Super Sidekicks 3:The Next Glory

Dearest friend of mine Rou La Femme began his sporting career at the prime age of 76. Being 46 at the time his ability to transcend his own age still remains a baffling scientific enigma. But his lack of physical skill never got in the way of his ability to get thrown off the pitch by fellow players and in some instances members of the crowd. I think it was the aformentioned individual who summed up the beautiful game in a single phrase "It's a ball based sport...but it aint on no court!"

Whats the story? The next Glory?

Or more accurately “Super Sidekicks 3: The Next Glory”.

Somehow I managed to let Super Sidekicks 1 and 2 pass me by and so had assumed that Super Sidekicks 3 would be the third in a series of games that followed popular Superhero sidekicks (i.e. Robin, Bucky Barnes, Rick James, Benderboy, Fabulocity X and Young Grendell) saving the world. Of course that’s a lie as “The Next Glory” came bundled on my copy of SNK Arcade classics Vol I and so I was able to observe the football related imagery long before I was able to process information relating to the title of the game. In fact I had thought it was called “SNK Grass Masters” until the retro prefect told me to review it.
Now normally I wouldn’t be playing ‘footy’ type games because they rarely feature lengthy cut scenes where Ryan Giggs try to find his true reasons for playing football.

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Back then I could get by with just grazed knees”

Reno Van: Nistleroy “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Gone talking to a wall”

Reno Van Nistleroy: “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle : “….”

Reno Van Nistleroy “….”

However I decided to give this game a go in honour of the “International Coca Cola Cup” which was happening at the time and also because the Retro Prefect had visited and we were running out of stuff to entertain him with because he is so very demanding. Not only did he keep demanding more peanut noodles but he cried for half an hour when we beat him soundly at Saint Seiya: The Hades.

I was expecting The Next Glory to look and play like Super Soccer/Sensible Soccer but in actual fact it has a strange Streets of Rage style viewpoint and Flashback style animations. Conrad Hart might not be playing on the team but the game certainly has the “hart” of rotoscoping, whatever that might be. It also has the ability to play as 64 different teams, I know this because I looked it up on wikipedia. I cannot comment as to whether these teams actually exist or were wearing the correct heraldry (I know there is a team called England but I thought they had pictures of Jeremy Irons on their shirts) but the ability to play as many now defunct African countries always brings a smile to my face. I believe that the players are nameless in order to match their featureless faces but they do manage to differentiate themselves by having slightly different haircuts and skin tones. How do they see the ball without eyes? The same way they manage to make racist remarks without mouths – telepathy!

It isn’t just the unique and slightly disturbing running animations that separate the next glory from the Fifa Street 2’s of this world it’s also the fact that the games last mere seconds as way for SNK to force you into putting more coins in the slot. Worst of their money grabbing tactics is the fact that you effectively have to pay to decide the outcome of a match as after your time runs out you must pay the price and select a rematch, penalties or sudden death. A rematch is pointless as goal scoring is largely impossible due to the restrictive time limits and the fact that it is impossible to actually get the ball into the net without first kicking the ball at the goalkeepers head and briefly concussing him and then stepping over his comatose body to deliver the coup de grace. Sudden Death is perhaps the best value option as you must continually play until someone gets a goal, unfortunately this will never happen even if you try and let the other person win because the Goals Guardian is always AI controlled. Eventually you will be thrown out of the arcade because the manager wants to go home, but not before he presents you with a miniature plastic arcade cabinet for your collection. The best option is of course penalties as this gives you a nice penalty kicking mini game where you get to look at the back of your mans leg as he decided where indeed to kick the ball. A good tactic is to constantly tell your opponent that you are “going left” and then pretend that actually you aren’t going to go left but then you go left anyway. This only fails if they also decide that the goalkeeper should go left but the chances of that are 1/3 i.e. unlikely.
The game also gives you the option to empower your team with different abilities such as “speed” “teamwork” and “power” none of these make a noticeable difference apart from speed as it allows you to constantly run into your opponents and steal the ball by virtue of phasing through them at high speed. Again I don’t know how true to life this feature is although I do hear that Wayne Ronstok always selects ‘Teamwork’ when fighting against the Gargons.

