Brutal: Paws of Fury

Brutal: Paws of Fury is a competitive fighting game created by GameTek for SEGA CD and Mega Drive/Genesis in 1994. The game was also ported and released for the Amiga, SNES, and MS-DOS.

Unlike Mortal Kombat with its hyper-realistic graphics, or Street Fighter II, which had human combatants (though with fantasy powers), Paws of Fury features a cast of animal fighters. Much like a Disney movie, you will have heroes such as Ivan the Bear, Tai Cheetah, Prince Leon of Kenya, Rhei Rat, and others. All drawn like cartoons. Not to mention Kung-Fu Bunny, which makes you wonder if Pixar didn't take inspiration from this game when they created Kung Fu Panda in 2008. Maybe. Funnily, the final boss to defeat is Dali Llama - a llama, as you can imagine. Hopefully, the religious leader didn't get offended by the reference.

The Amiga version is a faithful conversion of the Mega Drive one, excluding the controls, which use three buttons in the SEGA version - something impossible on the Amiga version where the joystick only has one button. On the other hand, the Amiga version, thanks to better compression, features two additional characters. With the CD32 version, you have both three buttons and additional characters!

It is probably not the best fighting game you can find out there, but if you like cartoon graphics and are willing to try something different, Brutal: Paws of Fury can be pretty charming.