Double Dragon:

Billy and Jimmy Lee begin their martial arts journey in a war against the Black Warriors. Seeking to find a weak spot in the brother’s armor, the Black Warriors kidnap Billy and Jimmy’s friend Marian in the streets and hold her hostage, taunting the Lee Brother to follow them into their turf.

Beginning in a city slum, players can play solo or together as the Lee Brothers and start pounding on the gang members that kidnapped their friend. Two of Double Dragon’s innovations were that it could be played simultaneously with another player and that hidden moves existed that players could perform. Headbutts, elbow smashes, hair pulls, and other attacks can be utilized by the Lee Brothers to make sure the Black Warriors pay for their crimes. Outside of the city slums, the fight expands to a factory, forest, and eventually the headquarters of the Black Warriors. If Billy and Jimmy are successful in defeating the leader, they will finally duel each other to find out who’s taking Marian home as the true hero.

As a staple game in the genre of beat’em ups, Double Dragon plays just like the original arcade cabinet on the iiRcade. Even better, the game is pre-loaded on all iiRcade cabinets. Though more advanced games in the genre would quickly surpass what Double Dragon brought the gaming industry, it still holds up as a must-play.

Double Dragon 2:

Released just a year after the original game, Double Dragon 2 took the essence of what its predecessor offered and refined the formula to make for an excellent sequel. The second adventure of the Lee Brothers starts with a shock, with Marian being gunned down by the leader of the Black Warriors.

While the first Double Dragon could feel sluggish at times, Double Dragon 2 sets the perfect pace of speed and control for a more playable experience. The punch and kick buttons of the second game may confuse beat ’em-up players at first, as whatever direction you are facing will indicate which button will attack in front of you. For example, if you face the left side of the screen, button one will punch, where button two will perform a reverse kick. This changes when facing right, as button two, will now punch, and button one will perform a reverse kick. This does take a few minutes to get used to, mainly if you just played the original Double Dragon, but it also becomes an excellent addition to thinking about how your attacks will change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=TLGGyu4Q7mNdcDowODA1MjAyMQ&v=Kpqej7Ja5Mc

Players will also find the challenge factor to the game increased and will need to mix up their attacks and strategies to beat their foes. For example, players of the original Double Dragon will note that the elbow smash was the key to easily defeating most enemies. This same attack is available in the sequel, but the enemies are often too intelligent and too fast to walk into repeat attempts at the move.

As the most rounded game in the series, Double Dragon 2 plays and performs excellently on the iiRcade. The sequel also takes top honors for the best soundtrack among the games and sounds terrific on the iiRcade’s speakers. So if you can only choose one Double Dragon game to play, Double Dragon 2 is the best route to go.

Double Dragon 3:

The third arcade installment of the Double Dragon series finds the Lee Brothers traveling the globe searching for the Rosetta Stones. On their journey, they will travel to China, Japan, Italy and finally unveil the mystery of the Rosetta Stones in Egypt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxe6LhBBkI&list=TLGGsHsi6-wRpNEwMTA1MjAyMQ

You will want to bring a buddy with you to play co-op in this game as the enemies pull no punches. No matter what stage you are in, the enemies are extremely punishing and can knock you down as soon as you stand up unless you learn to move quickly. If you get stuck, it will be up to your co-op partner to help break some faces so you can gather yourself for a minute.

Thank goodness the iiRcade allows unlimited coins for this game, as not only will it allow you to continue after you find yourself taking a cheap beating, but also so you can purchase power-ups. At the beginning of almost every stage, you will find a shop to buy additional fighters, energy, weapons, and more advanced fighting techniques. If you wanted to get these items on an actual Double Dragon 3 arcade cabinet, you would need to pay another quarter to get them. Even with all the power-ups, though, cheap attacks from the enemies can put you down and out quickly and strip away those precious upgrades.

Compared to the previous two games, Double Dragon 3 sits far below the pecking order of games to enjoy in the trilogy. Therefore, only those intrigued by its significant differences from its predecessors or the most hardcore Double Dragon fans should check it out.

To see all the games available on the iiRcade system check out https://store.iircade.com/games.

The post Double Dragon Trilogy iiRcade Review appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

On account of a seemingly endless series of non-gaming related distractions (sometimes referred to as life), I’ve been regretfully slow at responding to some of the great reader questions that find me on social media.

Let’s take a look into the digital mailbag and see if we can’t rectify that situation.

Q) Regarding your coverage of 16-bit fighting games, wondering if you’re planning on continuing on with 3D titles (some of my favorites to date).  Also what was the worst fighting game you played back then?

I honestly gave consideration to carrying on with the fighting game coverage into the 3D foray when titles like Virtua Fighter and Tekken and Battle Arena Toshinden came onto the scene.  In fact, it could be argued that the transition to pseudo 3D began even earlier than these when games like Ballz 3D came to the 16-bit platforms.  The trouble, I soon discovered, was that there is no definitive point to stop.  It could very easily be argued that 3D fighting games from those days never stopped being produced and still exist today.  One of the problems of writing for a retro-centric mag is that there is no clear and concise line between what separates modern from vintage.  And if there were, it would be forever advancing as newer hardware is a very frequent cycle.

In short, this is the long way of saying that while I do remember that transition to 3D well and respected it at the time for what it was, stopping the coverage at the conclusion of the 2D era made for a good bookend.

As for the worst – that’s tough!  I had some very dubious titles in my Genesis collection while waiting for SFII; Street Smart, Fighting Masters, Slaughter Sport.  I think one of the worst though had to be the home port of Pit-Fighter.  Atari had beat Mortal Kombat to the punch (no pun intended) on the whole digital scanned characters in a one-on-one fighting game but abysmal controls and some of the choppiest animation in existence at the time made this one of those rare instances where it couldn’t go back to the rental store quickly enough!

Q) You seem to cover the Amico a lot but rarely talk about the new VCS.  Why play favorites?

I do try to treat all new retro-themed hardware equally but the VCS is a tough sale for me.  While it is admittedly nice to once again see the Atari logo on a new piece of hardware – especially one with some wood veneer face plating; the price and purpose of the new VCS really make it difficult for me to even understand what they are attempting or who it’s for.

It is essentially a very pricy Linux box with an included 2600 emulator.  Already there are instructional videos appearing online on how to get the UI to work on any PC.  Worse still, at $300 without a controller, and the fact that titles purchased outside of their Vault system aren’t cheap, it’s really encroaching on next gen prices to play some titles that are available just about anywhere else these days (for considerably less).

Again, no bias intended but unless the hardware cost comes down substantially or they begin to get some exclusive killer apps, the Flashback 9 Gold with its 110 titles, two controllers and 720P output that I picked up for $50 will probably retain its entertainment center location.

Q) What is your feeling on this Next Generation madness?

I am usually a sucker for the latest and greatest hardware but have bowed way out of the mess that has been the Playstation 5 and XBox Series X launch.  Sony and Microsoft did consumers no favors when releasing (just before the holidays, no less) hardware that they knew couldn’t keep up with consumer demand.  It’s no industry secret that Covid has severely limited raw material production and stymied shipping times and, as predicted, resulted in a situation where demand severely outweighed supply.

This isn’t the first time we’re seeing this and it surely won’t be the last (a very famous example of this technique being used to manufacturer extreme demand would be Nintendo with the NES Classic Edition) but it feels like the public in general is extra antsy of late – due, in no small part I’m sure, to political unrest, Covid-induced isolation stir craziness and the arrival of government stimulus checks.  It’s all adding up to a fever pitch where product is being purchased up by scalpers who are demanding (and getting) exuberant money for the hardware.

The worst part about this all is that this is possibly the most unnecessary hardware generation in the history of home gaming – the reality is that 85% of consumers don’t even own displays powerful enough to capitalize on the hardware’s increased video output and there is no exclusive “next gen” software slated to be released for the next two years.  In short, waiting on this one makes a lot of sense.

Q)  Why hasn’t Nintendo released an N64 Mini yet?  What do you think will be the next retro console to get a mini?

As to why Nintendo hasn’t released an N64 Mini, I can only speculate.  The most likely answer is that Nintendo, being Nintendo, marches to the beat of its own drum.  They don’t seem overly concerned with what’s going on in the industry at a given moment, instead opting to release products that no one sees coming.  Another way of saying it is they generally like to be trend setters, not followers of trends (even the ones they create).

