Super Oozumou - Nessen Ooichiban

Here is a near-final prototype of Super Oozumou. By: Evan G Last updated: November 22, 2015

I have to admit, I was kind of intrigued by this game when I pulled it off the pile of unreleased prototypes that I have to go through. I spend a lot of time in Japan, and I really enjoy watching sumo. The past couple of weeks, I've tried to tune into the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament, which was the first time in a few tournaments that all three yokozuna were participating. I also had fun learning to say 熱戦 (nessen). My fiancee (who is Japanese) kept insisting that the way I said it sounded like "ni sen" (literally 2000)! Ah, the difficulties of an English speaker going to a place that only has five vowel sounds.

I can't really say too much about this game. It is basically a side-view fighting game, which is pretty simplistic compared to something like Street Fighter II. The goal is to knock your opponent down, or push them out of the ring boundary. Though there are moves you can pull off, I found that button mashing worked just as well. It is a bit hard for me to navigate the game's menus, which are done in full on calligraphy.

The prototype is pretty much identical to final. There are only 26412 bytes that differ between the prototype and the final version, all of which occur in the non-graphical part of the ROM image. These are probably bug fixes, but there was nothing that I could immediately notice that was different.

Front of the prototype. The labels on the EPROMs were added by me. The label on the RAM chip says "SFC すもう" (sumo)

Back of the prototype, says SFC-18, probably numbering for which prototype this is.

Download prototype