Namco vs. Midway: 1992 & 1993

It’s 1992.  Last year Street Fighter 2 kicked off fighting games in a big way and every company was jumping in on the new competitive martial arts gameplay, Namco and Midway included.  At least, Midway did in America.  It’s even slimmer pickings for Namco arcade games than last time.  Their 2D fighter Knuckle Heads didn’t come out in English, just like the majority of their games around this time.  There was the first Ridge Racer that came out…

However, I’ve never seen a cabinet for the original Ridge Racer in my life.

I could only get my hands on one Namco game and it’s from 1993 so you know what that means: another 2 year judgment time span.  They’d better hope Midway drops the ball again, but considering what I know is ahead, I don’t think they are going to.

Along with fighting games, this was around the time companies were seeing the potential in full motion videos, using real life actors to bring a new dimension of storytelling to the gaming medium.  This was most prominently done with the library of games from Digital Pictures (which I might write for another series), but Midway had something similar going already with the digitized actors in games like Cage Fighter.  The boon in both fighting games and using real actors combined together to make a game for them that would become one of the biggest franchises in gaming.  We will see if that franchise propels them to victory in this round.

Total Carnage(MID): This is functionally identical to Smash TV in gameplay, but the setting is completely different.  This time players take the role of two buff action heroes, Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem, as they go gunning down the mutant army of the nation of Kookistan to stop the evil dictator General Akhboob.  If the names didn’t tip you off that the whole thing is a very silly pastiche of American action movies, the cartoon expressions on all the characters will.  It’s like a made-up video game a crazy cartoon character like Uncle Grandpa or Stan Smith would play.

Total Carnage has the advantage of improved movement speed, some more stage variety and more enemy variety with armored vehicles, but it also suffers from the same pacing problem where it’s a very lengthy game that wears out its welcome.  Thankfully the gameplay fatigue is alleviated this time with a level select password system, something I haven’t seen in any arcade game before or since.  When you reach a new level in the game, you are given a short password that can be entered through a spot at the very beginning of the game to warp to that level.  This makes a big difference because it means that if you need a break from the all the shooting you can come back to it when you’re ready to go again.  With that, the drawn-out game length isn’t as bad and if you have all the passwords (through online means or otherwise) it also means you can skip to your favorite parts.  Even with passwords though, levels can drag on, but not as badly as in Smash TV.  I can at least give Total Carnage a pass.

Mortal Kombat(MID):

For as antiquated as the first Mortal Kombat is, it’s surprising how well it holds up.  Right off the bat it has a well-established story.  Having the same idea that SNK did with Fatal Fury 2, a prequel comic by series co-creator John Tobias was made to set the game up, establishing the evil demon sorcerer villain, his otherworldly champion and the kombatants arriving at his island for their own reasons.

John Tobias worked on the Real Ghostbusters comic.

It’s a pretty good comic on its own and Tobias was a talented and experienced artist.  It’s just that actual copies of the thing were downright mythical.  Thankfully all the prequel comics made across the 90s are available in their entirety on the Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection and some of the artwork was used for more accessible console port manuals.  The actual game doesn’t seem like as much of a tournament as the story suggests though.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to the first Mortal Kombat’s kombat.  Every character has the same basic moves, but two special moves with different properties; usually one distance-closing move and one projectile (both at once, for Scorpion).

That makes characters easy to learn.  If you know how to use the punches and kicks of one character, all that’s left with the others is their special moves.  There are also no real combos beyond rapid punching an opponent if you get close enough.  It’s more about landing the good hits, kind of like early Fatal Fury games, but with a lot more emphasis on the hits and blood spatter.  The digitized actors combined with windup and cooldown animations give the attacks some weight to them, making it more closely resemble a real martial arts fight, but not so much that it’s sluggish.  Realism was one of the taglines so it needed to deliver on making hits feel like they hurt.

I had this nightmare, but it wasn't Kano.  It was Freddy Krueger and the machine had KOF 94.

The single player experience isn’t too bad either.  Sure the computer tends to cheat, but I think it grants you mercy by lowering the difficulty every time you continue so at the lowest difficulty level it’s fun enough fighting opponents, finishing them off with fatalities and getting to face the 4-armed claymation Shokan himself.

