Knuckle Heads (ナックルヘッズ) is a two-on-two fighting arcade game released by Namco in 1992. It runs on Namco NA-2 hardware, and represents the company's answer to Capcom's 1991 hit Street Fighter II.

Gameplay

In the single-player tournament mode, the player's chosen character fights an opponent in best two-out-of-three matches with the CPU or against another human player, but when both are knocked out simultaneously in the first round, one of them will win the second round. The player has a character roster of six fighters to choose from, each with their own weapons and special techniques. After the player knocks out five different characters, the player must fight two opponents at once instead of one, for three rounds, and finally an "evil" solid-gold version of their own character, before their character's own ending sequence. The most notable features are the jump button, and multiplayer mode which allows up to four players to play simultaneously, but the multiplayer mode does not have an ending (much like Cosmo Gang the Puzzle, which was released earlier in 1992 and also ran on Namco's NA-1 hardware), and the closest a player can get to winning it is if they win ninety-nine times because that is when their "WIN" counter will roll over.

Characters

There are six playable characters and no bosses; all of them have their own unique statistics and special moves.

Virtual Console release

The game was later re-released by Namco Bandai Games (as they are now known) on the Virtual Console in Japan on August 18, 2009.

Reception

In Japan, Game Machine listed Knuckle Heads on their April 15, 1993 issue as being the seventh most-successful table arcade game of the year. RePlay reported Knuckle Heads to be the nineteenth most-popular arcade game at the time.