Aside from that, Nintendo is in a strange position.  Unlike many of the other retro minis being produced, Nintendo is still a very active company in the current console and handheld generations.  They still manage to make millions upon millions in selling their retro games across all of their platforms (both physically and in their e-shops).  Often times their biggest competition on these things is themselves.  So while no one doubts an N64 Mini would sell extraordinarily well, it’s very possible Nintendo doesn’t see the need to open a factory to manufacturer the new hardware when they still have many of the titles available from the system’s library available for purchase already.

As far as what will be the next retro mini – this logic is the opposite of my answer above.  Companies that are not currently active in the industry have a great opportunity to capitalize on licenses and hardware that has been lying dormant for decades right now.  If you were a rights-holder to something like 3DO or CD-i or Amiga CD32, this would be a gold mine opportunity.  Strike while the iron is hot.

If you wanted my prediction, I’d take the easy way out (since it was already confirmed) and say it’ll be another from Sega.  Which one, however, that’s a bit tougher.  Most are hopeful it will be a Dreamcast Mini but I’m not so sure they would leapfrog to the very last piece of hardware they manufactured.  I would hope they would do a Saturn Mini next with plans to follow that one up with the Dreamcast a couple years after.

The post The RETROSPECTIVE Mailbag appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

As the popularity of the versus fighting grew in the early to mid 90s, it didn’t take long for developers and publishers to see the appeal in coupling the genre with licensed properties to capitalize on two trends simultaneously.  A wave of licensed fighters shared shelf space with the Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats, some more successfully than others.  Let’s take a look at a few such examples.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters

In 1989 Konami took arcades by storm when it released the belt-scrolling beat em up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (called Turtles II The Arcade Game for the NES home port) and subsequently followed this trend up with Turtles III: The Manhattan Project on NES but most notably in the highly successful Turtles in Time on the SNES and The Hyperstone Heist on the Genesis.

Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the reptilian quartet worked amazingly well in the Double Dragon style play dynamic, when the time for a new Turtles title for the home consoles happened to coincide with the Street Fighter II / Mortal Kombat craze of the early 90s, Konami knew what had to be done.

Released September of 1993 for the SNES and Genesis (with an NES port to follow in February 1994), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters was a one-on-one fighting games with Konami’s touch of quality (if that doesn’t mean much to you, think similar to Capcom in terms of control responsiveness, system-optimized art, animation and sound).

To compensate for the fact that there are, in essence, only four primary Turtle characters, Konami dug through the franchise’s rich comic book history to devise a playable roster of memorable and uniquely powered combatants (ten strong on the SNES and eight on the Genesis). The highly simplified NES incarnation includes only six in 2-player mode/ four in story mode. It also has the distinction of being the final game Konami would release for the 8-bit Nintendo hardware. Codes were also available to unlock the boss characters for playability in the SNES version.

Interestingly, Tournament Fighter was not a single game ported to three systems but rather three completely unique games developed simultaneously in-house by different teams. How this ended up in execution is very much as one may have surmised: The SNES version being the most complete, best controlling and best looking, the NES version representing the most simplified, scaled back incarnation and the Sega Genesis title falling firmly between the two.

While graphical and controller input changes between hardware platforms are to be expected, Konami went as far as to offer up slightly different stories for each of the Tournament Fighter incarnations to justify differences in the rosters.

Like one would expect, the TMNT Tournament Fighters trio represented a bright, cartoony and not overly violent take on the popular one-on-one fighting game trend. Absent here were any form of finishing move, making the series most similar in terms of inspiration to Capcom’s Street Fighter II with slightly less fluid control and depth. Still, in terms of licensed properties, Konami, especially the SNES version, did both the franchise and genre justice.

Justice League Task Force

Imagine combining one of the most consistently popular subjects (iconic comic book characters) with one of the hottest trends in pop-culture (one-on-one fighting games). It was a formula that simply could not miss. At least, that’s what Sunsoft and Acclaim were telling themselves when creating June of 1995’s Justice League Task Force for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Acclaim would publish this one, Sunsoft develop it and the actual trench work came from Blizzard Entertainment for the SNES and Condor for the Genesis. The games are similar on both platforms though there are some graphical and interface differences as expected.

The game is standard one-on-one tournament fighting fair, boasting playable incarnations of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, The Flash, and Aquaman. However, unlike TMNT Tournament Fighters, there is no real good vs.evil matchup potential here as all of the battling takes place between heroes.

While the notion of matching up some heavy hitters like Batman versus Superman (years before Zack Snyder would destroy the concept) in some Street Fighter II style competition was worth the price of admission alone, the actual experience is nowhere near as fluid and memorable as the titles that inspired it.

For better or worse, the premise of Task Force is that the six heroes mentioned above have to square off against one another and battle for supremacy. It would have been a comic book nerd’s dream if the good guy roster were cut in half to reserve the rest for Legion of Doom members. How great would it be to square off Superman with a Kano-like Lex Luther or play as Mr. Freeze with a move set like MK’s Sub Zero? If done correctly, this one could have had serious arcade appeal as well.

It should be noted that after taking out your fellow Leagers, there are a few boss characters to battle (AKA bad guys) – the ultimate baddie here being Darkseid. It would have been a great touch if Sunsoft would have insisted upon an unlock code to make the bosses playable characters in the grand tradition of Street Fighter II Champion Edition. It has some novel appeal
As it stands, however, Justice League Task Force never rises above mediocrity on either 16-bit but about the greatest thing that can be said for Justice League Task Force is that it proved comic book superheroes and one-on-one fighting games blend surprisingly well. It would be a concept revisited, more successfully, many times since.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition

The logic here, not unlike that of most of the licensed titles in question, makes perfect sense. Take a property that is piping hot and blend it with a video game genre that is also all the rage. More often than not, the results felt a little cash-grabby but, as amazingly, MMPR: The Fighting Edition is a decent one-on-one despite (or some might say because of) the license.

The game was released for the SNES, developed by Natsume and published by Bandai in 1995. Now interestingly a Sega Genesis one-on-one fighting game was published by Sega that was known simply as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in November of 1994. Further confusing things is that the name Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was used to describe five different games across a variety of platforms. This becomes especially confusing because there was also a SNES game from Bandai called simply Mighty Morphin Power Rangers but it wasn’t the one-on-one like it was on Sega Genesis but rather a side-scrolling beat ’em up. That, of course, is why the game we are discussing here would be known as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition.

Confused yet? Don’t be. The bottom line is that The Fighting Edition is essentially giant robot one-on-one clobbering. The Sega version alternates between fighting as the Rangers themselves and the Zords.

The Super Nintendo game uses four attack buttons while the Genesis just two while the Genesis version boasts a roster of 12 playable characters and the SNES 8 (9 with an unlockable). Neither game features finishing moves of any kind. Combination attacks exist in both – with the Super Nintendo cart making use of a special attack meter during bouts to unleash more potent offensive moves.

Strangely the Genesis game uses single-round matches while the SNES sticks with the more common 2 out of 3 wins advances formula.

Both games did an excellent job with the audio – capturing the theme song and the vibe of the show with their 16-bit chiptunes.

Surprisingly both games control fairly well and offer decent challenges. The SNES version gets the edge, though, in terms of depth, with deeper move sets and charge meters that allow for “Super Moves”.

Double Dragon (The Movie The Game)

This title represents the video game equivalent of life coming full circle. The original developers of Street Fighter claimed to have been largely influenced by the popularity of the belt-scrolling beat em up Double Dragon when working on Street Fighter II. SFII would then go on to influence the arcade (and home console industry) so much that Double Dragon would evolve to mimic it instead!

Even more coincidentally both Street Fighter and Double Dragon would have the strange distinction of being a video game that was turned into a live action film that then had a video game released based on the movie.

Called Simply Double Dragon (terrible marketing move considering individuals who search this title are going to find the original 1987 game instead) and produced by Technōs,  this one was released for the Neo-Geo arcade (MVS) and home console (AES) in 1995.  It was later ported over to the Neo Geo CD and even got a PlayStation conversion that, sadly, never saw a North American release.

The title boasts a roster of ten selectable characters as well as two boss characters (for a total of twelve playable fighters). In single-player mode, the player competes against all ten of the regular characters (including a clone of their own) before facing against Duke and Shuko in the game’s final two matches. The first opponent of the tournament is also chosen by the player.

To access the playable boss characters (Duke and Shuko), a code has to be inputted.

One of the unique aspects of Double Dragon when compared to the contemporary fighters of the time is the control scheme; which lacks specific punch and kick buttons. Instead, there are four attack buttons of varying strength and speed, which can indeed perform punches or kicks but only depending upon the character’s onscreen position. The player’s character and his or her opponent have a super move meter called the “charge meter”, overlaid upon the health gauge. The less health the character has, the quicker the charge meter fills.

