Namco vs. Midway: The King of Arcades 2: 1994

1994 was a slow year for our two competitors, for arcades at least.  Midway was busy with the home ports of Mortal Kombat 2 and as usual Namco was not releasing games in English because… Because.  Both companies did put out at least one game each in 1994 though.  On Midway's side is a tried and true rail shooter that sticks to a lot of its companies established conventions and a stop motion fighting game.  On Namco's side is the beginning of one of the biggest names in fighting games.  It’s a one-on-one.  We shall see which game carries their company to victory.

Revolution X(MID): In this rail shooter the player(s) must rescue and team up with Aerosmith to fight the New Order Nation, an evil military cabal of corrupt organizations that wants to ban all music and fun in the world through force.  Players are armed with mounted machine guns in which the most powerful weapon at their disposal is exploding music CDs because “music is the weapon.”  Like Total Carnage, this feels like a parody a cartoon would have in-universe that’s so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly exist, but it does.

It’s easy to laugh at the 90s-era anti-authority attitude that is so indicative of the time, but a fascist army of masked forces terrorizing people and trying to censor and shut down dissent and things they don’t like through violent force echoes far more true to today’s reality than back then.  I think I would choose the New Order Nation over the racist, fascist meth head in the White House now, actually.

It doesn’t take long for Revolution X to go from its now-realistic premise to complete insanity.  This was made a good while after Aerosmith got sober and they must’ve offloaded some of their spare drugs to Midway because this game is full of bizarre and outlandish imagery, as if seeing digitized Aerosmith talk to the player about fighting an evil empire wasn’t enough.  Steve Tyler throws you the keys to a car through a video transmission on a TV that’s probably broken, there’s a giant slime monster that pops eyeballs out of its head as an attack and an executive desk turning into a flying gunship is one of the less strange things in the game.  All of this is to a soundtrack with clips and riffs of Aerosmith songs and Steve Tyler screaming to declare the power-ups.  The series Weird Video Games has a great rundown on the craziness of Revolution X that I highly recommend watching.

I love Revolution X.  What a trip.  It is textbook 90s Midway: sticking to the man, rock song references, digitized actors (included future Sonya Blade, Kerry Hoskins) and flashy action.  Compared to Lucky & Wild from last year, Revolution X is a more standard rail shooter without the immersive touches that made Lucky & Wild one of the best, but it too has to be played at least once.
 
Primal Rage(MID): The appeal of Primal Rage begins and ends with its presentation.  I love the effort that went into animating the immaculately detailed stop motion models.  It looks like Mortal Kombat if every character was like the Shokan and Motaro.  It’s such a shame the game plays like ass.

For the record, this was played on an actual arcade unit.  I remember my local Red Robin had it decades ago and now one of the arcades near me has it.  Straight ports of Primal Rage are notoriously difficult to make work, but I can safely say that even a perfectly functional version of the game is not very fun to play.  Combat does not flow.  Attacks rarely feel like they can combo into each other and if the game was going for a style of play focused around getting powerful single hits in like Samurai Shodown, it doesn’t pull that off either because hits lack impact and I think there’s something off about the hit detection too.

I never feel like I’m in control with this game because the combat isn’t snappy and that’s in part because of the decision to use negative edge inputs.  If you don’t know what that means, it means that in order to pull off special moves you hold down the button, do the motion and then let go instead of doing the motion and pressing a button.  It’s sort of like making every single special move a charge attack.  There’s a reason almost no fighting game ever does it that way anymore (at least not by default).  If I am pressing a button, I want it do what it does right in that moment right away because in a fighting game every half-second counts.  Primal Rage doesn’t even have much of a story or personality in the monsters either.  It’s just a big kaiju fight and that would be fine if playing it was fun, but it’s not.

Tekken(NAM): Knowing that this is one of the very first 3D fighting games ever made, I was fully expecting it to be a train wreck, but it’s surprisingly functional even today.  It doesn’t make much use of the third dimension, but the combat of controlling the four limbs, air juggling and throw mixups make for fun fighting at a base level, once you get used to the timing required.  The arcade mode isn’t even all that frustrating at the lowest difficulty as long as you make it so you automatically continue with the same character to jump right back into the fight.  I think it eases on the difficulty the more you continue too, like what the first Mortal Kombat did.

Tekken’s biggest weakness is that it has no, as the kids say it nowadays, “rizz.”  It’s impressive that every character is animated in such a way that some of their personality shines through; Bruce Lee knockoff Law uses jeet kun do, Jack moves like the robot he is and Kazuya fights with no nonsense, straightforward assaults.  That is where the characterization stops though.

Why does this game put the stage name at the bottom?

The only story given (in the PS1 port’s manual at least) is that Heihachi Mishima, the head of the Mishima Zaibatsu, is holding the King of Iron Fist tournament and every character has their own reason for joining.  The reason his son Kazuya enters is to take over the Zaibatsu and take on the world as well as to get revenge for Heihachi throwing off a cliff when he was young.  The reason Heihachi did that isn’t (canonically) explained until Tekken 7 decades later so in this game it’s treated like a small detail thrown into the plot instead of a central traumatic event in Kazuya’s character.

In fact, almost nothing gets any elaboration or expression in the first Tekken.  There are no character-specific interactions, no win quotes, no voice lines and no endings.  The infamously crappy-looking endings are from the PS1 port.  In the arcade version the ending is a compilation of the instant replays of the player’s victories against all the previous opponents, which I guess is a fun way to cap things off too.

PS1 exclusive meme.

Tekken isn’t bad for a first go, but it feels like a beta test for something better.  Sort of a proof of concept game.  A demo.

The Winner

In a reversal from the last round, it is Midway that made the crazy rail shooter and Namco that started a major fighting game franchise.  Like Lucky & Wild, Revolution X is an awesome rail shooter that everyone needs to play at least once, but Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 were enough to win out against Namco’s amazing shooter last time.  Tekken does not pull off the same feat.

Tekken gets points from me for being a big leap forward for 3D fighting games and being fun enough to play even to this day, but once you get past the fact that it’s 3D fighting with more grounded combat, there’s not a lot to make it stand out.  Not the music, not the actual graphics and the gameplay, even if it works, needs refinement.  Revolution X is a standard rail shooter gameplay-wise, but all the crazy visuals, music and level variety firmly burn the experience into my mind and to this day there is no other game like it.  Primal Rage also left an impression with its visuals, if nothing else.
 
When I interned at Screwattack I found out the next convention was going to have a Revolution X Cabinet and wrote about it in a piece all about some of the standout arcade games at the convention was going to have, to get people hyped up.  If the first Tekken were there, it would not be included in that piece.  Midway wins again.

Meanwhile...

Big hits and big misses made Capcom and SNK’s 1994 all over the place.  There were some big hits like the D&D: Tower of Doom and Samurai Shodown 2, but also huge misses like the English version of Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo and The King of Fighters 94, both of which are games that should have never been allowed to see the light of day in the state they were in.

Midway and Namco had only three games collectively (that I could play) so they were either going to have nothing but hits or nothing but failures.  In the end they came out with a memorable and zany rail shooter and a barebones fighting game with a unique fighting system done with polygons.  Also Primal Rage.  Capcom and SNK’s wins were much better than anything from the current competitors, but at least the current ones didn’t stumble too hard.

Next time, Midway is striking back.  Mortal Kombat will return and Namco will have the sequel to their hit new 3D fighting series.  It’ll be a brawl of the one-on-one brawler.  Who will win?