Oh, Trevor McFur - a pre-photoshop, hideously anthropomorphized jaguar (cat, not the car or the game system itself)
Fight for your Life has proven to be much less of Atari's answer to Virtua Fighter, and much more of a ugly, sluggish, impossible to control, coma-inducingly boring hunk of garbage. And Trevor McFur…
Oh, Trevor McFur - a pre-photoshop, hideously anthropomorphized jaguar (cat, not the car or the game system itself, though that could possibly be totally awesome), who, I could only speculate, was designed to become Atari's very own mascot to compete with a certain plumber and a blue rat, but later deemed too freaking awful even by otherwise impeccably dimwitted Jaguar marketing division.
Not contempt with just letting you shoot stuff right away, the game introduces the first level with a lengthy, boring, and painfully cheesy prologue in form of portrait-and-text cutscene, accompanied by images of more humans with feline heads crudely sawn on. And once you are done not caring about the tiny, nearly unreadable blue text of the introduction the game truly begins.
First thing you notice is that Trevor's ship is fairly large on screen - possibly larger than in most sidescrolling shooters. And then you realize that every, even the most devastating weapon in the game is available to you right from the word go, by pressing the numeric buttons of the keypad. At this point I should probably congratulate the retards at Atari R&D for not equipping the controller with a rotary dial instead of 0-9 buttons, that, and not trying to eat their own reflection whenever they pass by a mirror, as the numeric keypad instead of additional action buttons is still a terrible, terrible idea on a game controller.
Almost immediately you will realize that the entire level 1 is basically the first 5 seconds of it, looped to last about 10 minutes - randomly spawned waves of colorful pre-rendered blobs, and an occasional slightly larger blob that is different from smaller blobs only by the number of shots it takes before blowing up. The flat, endlessly repeating starfield seals the deal on the mind-numbing monotony of the experience. But then - excitement time! You fight a boss - a boss that looks kinda like an abstract vase, animates by spinning, and behaves exactly like any other enemy - bouncing around the screen, but has an ungodly number of hit points.
Another cutscene follows, but the text is so unbelievably inane, a game might've as well shipped with a coupon for a complimentary lobotomy.
The level two starts, and then you realize that it's level 1 again, but with a different flat, ugly, endlessly repeating backdrop and the same enemies re-skinned into some other pre-rendered rotating geometric shapes.
Oh, and there is a virtually undocumented two-player mode, but the second player is indestructible.
…And the game has sound – sound so unremarkable, the only thing I remember about it twenty minutes after replaying the game is that, yes, there possibly was sound.