The characters and settings are inspired of course by the 1994 Double Dragon live action movie directed by James Yukich with digitized segments of the film featuring prominently in the game’s intro.  Some of the levels even manage to integrate movie clips and actor stills into the backgrounds.

These days Double Dragon (The Movie The Game) serves as a reminder to a time when the one-on-one truly ruled the world and aside from some appeal to Double Dragon franchise (and Neo Geo library) completionists, has largely fallen into obscurity.

VR Troopers

Created by Syrox Developments and published by Sega, the second Saban teenage fighting team property got a one-on-one fighting game on Sega Genesis and Game Gear in November of 1995.

In this one players choose from any one of the three VR Troopers to face off against the evil leader Grimlord’s mutants and cyborgs and eventually Grimlord himself.

It offered typical one-on-one match-ups interlaced with cut scenes furthering a story mode that played out like one of the episodes of the show.

While combo moves were present, the game was largely chided for being overly simplistic and generic. With minuscule sprites, a shallow fighting mechanic and a soundtrack that was tinny and grating, VR Troopers would likely have been an average, to below average fighter a few years earlier. For the very tail-end of 1995, when the 32-bit generation was in full swing and Street Fighter Alpha tearing it up in the arcades, this 16-bit relic was immediately lost in the shuffle upon release.

A release for the Super Nintendo was also planned but ultimately got cancelled.

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story

Universal Pictures released a 1993 film called Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, which served as a semi-fictionalized account of the life and times of the legendary Hong Kong/American actor. As was virtually mandated when releasing a video game at the time, the material was used to inspire a one-on-one tournament cart of the same name.

Developed and published by Virgin Interactive – with distribution from console port Mortal Kombat beneficiaries Acclaim, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story arrived to Sega platforms in early 1994. It would be ported to the SNES and Jaguar shortly thereafter. A 3DO version was also in development but ultimately shelved – likely due to waning interest in the console.

While there is a story told in the game incarnation via cutscenes, some of which were taken directly from the film, the truth of the matter is they serve merely to setup the forthcoming bout with very little attention paid to logic or coherence.

In action the game follows typical one-on-one best 2 out of 3 falls format, uses digitized character models and straightforward button inputted (rather than combination) special attacks. Unique here were the concept of a chi meter which could be charged up by landing attacks successfully, which made for more powerful special moves. Additionally unique was the concept of fighting to earn a continue. If a player burned through his or her three continues during the tournament, beating The Phantom (the personification of Bruce’s fear who takes the form of an armored Japanese Samurai) in a match allows them to continue (though he was made nearly invincible). The Phantom Samurai appears again as the game’s final boss.

Unique at the time, the game was designed to support up to three players simultaneously, playing through the game cooperatively, or against each other in a battle mode on the 16-bit consoles (using the requisite multitap adapters of course).

Each character was given an unprecedented 100 frames of sprite animation. Even still, though, the game failed to win over critics and gamers alike, chided for being overly simplistic, having only a single playable character, stiff controls and lackluster graphics.

Interestingly, initial development of the game was to use the source material to inspire belt scroller beat ’em up project similar to Streets of Rage 2 before instead opting in developing a fighting title that was more in the lines of Capcom’s Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (surely due in no small part to the enthusiasm for the genre at the time).

Ranma 1/2 : Hard Battle

Just how big was the fighting game scene in the early 1990s? Properties that were relatively unknown in the United States even got official releases. Ranma 1/2 : Hard Battle arrived to North America in November of 1993 based on a Japanese manga/ anime of the same name that had virtually no presence here in the States at the time.

Ranma ½ tells of the truly peculiar tale of teenage boy martial artist Ranma Saotome who, as a result of a fall into an enchanted hot spring during a training journey, is cursed to become a girl whenever splashed with cold water, while hot water changes him back into a boy. His father Genma happened to fall into the spring of a drowned panda and became equally afflicted – only he takes on the form of a panda bear when splashed with cold water. How these guys shower is really anybody’s guess.

The setup is, of course, one of comedy so adapting it to a versus fighting game may not sound as natural as say a 2D platformer but somehow the gameplay works.  Developed by Atelier Double and released by DTMC, the game offers three modes of play: standard one-player tournament mode, a two-player competitive mode, and a two-player five-character team challenge mode. It boasts a nice roster of 12 characters (assuming you can overlook characters with names like Happy, ShamPoo and Pantyhose).

The bigger gimmick at play harkens back to the source material by offering characters in their natural as well as cursed forms: a male and female Ranma, a giant panda Genma, a human and bull form Pantyhose etc.).

The play control is unique in that rather than the usual series of directional movements capped off with an attack button, most special moves here are of the charge variety (holding the left, right, or down arrow in conjunction with an attack button for a few seconds and then releasing the attack button). The longer the button is held the stronger the attack.

In action the gameplay is slower and more user-friendly than the leaders of the pack at the time but its cheery nature, clean visuals and cast of characters that was nothing if not unique, Ranma ½: Hard Battle managed to carve out a place all its own in the flooded fighting game segment.

The post RETROSPECTIVE: The Licensed Fighters appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

As the Street Fighter II phenomena grew in arcades and then again when ports of the popular games came to home consoles, nearly every company in the industry suddenly found themselves in a position to capitalize on the frenzy. A complete list of the 2D one-on-one fighting games that resulted in the subsequent years surpasses 112 entries; many of these proving little more than flash in the pan titles, never to be heard from again once the craze quieted.

However, there were a few titles that managed to sell in decent numbers, establish a loyal following and, in many cases, spawn sequels – some leading to genuine franchises. Street Fighter II (and its dozens of iterations that followed) and Mortal Kombat (with its direct sequels) may have been the undisputed leaders of the pack at the time, but the following titles managed to share in the limelight:

 Killer Instinct

Created by Rare and released by Midway in arcades and Nintendo for the SNES in 1994, Killer Instinct was one of the more successful one-on-ones to come on the scene post SF2 and MK.

It borrows the basic move set and player controls from the SF2 school of play but emphasizes finishing moves like in MK. Unique to Killer Instinct was the concept of double energy bars: Rather than winning two rounds out of three, each player begins with two bars of energy. If a character finishes with his or her opponent’s first life bar, the fight stops and resumes, similar to a round, but the winning character still keeps whatever amount of energy he or she had at the time. The player who depletes their opponent’s second life bar wins the match and advances. 

Also, while combos were all the rage at the later stage of the trend when Killer Instinct came on the scene, KI was unique in that it offered players the opportunity to input combo breakers to stymie an opponent’s offensive charge. This meant equal emphasis on mastering button combinations on both the offensive and defensive side of the coin.

Finishing moves here are known as No Mercies and each character boasts a pair of these violent enders in the grand tradition of MK’s Fatalities though considerably less gory. Another twist on the formula is the Humiliation – or the combination finisher when your opponent is still on their first life bar which, rather than end them, causes them to dance.

It would perhaps become best known for its roster of fantastical fighters (there are, for example, a skeleton, velociraptor, android ninja, and werewolf on the list to mention a few), the game actually began development as a much more grounded Mortal Kombat style title known at the time as Brute Force.

Interestingly, the full motion video and audio clips were so data intensive at the time that every custom arcade cabinet actually contained a hard disk drive (HDD) strictly containing that information.

The game’s unique visuals were accomplished using early motion capture technology coupled to prerendered character models. Backgrounds, in the arcade, were treated like fully rendered movie files and thus boasted a nonstationary camera that scaled, zoomed, rotated and moved about the play areas.

The SNES version, due to memory limitations, was forced to do away with the fancy camera angles but maintained a lot of the arcade’s appeal with the prerendered characters, accurately depicted backgrounds and port-perfect combos and moves.

Killer Instinct did just about everything right, offering a unique character roster, deep combo and move sets, and, rare for the genre, a surprisingly deep backstory with individual character development. The downside was that it tended to fall in on the difficult side against the AI and demanded ridiculously precise timing to keep from being decimated (some combos could go on for as many as 80-consecutive hits, effectively ending a match in one sequence). However, it was timing, mostly, that prevented it from achieving the “legendary” status of its predecessors SFII and MK. By the time it came home in 1995, the 2D fighting game hype had tampered considerably; especially considering the move to full 3D gaming indicative of the 5th console generation was already well underway. Even still, Rare managed to move 3.2-million copies of the cart and has since developed a franchise out of the material spanning several areas of media, cementing its place as arguably the third most successful 2D fighting title behind the Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat empires.