What keeps me coming back to the first Mortal Kombat is how light it is on content.  I’ll give a pass to most characters having only 2 special moves because Street Fighter 2 was the same and fatalities were kind of an afterthought so everyone only having one is understandable.

Less excusable is having only 7 characters and 2 bosses when both Fatal Fury 2 and Street Fighter 2 had 8 playable characters and 4 bosses.  There are also only 7 stages, one of which you’ll probably never see in arcade mode, as opposed to every single character having their own stage in the aforementioned games.  This means when you play arcade mode, stages repeat themselves, as do characters because of the endurance matches that are clearly there to pad out the length.  It’s still a fun game to play.  It just needed more.

Moving on to 1993 we first have Namco’s only entry.

Lucky & Wild(NAM): This game is awesome and one of my favorite arcade games in a long time.  In this game you play as the buddy cop duo Lucky & Wild as they chase down members of a criminal syndicate in a series of driving shootouts.  It’s a hybrid driver and rail shooter game with two guns mounted to the dashboard representing their rapid-fire handguns.

Lucky steers the car with his left hand while shooting with his right and Wild focuses on using the second gun, unless you think you can drive handless and dual wield.

Lucky & Wild never expects the driver to play it like a racing game.  He only needs to steer left and right to dodge obstacles thrown out by enemies and make sure that foot is on the accelerator because if players run out of time, the criminal gets away.  There’s a brake pedal, but it doesn’t seem to slow the car down much so it might as well not be there.

From the moment the windshields get shot out to signify the start of every level, this game is a wild ride.  Having both movement control and light gun shooting is an exhilarating combination, even moreso with another player beside you, and the graphics have explosions and gunfire going on like a big fireworks show as you’re driving through tunnels, city streets and open roads with expert use of sprite scaling.  You even drive through a mall Blues Brothers-style!

Lucky and Wild themselves are fun protagonists because of how much detail went into their expressions.  They’re fully voiced and you see their faces in the rearview mirror reacting to the triumphant moments and mistakes.  Then, if you catch the criminal, you get to see them out of the car and hold them at gunpoint as a satisfying victory screen.  Sure their personalities aren’t different from other buddy cop duos, but they make a memorable impression.

Lucky & Wild is like an interactive ride from Universal Studios with the only thing missing being a vibrating seat.  I yelled “woo” more than once while playing it.  It oozes with style and excitement.  I’m lucky one of the local arcades had this and if you ever see a Lucky & Wild cabinet in person, play it.  It’s the game of the year.  Namco only had one game this time, but it’s a bigger slam dunk than the next game that’s known for its slam dunks.
Lucky & Wild should be making cameo appearances in Namco games, not Don-Chan or Pac-Man for the umpteenth time.  Can I at least have a Lucky & Wild paintjob in a Ridge Racer game?  Please?

NBA Jam(MID): The NBA Jam series is one of the most quintessential sports games ever made.  It is to basketball what Neo Turf Masters is to golf.  It might be surprising to know then that it isn’t very different from Arch Rivals.

It has the same simple controls and the same 2-on-2 basketball gameplay.  It might as well be a remake of Arch Rivals, but this remake has the official branding of the NBA and uses Midway’s digitization methods for a more authentic presentation with real basketball players.  Less authentic to basketball is flaming balls and a loud announcer shouting “boomshakalaka”, but it wouldn’t be a 90s Midway game if it didn’t go at least a little crazy.

I kind of miss the cartoon cutaways from Arch Rivals, but I suppose taking those out helps move the game along.  I liked Arch Rivals and this is a better version of that.  NBA Jam is still THE arcade basketball game, regardless of what version you play.

Mortal Kombat 2(MID): With the villains from the first game defeated, Mortal Kombat 2 ups the ante by having their emperor bring the fight to his home turf: the outworld.  Again the plot is set up in a great prequel comic that can be viewed in the Legacy Kollection.

Incoming sub-boss.

