Namco vs. Midway: The King of Arcades 2: 1995

1995. The peak of Mortal Kombat mania.  Last year may not have had a Mortal Kombat game in arcades, but those home versions of the games were selling like hotcakes and the franchise was getting merchandised to hell and back.  There was the movie, which is widely regarded as one of the best video game to movie adaptations to this day, there was the promotional VHS of the movie and there was the live tour.

Mortal Kombat got so much attention that other companies were trying to get in on the digitized actors and violence, usually to poor results.

Oh yeah, Namco is in this.  They released games mostly in Japan and not in America so they got left in the dust, although Tekken was shaping up to be their heaviest hitter in arcades.  Here in this competition, popularity and hype means nothing.  All that matters is who made the best games.  The current score has Midway in the lead, 7 to 5.  Namco isn’t far behind and still has a few years left to take the lead.

The Outfoxies(NAM): The premise of The Outfoxies is atypical of most one-on-one combat games; you choose one of 7 assassins and are tasked with taking out the other 6.  Only two of the assassins are what one might call ordinary humans while the rest include a chimpanzee, a pair of twins and a circus performer with a pet iguana.

As entertaining as the oddball cast of characters are, the show stealer is the stages.  The Outfoxies might be the very first Platform Fighter ever made, where fights take place on wide open areas for each character to jump and climb around on while picking up weapons with which to kill each other.  Stages are multi-segmented, expansive and often transform as the fights progress.

For a game from 1995 the amount of sprite rotating and scaling is amazing and is something I would more expect from a late 90s Neogeo game.  The camera zooms out so that both players are always onscreen, which we take for granted today, but back then that couldn’t have been an easy feat.  I doubt ships rocking back and forth in reaction to waves and exploding rockets were easy to do either.  Every stage has impressive detail put into them, right down to the little things.  In one stage you can pick up pies in the dining area as a weapon.

In the aquarium stage, there are tanks of piranhas and sharks, which swim out of their tanks once the place starts filling with water after a bomb goes off.  The train stage can go into tunnels, meaning you need to duck if you’re on the roof, and the smoke from the engine deliberately obscures the assassin inside it.

Gameplay has smaller details and quirks to give it that extra bit of innovation too.  If you’re set on fire you can spread it to the opponent and parts of the stages will stay on fire for a while.  You can also cook grenades and with all the movement going on in stages and limited ammo, a big part of the game is being able to line up your shots.  That’s not even getting into how every character has their own debriefing, post-victory animation and combat animations for things like stop, dropping and rolling when they’re on fire.

All of this platforming action concludes with a linear gauntlet stage and final boss exclusive to single player mode, capping off a fun, action-packed adventure, assuming you’re not just playing it for the multiplayer, which is great fun too.

The Outfoxies has some problems that come with being one of the first of its kind, like some stiffness in climbing and grabbing things or accidentally rolling when trying to pick up a weapon, but once you get used to some of the clunky design decisions , this is one of the best games Namco has made yet.

It did not come out in America.

The Outfoxies is a love letter to 80s action movies, is full of guns, a cool new gameplay style and mild violence that Americans were all over at the time and it never came out in America!  THE GAME IS ALREADY IN ENGLISH ANYWAY!  It is in English with Japanese subtitles!  Namco didn’t even need to do anything!  Whose crack-addled brain thought not to let the Americans have a game that almost seems exclusively made FOR them?!  I expect this from Capcom, not Namco!

It's in English!

It’s not related to the competition, but I also take issue with the Arcade Archives re-release from the Hamster Corporation.  Not that there’s anything wrong with the quality of its emulation, in fact they’ve stepped up their game with those by including a more detailed full-color e-manual and save states.  My gripe is they’re charging 15 smackaroonies for this thing instead of the usual 8 dollars, which is already pushing it for most games to begin with.
Apparently this is because The Outfoxies took considerably more effort on account of having the Primal Rage problem, where for decades no one could get it to work right on anything but the original arcade hardware.  I guess that’s something of an excuse, but as much as I like The Outfoxies, it’s not worth the 15 dollars I paid for it.  10 dollars along would be a step too far.

Still, taken on its own merits for the sake of this competition, The Outfoxies is awesome and has the kind of innovation, style and technical wizardry I associate more with Midway.  I can already tell this will be Namco’s biggest hit for this year, if you can ignore that it’s an English language game that never came out in English-speaking countries.

