Cyborg Justice

A brawler where you take your opponents apart piece by piece. Cyborg Justice, released in 1993 for the Sega Mega Drive, rests on the idea that your character is a robot assembled from parts, and those parts change during play. You can tear an arm off a defeated enemy along with the weapon attached to it and keep using it, so equipment comes from combat rather than from a shop.

Before starting, you build your own cyborg by choosing a body, arms and a method of movement. Each combination alters reach, speed and attack type, which was unusual for a side-view fighting game in 1993. Most competitors offered a fixed character and, at best, weapons picked up off the floor.

Development came from the Hungarian studio Appaloosa Interactive, previously known as Novotrade, one of the few central European teams supplying games to the western console market at the time. That fact alone deserves attention, since comparable cases from the first half of the nineties can be counted on one hand.

The game is listed as single-player with a side view. Level counts, enemy names and how the story resolves are not stated here, as we cannot verify them. What makes Cyborg Justice interesting now is chiefly the limb-swapping idea, which the genre rarely revisited. On OldGame.cz you can launch it straight in your browser and quickly judge whether building your own robot compensates for control that occasionally feels stiff.