Final Fight: The Glass Factory

The Context: It's been a tough fight for Haggar and company. After hearing that his daughter had been kidnapped, the town mayor did the only logical thing. He tore off his shirt and started beating people up. He could have hopped in the car, but instead Haggar enlisted his daughter's boyfriend to go street to street battling punks and getting revenge. Towards the end of the game our heroes find their way into a glass factory, setting up one of the most baffling bonus stages of all time.

The Rules: Players are required to break sixteen panes of glass within twenty seconds. These panels of glass are clumped together in various patterns, requiring the player to move around and position themselves just right. Making this bonus stage even trickier is the temperamental hit detection. If you don't smack the glass just right, it will spin around sending the player flying. Not only is this frustrating, but it also eats up your valuable time. If players can break all sixteen panes of glass they will be rewarded with 20,000 points.

The Verdict: I'm convinced that Final Fight isn't supposed to make any sense. How else can you explain beating up a car or punching panes of glass? These Final Fight stages sure do look cool and they're incredibly inventive, but I am left scratching my head every time. I do like that this bonus stage requires skill to complete. You can't just go in and mash buttons, this level is all about character placement. It's not Final Fight's best bonus stage, but then again it's hard to compete with punching a car to death.

Completely Missing the Point: Thank goodness this Final Fight bonus stage didn't lead to some copycat crimes. Imagine what the media would do with this news. "Area man breaks into glass factory and breaks everything in sight with bare hands, news at 11." Suddenly all of the local glass factories would hire a heavy layer of security, which only makes their products more expensive. And then it's guys like me that end up paying for it in the end. Thanks for nothing, Haggar!