What really elevate the next glory to the upper echelons is the amazingly rendered goal celebrations. These often feature images of your team, apparently illustrated by the man who does pictures for crime watch. My personal favourite is where two players psycho crusher towards one another at high speed but we must also give special mention to the image of the player with the huge rectangular body being hoisted aloft by his team mates. There are others but much like the antics of Confuser Gaz they are beyond my ability to explain.

So as far as football games go The Next Glory is probably the best I have played. The only other football game I have ever played is the one that came with Klik’n’Play featuring inly four players on each team and an incredibly interfering ref. Still The Next Glory never features a man limply saying “It’s a goal” whenever the ball gets into the net so you can’t have everything. For these reasons I would like to award The Next Glory three Bull Boy Shoes out of a Gareth Southgate.

The Punisher

Fans may be familiar with the Marvel comic’s series of the same name, a series which is yet to appear on any of the Capcom VS games despite Frank Castle’s potential for many infuriating projectile attacks. When playing this with friends, the second player has the unfortunate fate of controlling pre black Nick Fury. While filmgoers may have an image of the S.H.I.E.L.D captain as the smooth talking mother who enjoys acronyms of defensive items, the 90’s saw Mr. Nicholas as a middle aged heavy smoker sporting a memorable beige top and matching boots….very autumn! The punisher is definitely the one of the better beat em ups owing to the surprisingly violent nature of the game, it also features a number of drug references that went over my head as a child and came swooping back to scar my mind years later…a mental boomerang if you will. To see the potential damage such a concept can cause, just look at the Australians.

Retro Prefect in: Capcoms non stop coin-op…post op

Capcom headquarters annual meeting (1989)

Madelyn Von Geargang (Chickens under barrels division): News just in folks, Final Fight just hit the arcades and it’s a big hit, pun intended!

Roland Toe (Supervisor of giant hooks): Even though it clearly steals everything from Double Dragon except for the inclusion of a shemale accompanying a lumbering retard?

Madelyn Von Geargang: The shemale rumours are unconfirmed, and besides…people steal our ideas all the time!

Gordon Axe 2 (Senior Gilius Thunderhead): If I change Cody to Axel, no one will ever know!

Madelyn Von Geargang: In light of this revived interest in the scrolling beat em up/ street em up/ beat em street/ breet em strup…I think we should look into it further, any ideas?

Harry Gar (Former mayor and pipe user): How about we reuse the same game engine on several established franchises over the course of the early to mid 90’s?

Madelyn Von Geargang: Give that man a pipe!

Roland Toe: But my area is small rotating sticks…

Madelyn Von Geargang: I said give that man a pipe!

Anyone who ventured the arcades, or took to illegal emulation several years after their decline will remember that the 90’s was the age of the scrolling beat em up, a game which due to the necessity of 3-D in anything new has effectively marked its demise. Over the course of several years, Capcom was able to gain the rights to a number of popular franchises and somehow shoehorn a lift stage and pipes as weapons into them all.

Over the course of this month, I shall be unleashing several smaller Beat em up reviews as a means of writing less, but making it look like I’m doing far more. It may one day reach the point were I start using bullet points

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Metamorphic Force

BEAST! No, I haven't taken to shouting Kelsey Grammer on screen portrayals for laughs and giggles as you might assume. Rou La Femme has once again exhumed that bloated videogame corpse of the past in an attempt to provide a post mortem to the grieving gamers of yesterday. Or words to that effect....FRAISER!

Lets face it sports are absolutely rubbish and useless. That’s why football players are always gang raping people out of boredom. Cricket has serious lag problems, Tennis features some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard, the draw distance on weightlifting is atrocious and (get ready for the joke) certain characters in gymnastics are hugely UNBALANCED!!!!!

