LETTERS AND RESPONSES
ROB "CAPTAIN CAPCOM" PULL:
1. War Gods (what can I say, it's Midway)
That's all you need to say there.
2. Mortal Kombat series, except for MK2
Yeah, I suppose that's true enough. I hated Mortal Kombat 2 to death when it was first released in arcades, but it was probably because all the arcade operators cranked up the difficulty to the maximum limit allowed by law, just to keep the coins rolling from dipsticks like me who were desperate enough to see the fatalities.
3. Way of the Warrior
The first of many games tainted by the music of White Zombie (Jet Grind Radio and Sled Storm being two others that come to mind).
4. DarkStalkers (PS version only... and you thought Samurai Shodown 3 was asstastic on PS!)
I still do, actually. But it's not hard to imagine Darkstalkers on the Playstation being lousy. A friend of mine played the game on its fastest turbo setting in a futile attempt to keep from seeing all the missing frames of animation.
5. Street Fighter the Movie (sometimes you just have to ask yourself why...)
Sometimes it's best not to ask.
6. Final Fight Revenge (never let Americans develope fighters, please see note above about Midway)
As long as we're making blanket statements, I'd add Europeans to that list as well. Killer Instinct was tolerable, but anything on the Amiga (an older computer popular in Great Britain) is like passing a flaming kidney stone. If you're talking about Elfmania, you'd better add spikes to that stone.
7. Fighter's History (STREET FIGHTER II RIP OFF!!!!! Thats why Capcom sued their funky asses!!!!!)
Eh, I think Data East gets dragged through the mud entirely too much for this. Sure, Fighter's History is a shameless clone, and it's not very good, but... uh, wait a minute, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, World Heroes was practically IDENTICAL to Street Fighter II, and Capcom never bothered ADK about it.
8. Double Dragon on Neo Geo (NO COMMENT)
It's hard NOT to comment about this one, but if you insist...
9. Aggressors of Dark Kombat (this game shouldn't even be considered a fighter. This is the direct result of a Capcom ripoff gone bad)
Aggressors didn't have to be a bad game... it just was. I mean, combining the best parts of Street Fighter II and Final Fight could have resulted in an awesome game, but the problem was, ADK somehow forgot to add the best parts. They did put in plenty of frustration, though.
10. Rise of the Robots (this is just one of those games if I caught anyone playing, I would smack them in the face with a cold salmon)
You'd better keep one handy, then... Rise of the Robots was on a whole lot of systems, which means that someone could be playing it AT ANY MOMENT. Scary thought, huh?
CHRIS KOHLER:
The Strip
Fighter song was quite funny. And I can only
choose ten?!
Okay. Here we go:
It's kind of weird that you wound up picking only five, but what the heck, I'll take what I can get!
Tekken - Did
you know that in Japan, parents force their children to play
Tekken as a
punishment? Well, for all you know, it's
true.
I'd like to think so. Unfortunately, this would have the unfortunate side effect of turning them into braindead, Sega-bashing lamers.
Hmm... maybe that also explains why the Dreamcast did so poorly over there...
Fight For Life - you HAVE this game?!
No, no... even I'm not that crazy. I saw it over at a gaming party my friend held several months ago... his asked everyone who came to bring plenty of games and systems, and someone from Ohio had taken their (shudder) Jaguar along with several games... actually, I prefer to think of them as visual aids, illustrating why the Jaguar was stomped into the ground by its competitors.
Anyway, the guy had both Fight For Life and Checkered Flag, and the really sad thing was that I was more impressed with the 32X versions of the games they were trying to rip off. Fight For Life in particular was so stiff I don't even know if I could have fun bashing it here. Kasumi Ninja looks like a much more promising target... but unfortunately, it seemed like that was the only crappy Jaguar game the guy from Ohio DIDN'T have.
Fighting Street - only if you include WAVs of the vocal samples!
Why, you got some?
I would have posted some .WAV files, but I can't seem to get Fighting Street to work with MAME anymore... apparently, the newer versions of the emulator need different ROMs. That's fine, though... I recorded an imitation of the characters in the game, and while it sounds pretty dopey, it's actually not much different from what you'll hear while playing Fighting Street.
Capcom vs.
