Out of all the myriad giant-robot movies, comics, models, and games that Japan has produced, the Gundams have always been my favorite (Particularly G Arms and the SD Sengokuden). Anyways, unlike most of the other Gundam games, which are mostly strategy / RPG affairs, this is a 2D fighter very much in the Street Fighter, or actually maybe more like Dark Stalkers vein.

I don't really know that much about Gundam. I know there are about 50 different series and they all have different plots and characters and so forth, so it's kind of hard for me to keep them all straight. GWED has a nice selection of Mobile Suits to choose from, but it's missing my favorite one, the one with the round head and the one big red eye. I think it's from War in My Pocket or something, and I'm pretty sure it's a bad guy. They have lots of funny names like Sand Rock, Wing and Heavy Arms.

One thing that makes GWED a little different than SF2 or Dark Stalker is that besides having fireball-type attacks, you can also pull out your Gundam's gun, or Vulcan and blast your opponent, and you can even do "super Vulcan" moves I think.

This game is notable because it uses very large, detailed sprites (for the SNES), but is still extremely fast and fits on a 2MB cart. Here is how it is explained in the FAQ: "In traditional 2D fighting games (Capcom & SNK titles included), a character’s every possible pose is stored in individual bitmaps, which includes the entire body, even the parts that aren’t moving. For example, when a fighter is walking, the bitmap for the rest of the body are stored for each leg movement frame, even though the non-moving parts are the same. For fine character movements, such method uses a lot of space to store many duplicated, non-moving parts. With large amounts of character frames, this is certainly not an efficient use of the small Nintendo cartridge spaces. Furthermore, when developers want to add/change moves to each character, the extra sprites have to be drawn and stored all over again. In GWED, it uses what Bandai called motion parts system (MPS). Each character frame is drawn on screen by a combination of smaller sprites, such as arms, legs, heads, torso, weapons. When developing new frames, only the differently drawn parts are stored along with the frame structure. As a result, the same storage space can occupy more characters, finer frames, and even more moves than the ‘dumb’ methods in traditional 2D fighting games. Combined with similarties between characters (eg Vayeate and Mercurius) and rotational effects (eg Epyon), GWED was able to cramp 10 large robots into the same cartridge space that Street Fighter II, Art of Fighting, Mortal Kombat, DBZ Super Butouden (all 3 of them), and G Gundam had used." *whew* That was probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but it is interesting to nerds like myself. : )

Well, if you want a good fighting game with plenty of cool robots and super good graphics, look no further. It's not quite as good as Dark Stalkers or Capcom vs. Marvel, but it's close, and for free, the price is right. You will need a fairly fast computer / emulator to run this one though- a fast 604e is probably necessary. I think this ROM is pretty tough to find, though- it was on SitC, but that's the only place I've ever seen it.

Need a move / combo / strategy list? Get the FAQ here.

Also visit a few of these other Gundam related sites: Gundam Project Page - Bandai - Natsume - Goldart's Page