After finishing off your final opponent, you get this rather odd message from Mr. Acme who looks a bit... Odd. He says you've got to haul your ass over to his mansion to get your money. Oo-err, a bit ominous, don't you think? Oh well, we wanna get paid for all this killing malarky, I suppose... It is awfully tiring, after all. To the Acme Mansion! For this mission, we'll be playing as Danny & Demi, just for fits and giggles. Also: the fact that, essentially, Mr. Acme is luring two 11-year olds to his big old lonely mansion amuses me to no end.

Mr. Acme's Mansion
♪ Mr. Acme's Theme ~Planned Double Cross~ ♫



Hey, swanky place you got here, Mr. Acme. He must have money to burn. The stage starts with your selected character going through the front door and expecting a warm welcome. But, for some reason, it seems like no-one's home... Weird. Maybe if we go a little further into the hall...



oh shit dogs!

Actually, the attack dogs are the least of your concerns, as stepping inside causes the chandelier to fall down on your noggin. The dogs just need to be avoided, as fighting them is pretty useless. Amusingly enough, amongst these ferocious canines is a cute little white puppy, that yaps at you and tries to gnaw at your ankles. Bless it! No time for the dogs now, though, where is that elusive Mr. Acme, and why is his house trying to kill us?



There he is! I guess he must be shy. You'd better chase after him, get in the lift!



Alright, now he's just being awkward. At least we finally get a decent look at him... That's one pointy nose he's got there. At least his haircut is fitting, you could set your watch to that flat top! Anyway, he's hiding behind a bunch of crates which actually contain deadly sea creatures. Including sharks. Every couple of seconds, he'll yank the chain above him, which releases a stream of water- get caught in that, and you'll be swept away into the fish tank just behind you, which, as you destroy the crates, fills up with all sorts of nasty fish, taking a huge chunk from your health. What an asshole!

So, to get past here, you have to take it one crate at a time- grab them and smash them while making sure to jump over the stream of water when it appears, and keep it up until you break through. Maybe now Mr. Acme is willing to talk business?



No, of course he's not. Now he runs up the stairs like a bitch.



You now need to chase him into his office. The hall's not very long, but running is advised, as the lanterns on the roof, like the chandelier, drop as soon as you pass underneath them. Running full pelt is enough to avoid being hit. As you get closer, you might spot the helicopter... That'll be important later. But who's that in his office?



Hey, listen lady, we're here for Mr. Acme. You gonna get out his chair?



Welcome.
I am Acme's wife.
As we promissed, we shall pay you right now.

Oh, this explains everything. I thought that shadowy face between each stage was a little too feminine... Turns out that Mr. Acme is a henpecked wimp, and it's Mrs. Acme who's running the show! She definitely wears the trousers here. Well, I don't blame her really. All her husband's done since we've been introduced is run away from me. The guy just needs a little, uh, direction, and considering Mrs. Acme has created this vast conspiracy to get some rare art and eliminate all the people responsible for bringing it to her, I guess she's the best person to do it. OK then, show me the money, Mrs. Acme!



Hey, who turned out the lights?



HEY! Did you just shoot at me, Mrs. Acme?!



You know, I almost feel like I'm not wanted here.

Vs. Mr. & Mrs. Acme
♪ Counterblow ♫



After they kill the lights, fire a few bullets at you and leave a nice grenade to keep you company, the odd couple make their way down into the basement, locking the door to the escape tunnel behind them, as the office develops a serious grenade problem. Every few seconds, another one spawns, but you'll need them- keep out of their blast radius (which is admittedly a tall order, but just about doable) and, a few explosions later, the path to the escape tunnel opens up for you. Be careful when you're jumping down though, as you can get shocked by some stray electric wires on the way to the basement.



Hiding behind what appears to be a small table, Mr. and Mrs. Acme start throwing more grenades at you (they certainly like those things, don't they?) and you can't climb up the ramp to give them a well-deserved kicking. The solution is to grab one of the stray grenades, hope the fuse is long enough, and throw it back at them- if your aim is true...



... You'll knock them right to the floor, and they make one final attempt to escape in the lift behind them.

The ramp sprouts some stairs from seemingly nowhere, and there's no more fooling around- the final battle is about to begin! Get in the lift! Again!



