5. Shaq Fu
1994 - SNES, Genesis, Game Gear, Game Boy
You might think that Shaq Fu is a weird mash-up of b-ball superstar Shaquille O'Neal and weirdo nerd martial-arts fantasy, but you'd be wrong. In reality, it's a mash-up of Pepsi ads and terrible game design. Coming in at the tail end of the early '90s 2D-fighter fad, Shaq Fu was supposed to have been a technical marvel - it was developed by Delphine, after all, a studio known for creating killer games with hyper-fluid animation. But Delphine apparently spent so much time trying to cram a ton of rotoscoped animation frames into the cartridge that they ran out of time to make even a mediocre fighter. And in the end, the animation didn't even turn out that great.
But it's the story that really propels Shaq Fu into weird-mash-up territory. In one of the most half-assed fish-out-of-water setups we’ve ever seen, the game opens with Shaq wandering around Tokyo alone - in his team uniform - when he stumbles onto a tiny, decrepit-looking dojo and decides to look inside. The dojo's master - who speaks English but has apparently never seen a black person before - instantly assumes that the tall man with the strange skin can only be a prophesied warrior from the stars. On second thought, he probably says that to everyone. As we soon see, he has a sinister agenda.
Rather than leaving immediately, as a sane person might, Shaq feigns disinterest and invites the old guy to his charity basketball game. This is his fatal mistake. The dojo's keeper ignores the invitation, instead inviting Shaq to enter a "magic portal" into a stockroom filled with cardboard boxes. Shaq ambles through, at which point we can only assume he gets hit on the head by the old man's accomplice. He then "wakes up" in a bizarre, martial-arts filled dream world where he has to throw down with undead monsters and hot catgirls. Meanwhile, the "dojo master" fills a bathtub with ice and calls his organ broker.
As bone saws and scalpels are honed to razor precision, Shaq explores the alien dreamscape in search of a little boy named Nezu. In the nightmare land created by Shaq's swollen brain, however, the phrase "Can you tell me about the little boy, Nezu?" is slang for "I will karate your entire family to death while forcing you to blow in your dog's ear." And so poor Shaq gets into nasty scrapes with absolutely everyone he meets.
So yeah, given our admittedly fanciful kidney-harvest interpretation of the game's events, we can accept that an NBA star would "travel" (via massive concussion) to a magical fantasy land to fight kung-fu mummies and Arab princes and green Skeletors and such. But only just.
