Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection Review

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love game compilations. They’re a bargain, convenient and sometimes have extras for added value.  There are a lot of great game compilations I can recommend starting around the time of the Gamecube, but in recent years game developer Digital Eclipse has been rising to prominence in this particular subgenre.

A not-inaccurate way to describe Digital Eclipse compilations is that they are the Criterion Collection’s game counterparts. Using their Eclipse game engine, they’re able to take the ROMs of older games and decompile them for modern systems at maximum efficiency, and using painstaking effort and resources from whoever hires them, they get every detail they can about the games included. That includes development history, interviews, high quality scans of whatever production and promotional artwork they can get their hands on, music galleries and explanations of each game’s central idea and what unique parts they play in the history of its franchise and gaming. It can almost make the games more of a side attraction there to let you experience the history the rest of the package lays out.

I recommend their Street Fighter 30^th Anniversary Collection, even if Street Fighter is obviously for peasants who can’t play KOF.  It not only has all the mainline games made before Street Fighter 4 (as well as the original Street Fighter nobody cares about), but it also has online play for the four most important games included and the aforementioned museum.

That's a lot of games.

After how well they pulled that off, I got excited for their new fighting game anniversary collection on the PC: the Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection. It may not be as awesome as the fast-paced action of KOF, but Samurai Shodown has its own legacy as a series less focused on high speed combos and more focused on slower-paced fencing, where one strike from a weapon can do tons of damage and draws lots of blood to really make you feel the weight of the blades. With a beautiful aesthetic of the Edo period of Japan, it’s host to all kinds of warriors of old from around the world, from Prussia to France to Texas. It’s a great series well-deserving of such a compilation.  There was already a Samurai Shodown compilation, the Samurai Shodown Anthology for the Wii, PS2 and PSP, but more game compilations available on more systems is good to have and both the Anthology collection and Neogeo collection have their own quirks and upsides, regardless of what might be considered the better one.

This is one of the best pieces of cover art ever.  Gold star.