Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1993

In 1993, the fighting game genre had gone into full swing.  Mortal Kombat 2 came out with even better graphics, more violence and cheating asshole computer opponents.  Home ports of arcade games like it and Street Fighter 2 were topping the sales charts and other companies got in on the fighting action themselves, like Data East with Fighter’s History and Konami with TMNT: Tournament Fighter.

1993 was also a big year for 3D gaming.  The PC megahit Myst came out with its 3D pre-rendered backgrounds and full motion video, while on the console side, Nintendo made Star Fox, a game able to render polygons on a Super Nintendo cart.  For fighting games, Sega topped off the year by revolutionizing the genre by adding a 3D element with Virtua Fighter.  It was a year of major technological advancements for the medium of gaming.

I have to admit, 3D models having faces is pretty impressive too.

For arcades, one of the biggest technological advancements came with Capcom's new arcade hardware.  One that could, in some ways, even surpass the Neogeo: the CPS2 board!  This new technology would allow for more and bigger sprites, more colors and even better audio thanks to QSound technology (though Qsound was used in a less-used CPS1 variant called the CPS Dash).

Though 3D fighting would blow up in the coming years in large part due to Virtua Fighter, Capcom and SNK were still sticking with what they had in two dimensions, albeit with less releases this time.  In fact, this year Capcom only has 3 games to work with.  Even still, there’s a direct point of comparison with two of Capcom’s games.  Both have an updated version of their hit fighting games and, more uniquely, both have a wrestling game.

Let’s see who gets treated like Roman Reigns and who gets treated like John Cena!

3 Count Bout: Unlike King of the Monsters, there’s actually more to the game than hitting your opponent until they go down.  Now you have 2 basic attacks, dash attacks, Irish whips and some wrestlers have a special move.  You need the manual for most of these techniques though because the game doesn’t explain it all.

The grappling aspect is the simplest part of all.  When you run into your opponent, both players get a brief moment to mash the attack button as much as they can and whoever wins has a moment to do a wrestling move of their choice.  How injured a player is when grappling can give them a disadvantage in grapples, making it a strategic choice whether or not to engage in them.  It’s not very in-depth, but there’s enough to play around with thanks to different stages and their anomalies like the referee and weapons.  I’ve beaten up the referee plenty in wrestling games over the years, but I can’t say I’ve played a wrestling game in which you can throw the ref right at your opponent until I played 3 Count Bout.  With a friend, the game’s a pretty fun distraction and gets you in the mood to spout off pro wrestling memes.

I must emphasize the “with a friend” part very heavily.  With the sports games, there’s not a lot to say about the single player because all it is is playing against the computer, which is still fun, but nothing of note.  In 3 Count Bout, it is not fun.  The computer cheats its ass off and seems damn near invincible the longer it goes on, beating you in every grapple and making fighting them a battle of attrition.  Because of this and the already somewhat shallow gameplay, I can’t give it a full recommendation.  It’s a lot better than some of the other wrestling games out at that point in time.  I’ll give it that much.

World Heroes 2(SNK): I didn’t play the first World Heroes so playing the sequel means it can give a good first impression.  First impressions were indeed good thanks in large part to the premise.  The story of the first World Heroes is that time traveling mad scientist Doctor Brown brings in the best fighters from across time to determine who is the best in a big tournament.  For science, I guess.  They don’t give him much of a motivation besides wanting to know.  In the previous game, a blob monster from the future named Geegus interrupted the tournament, but ultimately the victor wasn’t decided and he’s doing it again.

The cast of characters in the game are all historical figures, slightly adjusted as needed if said figures aren’t public domain.  Gregorio Rasputin, Jeanne D’Arc, Hulk Hogan, Genghis Kahn and the poster boys Hanzo Hattori and Kotaro Fuuma, famous enemies in history.  All of them have fun, colorful designs and movesets with detailed backgrounds.  It has all the makings of a fighting game classic.  Too bad the gameplay isn’t so good.

That's not Jeanne D'Arc! Where's her transformation armlet?

World Heroes 2 only uses 3 buttons.  Two are for attacks and one is for taunting as well as grabbing if you don’t feel like doing it with the punch button like a normal person.  Similar to what the Neogeo Pocket games would do later, tapping the button does a light attack and holding it does a heavy one.  World Heroes really feels like it could’ve benefited from just having 4 attack buttons because doing it the way it does doesn’t feel as tight and there’s a slight feeling of imprecision.  There are 16 characters, all with good arsenals of attacks to play around with and there’s an alternate “deathmatch” mode that adds obstacles to the stages, something unheard of at this point, so World Heroes is quite content-rich for 1993, but you’re only going to get anything out of it with others because this game follows in the footsteps of 3 Count Bout with its crap single player.