Told you that helicopter wasn't just for show. Finally tiring of your antics- destroying their chandeliers, kicking their dogs, and generally rabble-rousing and making such a mess on the carpet- Mr. and Mrs. Acme try one last time to finish you off for good, by taking flight and... Throwing more grenades at you. Unfortunately for them, they left behind their special rocket launcher, which you'll be using for this fight- it's got infinite ammo. I guess it comes with a free bandana, then. This fight is pretty simple, really, you just need to avoid all the grenades that the pair throw at you, and hit the helicopter with as many missiles as you can. You haven't really needed it up until this point, but you can aim the rocket launcher upwards... But the shots tend to veer to the left of the right, so you'll have to bear that in mind. After five or so direct hits, the helicopter finally gives up the ghost, and explodes...



SLAM! Amazingly enough, Mr. Acme survives the fall, but his health meter goes down into the yellow...



... And then his wife lands on him, which finishes him off. She's about to get up, and...



Oh, shit.

This game rules.




After you defeat the gruesome twosome, you get your final score (ignore mine, I was cheating like there was no tomorrow in that run), Mr. Acme's TV gets switched off forever, and you get the end credits. The ending isn't anything too special, but each character gets three different pictures in the credits roll. I picked Danny and Demi for reasons other than a lame "hurrrr Mr. Acme is a paedo" joke, you know...



Aww, isn't that nice? They spent all their winnnings on cakes, bless 'em! If I had 4031000 Swiss Francs, I'd totally do the same thing, you know. Despite being professional assassins, maybe Danny and Demi are just honest-to-goodness normal folks, like you or...



OH GOD WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO THAT POOR DOG?!
Are they... shaving it and drawing all over the flesh?



Is that... DID THEY SET FIRE TO MICKEY MOUSE?!
(If you zoom in, you can see a girl vaguely resembling Snow White, so they probably did)

Danny's smile in that picture will haunt me to the grave.
On a lighter note, let's talk briefly about some of the staff in that staff roll. There's not a huge amount of information out there about the development of The Outfoxies, but the Hamster livestream for the ACA release revealed some interesting details, as translated by michelentongs on Bluesky (thanks to HokutoNoShock for pointing this out) which is where we get the following info. The director, Masateru Umeda, joined Namco in 1991 and was stuck making quiz games for a while until, after saying he'd make one more, he was allowed to pitch his own action game. A big inspiration was actually Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins / Makaimura series with an emphasis on traps in an ever-changing world, but those kinds of games weren't as popular at that time... But Street Fighter II was. So, The Outfoxies took the direction of a platformer with a versus fighting focus. Even as far forward as 1995, things can be traced back to a game from 1985... Video game history is interesting, huh~




So, that's The Outfoxies, then. An arcade-only release until it was ported 30 years after the fact that most people have only heard of via emulation. Me included (I was on it in 2008, I got here first, you can't call me a poster). It's fair to say the game got pretty limited distribution, especially outside of Japan (a World ROM set exists with some very minor differences, but as far as I'm aware there's no English-specific flyer out there, here's the Japanese flyer for you). It's pretty obvious why it was never brought to the home consoles, though- the 16-bit systems simply wouldn't be able to keep up with the constant scaling and camera-panning demanded by the game, and, judging from Namco's initial Playstation releases, they wanted to push forward with their 3D work, like Ridge Racer and Tekken, rather than release a 2D title... Even if The Outfoxies still looks pretty amazing. Yes, yes, I know that GameFan Vol. 3 Issue 8 listed the game as having an impending Playstation port, but look at that list of games- aside from the 'compilation disk', none of them came out on PS1, so I'm convinced GameFan just made shit up, I don't believe it was ever going to happen. In any case, that's all moot as you can now play it at home, but more on that in a minute.

Although I've basically covered the single-player mode for you, the real reason to play this game- much like Smash Bros., admit it- is the multiplayer aspect. Although only two people can play at a time, each match is still frightfully hectic, and the extremely varied nature of the seven available stages (chosen randomly in two-player mode, sadly) means that it's not likely to get stale too quickly. Is it a balanced, finely-polished experience? Oh, hell no, this game is messy at points and not especially tournament-friendly, with some of the complaints pointed out on Game Catalog @Wiki being that there's no mirror matches, Betty Doe is considerably better than the rest of the cast due to her accuracy, the inabilty to select stages in versus mode meaning some characters are at a big disadvantage on some stages... Besides, as a single player game, The Outfoxies is rough- the Acme Mansion stage is really fun, but after the third stage the computer opponent stops playing around, and, in a blatant bit of cheating, takes slightly less damage and starts hitting you for much, much more, which makes it rather frustrating at points. Additionally, the camera zooming in and out can cause severe motion sickness in some players- I don't suffer from it myself but I can absolutely see the constant movement making people sick, and there's no real way to fix that.