SNK Pro - Blow me, Capcom. You put together a game with MUGEN,
then want me
to pay extra for two fucking characters that should have been in there in the
first place? At least it was a "bargain" price of only
$40.
It's a good thing Capcom made amends with Capcom vs. SNK 2, and just in time... I've heard that their rights to the SNK properties expired the moment SNK itself did. It's a shame, because I'd like to see more of these games, but on the other hand, maybe it will convince Capcom to go another direction and give us a game I've been wanting for a long time... Sega vs. Capcom.
And I'll just
end by saying Strip Fighter II. I never played it, but hell.
Jess plus
naked jokes = comedy goldmine.
Thanks... I hope I didn't let you down!
JUAN SOLER (AKA JOHNNY UNDAUNTED):
Hello:
I noticed that you
need readers' input in your next Fighter's Misery article. Too be honest, Double
Dragon for the Neo-Geo wasn't that bad, even if it's just a generic fighting
game with the Double Dragon name in it. I think Gowcaizer was worse, since it's
only saving grace was Masami Obari's habit of drawing his female characters with
boobs bigger than Lara Croft's.
Oh, man, Gowkaizer! That
was a perfect candidate whose name somehow escaped the ballot. I wouldn't
even say that the breasts in that game were a redeeming quality, because the
women are so incredibly thin... to quote Chris Kohler, they look like "stick
bugs with boobies". I did like the concept of taking weapons from defeated
opponents, but that was hardly a new idea, and Technos didn't do it nearly as
well as Capcom had.
Still neither of them were as bad as Double
Dragon V: The Shadow Falls. Talk about a loveless cash-in. The cartoon itself
was a mockery of the Arcade game, but was there any need to make a fighting game
based on it? The saddest fact is the fact that
Tradewest sold this bad
spinoff as if it was a sequel. I wish a painful death to the staff of Leland
Interactive, Tradewest and Mike Abbot for ruining one of my childhood's favorite
arcade game. So Double Dragon V gets my vote for your next Fighter's
Misery.
Oooh... I didn't add that to
my list of reviews, either, and I'm not sure why, because you weren't the only
one who chose it. I may have to remedy that mistake, because even I didn't
like this game that much. I don't remember the cartoon very well, having
seen only half an episode of it, but if it inspired Double Dragon V it couldn't
have much good.
I'm surprised you didn't put War Gods as a candidate.
Gamepro actually wrote an entire article about it and touted the game as the
most evolutionary fighting game since the original Street Figher 2. Add that to
the many reasons Gamepro sucks.
The really sad thing is that GamePro inspired another magazine, Expert Gamer, to change formats to compete directly with it. I'm hoping it's just a sneaky attempt to get it off the shelves... then, once GamePro is finished, Ziff-Davis will drop their new magazine like a hot rock and just add more pages to EGM.
As for War Gods, I WILL review that eventually, although frankly, I'd prefer that someone donate it to The Gameroom Blitz so I won't actually have to spend money renting or buying it. I suppose it was an evolutionary step for the Mortal Kombat series, in the respect that it was designed to see if people were open to the idea of playing Mortal Kombat in 3D. I kind of doubt that Midway had other plans for it, though, because the moment Mortal Kombat 4 went into arcades, War Gods was rolled right out. We never saw any sequels to it, either, unless BIO Freaks, the game so crappy Midway wouldn't even release it in arcades, counts.
JOHN ROCHE:
This is a tough decision, because I've never played most of these games (all but 8 to be specific), and I've never even heard of three of them, and some of them are pretty bad (call me a raging psycho, but I think "ruined" is a bit strong/irrevocable for RBS, especially considering the masterpiece that is Mark of the Wolves) but my choice for worst would have to be Brutal. This was probably the most f'n overhyped fighting game that isn't called Rise of the Robots ever, and its innovations were completely moronic (having to "learn" your moves? LEARN YOUR MOVES?! WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!? WWW.WHATTHEFUCK.COM?!?!)
Well, that worked in The Art of Fighting, but the difference between that game and Brutal is that it didn't make you earn every special attack... just an extremely powerful but hard to perform proto-super that wasn't of dire importance to the player's strategy. In Brutal, you've got to work for everything, and in the first round you start off with just punches and kicks... as you can imagine, that gets mighty boring, and you can forget about creating complex strategies to defeat your enemy. That's not all that's wrong with the gameplay, but I'd better save some of these complaints for the upcoming review.