I fully believe the computer, at a certain point, cheats.  I’m aware computer opponents in most 90s fighting games cheat, but with those games the cheating is more reigned in at lower difficulties and most often takes the form of the computer reacting with quick precision, which can be planned around.  Here I think the computer’s attacks are faster than they normally are and they do things the player can’t.  It’s like the game can’t win through the skill of its computer opponents and has to directly hack the game to get anywhere.  Maybe it’s my imagination, but what I can say for sure is that playing through the game gets less and less fun and more and more frustrating as it goes on.  Just like with 3 Count Bout, it’s probably a good time with friends, but I can’t give it much of a recommendation.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs(CAP): Warriors of Fate fell flat last year because of its repetitive game design, but Capcom learned their lesson for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.  Characters have more diversity not only in their special moves, but each of them also have their own sets of dialogue for the story, of which there is much more of one.  In fact, the ridiculous story of going up against dinosaurs, Fist of the North Star-type punks and mutated mad science made me think of SNK’s beat-em-ups like Mutation Nation.  Rest assured though, it has all the Capcom brawler staples, like the dash attack, 360 attack and weapons.  There is quite a lot of weapons, in fact, if not in variety then it the number dropped by enemies, making it so the game is never keeping you purely unarmed for long.  It’s a satisfying combat sequence when you quickly pick up a rifle, hit enemies at a distance until you run out of ammo, then throw the gun at them and start beating down enemies closing in behind you with your good old-fashioned martial arts.

The only bad thing about Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is that it starts to wear out its welcome.  It’s not badly paced and unlike Warriors of Fate, there’s a lot of different environments, hazards and bosses to keep things from getting stale, but towards the end I have to admit I was wanting it to just get to the finale.  It’s consistently fun throughout though.  It’s a well-made beat-em-up to add to Capcom’s library, but sadly it has never gotten a console port.  I had to drive a not-significant distance to get to the arcade that had it so if you donate to my Ko-Fi you’re paying for my gas money.

Samurai Shodown(SNK): I wasn’t there for the Samurai Shodown zeitgeist, but based on what I’ve heard from people who were, this game was a big honkin’ deal.  It made absolute gangbusters, won a number of game of the year awards and apparently even went back and forth with topping every version of Street Fighter 2 in sales (albeit not the combined sales of all versions).  It was so big that later on, a good port of it and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo were considered two of the few reasons you might want a Panasonic 3DO.  I’ve always considered the first Samurai Shodown to be bad, but now that I have more of a context for arcades at the time, I’m giving it another chance.

The first Samurai Shodown was indeed a unique concept and I can see how it would wow players back in the day with its samurai aesthetics and gameplay that takes the whole “get in a good hit” thing to the extreme with higher damage blade strikes and no real combos.  It’s just that when you really look at it it’s very lackluster.

The graphics are poor.  Fatal Fury 2, 3 Count Bout and World Heroes 2 look way better than Samurai Shodown does.  The backgrounds look nice enough with little details to get you into the moment, but the character sprites look almost cartoonish and awkward, as if they had bigger character designs they had to crunch down for memory space.  There is a noticeable dissonance between the in-game sprites and the character art, especially with Tam Tam and Amakusa.  Amakusa looks awesome in the cutscenes, but his character sprite looks like someone else entirely.

The biggest problem with the graphics though is that for a game that really wanted to emphasize the weight of the blade, the combat feel is pretty weak.  The herky jerky movement of the characters do not give strikes very much of an “oomph” factor beyond a hit stop and it doesn’t help that when this game was released in America, the blood was replaced with sweat because it’s not like there was a game named Mortal Kombat that showed you could have blood in your arcade game!  This was apparently not the case if you played the English cartridge in a Japanese machine.  The version on the Samuai Shodown Neogeo Collection has the proper red blood and the Hamster ports of each of the Neogeo games let you toggle the blood color and violence.

The gameplay gets the job done, but it’s ultimately not a whole lot different from other SNK fighting games up to this point, if I’m being honest.  The main gameplay difference is that blocking a blade strike leaves the attacker more open, making it more like blade-clashing fencing, and there’s a rage gauge I usually forget is even there.  This is all before you get into the character imbalance that the designers outright admitted was more or less done on purpose and they apologized for it.

I do like the characters, their designs and the story that reveals the real villain to you as you play, but I think that my favorite parts have nothing to do with actually playing the game speaks for itself.  It’s better than I remember it being, but I’d still much rather play something else.