However. Messy and scrappy as it may be... I love The Outfoxies. The graphics are gorgeous, completely different on each stage, and all the little touches give it a lot of charm. The music is equally excellent, and the sound effects (including Mr. Acme's voice-distortion) are spot on. More importantly though, there's no game out there Like The Outfoxies. People constantly refer to it as a Super Smash Bros. predecessor or a 2D Power Stone, but it doesn't really feel like either of those games. While not true for every stage, most of them change so dramatically during the fight that they're basically characters in their own right, and while it's not exactly balanced or fair, it doesn't matter to me too much. I think something that speaks to the appeal of the game is, when the ACA version came out, I was catsitting at my parents' house and my brother came over where we played a few matches. He instantly took to the game and we had a blast. There's not many games that can do that, and so I feel The Outfoxies is at the top of its very own league, and every self-respecting video game hero should to play it with a friend. Remember- Kill your enemy by any means!


And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!




As mentioned, the World version of the game is supported by MAME- how wide a release it got is unknown.

But there are some very minor differences between this mysterious World version and the Japanese one.

First, the title screen has The Outfoxies written in katakana as a subtitle. The intro and all cutscenes are subtitled too.

Speaking of the intro, this is the main change as far as we can see- Bernard White, Professor Ching and Danny & Demi's profiles are different:

World Japan
Bernard White A bio-tech engineer with super human strength. An experiment resulted in him losing his hand. He now has an artificial hand made of steel. The giant who is breaking the world record of massacre again and again with his supernatural strength and artificial hands specially made of steel.
Professor Ching Though partially handicapped, he is a famous master of Chinese martial arts. He is also a famous master of Chinese martial arts.
Danny & Demi The ex-Siamese twins, seperated by a train crush. The malicious twins, born in the laboratory of an insane physiologist.

I'm not going to lie, I burst out laughing at Bernard's Japanese bio. The world record of massacre indeed!




Next, The Outfoxies would not receive a home port for thirty Earth years.

This would finally change in 2025 with the Arcade Archives release for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Switch, Switch 2 and Xbox Series.

Dropped almost completely unannounced on December 18, 2025 as the 499th ACA release (the 500th would be Space Invaders, and you know what, that's fitting), this is a direct emulation of the arcade game and seems pretty solid. As it uses the more modern Arcade Archives UI, you've got a pretty solid feature set- Original Mode where you can fiddle with options, Hi Score Mode to get the highest score on one coin, Caravan Mode to get the highest score possible in 5 minutes, Time Attack Mode (ACA2 only, that means PS5, Switch 2 and Xbox only) to beat the game as fast as possible, plenty of screen options, all the original game settings availble to change, fully configurable controls, save state and rewind support, a manual that explains how to play and has the original instruction card to look at and the ACA2-only Variable Refresh Rate option. It is, sadly, missing online play, but you know what, I genuinely didn't think this'd ever happen (I'd convinced myself the game would never be rereleased because of the violence, especially regarding Danny & Demi) and there's only one edit (the red-and-black flashing TVs in the attract mode flash less intensely) so I'm happy people can experience THE OUTFOXIES in the comfort of their own home without emulation.


The Outfoxies - Unofficial Soundtrack

Alright, this is a little redundant now. See, in the before-times of 2008, the official soundtrack release for The Outfoxies- Namco Game Sound Express VOL.20 The Outfoxies- was not ripped and available to find on the internet. So, I ripped it myself using the internal sound test in the game's test menu... Unaware that the sound emulation wasn't correct and a lot of the percussion samples weren't being emulated. OOPS!! As a result, this is not how the game is supposed to sound, like, at all. Still, I've kept it here in case you're a sicko who prefers how this sounds.

This also has two songs that aren't on the CD soundtrack- the music that plays when you're prompted to continue, and a 'stereo check' track, used to test the speakers in the arcade game, that happens to be the intermission music from Pac-Man. So that's nice. You can find the official soundtrack elsewhere though, so maybe do that!


And after the harsh battle, Mr. and Mrs. Acme disappeared forever...



... Or did they?!

Your contract is over now, go and buy some cake! And, er, head back to the main page.