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
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