Saturday Night Slam Masters(CAP):

Where is Thouzer?  I was promised Thouzer!

My mind feels numb after playing Saturday Night Slam Masters.  It’s King of the Monsters all over again.  There is practically no nuance, no finesse and very little strategy.  You have one attack button, a jump button and a dedicated button to pin the opponent for the 3 count.  Reduce your opponent’s life by mashing that attack button.  There are ways you can approach the opponent, but timing or technique isn’t much of a factor.  Just hit the attack button to use the same set of basic attacks over and over again to make the other guy’s health go down to 0 and then press the pin button to win

Pinning your opponent is really redundant when their life is at 0 and it’s aggravating when both fighters keep hitting each other with their life gone yet neither of them go down to be pinned until one of them gets lucky or the 3 minute timer runs out, leading to a tie, which in single player mode means you effectively lost.

Characters have practically no diversity in how they play.  Each wrestler has one special attack that’s either useless because the regular attack works just as well or is activated by button mashing.  They also each have a special grapple move, but grappling is a total crapshoot because you have to get close enough to your opponent to do it without them either hitting you or grappling you first and who gets a grapple in first is practically a coin flip.  Then once you do have the opponent in your clutches, you only have a brief half a second to do your grapple input command when you can do a regular grapple instead.

The only thing this game has over 3 Count Bout is that it supports up to 4 players at once and I suppose that can be fun for a one-off skirmish with friends for some goofing.  Apart from that and 3 Count Bout’s single player being horrendous, SNK’s wrestling game trounces Saturday Night Slam Masters in every way.  It looks and sounds far better, there’s more depth thanks to 2 attack buttons and a grapple system at the forefront of each match that at least has a little bit of strategy to it.  I had high hopes for this one, but it’s one of the worst kinds of games: boring.

Super Street Fighter 2(CAP): It’s only fitting that Capcom started off their new technology with their biggest hit.  Super Street Fighter 2 is the biggest upgrade for the game, overhauling practically everything but the character sprites.  The character portraits look far more detailed and less goofy, backgrounds were given more color and detail and every single music track got re-recorded.  Now all the ones that were unmemorable before are memorable, the ones that were already great are even better and there are new tracks that match the quality of the rest.

These new tracks are the ones that come with 4 new characters, the first time all new characters were added to the game.  I can do without T. Hawk, but the rest of them are winners, especially Dee Jay, one of my favorite characters in the franchise.  He’s Capcom’s Duck King.

Some characters also subtly got new animations and new command inputs for their moves.  All the tweaks and a game speed that sits between the original and Turbo make Super Street Fighter 2 feel polished and the best Street Fighter 2 has ever been.

Fatal Fury Special(SNK): Follwing Capcom’s lead, SNK also re-released their fighting game sequel and made the bosses playable, but unlike Championship Edition it also adds 3 characters previously unplayable from the first game with new movesets, including Geese Howard himself.  That had to have been a big draw, though I’m not sure Geese had reached the memetic infamy he has today.

If he hadn't, it sure helped.

Super Street Fighter 2 is great fun, but Fatal Fury Special is downright masterful.  The problems I had with how Fatal Fury 2 played were rectified.  It moves faster and flows better, combos are easier to do, the computer opponents aren’t quite as cheap and there are more opttons for going in and out of the background. Playing it right after Super Street Fighter 2, I find that Fatal Fury Special has more weight and oomph to every attack and characters don’t have as many moves that move them around the screen, making the action more like an up close and personal stand-off.  It’s also still a wonderful looking and sounding game and now with the new characters there’s even more amazing stages full of life, particularly with Duck King’s super elaborate rave that is easily the very best-looking stage in any fighting game yet.

The added characters did come at the cost of the story.  Krauser isn’t kept a mystery now that he’s on the character select screen and some of the cutscenes were cut because they showed Tung and Duck as not being involved in the tournament, but this is alleviated by a charming credits sequence of little character skits and a character roll call.  I love everything about Fatal Fury Special and it earns my 1993 Game of the Year Award.

 The Winner

Well, Capcom only had 2 games and both fell short of SNK’s equivalents.  3 Count Bout was better than Saturday Night Slam Masters and Fatal Fury Special was better than Super Street Fighter 2.  World Heroes 2 was bad and Samurai Shodown was forgettable, but neither of those were bad enough to drag down SNK’s triumphs, so they win by a mile.

SNKis catching up to Capcom's lead.  Now we’ll move on to 1994, which is where some might say the golden age of fighting games really began if 1993 wasn't quite it.  There’s going to be all sorts of classics from both sides like

Oh god.