Despite all this, local sports and leisure complex the Metrodome stands as a pinnacle of human endeavour (in Barnsley). As expected all the sports stuff in there - football courts, boxing castles etc are rubbish but the Metrodome also has several high points such as a wicked wave machine, a sort of anti gravity water slide, the Rigby Suite Carvery and best of all proper arcade machines. Arcade machines with joysticks and buttons that don’t cost £2 a go or require you to make use of a plastic guitar/gun/dance podium/horse. Although they did for a while have the wonderfully dangerous version of Super Hang On where the main challenge is not falling of a steam powered bike. Games were rotated on a fairly regular basis and included favourites such as The Punisher, The Avengers and the slightly disappointing Raiden II. (Disappointing as it didn’t feature a man in a cat basket hat flying across the screen shouting “Aramawoggi”) Burning brighter than all these though was a hidden classic, the undeservedly forgotten Metamorphic Force.

Like all arcade games in the early 90’s Metamorphic force was a scrolling beat em’up, however it had an amazing twist in that it also ripped off the ‘turning into animals’ mechanic of Altered Beast. The trick being that Altered Beast was essentially and unplayable mess with funny voice acting and confusing sexual undertones whereas Metamorphic Force was not only brilliant fats paced and colourful but featured sprites the size of a babies head. What I gleaned of the plot from the arcade attract screen was that some huge ethereal woman in a toga had chucked four guys with animal transformation powers down onto the world in order to do in a load of bipedal animals. I would guess that these animal men were the bad guys as they were mostly baddie animals i.e Frogs/Lizards/Goats they also employed baddie weaponry such as Tridents, Curvy Swords, axes and shields with pictures of skellingtons on them.

You had a choice of four men with which to force these animals into extinction.
They were –

Ivan
A huge mustachioed Russian guy who fought with a log and appeared to have based his fighting style on the bit in chucklevison where old chuckle would swing round with a beam and smack younger chuckle in the face. “Oh dear Oh Dear brother Barry, looks like another trip to the hospital. What do you tell the doctors?” “I walked into a door brother Paul, I’m sorry for being so clumsy” “That’s right brother Barry because you don’t want to split up the family do you? What would mother think!?” Upon collecting a golden statue more than slightly reminiscent of an Oscar Ivan would transform into a bear man and the phrase “BEAST” would emanate from the Arcade machine at ear destroying volume. Needless to say as an impressionable youth I had hours of fun yelling “BEAST!” at people and then cursing my inability to assume an animal form and fight back as they kicked me in the shins.

Max
A mysterious character that turned into a black panther and campaigned for racial equality in extreme ways. No one ever picked him due to Panthers being such a rubbish animal, but I believe his fighting method was “bear knuckles” a wise choice against a heavily armed chameleon.

Ban
Ban, Ban, Ban is a kung fu man. He is also the most boring and generic character – reminding everyone of Axel from Streets of Rage or Cody from Final Fight. Upon attaining beast status he turns into an Ox – the dullest of all animals. In my eyes he should have been ban(ned) from the game.

Claude
Calude is an effeminate French swordfighter and also the best character in the game, if not the best character in any game. He noodles around the battlefield in jodhpurs and a frilly shirt showing off his long blond hair and occasionally stabbing a toad in a loin cloth. Upon achieving the coveted beast form Claude would become a metrosexual wolf with impeccable finger nails. The best thing about Claude though was that if you left his standing still for a bit his idle animation consisted of him flicking and fluffing up his perfect hair. I still hope to one day see Claude become the spokesman/wolf for herbal essences.

Special mention also has to go to the bonus item drop character who looked like one of those sinister Mickey Mouse toys they have in foreign grabber machines. Mostly under names such as “Michael the Disney style rodent friend” or “Uncle Walt’s Lunar Rat”. This mouseman would scurry along the screen with a swag bag of bonus statues which he would be forced to drop when you gave him the beating he so richly deserved. At first you feel a bit sorry for poor messenger mouseman as he has been cursed to be bottom of the animal/man hybrid foodchain. However he just keeps coming back with more statues so we can only conclude that he was a rich pervert who didn’t mind losing a few of his gold statues so long as you would hurt him like the bitch he was.

Overall this game featured graphics, sounds, music, an impossible goat boss at the end of the first level who rather prophetically stated “You will never beat me”, and an impossibly cool French Werewolf. Therefore I would give it Claude Greengrass out of Jean Claude Van Damme.

