Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1989

It’s 1989 and even though it hasn’t hit the start of the next decade, you might consider this year to be 90s as hell.  1989 is when a lot of cornerstones of the era got their start as they continued into the next decade.  Tim Burton’s Batman movie changed the way people looked at comic book movies and a few years later lead to the creation of Batman: The Animated Series.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid hit theaters, leading to what is called the Disney Renaissance with several more iconic animated movies from the company in the following years.  In gaming, one of the games I’ll be looking at, Final Fight, also set a standard for beat-em-ups of the 90s.  It was the transitionary period to the new decade and both Capcom and SNK brought both their A-games and B-games.  Let’s see who comes out on top!

Monday, March 11, 2024

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1988

It’s 1988 and the pop culture swing of the era wasn’t quite over yet, what with Die Hard, Bloodsport and even slasher icon Chucky in Child’s Play all hitting theaters.  Signs of the move into the technological advancement era of the 90s started to trickle in though, as a thing you might have heard of called the internet made its very first official connection and Capcom brought out their new weapon in the fight against SNK: The Capcom CPS.

It's more what you didn't see inside the cabinet that impressed.

The newfound power given by this mighty piece of hardware would allow Capcom to be on the cutting edge, with more and bigger sprites and better, clearer audio to make for gaming experiences not even the 16-bit consoles that would come out a few years later could match.  SNK, meanwhile, hadn’t quite made that leap.  Perhaps bigger doesn’t mean better and SNK can instead eke out a win this year with their charm and game design alone, but it’ll be some stiff competition.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1987

It's 1987 and out competitors are in full swing!  This year we can see the start of Capcom's drift away from the shooty shooty bang bang games that have dominated the arcades, but SNK was still going all-in on the shooting action so I guess you can say they stuck to their guns.  This isn't a competition for who made the most creative and genre-busting games though.  This is for who made the best games.  In other words, who is the year's King of the Arcades and

who's bad?

Well, Data East, but that's not until next year.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1986

1985 was a year of shooty shooty bang bang arcade games and that trend continues with 1986, but perhaps because they were aware of the saturation of such games, this year saw some new innovations.  The question then is who innovated and polished their games the best.

Ikari Warriors(SNK): Ikari Warriors has a lot of the same problems as its run n’ gun contemporaries of this time period, but makes enough significant improvements to make it stand out.  It’s viciously unfair and brutal like the others, but unlike TNK3, the Ikari Warriors can move a little faster and unlike Commando, bullets are bigger and easier to distinguish.  When the enemies thinned out in between impossible to dodge onslaughts of deceptive grenade blast radiuses and hails of endless machine gun fire, there were moments of fun.  Those 5-15 seconds of not dying, dodging bullets while gunning down enemies and the grenade trajectories cooperating gave me dopamine hits that were just frequent enough to keep me going.  It helps that it’s also one of the nicest-looking games yet and there’s only 2 music tracks, but the main one is long enough to make it not feel grating and it’s an impressive bit of music for the time, with the multi-layered music and backup drum beat.

Monday, February 26, 2024

SNK vs. Capcom: The King of Arcades: 1985

At last the clash of the century begins.  Capcom and SNK, having already established a portfolio of modest titles, but 1985 is when things start to get heated.  Something you may notice though is that their games of 1985 are very… Shooty.  In fact all of them are either space shooters or military shooters.  It could be a coincidence, but there was also a very shooty movie that came out that same year.

It’s entirely possible that the monster popularity of this shooty movie influenced what games they were wanting to make.  Just a hunch, but regardless of their intentions, what matters here is how good they are, so let’s begin.