A 1996 sequel was released to arcades that would be ported to the N64 as “Killer Instinct Gold” and a series reboot found its way to Xbox One in 2013, Windows 10 in 2016 then Steam in 2017.

Eternal Champions

If Killer Instinct was the Super Nintendo’s exclusive one-on-one killer app, then Eternal Champion’s was Sega’s. The Genesis and SNES shared 98% of the fighting games on the market, as developers were quick to port arcade smashes to both competing systems for maximum market reach. However, there were a couple of titles exclusive to each platform. In the case of Eternal Champions, not only was it a Genesis exclusive, it was developed from the ground up for the Sega home market; one of very few one-on-ones not to have originated in arcades.

Released in December of 1993, Eternal Champions came on the scene when the fighting game genre was red hot and Sega still wasn’t taking chances when it came to promoting their new golden child. A Slurpee flavor entitled “Eternal Champions Cherry” arrived to 7-Eleven stores throughout the United States that came in cups with character art on them and a temporary tattoo on the bottom. There was also a special cash and rebate promotion in July 1993 featured on MTV in a time where they still aired music videos. Electronic Gaming Monthly sponsored Eternal Champions tournaments in the United States as part of a roaming video game show. In short, you had to have been living under a fairly decent sized rock to have missed the launch of Eternal Champions.

The game featured a surprisingly rich story for a fighter. In it an omniscient being known as the Eternal Champion predicts that mankind’s reign is faltering due to the untimely and unjust deaths of key individuals throughout human history. Seeking to restore balance to humanity, the Eternal Champion gathers these individuals from the fabric of time moments before their death to participate in a fighting tournament. The victor would bring balance to the universe, whilst the losers would be returned to the instant they were taken to live out their deaths just as history intended.

Among those chosen – a bounty hunter from the future, a prehistoric caveman, a 1920s gangster, an Atlantean gladiator, an enigmatic alchemist etc. The story structured so that space and time were not factors allows Eternal Champions to experiment with an intriguing roster of combatants from many eras and periods. All told the games boasts nine playable characters and an end boss coming in the form of the Eternal Champion himself.

As is mandated for consideration in the genre, there are combo moves aplenty in Eternal Champions though saying they captured the joystick fluidity of Street Fighter II’s dynamics is certainly a bit of a stretch. It seems as though emphasis was deliberately placed upon charge attacks here, possibly to distinguish it from the hoards of competition. Additionally, Mortal Kombat’s Fatalities had all but dominated the scene by this point in time so it stood to reason Eternal Champions would be sure to include some variant of the concept. What it offers is something called Overkills whereby a button combination must be entered in the final moments of a match and the opponent standing in a specific spot of the screen. Like a Fatality, this results in a spectacular, if oft violent, demise of the opponent but often integrating the stage’s background into the process.

Visually the game is a bit of a mixed bag – it boasts nice large sprites and backgrounds with an impressive amount of activity taking place. However, because of the Genesis’ limited color pallet and relatively restrictive memory, the graphics seem plagued with a grainy, washed out aesthetic. Sound and music, however, were masterful and made wonderful use of the 16-bit hardware.

Sales numbers are all but impossible to track down but the game was popular enough to warrant both a sequel on the Sega CD platform in 1995 (Challenge from the Darkside) and a pair of spin-off games, Eternal Champions’ ultimate fate was to fade into oblivion when Sega of Japan decided it was unwise to split their resources promoting two first party one-on-one fighting games and opted to focus its energy exclusively on the Virtua Fighter franchise.

Primal Rage

Atari knew that arcades in the mid-90s were chock full of quarter-carrying kids looking to show off their skills in a one-on-one fighting game and threw their proverbial hat into the arena with Primal Rage in 1994. The concept was certainly nothing unique: A one-on-one best two out of three match format tournament fighter complete with combo moves and finishers ala MK – but what made Primal Rage stand out against the hordes of similar fighters was the character roster. Each of the seven selectable characters was a monster of sorts; with characters designs mimicking dinosaurs, reptiles and primates.

Set in an alternate universe where a massive meteor strike devastated the planet, human civilization finds itself regressed into essentially tribes of Stone Age dwellers. The planet is now primitively referred to as “Urth” by the survivors of the cataclysms. Seven fearsome creatures emerge from their slumber deep within the Urth’s crust, worshiped by the primitive humans, who form segregated clans beneath the ones they follow, the battle for supremacy can only be determined by a winner-takes-all battle royale’.

The visuals were accomplished by using moldable armatures cast and airbrushed then filmed using stop motion animation. As a result, the end result is neither a pixel art graphic (Street Fighter II) nor a motion capped human actor (Mortal Kombat) but rather something in between.

Perhaps the game’s lasting notoriety is that it was ported to nearly every console imaginable at the time. After making rounds in the arcade, it was brought to the 3DO, SNES, Genesis, Amiga, MS-DOS, Game Gear, Game Boy, Jaguar CD, PlayStation, and Saturn. In short, if you had a console at the time, you could play Primal Rage on it.

Combos were a big part of the game’s appeal and depth but Primal Rage moved further away from the fluid joystick rolls with button presses that Capcom made popular and opted to instead focus on combinations that required multiple button holds with stick movements jammed in at the end. This worked decent enough in the arcade but proved terribly tricky for many of the home ports depending upon the platform in question’s button layout.

Stringing together hit combos in battle is a good means of getting puny humans to gather to watch the carnage and the player is free to squash, throw or eat them accordingly. This gimmick alone proved surprisingly amusing. And of course the gore between combatants is maxed out as well. Finishers in particular can be violent, bloody and occasionally humorous (one character literally urinates all over its fallen opponent).

Difficulty, as had been the trend by then in the genre, borders on ridiculous. To beat the game, the player has to beat all seven playable characters before taking on all of them again back to back on a single health bar.

The graphics vary wildly, as expected, given the sheer number of platforms that received a port with the “next generation” hardware at the time coming closest to matching the large characters and crisp backgrounds of the arcade.

Like so many games of the era, multimedia tie-ins were plentiful with Primal Rage toys, comics and novels finding their way to store shelves. The game, however, would remain the only entry in the franchise as development for a 1996 sequel was ultimately cancelled when Atari feared the industry had moved away from the genre enough to where profitability potential would be slim.

Fighter’s History

It is very possible Data East’s foray into the hottest genre at the time would have been little more than a flash in the pan like so many of the other entries on this list except for one little detail. Of all the one-on-one fighting games that flooded the market post-Street Fighter II, Fighter’s History was the one Capcom deemed the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back and decided to seek legal retribution.

Fighter’s History arrived to arcades in March of 1993 and was then ported to the SNES in May of 1994.

The game uses a six-button control configuration similar to Street Fighter II and its iterations; three punch buttons and three kick buttons, each with different strength levels (light, medium, and heavy).

This one offers a total of nine playable characters from around the globe, as well as two non-playable bosses at the end of the single-player tournament. The final boss and sponsor of the game’s tournament is revealed to be none other than bald, mustachioed Karnov; lead character of the older Data East action game of the same name.

One unique feature Fighter’s History brought to the genre was the concept of character weak points; or a single region targeted enough to where landing a hit causes dizziness and continued contact there results in greater damage to the life bar.

In terms of style, control, look and feel, the game does mimic Capcom’s Street Fighter II, perhaps more so than many of the rival titles being released around the time. So on March 16th, 1994, Capcom sought a preliminary injunction in California court to prevent Data East from producing, marketing or selling Fighter’s History anywhere in the world, alleging that the game infringed Capcom’s copyright in Street Fighter II.

Capcom alleged that Data East copied the distinctive fighting styles, appearances, special moves and joystick/ button combination attacks of many of Street Fighter II’s characters. Data East rebutted by saying that there was nothing unique about Street Fighter II aside from its immense popularity and that similarities between the two games were the result of both companies drawing upon the public domain of stereotyped characters (martial artists, pro wrestlers, gymnasts etc.)

In order for Capcom to get the injunction to proceed, they would have to prove that their copyrighted material itself had been stolen by Data East – in this case it would have been actual source code or game development assets.

Because Data East had developed its own game from the ground up, Capcom was quite unable to prove any such claims and the courts saw things in Data East’s favor. Sure, the games looked and felt similar but, the court reasoned, neither Capcom nor Street Fighter II invented the genre of the one-on-one fighting game. Even if they had, it’s not possible to copyright something so broad as a category of video game or control scheme (think about how many games mimicked Space Invaders’ style of play and control in the early 1980s).