Poy Poy 2

For those of you who enjoyed poy poy (the first) to the extent that you thought it necessitated a sequel , then I can conclude you've either lived a sheltered gaming life, playing exclusively on unwanted copies of power piggs, skullmonkeys and a variety of other sub-par anthropomorphic titles; or more likely you don't actually exist. Its a shame to see that the 'crate throwing' genre never really took off as it had potential to move into other hybrid areas such as 'first-person crate throwing' and 'crate em-ups'. The latter purely for the opportunity of an announcer saying "Crate combo!".

Poy poy 2 struggles to be anything other than four people throwing things in a confined space, effectively simulating how Russian democracy worked for many years. Konami however has managed to create depth to something that really didn't need any, the Poy Poy cup is that most coveted of prizes among people who don't mind inanimate objects embedded into their faces. Being a televised event one might think the cameramen would like to find some edgy shots to invoke audience participation, clearly the cameraman in question is a junior rookie given a shot at the big time. His unique static camera method may not be the norm now, but when he becomes the first person to nab rare pictures of Spiderman its greenhorn no more!

Playing the 'story' mode in the loosest sense of the word provides that epic feeling of watching the second half of Eurovision. An irksome announcer introduces and closes the show with a grating voice that more than makes up for the absence of awkward banter normally seen between two presenters. Followed by every round is a score tally by a woman who possibly due to equality regulations has just as irritating a voice as her male counterpart. The score tally marathon tends to take between 3-5 minutes as the disk slowly loads up the individual sound bite for each characters name. Considering there are several divisions you begin to resent any competitor with a name over two syllables, especially when they have names like Ten Ten. Clearly he was so adept at throwing things at an early age that they decided to name him stupidly twice.

I'm sure when four players gather round for 'Poy Party' as we all know them might increase the games appeal. I along with many owners of this game however find it difficult to justify inviting three people into my home for the sole purpose of playing something they probably haven't heard of, and I know just about enough to struggle through an article about it. I know many retro gamers are all for seeking out the niche titles, but much like the ark of the covenant they are often hidden with good reason. I'm not saying Poy Poy 2 will melt the faces of the master race any time soon, but it might unlock the secrets of an ancient alien race...that secret being throwing things is the basis for a lucrative TV show.

SNK Special

Having being accosted frequently by former gold bullion enthusiast 'RouLaFemme', it is with mixed feelings of contempt and arousal that I introduce a showcase of SNK offerings through the eyes of Rou. Some might say those eyes are of a blind man, well I say that never stopped Daredevil...from making a bad film

The SNK meetings vol.1

01/05/1994 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage (El Presidente): Right it seems that our plan to sell exact replica’s of our arcade games for about £100 a go isn’t that successful. Apparently people feel that Samurai Showdown isn’t worth taking out a second mortgage for. Does anyone have any ideas?

Geese Thompson (Chief of animating people falling from ledges): Well why don’t we just keep releasing more and more fighting games in the hopes that we can beat the Street Fighter series by sheer force of numbers. Oh and the last bosses should all be ludicrously unfair.

Sir Nicholas Kage: Good idea Geese, I like it!

01/05/1999 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Well we seem to be having problems again. People seem not to like these really unfair boss encounters and they say our games are starting to look a bit old fashioned! Does anyone know how we can turn this around?

Allan Krauser (Head of saying “Out O Bounds”) : Sir why don’t we put all our money into bringing out a handheld console? After all look how much money the gameboy is making and that started off with a green screen!

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like this idea but we need to have some feature to set it apart from the gameboy…a selling point people can really get excited about.

Geese Thompson: Sir how about instead of giving it a d-pad we give it some sort of fudge between a d-pad and a joystick. Also the stick should click incredibly loudly so that when you play it in public everyone will look at what you’re doing.

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like it! Lets get started right away.

01/05/2002 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Right I’m afraid we’re bankrupt and we’re going to have to sell all our intellectual property to a pachinko company. Its been nice working with you all.

Geese Thompson: Sir this isn’t fair, I have loads of ideas for new bland fighting game characters! SNK will rise again. I vow it!