Mortal Kombat 3(MID): Just like with Mortal Kombat 2, this game is more of the same in terms of gameplay, but the setting, moves and characters are switched up so it’s not simply an updated version of the previous game.

This time Shao Kahn uses an interdimensional loophole using his wife Sindel in order to bypass the rules of Mortal Kombat and start invading Earthrealm.  The first thing he does is suck the souls out of the world’s denizens save for a select few kombatants who were protected from it.  Now most of the stages are city streets, subway tunnels and skyscrapers.  There’s no prequel comic this time, but the attract sequence says enough.

The big new additions to Mortal Kombat 3’s gameplay are the pre-set kombos and run button.  Interesting that this game did running in a fighting game before The King of Fighters would in the next year.  The run button is mainly used for the kombos so that you can rush in and start pulling them off, which adds an extra layer of speed and aggression to the game that the previous entries didn’t have.  It loses some of the simplicity and spacing focus that came with the previous games and their lack of real combos, but it’s also a lot of fun to wait for the right opportunity to charge in and get in some big damage.  I am a KOF player, after all.

Thankfully the worst part of Mortal Kombat 2, the cheating computer opponents, have been dialed back considerably and now they don’t cheat nearly as much, though it still happens.  Combine that with the kombat kodes that allow for modifiers, the new animalities and an even larger roster of characters and you have a recipe for a damn fun fighter.

Tekken 2(NAM): It’s funny to look at Tekken 2’s setup in hindsight, even though most of it is in the console versions manual.  After throwing Heihachi off a cliff at the end of the first Tekken, Kazuya Mishima takes over the Mishima Zaibatsu and becomes the new villain because if you can beat the head of the Zaibatsu in a fight then you get to take it over.  That’s not even a joke.  It happens again later after Tekken 5.  Imagine if you got control of Amazon because you can beat Jeff Bezos in MMA.  How does being a giant badass make you good at business?  I guess the CEO being a world champion martial artist is a hell of a marketing hook, at least.

Well everyone gets a shot at the new head of the Mishima Zaibatsu in Tekken 2 because Kazuya starts another King of Iron Fist tournament to prove who is the best.  Among the participants is Heihachi, who survived in what I’m sure will be the only time it looked like he should’ve died, but didn’t.  However, there is potentially a supernatural element on Kazuya’s side, as it’s rumored that he made a deal with the devil to gain superhuman powers.

I never liked this stupid design.

It’s a good thing it’s specified to be a rumor because there could be a different explanation, like that he got super demon genes from his mom or something.  The plot begins to creep into what Tekken is known for today and so does the gameplay.

Tekken 2 has more characters, more moves, more combo potential, more eye-catching stages and more fluent and responsive gameplay, including the introduction of side stepping.  I gave the first Tekken praise for not being an unplayable mess for being one of the first of its kind, but with Tekken 2 it’s genuinely a fun fighting game without the need of such consideration.  The stiffness in Tekken 2 feels less like clunky game design and more like the game expects players to be very deliberate and exact in what moves they use.

There are many of those moves to try out because Tekken 2 has a whopping 25 characters, a number that’s about as many as The King of Fighters 95.  To be more specific, it had 25 characters eventually.  See, Tekken 2 and future games would only give the arcade version a certain number of characters and more would be unlocked over the course of how long the arcade machine was left on.  This was to keep players coming back.
I should get on Namco’s case about withholding content to manipulate their audience, but as we’ll see later, Midway isn’t exactly innocent of this tactic either and it’s still 25 characters in a 3D game when most 2D games had maybe 20 characters max.

The arcade version of Tekken 2 still lacks the “rizz” I mentioned about the first game, but that’s offset by Tekken 2 finding the franchise’s identity in the music.  I can’t remember any of the tracks in the original game, but Tekken 2’s soundtrack is the genesis of the beatboxing dance music the franchise would become known for and it has some good tracks.

I wouldn’t recommend bothering with the original Tekken because it’s nothing that stands out, but Tekken 2 is worth a play.

Area 51(MID): This game is practically ubiquitous for arcades where I’m from.  The local skating rink had it, the bowling alleys had it, most arcades had it and now the retro arcades usually have it.  Area 51 was everywhere and back then I thought it was awesome.  Now though, not quite as much.