Data East was free and clear to continue both in manufacturing and distribution of Fighter’s History and, what otherwise would have been yet another SFII clone in a time chock full of them, a piece of legal history was made in the process.

Two different sequels were produced: Fighter’s History Dynamite for the Neo Geo in 1994, followed by Fighter’s History: Mizoguchi’s Moment of Crisis (which never left Japan) for the Super Famicom in 1995.

Power Instinct

Atlus wanted in on the craze but needed something to stand out from the crowd. When they released Power Instinct to arcades in early 1993, the gimmick they settled on would be humor. The story is straight forward enough: You play as a member of the Gōketsuji clan, who are battling to determine who will replace 78-year-old Oume Gōketsuji as head of the clan.

It offers eight selectable characters and one unplayable boss character, Oume Gōketsuji herself. It’s not every game that has you battling it out fisticuffs style with a 78-year-old lady as the end boss but hey, Atlus wanted to stand out from the competition and this was as good a way as any to do it. Additionally it introduced a unique transformation feature: several of the characters can change their outward appearance and even their fighting style by executing certain moves.

In terms of style and gameplay, this one leaned more toward the Street Fighter school of design than it did the Mortal Kombat with fairly large sprites and bright pixel art. Visually perhaps its closest comparison would be to some of SNK’s contemporary efforts with the responsiveness of control usually associated with Capcom.

Additionally, further separating itself from the hordes of SF clones was the ability of characters to double jump (which makes the screen scroll upward) and run. Run attacks were also possible for the entire roster. Also particularly neat is the fact that most stages’ initial borders are in fact smashable and extend the background in either direction should you crash your way through them. What you won’t find here, though, are Fatalities or finishers of any kind or over the top goriness.

For the most part Power Instinct strayed little from the proven Street Fighter II formula but managed to introduce some genuine charm into the fold (the old lady’s slightly younger sister Octane is a playable character and one of her attacks involves throwing her dentures at opponents). It sounds zany and silly on paper but the play experience is surprisingly solid.

A fairly faithful arcade port was brought to the SNES in late 1993 by Atlas and while the game was also ported to Sega’s 16-bit hardware, the Genesis incarnation never left Japan.

While it was relatively successful in both arcades and on the SNES here in the west, Power Instinct has become a staple franchise in Japan where it spans 6 games, novels, soundtracks, calendars etc.

Shaq-Fu

It almost seems hard to believe now as few, if any, present day athletes are quite as multimedia friendly as Shaquille O’Neil was in the early 90s but here we had a basketball player turned actor turned rapper turned video game hero. And this was well before his Icy Hot commercials.

In corporate America’s defence, they did realize that forcing a manufactured “phenomenon” down society’s proverbial throat would be much easier if done so on the grounds of something that we were already obsessed with… And thus was born Shaq-Fu.

Electronic Arts and developer Delphine Software needed only look at the trending numbers to realize the one-on-one fighting game scene was red hot and while they surely wanted a piece of the arcade pot, the world would instead receive a pair of 16-bit home titles in late October of 1994.

What passes for a story here is that Shaquille O’Neal happens upon a dojo while heading to a charity basketball game in Tokyo, Japan. After speaking with Leotsu, a martial arts master, Shaq is convinced to travel to an alternate dimension, the Second World, where he must rescue a young boy named Nezu from the clutches of an evil mummy.

No major concern there, fighting games rarely rise or fall on the merits of backstory alone; this one would need fluid controls and strong gameplay mechanics to compete with the industry leaders. Did it deliver? Well let’s just say there was once a website called shaqfu.com that was dedicated to the cause of rounding up as many copies of the cart for decimation as possible.

So it’s THAT bad then? Actually, no. There are far worse one-on-one fighting games on the consoles floating about. Slaughter Sport on the Genesis and Rise of the Robots on SNES spring to mind to mention a few. Shaq-Fu’s biggest weakness is clunky, slightly delayed control but it contains all of the trappings for which the genre is known: A decent roster of playable characters, combination induced special attacks, even finishers and a blood code for the SNES version!

Amazingly enough, while the presentation of the material is pretty similar in both versions, the Genesis version comes out on top with more selectable characters (12 vs 7) and three additional stages. It is also credited for boasting the better music while the SNES benefits from a larger color pallet/ crisper visuals, especially in the background art.

Though the game doesn’t resemble Mortal Kombat in execution, the process of creating it was surprisingly similar. Delphine applied the same rotoscoping techniques as their 1992 title Flashback: The Quest for Identity, whereby human actors were filmed against a Blue Screen in studio before being digitized and drawn upon by artists using a Silicon Graphics SGI workstation.

In this instance the actors were used more as reference points for rotoscoping animated images than MK’s approach of simply animating the actual actors as the final result.

In practice the game is simply average – the biggest complaints coming in the form of laggy controls, inconsistent special attacks and computer controlled opponents attacking with precision nearly impossible to match by controller inputs. Additionally many players attest that the only strategy that seems to work for victory is to settle upon a single move (like Shaq’s forward lunge kick) and to simply spam that button until the opponent’s life bar is depleted.

Despite mediocre reviews at the time of release, this one has achieved absolute infamy as one of the worst video games ever created since. Game Gear, Game Boy, and Amiga did receive ports shortly after the 16-bit versions made their rounds.A direct one-on-one sequel was in development for release in early 96 for the SNES and Genesis but ended up on the cutting room floor on account of mixed reaction to the first one. A sequel, titled Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, would eventually be developed and was released in 2018.

Power Athlete

For reasons entirely unknown, Power Athlete just may boast the highest number of official names of any game on our list. Developed by System Vision and published by Kaneko in 1992, Power Athlete was released to the SNES as Power Moves and Genesis as Deadly Moves. The differences, as was so often the case then, had all to do with what Nintendo deemed too violent for its audience while Sega presented a more unfiltered version of the material. However, unlike games like Mortal Kombat and even, to lesser degree Shaq-Fu, the differences here are nearly entirely relegated to things like the game’s title and boxart.

Gameplay is virtually identical on either platform and, unlike a majority of the fighters at the time, doesn’t allow the player to select from a roster of characters in story mode. Rather, the only option here is to use a generic martial artist named Joe and to take him across the globe in a series of one-on-one/ best two out of three match battles.

Fortunately the entire cast of warriors (exception- the final boss, Ranker) are available in the 2-player versus mode, each coming with a unique set of moves, strengths and weaknesses.

One unique feature to Power Athlete is that points accrued during matches could then be applied to upgrade character attributes.

Control is fairly decent with a single caveat – Power Athlete was one of the rare 2D fighters that allowed for movement on the z-axis (foreground and back), meaning pressing up and down on the directional pad moves the character further back or forward rather than jump and duck. This also means that jumping is relegated to a button on the controller. While it doesn’t make playing the game particularly difficult per se, it does take some adjusting for individuals accustomed to the plug & play control scheme of most of the top entries in the genre.

Also absent here are finishing moves of any kind. Violence and special moves are comparable to Street Fighter II and, in fact, more than a few could have been copied and pasted directly. The music, unfortunately, isn’t near as memorable.

All in all Power Athlete/ Power Moves/ Deadly Moves is a largely forgettable experience from an era crowded with forgettable experiences. It received only a single release in North America but was successful enough in its native Japan to warrant a trilogy – followed there by Battle Master and Ragnagard.

Weaponlord

When Weaponlord came out in 1995, already the one-on-one fighting game genre had splintered into several subsets, weapons based titles being one of these. Games like Time Killers in the arcade and SNK’s Samurai Showdown had come before and demonstrated the appeal of weaponry rather than strictly fisticuffs. Developed by Visual Concepts and published by Namco, Waponlord took the concept and brought it to both the Super Nintendo and Genesis platforms.

Project leads James Goddard and Dave Winstead, former Street Fighter alum at Capcom, left with plans to design a title for true enthusiasts of the fighting game genre. What resulted was a gritty, norse-themed weapon fighter with a ridiculously deep move-set designed to demand precision inputs rather than button mashing.

In fact, the game introduced a unique system whereby thrust-blocking, a combination input, was crucial for breaking up opponent combos. Additionally Deflect moves, essentially counterattack maneuvers were implemented here. Certain special moves, known as “Take Downs”, knock opponents onto their back with the potential for additional attacks while their foe is still on the ground.

