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!

Ikari Warriors 3(SNK): The president’s daughter has been kidnapped and since this is an emergency situation, the United States decides to not handicap Ralf with a gun this time.  Ikari Warriors 3 is a beat-em-up, but interestingly still used the loop lever.  There’s not much use for rotating your character to strafe in a beat-em-up and in fact there were apparently cabinets that used a regular joystick and both are an option in the anniversary collection.  The twin-stick setup can still give that extra bit of control for when you pick up a gun for limited use, but if you want to use your arcade stick, that works just fine here.

The actual game is a noticeable improvement over P.O.W.  The graphics and sounds are far better and more satisfying and there’s a bit more to the controls thanks to jumping and a back punch.  The enemy variety is still pretty dire, but at least there’s more than 4 different kinds this time.  It does a passable job as a beat-em-up for the time, with punchy sound effects and some weapons to spice things up, but unfortunately there’s one thing that ruins it: the fucking timer.

Through the entire game, there is a timer (the “distance gauge”) constantly counting down and only goes up by small increments when you advance in the map.  Enemies do not go down fast, especially not when they’re stun locking you to death, and if that timer runs out, you start the level from the beginning!  Getting to the end of the stage in the time limit given becomes impossible unless… Well, the following quote from Hardcore Gaming 101 explains:

"Here’s the funny thing: If you have less than 25m on the distance gauge, dying and then continuing will recharge it to 25m! Unless you can beat up all enemies inhumanly quickly, repeatedly dying and continuing to replenish the timer is the only way to get through levels and end this game! It’s more of a danger to actually stay alive and have the enemy capture you. SNK actually invented a new, immoral way of to make players use up credits.”

That is probably the single most idiotic, cockamamie, counter-intuitive thing I have ever seen in an arcade game!  It is a game where you need to make dying an important part of winning because they couldn’t be bothered to balance it!  Epic fail!  At least Capcom knows better!

Rally 2011 LED Storm(CAP): Capcom does not know better.  Just like Ikari Warriors 3, this top-down racing game runs on a time limit in the form of fuel.  You have to keep collecting fuel on the track as you race in order to make it to the end of each level and if you run out you are booted back to the start of it.  Fuel is far more scarce than it should be and the canisters you pick up won’t last you very long, meaning there is very little margin of error and if you whizzed by a canister because it was on the opposite side of the track because you had no idea where it’d be, you’re probably boned.  Unlike Ikari Warriors 3, your fuel keeps going down even when you are slowly brought back after crashing, making it even worse, from a certain point of view.

There isn’t even enough payoff to make it worth that frustration.  LED Storm is very average, not utilizing the new CPS board for much other than voice samples from your talking computer assistant.  Every track is just a texture swap and not even the transforming vehicle mechanic amounts to much.  This game kind of blows.

Strider(CAP): It’s been a while since the last action platformer, but not much has improved.  The main character, Hiryu, gets a lot out of his one jump button, able to climb and clamber on virtually any surface plus do a slide on the ground, but the level design doesn’t do a lot with that and many times starts to approach Ghosts n’ Goblins levels of difficulty with its cheap shots and enemy placement. It tries to tell a story to keep you interested, but all the characters in it have no character traits whatsoever and cutscenes are brief.  There’s simply nothing that motivates me to play it.  Even before this I played Strider at an arcade and got sick of it fairly quick.  It’s bland and mediocre.

Dynasty Wars(CAP): That’s weird.  I thought this was a Tecmo Koei game.  Dynasty Wars makes some significant improvements to set it apart from the beat-em-ups I’ve looked at so far.  You can attack in 2 directions, giving it the sort of twin-stick strafing feel of previous shooter games, and each attack can be both used for rapid attacks and charged for a stronger, longer-reaching attack.  At the cost of some vitality you can also use several different enemy-wiping special attacks.  This all seems simple, but in the heat of the moment you have to take into consideration whether a charged attack or rapid attack works better for the ways enemies are positioned and if the cost of using the special attack is less than what you would lose dealing with enemies the old-fashioned way.

No slowdown or flickering, though I'm not playing on the original hardware.

It’s still a difficult arcade game you’ll have to keep continuing, but the options it provides gives the game more depth than what might look like a brainless beat-em-up at a glance and it kept me engaged.  The number of enemies it can have onscreen is an impressive feat for the time as well and if you like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms aesthetic it’s all the more reason to give this one a try.

Curiously, being based on a Shonen Jump manga, this is one of the few licensed games I’ve looked at.  There have been a few licensed games from both companies up to this point that I’ve had to skip either because they’re console games, they never got a re-release for probably legal reasons, or both.  Since this manga is an obscure one from the 80s and had a short run, I would imagine it wasn’t much of a hassle getting the rights to re-release it.

Prehistoric Isle in 1930(SNK): SNK clearly saw what Capcom’s big weapon was doing so they upped their graphical fidelity accordingly for this game.  The sprite work and smooth animations on some of the enemies look gorgeous for the time and the game itself is a solid shoot-em-up with a unique swiss-army secondary weapon and several different distinct dinosaur bosses.

Each boss gets a little stats screen.

The secondary weapon power-up seems to be a precursor to the 3DS Street Pass game Mii Force, where you can rotate its position and it can become different weapons, many of which are exactly like the ones in Mii Force, but I think this game would’ve benefited from using the loop lever joystick.  All you can do to move this secondary weapon is press a button to rotate it clockwise, which is really inconvenient when you have to hammer the rotation button just because you wanted to move it one notch counter clockwise.  That aside, it’s an exciting and fast-paced adventure that shouldn’t be missed.