Typical of a Midway game, the visuals are eye-catching, featuring digitized actors and stop motion animated enemies with wonderfully detailed miniatures used.  I also just love the sound the zombies make when they die.  It’s one of my favorite death sound effects ever.  Unfortunately those two lovingly detailed enemy miniatures are it.

Area 51 is anemic in content.  For most of the 20 minute game you fight the same enemy with color variants and then one more enemy type appears toward the end, building up to a boss that stretches the definition of “boss” and a text-only ending.  I know I’ve typed this a lot in the past year alone, but it’s like a beta build or a demo for a better game.  It’s mindless fun shooting and reloading to make alien freaks explode with that oh-so-satisfying sound effect, and there are some secrets to find, but the entertainment is fleeting.

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3(MID): It didn’t even take Midway a year to make an update to Mortal Kombat 3 and apparently it was a deliberate ploy to hold back content and make people come back for it, which, like the timed release thing in Tekken 2, is kind of shifty to me.

UMK3 significantly upgrades the multiplayer side of the game by adding new characters and stages, but it seems to have come at the cost of the single player experience.  Someone at Midway must’ve thought that the cheating computer opponents grabbing players while being hit was the best idea ever because now it’s one of their favored tactics after Mortal Kombat 3 held back from doing so and was better for it.  Now computer opponents can do more tricks that human players can’t, like instantly jumping after being knocked down without the need of an animation to get up or always beating the player to the punch, without fail, if they attempt a rush-in combo.

Motaro is about the same, but with new sound effects.

Then there’s Jade, now a playable character.  Jade might as well end any attempt to beat the single player mode.  She has a move that makes projectiles pass through her.  In the hands of a human player it’s a balanced move because the player has to input the command to do it, like any other move, and it’s only for a second.  When used by the computer opponent, Jade can instantly activate it right as the projectile would hit her and then immediately dash up to the player while they’re still recovering from using their projectile and land a devastating combo.  This would require a human player to hit both the button for the move and the dash button at the same time, which is impossible.  She cheats and fighting cheaters is no fun.

Not only is single player less fun, the endings from the original MK3 were made worse.  Now instead of an ending image made for every character, they all re-use their versus screen portraits for their endings.  They couldn’t even carry over the endings from the original?

UMK3 is one step forward and one step back.  They improved the multiplayer, which is generally regarded as the most important thing, but they should have done that without making other parts of the game worse.

The Winner

The winner is easy to quantify.  The Outfoxies and Tekken 2 were both really good so there were no losers on Namco’s team.  Mortal Kombat 3 was a winner for Midway, but Area 51 needed more time in the oven and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 should have been an improvement with no downsides.  Namco wins.
 

Meanwhile…

Capcom’s CPS2 and SNK’s Neogeo were taking them a long way in the sound and visuals of their games.  1995 showed both company’s continuing shift to bigger, more expressive character sprites and pre-rendered pseudo-3D visuals.  Samurai Shodown 3, Street Fighter Alpha and Fatal Fury 3 all shifted art styles in a continued evolution of their biggest fighting game franchises, as opposed to our current competitors who stuck to what made the previous installments work.

The previous competitors have Midway and Namco both beat in 1995.  I liked everything they had to offer this year, but Capcom and SNK were making some of my favorite games of the era, including Fatal Fury 3 and the second, actually good Darkstalkers game.  A big part of that is because Capcom and SNK’s games were putting even more effort into telling a story with their games.  Fatal Fury 3 and Cyberbots had dialogue before every match, Street Fighter Alpha had some before each character’s final rival battle, The King of Fighters 95 had even more than that and Mega Man: The Power Battle had some lengthy endings.

Meanwhile Tekken 2’s arcade version still had no endings and Mortal Kombat 3 had no prequel comic and endings were still walls of text.  That combined with computer opponents still being unfun cheaters makes Midway and Namco’s games seem behind the times in some ways.
I already know that Mortal Kombat 3 would be the last 2D Mortal Kombat game Midway would make for arcades so what can we expect from them in 1996?  The answer is nothing.  Not unless I can find a cabinet of Cruisn’ World.  If not, next time will be another two year round.