Xenophage - Alien BloodSport

Xenophage: Alien BloodSport is a 1995 one-on-one fighting game from Argo Games, published by Apogee. It was one of the relatively few attempts to bring the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter arcade format to MS-DOS with a home-grown roster, trading the usual martial artists for a lineup of grotesque alien and monstrous combatants.

Following the template of its digitized-era rivals, it pits two fighters against each other in best-of-round bouts, with special moves and finishers played up for shock value in keeping with the gorier fighters that dominated the mid-nineties. The creature-feature theme was its main hook, aiming to stand out from the crowd of human brawlers.

Xenophage never reached the polish or balance of the arcade giants it emulated, and PC fighting games always struggled to match their console and coin-op counterparts. Still, as an Apogee-published curio it is an interesting example of the DOS scene's ambition to compete in a genre it was ill-suited for, and it has a certain cult appeal for that reason.