Also unique, certain attacks could be performed on an opponent in mid-swing, cutting off a piece of clothing or hair in the process. Of course a game with this complex a move-set is going to offer Fatalities for maximum gore and closure to a match. They are known as Death Combos here.

Weaponlord’s characters possess between 9 and 12 special moves each and a password system meant returning to story mode at a later opportunity.

The biggest downside to this one is that the 7-playable characters were hardly memorable compared to the rosters of your Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats; and sprite animations were a bit stiff and slow to account for the game’s ambition of being compatible with early online play.

Visually the game is a very unique blend of traits with hand drawn background scans placed behind massive character sprites. And the soundtrack is appropriately epic.

All in all Weaponlord is a largely overlooked gem with a very steep learning curve and enough depth to satisfy even the most diehard fans of the genre.

Tuff E Nuff

Tuff E Nuff (known in Japan as Dead Dance) is a 2D fighting game developed and published by Jaleco for the SNES in September 1993.

Set in the post-apocalyptic future after the Great War of 2151, the story follows four champions as they fight in a large coliseum to determine who enters the great Tower of the Fighting King and defeat his six minions (before taking on the Fighting King himself). This plays out across ten stages in story mode.

As the story suggests, the game’s roster of playable characters is thin. The game starts off with only four characters, but implementation of a code can unlock the other seven characters.

The fighting system is based on four buttons: two for kicks and two for punches (light and fierce, respectively) and all characters have at least two special attacks.

The four main characters’ skills evolve over story mode, featuring an RPG-like element, special moves becoming slightly larger and more powerful after each group of opponents are defeated.

ClayFighter

ClayFighter proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that not all fighting games had to take themselves seriously to be fun.

It was released for the Super Nintendo in November 1993 and later ported to Sega Genesis in June 1994. Developed by Visual Concepts and published by Interplay Productions, ClayFighter would go on to become a franchise unto itself.

From a creation standpoint, the game’s design wasn’t all that different from the Mortal Kombat school of design only rather than photographing and animating human actors, clay models were photographed and animated into positions for the onscreen action.

The game features eight playable characters and one boss. Circus themed, bright and playful, it was a nice diversion in a particularly dark time in the genre. However, especially in hindsight, gameplay was stiff, slow and very uninspired. The first entry in particular is a rare case of large sprites working against the game as colliding hit boxes are all but inevitable so rather than develop offensive and defensive strategies, it’s usually a situation of button mashing to get more hits in than the opponent.

ClayFighter was followed by the Tournament Edition update in 1994. Two sequels were also produced: ClayFighter 2: Judgment Clay for the SNES in 1995 and ClayFighter 63⅓ for the Nintendo 64 in 1997. The latter of which had its own special edition with ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut in 1998. ClayFighter sold 200,000 copies by the end of 1994.

Brutal: Paws of Fury

Another entry to the genre of the more light-hearted variety came to us from GameTek back in 1994 in the form of Brutal: Paws of Fury

.

This one used 2D cell shaded graphics for a cartoony look and consisted entirely of a tournament for anthropomorphic animal combatants.

While it followed most of the trapping associated with the genre, Brutal was unique in that players begin with only ‘basic’ moveset (movement, three attack types, grapple), and have to ‘learn’ new moves during the single player story mode. Upon defeating two opponents, it’s off to a tutorial stage to learn a new technique (the first is a taunt that recovers their character’s health, followed by a special move or kata in subsequent revisits). By the time the player has fought all the way to the final boss, they would have unlocked their character’s full repertoire of moves.

Interestingly, this game was originally a Sega CD exclusive title that was then ported to other systems after the fact. It began with a roster of 10 playable characters that had to be scaled back to 8 for the 16-bit incarnations.

Brutal: Paws of Fury was released for the Sega CD, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, PC, Amiga, and Amiga CD32. An enhanced version, Brutal Unleashed: Above the Claw, was released for MS-DOS and Sega 32X in 1995.

Game play was, comparatively speaking, slower and less fluid than many of its contemporaries, though it could be argued that the game wasn’t looking so much to emulate the feel of the Street Fighter phenomenon so much as forge its own path with gorgeous cartoony visuals and a character leveling gimmick to add depth to the formula.

Sadly, by 1995 the popularity of the one-on-one fighting game had largely run its course, due in no small part to the transition into 3D capable console territory with the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn and soon-to-be-released Nintendo 64.  As such, Brutal was largely ignored for having arrived late to the party.

The post RETROSPECTIVE: The Best of the Rest appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

It is almost impossible to overstate Street Fighter II’s influence over the gaming world, arcades in particular, in the early 1990s. In just about every arcade the world over, gamers flocked around the cabinet – some to try their hand, others to simply watch the local experts make light work of all challengers.

A good part of the appeal and lasting success of the game, in my opinion anyway, was twofold. The first was that it made the act of gaming in the arcade a legitimate competitive event in a way that had been only hinted toward prior. Becoming good at the game equated to legitimate bragging rights. In a strange way a successful bout in the game became akin to an alleyway brawl or winning a backroads drag race on a Friday night. Neighborhoods, schools, blocks or even in-game characters could all be represented competitively without any real risk of violence.

Secondly, the learning curve was steep enough to where presentation, in addition to simply winning or losing, was a factor. The addition of elusive combinations to unleash powerful and visually stunning special moves (don’t forget this was before the internet) made being good a very exclusive club. Mortal Kombat, it could be argued, took this concept to the next level with Fatalities. Unlike some of the SFII cabinets, which actually had basic moves integrated into the artwork, MK took an even more secretive and complicated path to special movedom. These were games that thrived on rumor, magazine scrutiny, and the careful study of those able to make it happen in dimly lit arcades.

Time and again we witness Street Fighter II’s influence over the field but how did Capcom manage to do everything right? Surprisingly enough, they weren’t alone but it is a story seldom told now. Never told then. It begins with the original Street Fighter, which was released in 1987 and centers on the name Takashi Nishiyama. Many of what have since become one-on-one fighting game standards are in fact miscredited as Street Fighter II innovations but let us start at the beginning.

So omnipresent and viral was Street Fighter II’s arcade presence upon release by middle 1991 that many gamers began to question whether or not the game was a sequel at all. In fact, rumors began to circulate that the stylized “II” in the logo was chosen for effect and that there has never been a Street Fighter I.

There was indeed an original. Street Fighter, designed by Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, appeared in arcades in 1987. In it, the player takes on the role of martial artist Ryu, who competes in a global fighting tournament spanning five countries and 10 opponents.

A second player has the ability to join in the action as American martial arts rival, Ken. At his disposal, the player had three punch and kick attacks (each varying in speed and strength) with either character and three special attacks: Hadouken (fireball), Shoryuken (flaming uppercut), and Tatsumaki Senpu Kyaku (spinning aerial kick). Each of these powerful attacks was performed by executing joystick and button combinations. A second player entering the game did not allow both characters to advance through story mode together but instead interrupted the first player’s progress to a one-on-one match that would determine who got to continue playing.

The game arrived to arcades in two cabinet options – a standard stick and 6-buttons on each side (one for each player) and a touch sensitive version with rubber coated sensors that required players to literally hit in determining the strength of their attack.

Though nowhere near as popular as the sequel that would follow 4-years later, Street Fighter did receive many home console and computer ports (sometimes renamed to Fighting Street) and ultimately established many of the conventions that would eventually become standard in one-on-one fighting games; 6-button control schemes, combination special moves, best two out of three match format etc.

This would probably be the end of the story but a strange split occurred shortly after the first Street Fighter’s release that makes tracing SFII’s success a bit less cut and dry than expected. It begins with Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto leaving Capcom after having developed the original game and landing at SNK. There they continued developing and refining the concepts of the game they had created at Capcom.

Capcom, meanwhile, had intentions of continuing on in the Street Fighter franchise on their own but not in the way we’ve since come to expect. In fact their next entry into the fold was going to do away with the one-on-one fighting aspect altogether and instead become a belt-scrolling beat ‘em up in the tradition of Double Dragon.

They completed this game in 1989 and, running on CP system board hardware and decked out in its fancy new cabinet for presentation at arcade trade shows that same year, the name of the game was Street Fighter ‘89.

However, arcade managers were quick to note that this new “Street Fighter” had very little in common with the original and Capcom was quick to rename the title so as to keep the two franchises distinct. The new name it was given was Final Fight and development of a genuine Street Fighter sequel would again be shelved.

