When it comes to shonen manga, anime and games, there are few with as much knowledge and love as the Shonen Otaku. Join me as we look at all different varieties of action-packed media.
Curious things happened in the aftermath of The King of
Fighters 13 and Super Street Fighter 4. SNK wasn’t coming out with a lot of new games except mobile phone ones
and ports of previous games. There were
some good mobile games and good ports, mind you. I still love The Rhythm of Fighters and had
some fun with Metal Slug Defense, which led into Metal Slug Attack and apparently
Metal Slug Attack had so much of an audience that just recently they came out
with a complete console version of it called Metal Slug Attack: Reloaded. For ports, the Code Mystics ports for KOF 98
and 2002UM were made available on PC with online play, which for me was a huge
deal.
On Capcom’s side… Well a lot of people consider it Capcom’s
darkest time period and would lead into them becoming the evil fan-hating
company they are today. There were
already a lot of contentious decisions and games like the Bionic Commando
remake, Dark Void, DMC: Devil May Cry (it’s not THAT bad, guys) and of course Street
Fighter X Tekken. Street Fighter X
Tekken was a disaster for Capcom because of on-disc DLC due to a deal
with Sony and a gameplay customization system essentially kind of being pay to
win. I play Street Fighter X Tekken on
the Vita, where all the characters are included, so I didn’t get as much
withheld content and I think it’s a pretty fun crossover, but I am in the
minority.
Capcom had one possible saving grace with Sengoku Basara 4,
a game that was shaping up to be the end all be all for action gaming once it
came out in English. As long as Sengoku
Basara 4 came out, Capcom would become immortalized as the greatest game
company in the that could do no wrong. Everything hinged on that one game as far as console games went.
Both companies were either too busy or didn’t care enough to
make new arcade games after their last ones, but both of them did throw arcades
a bone and released updated versions of their best, most recent fighting
games. Now we’ll decide which of the
company’s best of their best is THE best.
The Marvel vs. Capcom Collection is out and with its
widespread availability, Capcom has some more ammunition under their belt. While doing the Capcom vs. SNK series I’ve
had to skip all but the last two games included in this collection, but now
that I can finally play them, it’s time to fill in some gaps and maybe make it something of a review of the collection as a whole..
I had previously stated that when this
collection came out I would go back and edit the included games into their
respective year, but on further contemplation, that could cause a mess for
consistency because there’s the possibility of these games elevating Capcom
just enough to retroactively score a win for a year, which would make future posts referencing victories contradictory. Therefore, this bonus round is going to give
Capcom a few chances to reclaim a point in the competition and allow me to
evaluate the 5 games I didn’t get to play before. I will conclude each one by determining if it
was good enough for Capcom to have had a better showing in its release year
than SNK’s games. In the case of years
where Capcom won, all they have to do is not have the game be a disaster
than brings them down.
2009 was the beginning of Capcom’s golden age. It was when the far superior console version of
Street Fighter 4 came out and got more fans into the franchise, since digital
distribution of classic games wasn’t quite as available as it is now. This gave rise to the “09ers”. The newbies.
Capcom was hitting big. It wasn’t just Street Fighter 4 either. Capcom was also making tons of master works
around this time, such as Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, Devil May Cry
4 and Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, the game with the distinction of having
the single greatest English dub in the history of the gaming medium and one of
the cornerstones of action gaming.Capcom was the best company in gaming at this point in time.
However, that was all on consoles. Another arcade version of Street Fighter 4
wouldn’t come until later on, giving SNK their chance to swoop in with their
flagship franchise and claim themselves as the rulers of the arcades. Once again Capcom has to play catchup and try
to beat everything SNK comes out with with just one game. Let’s see if they do that.
SNK had an overall good few years for the arcades while on handhelds and consoles it was more of a mixed bag and very few of what they were putting out, like the Days of Memories visual novel games, were coming out in English. What's more, after Capcom's complete and total absence in arcades for a good while, they at last came back to challenge SNK this year in 2008. Will their new arcade games be enough to make up for all the strides SNK had already been making while they were gone? Let's find out.
2004 was the end of an era for arcades. The Neogeo had an astonishing 14 year run, a
true testament to its power, but after Samurai Shodown 5 Special, SNK decided
that it was time to move forward in their arcade technology so they started
using Sammy/Sega’s Atomiswave, an awesome system that allowed for an excellent
fusion of 2D and 3D visuals, not unlike the NAOMI system. Outside of the games SNK would make for it,
it had games like Dolphin Blue, Arc System Works’ Fist of the North Star game
and DIMP’s The Rumble Fish. All in all
it was a great home for SNK to make bigger and better arcade games.
What did Capcom have?
Capcom was doing very well for themselves on home consoles
and came out with some of the greatest games of all time, like the Viewtiful
Joe franchise, Resident Evil 4 and Haunting Ground. The arcades didn’t get any of the action from
them during this time, partially for reasons I’ve already explained regarding
home console hardware catching up and partially because as much success as
Capcom saw, this was also an era of Capcom idiocy.
“People didn’t like our half-assed asset recycle bin
fighting game?!Clearly the people don’t
want arcade games!” “People didn’t like our already mediocre game about Japanese
warlords?!But we edited the entire
setting with no context to replace it, made the music worse, changed the
gameplay and even cut content!Clearly those
stupid Americans don’t want it!What
they want is Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance!” “Hey, Hideaki Istuno!I have some stuff here left over from the guy who bailed!Make a sequel to Devil May Cry in a few
months, will you?”
SNK didn’t release anywhere close to as many games as Capcom
did, but since games on the Atomiswave were able to be ported to the PS2 and
Xbox very easily (not sure why not the Gamecube), this means they could cover
both fields..With the increased memory
capacity of PS2 discs, SNK was also able to dip into their arcade game library
and make compilations like the Fatal Fury Battle Archives and Art of Fighting
Anthology.
Finally and most notably, SNK made the King of
Fighters: Maximum Impact games, console-exclusive 3D KOF games with their own
continuities that for once actually got proper advertising and merchandise in
English.Ads for Maximum Impact appeared
in magazines, there were TV commercials, the Hong Kong
comic was released in English (as was KOF 2003’s) and Maximum Impact 2/The King
of Fighters 2006 got its own sets of trading cards for the Universal Fighting
System card game alongside Samurai Shodown 5.
Capcom would eventually make a big comeback to arcades with
one game in particular, but that wouldn’t come out until 2008, so until then we
got 4 different games on the Atomiswave for SNK to build their portfolio with
for this stretch of time before Capcom entered the picture again to challenge
SNK’s arcade dominance.