With the new setting comes many new characters and stages.  The lack of content the first game suffered from doesn’t apply here.  It has 12 playable characters with two bosses and far more stages, which are much more interesting and imaginative this time.  The outworld setting allowed the creators to make some bizarre and creative backgrounds that remind the player they are no longer on earth.

The combat is faster and characters have more special moves and more finishing moves, including the new friendship and babality finishing moves you can use to style on the other player.  It does everything the first game did, but better and fighting other players leads to hours of fun.  I should know.  I played a lot of it on a Sega Genesis back in the day and with the Legacy Kollection I still come back to fight others in it.

I only come back to it to fight others.  The single player experience is

The computer fucking cheats!  The computer cheats like crazy!  It cheats as much as it possibly can!  There is no fair fighting against the computer!  The computer can do things in situations you can’t, uses moves faster than you can and will always grab you!  The computer can grab you from anywhere!  For most players, grabbing isn’t especially practical, but for the computer it’s the most reliable move they have!  Your foot can be right in their face and your punch can be hitting them dead-on, but instead the game will say “fuck you” and the computer will grab you MID-ATTACK!

It doesn’t even go easy on you after you continue like the first game did!  It might obviously lower the difficulty for one round just to let you think you have a chance and then in the next round shoot the difficulty level up to “cheating bitch” difficulty!

The Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection has an option to help with this, where you can play the arcade mode on a fixed difficulty so it doesn’t get out of control as it goes on and it also has a rewind option to cheat the cheaters in your own way, but both of these options serve to highlight how shit the computer opponents are.
The lowest difficulty for fixed difficulty is level 0 (out of 9), but that’s not fun because the computer at difficulty 0 is brain-dead and walks right into your attacks or loops making one simple punch you can duck under to avoid while the computer continues to swing at the air.  The jump from level 0 to level 1 is big because at level 1 the computer will start cheating and throwing you as you hit them, just not as frequently as it does at higher difficulties.  That means your best difficulty options are either no challenge or dealing with a cheater.
The rewind option highlights that the computer doesn’t actually do anything strategic.  It just instantly counters whatever you throw at it and it’s almost funny using the rewind tool to dissect how the computer has a perfect counter for every situation BEFORE THE ANIMATION STARTS!  What a shitload of fuck!  Who thought this was acceptable?!

I can recommend Mortal Kombat 2 to play with others, but the single player mode is so badly made that it’s a huge demerit on what should be an all-time classic.
 

The Winner

As much as I loved Lucky & Wild, that was only one big hit for Namco.  Midway had 3 hits plus half a hit, most of which had more longevity and depth.  With Lucky & Wild you play it once or twice and you’re done, again comparable to a Universal Studios Ride.  With NBA Jam or the Mortal Kombat games, there are hours of fun to be had with other players by their competitive nature, the variety of teams and characters given with the different strategies and varying experiences that come with them.  Lucky & Wild is one of the best light gun shooters I’ve ever played, but Namco needed more than that this time.  Midway wins.

Meanwhile…

Capcom and SNK were going full force on all cylinders at this point.  1992 to 1993 saw all manner of shooters, fighters and beat-em-ups from them.  There were so many I had to split 1992 into two parts.  Street Fighter 2 got better and better versions, Fatal Fury got its sequel followed by an update of its own and SNK went further than that by also introducing the world to Art of Fighting, World Heroes and Samurai Shodown.  It was a hell of a time to be a fighting game fan.

Neither of our current competitors measure up to our previous ones for this time span overall, but NBA Jam is a better sports game than the ones from SNK and Lucky & Wild is at least on par with the best beat-em-ups the previous competitors had to offer.  Capcom and SNK weren’t investing in the big, tricked-out driving cabinets.

As fun as all the games from these companies were, a very interesting game from 1993 came not from Capcom, SNK, Midway or Namco, but Sega; a fighting game that used polygonal graphics to allow for 3 dimensional movement.  We already saw polygonal graphics with some of Midway’s games, but to put that into a martial arts combat simulator?  It’s unheard of.

Maybe such a new dimension opening up for the genre will inspire one of our current competitors next year.