In the meantime Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, now at SNK, were working on a bigger, better Street Fighter to capitalize on increasingly powerful arcade hardware. They wished to retain as many of the traits that made their original title appealing (combo move special attacks, a global scale with fighters from all over the world, two out of three falls matches and so on) but had to leave all of the licensed elements of the original they created with Capcom.

Rather than two playable characters, their new game would have three and they would fight against eight computer-controlled opponents. When a second player joins in, this time, they would have the option of either playing cooperatively with player 1 against the CPU or competitively against each other. This game would be known as Fatal Fury and contrary to common misconception, it was developed simultaneously as Street Fighter II and released within months of Capcom’s official sequel to arcades in 1991.

The plot of Fatal Fury centers on a martial arts tournament known as the “King of Fighters”, held in the fictional American city of South Town and sponsored by known crime boss Geese Howard. Ten years prior to the event, Geese murdered a rival martial artist named Jeff Bogard. Now, Jeff’s adopted sons, Terry and Andy, along with their friend Joe Higashi, enter the tournament in the hopes of battling their way up to and getting revenge on Geese.

When comparing Street Fighter II: The World Warrior with Fatal Fury: King of the Fighters, it’s remarkable how similar the two finished products ended up being despite the fact that they shared no common development teams, or, for that matter, even knew about the other’s development.

One of the major differences between the two stems from Fatal Fury’s two-lane battle model. Unlike SFII, whereby battles are fought entirely on a single 2D plane, Fatal Fury features both a background and a foreground row. Players have the ability to “jump” between rows at any time except when battling against the computer, in which case the CPU essentially determines when it’s time to move into one lane or the other by moving its character there first.

The second difference stems from Fatal Fury’s attempt at simplifying the control scheme compared to that of the original Street Fighter. Rather than 6-attack buttons (high, medium and low punch and high, medium and low kick), Fatal Fury uses only three attack buttons: punch, kick and throw.

Still, there were combination moves aplenty. There were even characters with uncanny similarities – one need only look at Balrog and Michael Max to conclude that while they didn’t realize it, the two companies were thinking along the same lines when developing what each deemed the successor to the original Street Fighter.

Running on SNK’s Neo Geo MVS hardware, Fatal Fury shared arcade space in 1991 in countless locations with, and was largely overshadowed by, Street Fighter II. It did, however, still earn attention. So much so that within a year, SNK would release an entire sequel game by 1992 along with another fighting game developed by the other gentleman who had worked on the original Street Fighter (and is credited with coming up with the famous Hadouken); Hiroshi Matsumoto. His title would be called Art of Fighting.

Art of Fighting also ran on the Neo Geo MVS arcade hardware and could often be found inside cabinets containing both it as well as Fatal Fury. Art of Fighting took many of Fatal Fury’s attractions and added with them a unique scaling function during the onscreen action to help distinguish it from the quickly-flooding genre.

Interestingly, the game is set in the same fictional universe as serves as a prequel to the Fatal Fury series. Players here have two basic attacks (punch and kick) as well as a utility button that switches between punches, kicks, and throws. A fourth button is used for taunting. Taunting was used to charge a meter that allowed for more powerful special attacks.

The game follows a pair of students from the Kyokugen Karate Dojo, Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia, in 1978. Ryo is the son of the Kyokugen (translated to “Extreme”) Karate discipline’s creator, Takuma Sakazaki, and Robert is the wayward son of a billionaire family from Italy. The game is technically documenting the rise of Fatal Fury’s Geese Howard from corrupt police commissioner to crime boss of Southtown.

While all of this was going on, ADK & SNK were developing another one-on-one title, World Heroes; whereby a time traveling Doc Brown (no DeLorean, though) organizes a tournament for various fighters throughout all of history to square off against one another. As such many of the fighters on the roster are based on actual historical figures. The game was released in July of 1992 – right alongside Fatal Fury 2 and Art of Fighting; again often sharing an arcade cabinet with its brethren.

The early to mid 1990s will be forever remembered for birthing the one-on-one 2D fighting game and while a majority of the credit goes to Capcom for Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and Midway for Mortal Kombat, the truth of the matter is SNK built an entire empire of fighters (to date over 60 of them and counting) thanks to two individuals who never stopped tweaking their Street Fighter vision.

Nishiyama and Matsumoto would eventually bring their two SNK fighting franchises together in 1994 with a new series called King Of Fighters. This mashup, which allowed for team dynamics, would go on to become SNK’s flagship fighting franchise. In fact it took a chapter out of many traditional sports games books by coming out with annual updates adding new fighters to the roster and game mechanics to keep things fresh.

Then five years later a new type of mashup would manifest, one that saw the two longtime rival companies set aside their collective differences on a collaboration that was nothing shy of a fighting game aficionado’s dream: SNK Vs. Capcom (and Capcom Vs SNK; the first company in the title denoting the company behind the game’s development). The series pitted rosters from both company franchises in a battle royale’ for ultimate bragging rights.

Sadly SNK would file bankruptcy in 2000 while Nishiyama and Matsumoto would found an independent development studio they called Dimps. The ultimate coming full circle moment would then occur for the two men who had started it all when Capcom hired Dimps to do development work on Street Fighter IV and V.

As for SNK – new life has been breathed into the brand on account of the global resurgence of retro mini classic edition console interest. After producing the successful Neo Geo Mini in July of 2018 to commemorate the company’s 40th year anniversary, they followed it up with the Arcade Stick Pro in November 2019 and have announced plans for a third modular mini Neo Geo console at the time of this article’s writing.

The post RETROSPECTIVE: A Fight of the Heavyweights appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

My nephew is 11 years old.  He has just about every modern console known to man, a gaming PC, a powerhouse iPad and iPhone and the other day, in casual video gaming conversation, he happens to mention Street Fighter II.

I paused immediately, asking him how in the world he knows the original Capcom classic in a time when Street Fighter V is, itself, considered archaic with its release coming back in 2016.

“Uncle Jay,” he told me in a tone of mockery laced with sympathy, “everyone knows that Street Fighter II is the greatest fighting game ever made.” 

Huh!  I suppose I should explain that back when the original Street Fighter II rose in popularity in arcades, I was only a little older than said nephew is now.  In fact, I was of high school age at the time and spent weekends with my friends at the malls in the arcades. I can remember very clearly the first time my cousin and I encountered the cabinet.  We had both studied the moves lists in the pages of EGM prior in preparation of the inevitable day so that tossing a fireball at my unsuspecting opponent as Ryu would turn the tides in my favor. My cousin, similarly inspired but a bit lazier, decided Blanka would be his warrior of choice.  His logic? Tapping the punch button was all it would take to charge up electrically. Victory would be ours over a sea of imaginary opponents who were not aware of these advanced abilities. Or so we told ourselves.

Suffice to say – we both learned immediate lessons in humility that day.  Our one-trick-pony combo moves were seen, countered then used against us both by fellow human players and AI controlled opponents alike.  However, we didn’t leave that day defeated, in fact – quite the opposite. We were inspired. Inspired to come back again better prepared.  We would study up on all of our characters given move sets. The desire to play again, to practice against the computer, became an obsession in the months to follow.

Shortly thereafter, the first official home port came to the SNES and, both Sega Genesis supporters at the time (this was an era where most individuals working part time jobs and going to school could afford to support one system at most), the only way we could get our fix was to rent the Super Nintendo and the Street Fighter II cart from the local video store.  We did this every chance we could. There were occasional weekends where SFII was out so we’d come back with the system and Final Fight (which, sadly, ditched the two player co-op ability) in a funk of disappointment. We tried renting lesser game experiences – Pit Fighter, wrestling, boxing. None came close to duplicating the rush we were after.

That year’s birthday witnessed the depths of my SFII desperation when I picked up Fighting Masters for my Genesis.  My nephew may think he has a grip on the best fighting game ever made, but I’m sure I can enlighten him on several of the worst. 

Ultimately I caved and worked my way up to the SNES and Street Fighter II – in fact having purchased the cart even before getting the system.  The logic here being if we rented the console in the meantime, there would be no fears of the game being out for the weekend.

And as it would turn out – right when our skills had matured enough to be able to hold our own in the arcades, a new game, this one from Midway, appeared and began luring the masses over to its cabinet instead.  This one was called Mortal Kombat and while it played largely the same, it did away with the pixel art graphics in favor of actual scanned actors and, while the combo moves were certainly retained, this one introduced a concept that would forever change the one-on-one landscape:  Fatalities.

Gory and over the top finishing moves accomplished by button and stick combinations at the end of the bouts certainly had earned the attention of the masses.  A new rivalry was born immediately. And with no home ports on the immediate horizon, it was looking like heading to the arcades, moves lists memorized to the best of one’s abilities, and a pocketful of quarters was the only way to learn this new entry.

