Cosmic Carnage, known in Japan as Cyber Brawl (サイバーブロール), is a 2D versus fighting game developed by Almanic and ALU and published by Sega exclusively for the Sega 32X in late 1994.
Light years away in a distant star system, in an intergalactic prison barge, four of the prisoners on the ship mutiny against their captors and escape, attacking the ship and destroying its controls and life support systems. The military crew onboard manage to bring the barge closer to safety, but all but one of the escape pods were destroyed in the destruction. Now the four prisoners and four soldiers must battle to use the last escape pod and escape to safety.
Gameplay
There are eight playable characters in the game, divided into two groups, 'Military' and 'Renegade'. The goal of the game is to defeat all the other characters in as short a time period as possible. Depending on how quickly the game is completed, a different ending is shown, with the best possible ending having the character make it to the escape pod and escape the ensuing explosion of the barge.
The game uses two punch buttons and two kick buttons on a six-button controller, with two buttons reserved for taunting the opponent and the use of some special moves. Similarly to Mortal Kombat, characters can be dismembered if they are hit on the winning round with any special move, although the game has no character-specific fatality animations.
The military characters have the advantage of getting to select their armor before a battle begins, with three pieces of armor for their body, arms, and legs. Each armor piece comes in light and heavy variety, with the difference of either size of the part being the special move it can use. Armor can be destroyed if it receives enough damage, disabling the use of the special move attached to it for the rest of the round. The renegade characters do not have any armor, and do not lose their special moves no matter how much damage they take.
Cyber Brawl
Before the game was released in America as Cosmic Carnage, the game received one major change. The human military characters were replaced with aliens, presumably to avoid the controversy raised by similar games such as Mortal Kombat. The Japanese and North American copies of the game are however, identical - region encoding forces Cosmic Carnage to boot in the US, however by holding , , and START during the introduction, the contents of Cyber Brawl (i.e. the title screen and human characters) will be swapped in.