01/05/2004 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Right by marrying into the wealthy Playmore family and for some reason adding their name to my own despite being a man I have managed to raise the funds to recreate SNK except now it has to be called SNK-Playmore.
So what’s the first order of business?

Geese Thompson: Well Sir I think we should buy back all the intellectual property we had to sell last time. It boils my blood to think of my bland designs being used on pachinko machines when they could be being used in lots of new StreetFighter clones.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: But Geese didn’t releasing lots of bland fighting games send us bankrupt before? I don’t think those characters were doing out company any favours!

Geese Thompson: But Sir that’s just because they were ahead of their time. People couldn’t handle how cool Terry Bogard was with his baseball cap and jeans but now everyone’s wearing that. You don’t hear people saying “Shoryuken” these days, nowadays its all “Gng dwn twn fr dbl rnbken m8”. This time it will be different!”

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: You’re right dammit! Go buy back everything, I don’t care what it costs!

Todo Jenkins (Newly appointed chairman of badly mangled dialogue): Sir shouldn’t we update out games for the new millennium? Maybe we could use 3D models shaded to look like watercolour paintings and retain the classic 2D gameplay.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Don’t be foolish Jenkins, nobody would want to play anything like that! Now go away and write some incomprehensible dialogue for the new king of fighters game.

Poor old SNK. Everyone used to say their games were amazing but only the three kings of Europe could afford them and now that you can get their entire back catalogue in the form of PS2 collections everyone has realised they were generally a bit rubbish. Never mind SNK, we still love you and to prove it here is a review of every SNK fighting franchise. (That I have played)

World Heroes: I can’t be too harsh on World Heroes as I was given World Heroes Collection as a festive gift by the Retro Prefect. We wouldn’t want to recreate the feelings of betrayal that occurred when he gave Uncle Pete Sideways on DVD for his birthday and received a very disappointed look. Let’s just say that if you like Street Fighter clones featuring vaguely historical characters such as Captain Kidd the homoerotic pirate, Brocken the cyborg Nazi, Mudman the hilarious racial stereotype cannibal or Rasputin the flower child Russian mystic, then you may possibly glean some enjoyment from this game. However if you prefer games where characters perform the required action when you press the button rather than two years later then you best give it a miss. It’s rare for a games best feature to be a SS officer launching missiles from his knees and it is for this reason that I score World Heroes only one Brocken Bomber out of a Psycho Crusher.

Art of Fighting: More like ‘Art of Street Fighter clone’ eh readers? I know that the games prefect has a soft spot for this series mostly because of a character named Mickey who mysteriously changes from a muscle-bound punk in the original Art of Fighting to a flat topped Guile impersonator in Art of Fighting 2. He obviously felt out of place with the rest of the cast who are all shameless in their imitation of the classic Capcom line-up. Art of Fighting is a sort of Aldi version of Street Fighter so much so that they should have just called it “Pavement Combat” and had done with it, just remember kids ‘Jive’ looks like a Twix so it seems good value for money but the instructions are in foreign and the chocolate is bitter because it is made of ground up glass. The same goes for Art of Fighting and its cast of characters who for legal purposes have different names but use similar coloured packets. Characters like Lee (Masked, claw wielding, ineffectual) King (High and low fireball, kickboxing, cross dresser) Ryo (Fireball throwing, uppercutting, main character) Takuma (Overpowered clone of main character, at parties wears a Tengu mask and calls himself Mr. Karate) can all go back to the continent where they belong! The only exception is Mr .Big (baton wielding pimp sub boss) whose total inability to jump endears him to the nation. For this reason I give Art of Fighting two “I am actually a woman”s out of a Garcia concern.

Samurai Showdown: One of the more highly rated SNK franchises and with good reason. Samurai Showdown combines huge colourful sprites with interesting character design and the fact that it isn’t a blatant copy of Street Fighter. In fact Samurai Showdown managed to popularise a lot of fighting game staples such as the super move bar that increases as you take damage, the ability to kill your opponent at the end of a match and the addition of weaponry. Unfortunately for Samurai Showdown, Soulcalibur later stole the crown of weapon based fighting using fancy 3D graphics and gratuitous cog falling scenes but in our hearts we all know Samurai Showdown was the original if not necessarily the best. Unfortunately a lot of the home ports of the Samurai Showdown games were done by a bottle man and so run at about a fifth of the speed they probably should be, thereby rendering them unplayable. Combine with this the fact that Charlotte is a fencer rather than a Samurai and Samurai Showdown can only be awarded a Cham Cham out of a Tam Tam. (With extra marks for lots of attacks which involve a pause and then something neatly falling into two halves.)