Willow(CAP): Like I stated regarding Dynasty Wars, licensed games aren’t as likely to get re-releases, so ordinarily I would skip this one because it’s a good example, but recall the introductory post to this whole series when I said I had access to several arcades within driving distance.  One of those locations just happened to have Willow so it gets to be included.

It’s a shame that this Willow game isn’t readily available because it’s the best action platformer yet.  If it weren’t for the occasional spates of unfair difficulty you wouldn’t even think it was an arcade game because the challenge is balanced throughout and has the design you would expect of a Megaman game complete with the charge shot and slide move.  Through the set pieces of the source material the levels are varied, with the two playable characters and Black Tiger-style shop upgrades adding further variety.  It even has some cutscenes to retell the story, but if you haven’t seen the movie it doesn’t make much sense.  Some impressive sprite art for the time seal the deal to make Capcom’s Willow the game of the year.

The final level can be grating, however.

Street Smart(SNK): The Anniversary Collection says Street Smart is SNK’s first fighting game, but I vehemently argue against that.  What it is is a beat-em-up with only one enemy at a time, 2 if a friend joins.  You have a punch, kick, jump that never helps and a backflip that’s worthless.  All you can really do is mash the two attack buttons at the enemy while they use their attacks on you and everyone gravitates toward the person that they’re hitting as they reel back, causing them to slide all over the stage like the floor is made of ice.  It’s absolutely brainless and gets old quick.

Certain aspects of it would be seen in later SNK games so I get why the anniversary collection made it playable for the sake of historical curiosity, but I think even the guys at Digital Eclipse know it’s trash.  It’s still better than Street Fighter 1 though, because at least it looks and sounds pretty good, if nothing else.

Beast Busters(SNK): This game is available in the SNK 40^th Anniversary collection, where you can use a controller to aim, but as you might expect, it’s not quite the same as the lightgun cabinet it was made for.  It wouldn’t be so bad if the decided method of control wasn’t centering the aiming automatically when the control stick isn’t being touched and if you don’t like that, like me, you can’t change it.  I could settle for using the mouse like in other modern day rail shooter ports, but I guess Digital Eclipse didn’t bother to program that just for this one game.  Lucky me then that the same arcade Willow was at just happened to have a Beast Busters cabinet that keeps getting passed around the local arcades.

Now that's a cabinet.

The machine gun controller with recoil feedback adds a lot to the experience.  It’s a primal feeling when the gun has weight behind it while enemies onscreen get blasted into messy chunks.  The best-known rail shooters today are ones from the 90s, like Terminator 2, Area 51 and The House of the Dead, but while Beast Busters doesn’t reach the level of those games, it has the core pieces that make those games great before they were released.  The layers of the levels, the number of enemies that can be onscreen and all the gory effects are very impressive for the time.  Even by today’s standards, it’s probably the only rail shooter I’ve ever seen, arcade or otherwise, that allows for 3 players at once.  If you come across a cabinet it’s a great game to hop onto with some friends.  In fact, before I started playing there were 3 guys on the cabinet and they were having a blast.  Consider that an endorsement.

Final Fight(CAP): When it comes to the beat-em-up, this and Streets of Rage later on are the two most influential and often-cited in the genre.  There had been ones before Final Fight to varying success, but this one set a standard that other games would follow and not without good reason.  The act of beating up thugs and watching them fall down and go flying is made satisfying thanks to the solid audio and visual design.  The sound of smacking and yelling over the grungy panoramic backgrounds come together to suck you into the moment.

The car-crushing minigame gives a little break from all the standard beatdowns.

Gameplay-wise it’s very simplistic with its one attack button, but it has just enough built around that simplicity to prevent it from being completely brainless.  Like in Dynasty Wars, you can sacrifice health to do a special attack, making you decide on whether it’s worth the cost, there are weapons you can choose when to pick up and use mid-battle, the two types of them have different properties, there are 3 different characters with slightly different quirks and there is some tactic in throwing enemies into other enemies.  It’s a fun time, especially with friends, and has been re-released several times over.  Every gamer needs to play Final Fight at least once.  Just ask Matt McMuscles.  That dude loves Final Fight and even before Youtube, Nintendo Power built Mike Haggar up as a meme-level badass alongside Mr. T and Chuck Norris.

S.A.R.: Search and Rescue(SNK): This is SNK’s last loop lever shooter and it does not go out with a bang.  It doesn’t go out on a whimper either, but it’s derivative.   This game was designed after watching Aliens and playing Contra.  Room after room you messily shoot down infected humans and creepy aliens, including legally distinct Xenomorphs, as the environments get progressively more organic.  Apart from gooey alien visuals not much makes it stand out from Guerilla War or Victory Road before it except for the ability to charge shots for different secondary effects depending on the weapon.  The shooting is still inherently fun at the basest level and this seems like a game that could potentially build a speedrunning community with how you can navigate enemies to get to the end without having to kill everything, but it’s just a footnote in SNK’s history and not anything special.

The Winner

The winner of this year is close.  Both companies had their share of big hits and misses.  SNK had some greats like Prehistoric Isle and Beast Busters while Capcom had Willow and Final Fight.  Ultimately it comes down to the games that were not the standouts.  The less notable games from Capcom like Dynasty Wars and Strider were simply more fun than SNK’s less notable games like S.A.R. and Street Smart, putting SNK in the same issue of quality consistency I criticized Capcom for in 1986.  Therefore, Capcom wins 1989.

With S.A.R. I have officially played all the arcade games from the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection.  There’s still one or two console ports on it for 1990, but no more arcade games.  Did they give up?  Did SNK stop making arcade games? Has Capcom ultimately won in the long run or is SNK preparing something big?  Something that would turn everything around?  A weapon to surpass Metal Gear?!  Well there’s going to be another post after this, so maybe.  Get ready for next time when the 90s officially begin.