you will see what I mean after watching. The game is called Crush King, made by a South Korean developer who says he has 22 years of experience developing arcade games but the video description doesn’t have a mini-resume of sorts to show who he has worked with and what he has done previously. Whoever he is seems to know what he is doing though as looking at the game itself the graphics are really good and the concept is something that has shown up in games before. Many might instantly think of a bonus round in Mortal Kombat where you break a bunch of boards with a karate chop or punch, although for me it goes back further to a game I played often as a kid prior to the Street Fighter craze, International Karate on the Atari 8-bit computers where you didn’t chop the boards, you head-butted them. not that I would recommend head-butting in Crush King exactly but you get the idea. What I really like about this concept is that I’ve never seen it done in this exact manner before and it’s a bit different from anything else out there right now which would make it a unique piece for an arcade to have, not to mention far more entertaining to use this hardware than to pretend karate chop with a joystick/buttons.

Unfortunately we have no idea at present more about this game aside from the video but the developer is looking for distributors to carry it and it seems to have been designed with a Western audience in mind. This could prove to be a unique game to have in a place where those boxing machines do well.