I really enjoyed Garou: Mark of the Wolves, too... it's got crisper graphics and a far better storyline than Capcom's equivalent, Street Fighter III. However, even though Garou saved the Fatal Fury series and atoned for the Real Bout Special games, it didn't erase them completely, and SNK still deserves to be criticized for releasing them in the first place.
Off the subject... does that link to
www.whatthefuck.com really work...?I personally didn't hate Double Dragon (NG) that much; it did have an interesting feature--the charge meter. Basically, when your "special" bar exceeded your life bar, you could do an ES (if you've played Darkstalkers, you know what that stands for) or a super of some kind (Billy and Jimmy can turn into their super alter-egos from the movie, for example, and I can presume Koga Shuko can turn into a shadow dude; I never played to the end because I traded my cart of it for Kizuna Encounter--innovative indeed).
You are right about the charge meter... it was an interesting balance between Capcom's less flexible super meters and SNK's desperation attacks, which could only be performed when your character's life bar was almost empty. You could even say that it's the best of both worlds, but having the life meter and super meter in the same bar was a little confusing... and the game was pretty mediocre in comparison to my favorite Neo-Geo fighting games. Not only that, but it's not the Double Dragon I remember from my childhood... like Double Dragon V, it's another desperate attempt at cashing in on the Street Fighter II craze, with a recognizable license attached to ensure sales. The joke was on them, though... how many games on the Neo-Geo can YOU think of aside from Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown that sold more than a couple thousand copies?
Funny you mentioned Kizuna Encounter... I almost included it as one of the Fighter's Misery candidates! The tag team feature just seems so clumsy in comparison to X-Men vs. Street Fighter's... and some of the characters just freak me out, particularly the fat cop with the Austin Powers body hair and that clown. Clowns... brr.
World Heroes was a blatant ripoff (I've heard rumors that they even just slightly altered sounds from the original) but at least they blatantly mimicked guys who knew what they were doing, rather than going off and trying something new that really sucks.
I'm with you on this one. The first World Heroes was cack but I really liked some of the later ones. World Heroes Perfect was as close to perfect as the World Heroes series will ever get, plus it had some great super moves... like Rasputin's! Man, there's something you never read in the history books.
Primal Rage was pretty bad, but at least it had an interesting concept and a lack of bad pun names (Foxy Roxy? Kendo Coyote? Dalai Llama? It's a good thing Tibetans aren't known to be litigious). Plus, it got Tipper Gore's panties in a bunch, and there ain't nothing wrong with that ;)
Other than imagining Tipper Gore's panties. And I thought that clown in Kizuna Encounter was scary...
As I said, I thought RBS was a good title. You want suck? Go for Real Bout 2. The sequel actually took out moves and oversimplified the motions for supers (I miss the pretzel motion for Raging Storm ;_;). True, the one punch and one kick was ill-conceived, but I've seen worse.
The only button set up I can think of that was worse were those huge padded buttons you had to smash in Fighting Street to get the strongest attacks. I guess it's just as well... the game played like crap even when you played it with more responsive controllers like the TurboPad or a standard PC joystick. Sometimes I wonder if I could improve my scores in that game by just leaving the room when each fight starts.
And Martial Champion--I look back on that one somewhat fondly. It had interesting characters. And if it hadn't been made and failed, we wouldn't have DDR, would we? (Okay, maybe we would)
I think Konami would have given us the Beatmania series regardless of what happened. Hell, an earthquake ripped their main office in half, and they still released Beatmania, Drummania, Keyboardmania, Punchmania, Gunmania, and who the hell knows what else. Some of my friends love the series and even have most of the costly controllers for the games, but personally, I wish Konami would spend more time giving us actual games with substance. We wouldn't have had to wait two years for Metal Gear Solid 2 if Konami's programmers hadn't been occupied with crap like Beatmania: The Sounds of Tokyo.
And why do you guys hate Rare so much? Is it because of Conker? Or Battletoads? Or Goldeneye? Or RC Pro-Am? (okay, that game was quite tedious, but still)
Uh... you'd have to ask Josh about that one.