Fatal Fury: A fighting game based around the premise of men (and it is all men in the first one at least) being so angry that they might actually die. Actually it has nothing to do with that it’s just a silly name for another Street Fighter clone. Fortunately it’s not as blatant as Art of Fighting and the characters are generally more charismatic than the Mickeys and Roberts of this world. Fair enough most of the characters look like they could have played dancing gangster’s in the ‘Beat It’ video but I think this only adds to the appeal. Apart from early 90’s idea’s of cool Fatal Fury also featured the ability to leap in and out of the foreground, just like in a real fight. (That takes place on three separate two dimensional planes). It sounds like an incisive play mechanic to stop projectile based characters gaining the upper hand in fights, but really it was a bit rubbish as it meant large parts of the fight were spent chasing your opponent back and forth across the three planes. Such is my love for Fatal Fury that not only am I able to ignore this rubbish feature but I am also going to list and describe every character when I give my score. Therefore I would give Fatal Fury a Terry Bogard - Quintessentially cool in baseball cap, jeans and red leather jacket. Dressing like him and walking around Sheffield saying “Are you ok…BUSTER WOLF” doesn’t make you any friends. Andy Bogard – Terry’s inexplicably Chinese brother. He likes to dress in white pyjamas and pretend that he’s Ryu from Street fighter. Everyone hates him. Joe Higashi – Commonly regarded as the joke character. Kick boxing Joe is actually ludicrously overpowered; he likes to upset people by punching tornados at them or briefly becoming a jaguar’s head. Richard Meyer – Richard is the manager of the Pau Pau café and like all small business owners he is always trying out new ways to attract in the customers. Using a yoyo to attach himself to the ceiling might not be his best scheme but it certainly seems to help him in the constant fights that break out. “You wanted decaf, I’ll decaf your face in with the help of my yoyo.” Raiden – Huge wrestler with the mysterious ability to conjure bees from his mouth for extremely long periods of time. Precursor to the current trend of featuring Luchador style wrestlers in every game ever made. Michael Max – Balrog with a tornado punch and a more potato like face. TunG Fu Rue – Admittedly I had to guess his name on account of it being in foreign. What isn’t foreign is the small Chinese man’s ability to rip his shirt off and become ha huge muscle-bound freak halfway through every fight. Even more mysterious is his ability to regrow his sleeves when he shrinks back to normal size. Duck King – Like all gang members Duck is an expert in funky dance fighting and has a colourful Mohawk. Unfortunately his original MC hammer outfit was replaced in later games by a more conventional hooded top but he made up for it with the Duck King themed rap which plays as he fights.
Geese Howard – Snake faced final boss with an impossible to perform special move known as “Raging Storm”. His hobbies include letting himself fall from balconies and saying things are predictable. Out of Billy Kane wasn’t in the Megadrive version so shut up.

I might possibly add a Blue Mary to that score for ‘Mark of the Wolves’ due to it’s hi res sprites and vision of a future where Terry Bogard has a new coat and is in love with Geese Howard’s son.

