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.

Paddle Mania(SNK): When you see a game called Paddle Mania you expect a straightforward game of paddleball or maybe Tennis and for the most part, that’s what you get.  All you have to do is move around the court and swing to hit the ball left or right.  It’s that simple.  Up to 4 players can play with different options for playing against each other and the computer.  It’s when you play against the computer that the “mania” part comes into play.  After every other match against a paddleball player, you play against other sports players like a volleyball team, a sumo wrestler and even a synchronized swimming team, all of whom have a certain gimmick to how they handle the ball.  It spices up the experience, but at its core it’s just a simple little paddleball game you might play a few rounds of with friends.  Every arcade needed a game like Paddle Mania before NBA Jam.

Last Duel(CAP): This is the one Capcom game this year made before the CPS came into play.  It has 2 halves: one is a vertical car shooter where instead of the game automatically scrolling, you control the scroll speed by accelerating or decelerating the car.  The other is a typical space shooter.  The car sections are innovative and thrilling as you can go for a good while at a high speed while blowing through enemies in your way and avoiding the shots you speed past.  The space sections are exactly what you would expect, but with the unique option of a barrel roll that effectively acts as temporary invincibility for those moments where avoiding getting hit is impossible.  Both halves of the game aren’t anything that stand out, but they’re competently done and some of the music is a vibe.

Forgotten Worlds(CAP): Capcom knocks it out of the park with this one.  It’s a winning concept: 2 dudes straight out of Contra go through a world of magic and magitek, gunning down gods, mystics and fantastical monsters with their big blasto guns.  This is the first game to use Capcom’s CP arcade system and thanks to that upgrade the graphics look excellent and you’re given full rotational aiming with 16 different directions, which has a caveat when it comes to playing it on the Capcom Arcade Stadium.  SNK games used a loop lever joystick, where you could rotate the base of the joystick to rotate the character.  The same principle applies to Forgotten Worlds, except instead of the joystick the rotation device was also the fire button.

In the SNK Anniversary Collection, the rotating joystick aspect is changed into twin stick shooting controls, where the second analog stick of a controller is used to position the character, but sincethe Capcom Arcade Stadium doesn’t take a second stick into account, it assigns rotating to the left and right bumpers of a standard PC controller.  This means using an arcade stick for it is not ideal and I’m willing to bet it also means that the turning and positioning is not one-to-one like it would be using the arcade technology, but it does turn at a speed that isn’t too slow and not so fast that it’s finicky to aim right.

Even if it was one-to-one the game gets as hard as you would expect of an arcade shoot-em-up, but it’s entertaining throughout and you do yourself a disservice missing out on it.  They even brought Raiga and Fuga back from Tiger Road.

Big chungus CPS sprites.

Chopper 1(SNK): This is SNK’s equivalent to 1943.  It looks and plays fine, but it’s generic and does nothing to stand out from the other shooting games I’ve already gone over.  Even the Anniversary Collection’s history timeline, which normally goes over what made a game stand out, doesn’t have much to say about it.  It’s like it was thrown in because they could and had some extra time, which I suppose is nice of them, but this one is forgettable.

P.O.W.(SNK)

Is that Reb Brown?  I'm not the only one seeing this, right?

This game is the beat-em-up equivalent to Street Fighter 1.  It does everything wrong.  You have barely any moves in your arsenal and no combos, enemies lack any variety, the pacing and walk speed is a slog and hit detection is off.  It’s a miserable experience that drags itself out and practically runs out of ideas within the first few minutes.  A big lose for SNK.

Ghouls n’ Ghosts(CAP): The original Ghosts n’ Goblins was ass, full of dickheaded level design and trial and error frustration with no fun, but Ghouls n’ Ghosts is a complete 180 from that!  It shows what the Capcom CPS does to a franchise.  It looks beautiful for the time, you have more offensive options and the level design is challenging without being viciously unfair!  Checkpoints are plentiful so even if you die it’s not a repetitive chore to get back to where you were, making playing through the game actually a fairly smooth ride.  There’s more choice in difficulty selection to boot, meaning it can be masochist hard only if you want it to be.

The magic armor gives you a taste of power.

It does play the stupid Ghosts n’ Goblins card of sending you back to the beginning of the game to get the true ending though.  You get a super powerful weapon for the second go-round and it can be cathartic plowing through the enemies with it like a new game plus weapon, but it’s still artificial longevity.  Just play to the end the first time and that’s good enough.  All you’re missing is getting to fight the D&D devil.

How about no?

The Winner

How the tides have turned.  Last year Capcom got positively stomped by SNK, but now it is Capcom who is doing the stomping with their giant foot that is the CPS.  Making things worse for SNK was the lack of quality in their showing this year.  Paddle Mania is a decent game to have around, if not standout, but they had the mediocre Chopper 1 and pathetic P.O.W. weighing them down while Capcom had one decent game and two absolute bangers, including Forgotten Worlds, which I declare the 1988 game of the year.

In SNK’s defense, it’s my understanding that this was around the time they were upping their game when it came to home ports and NES exclusive releases, but this is The King of Arcades, not the King of Homes.  If they want to reclaim their title, something has to be done for the next year when these companies face off again in 1989.