While all of this was going on, a strange multi-game cabinet from SNK was garnering more and more attention from its place in the corner.  Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat may have been getting all of the attention but these guys, the ones we remembered making games like Ikari Warriors and Alpha Mission on the NES, seemed to be taking this new one-on-one fighting game thing seriously too.

To many, it looked like they were trying to capitalize on the success of Street Fighter II’s popularity.  That incorrect assumption has lasted for many, many years. In a truly strange and fascinating tale, the real Street Fighter II was in fact an SNK arcade game.  In next month’s column we’ll take a look at how many of the staples of the genre are miscredited as SFII innovations and how Capcom tried to go after others for copying what was not, in fact, exclusively theirs in the first place.

The post RETROSPECTIVE: A Tale of Street Fighters appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

#17 : Dark Rift

Yet another fighting game joins the ranks on the Nintendo 64, but we still don’t have our first native fighting game, with all the released ones being re-released titles. Dark Rift comes from a cancelled fighting game that was intended for the Sega Saturn (so if you want to split hairs, maybe this is the first native-fighter on the console?), and sets us far in the future where a crystal is being hunted down that turns out to be a piece of a Master Key. This key was found a very long time ago in a tear in space. Upon being retrieved, the key burst into pieces and were scattered to alternate dimensions, thus creating the games titular Dark Rift. A tournament is being held by Sonork for possession of this key.

The roster comes with eight fighters, and two additional ones that can be unlocked by completing the game in single player mode (or with a cheat code if that’s your thing). Each fighter comes with their own weapon to attack with, and a list of their own special moves they can pull off. Naturally, everybody can punch, kick and jump all the same. Rounds are done in a best-of-five scenario instead of the traditional best-of-three, which makes them go a little bit longer and allows a bit more time to use each fighter. Now…whether or not you’ll want to spend that time with the fighters is up in the air.

Not a lot is noteworthy and amazing about Dark Rift, but it’s also worth saying that there’s not a lot bad and put-off worthy about it either. The fighting controls are awkward, utilizing all the yellow C-camera buttons. The backgrounds for the fighting areas look beautiful, especially if you’re using the N64’s RAM expansion. As far as in the game though, the best thing about it is probably the fact that the AI opponents will adapt to your style if you continue to spam the same attack. So if they start blocking you more efficiently, you might want to try switching stuff up.

Grade : C+
Price : Loose ($6) CIB ($20) New ($60)

#18 : Starfox 64
|

Starfox is a name that rings strong for any Nintendo fan, no matter what generation we’re talking about. Super Nintendo brought us the original title, so with everything making the jump to this 64-bit, 3D glory…it’s only natural that this hard hitter came along for the ride. Serving as a reboot of the series, the opening cutscene takes us through an accident on the planet Corneria caused by a scientist, Andross. He is then exiled to a faraway plaent, Venom, as a result of his actions. Years later, Andross stages an attack across the entire Lylat system of planets. From Corneria, the new Starfox team assembles consisting of Fox McCloud, Peppy, Falco, and Slippy Toad.

The game itself features branching paths, with only a few minor elements being shared. All paths start from Corneria, all of them end at the planet Venom, and at some point along the path you’ll cross with your rival gang of mercenaries, Star Wolf. Each path represents a different difficulty, with Easy offering less levels and therefore less enemies than the Normal and Hard paths. However you start off with the same number of lives and same stats for each vehicle, so the easier paths are less chances of losing those things.

Most of the levels are played in a corridor-style, where your ship will be represented at the screen, and the level spans out in front of you “into” the screen. You can fly to all extremes of the display, firing at enemies, dodging them firing at you, dodging natural blockages in the levels like buildings and asteroids. There’s even a number of rings to fly your ship through that all have varying results : replenish your ships, or your special bomb ammo, gain extra lives, as well as collecting special gold rings that can extend your ships shield bar.

It would be hard to put a damper on this game. It’s generally accepted as one of the greatest games of all time, being one of the hottest seller’s on the N64. Additionally, it’s because of this game that we were given the Rumble Pak, since Starfox 64 was the first game to utilize such a feature. Years later, it was also remade to be played on the handheld 3DS. Nothing can ever tear this game down from the throne that it sits upon, and it is a must have in any Nintendo 64 library.

Grade : A+
Price : Loose ($15) CIB ($40) New ($120)

Upcoming

As it may have been noticed I ended up stepping away from all the Chronicles stuff for a bit, but I’m back! Our next article we’ll be hitting our 19th and 20th games, International Superstar Soccer 64 and Tetrisphere. Things are going to be sporty and puzzly so it should make for an interesting read. As for the current situation of the Chronicles, I’ve just entered into the 60’s for the games, and my next streamed episode we’ll be covering Bio FREAKS and All-Star Baseball ’99. See you guys next time!

The post Nintendo 64 Chronicles [9] Dark Rift & Starfox 64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

A very long time ago, there was a spaceship passing close to Earth, carrying ore that had the ability to give life, when the ship crashed on the planet, scattering all of it’s cargo across the planet. Over time, ten humans discover rock pieces of the ore, which then grants them the powerful abilities of god-like creatures. Now, these chosen ten, seek the ultimate power : kill the other nine, take each of their stones, and become the most powerful creature possible.

Once again we get a fighting game to play in this library, and once again it’s brought to us by Midway. Think about that, this is now there seventh game on the console with their name plastered on it. However, pushing that aside, once you fire up War Gods it’s easy to see that this title pulls it’s inspiration heavily from another Midway fighting game, and I’m pretty sure we all know the one I mean. Everything from the style of fighting, the presence of fatalities,

Not much stands out on it’s own about War Gods, other than the fact that it’s just not all that good. Especially not two decades later. The animations are clunky, the character designs are cool at first but become quite stale. In all essence, this game is just a mod for Mortal Kombat 4 because that’s exactly what it plays like. Aesthetically, this game looks really cool but sadly that’s where the admiration stops. Because once you look under the hood of this hot rod, you’ll soon realize it’s just a clunker. But…I guess if you want to play a MK game without actually playing one, War Gods has your back.

Grade : C-
Price : Loose ($6) CIB ($15) New ($40)

#16 : Hexen

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Doom were set in a medieval-type setting? No? Well…me neither. But that’s pretty much what you get when you start playing Hexen. Taking place after the initial game in the series, this version of Hexen tells the story of three heroes who set out in a new realm called Cronos, in search of a Serpent Rider by the name of Korax. The Serpent Riders are a trio of baddies that were introduced in the first game. Korax’s power comes from his special bond with a Chaos Sphere, which gets used to warp everywhere and corrupt everyone to his side, amassing an army only nightmares could imagine.

While the game features three heroes technically, in reality only one will set out to track down and destroy Korax. You will choose which of the heroes you’d like to be, opting between a Fighter, Cleric, and Mage. The fighter is built for getting in close, toting massive melee weapons and moving the fastest of the three, while the Mage sacrifices speed for the ability to attack from a distance with spells. Lastly, the Cleric serves as a middle ground between the two classes, and is typically the best choice for when you’re initially stepping into and learning the game.

Surprisingly, despite not really enjoying Doom 64, I had a great time with this one. The vastly different characters not only offer something for any style player, but it also ramps up the replayability of the game. Much like Doom you’ll be going through levels looking for portals, eventually finding your way to a hub world. It’s these hub worlds that become key, as travelling between them is when you’ll fight your bosses, but it’s also how you progress to find and eventually (hopefully) eliminate Korax. The hubs will play a key role later in the game as well since there’s an over-arcing puzzle that will eventually need to be solved by connecting everything.

While the gameplay immediately feels very familiar, it just as soon sets itself apart. It plays like Doom but it doesn’t, and that’s a statement that’ll be really hard to fully describe unless you play the game for yourself. Which is something you absolutely should do because it is a ton of fun and well worth the challenge.

Grade : A-
Price : Loose ($10) CIB ($30) New ($40)

Upcoming

In regards to the stream, what’s coming up next is the most expensive game in the N64 library, Clayfighter’s Sculptor’s Cut which I’m excited for since I’d like to see if this thing is really worth all the hype it gets on the market. Our next article, however, we’ll be looking at another side-screen fighting game Dark Rift and an all time classic, Starfox 64. See ya next time when we’ll be doing some barrel rolls!

The post Nintendo 64 Chronicles [8] War Gods & Hexen appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.