King of Fighters: Cross over fighting games are great because they feature all your favourite characters punching each other in the face. SNK must be raging (storm) at the success of the VS. games because they invented the entire formula ten years previously. King of Fighters features characters from Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury and Ikari Warriors as well as many original characters aiming to smash up their opponent’s features. The King of Fighters series has never reached the heights of popularity enjoyed by Foyles War Fighting Jam or Mortal Kombat VS DC Thompson, but that doesn’t seem to have deterred SNK from updating the franchise on a nearly annual basis. Most of the twelve core titles have featured some sort of ongoing storyline however a combination of extremely badly translated dialogue and apathy means that I have no idea what this story is supposed to be. For the most part it seems to involve some of the most difficult and unfair final bosses in fighting game history, lots of clones of Kyo and Geese Howard repeatedly coming back from the dead. It’s hard to dislike a series where throwing your sunglasses at someone counts as a special attack but for every K- and Iori there are about five men in hats with names like “John” and “Ralph.” Furthermore there are too many systems with names like “Tension Break” “Reverse Council” and “Player Mugabe” which only autistic frame counters are able to make use of. It is for that reason that I must award the King of Fighters series one Heidern out of a Jeidern. I would however grant the Maximum Impact spin off’s a Jeidern out of a Heidern as they are the closest thing you can get to Rival Schools without cutting your eye on the broken Dreamcast box of Project Justice.

Last Blade –Samurai Showdown with nicer graphics or a more level headed version of Guilty Gear? Probably one of the better SNK franchises Las Blade was unfortunately cut dead in its prime by the unpredictable nature of my Dreamcast and the low quality of ‘Mr Data’ CDR’s.
Therefore I must give Last Blade an ill informed Last Bronx out of a Last Blade.

SNK Vs Capcom Chaos – SNK prove rather successfully why Capcom make much more money than them despite being far lazier. One infinitely reused Morrigan sprite out a what on earth is Hugo doing in it?

I think that’s probably all of them. By the time you read this an SNK lynch mob will probably have severely Psycho Balled me into next week for my omission of some obscure Japanese only franchise (Like Gal Fighters) or for insisting that King of Fighters ’99 is nowhere near as good as King of Fighter 2001. This sounds nasty but I’m sure after the initial awkwardness we can become firm friends and I will let them try on my water damaged Terry Bogard hat

U.S. Championship V'Ball

You might be asking yourself "what audacity have Technos, masters behind Super Double Dragon and River City Ransom; got attempting to create a simulation of a common if not exclusive to beach sport? Also, why have they felt the need to abbreviate the sport in question, thus removing the entire 'volley' aspect of the game?" Well fans thats a lot of questions, and in times like these I would suggest you write to your local MP who with any luck is a keen enthusiast of the sport, a 'volley dolly' as they are referred to within certain circles. (Or should that be certain balls?)

Its nice to see a game that doesnt shy away from creating an atmosphere of homoerotic bliss within the tropical locales of Hawaii, Daytona and Croydon. Alas the latter location was removed on the grounds of strict parrying policies, that and the severe lack of beaches in London boroughs. Character selection is resereved to the hand of fate, with each corresponding coin slot there is the choice of one of the following:

Player 1: Man in yellow pants
Player 2: Man in pink pants
Player 3: Other man in yellow pants
Player 4: Former sex offender (In pink pants)

Some players might speculate that yellow pants man and pink pants man are indeed the same person, shamelessly re-coloured to avoid the task of redrawing another homosexual from scratch. A daunting task for us all, but for every John Barrowman theres always going to be a pink pants equivalent if this carries on. I of course speak in jest, there is nothing more manly than sweaty half naked men grunting as they hit balls while looking apathetically towards the bikini clad audience.

Behind those rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia lies the cyclopian-esque ability to shoot beams of light at Ian Mc Kellen, only instead the projectile takes a more spherical form. A unique feature in U.S. V'Ball is the way in which pink and yellow pants can return a serve. Rather than gently patting it over the net like so many of todays budding volleyball enthusiasts. It is possible to smash the ball with enough force to not just knock the opponent off their feet, but also send them hurtling several meters backwards accompanied by the on screen text "KABOOOM!". On the plus side there is nothing more honourable than an onomatopaeic death, which is why I have always considered silencers to be somewhat cowardly. The incapacitated partner then has to rely solely on the abilities of his partner amidst two opponents as he slowly remembers what it was like to have a non crushed spine.

U.S. Championship V'Ball is a game of two halves notably left and right, playing this game alone is tragically unsafe and can cause suicidal thoughts and general questionings of ones sexual preference. With four people however this proves that despite the uncomfortable silences as players grease each other up, it can be a game enjoyed by all. But not too much mind, as theres only so many backs for so many walls.