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.

Namco vs. Midway: 1990 & 1991

We’re back from my Sengoku Basara detour and our contest picks up in 1990 and 1991.  Since I can’t get any Namco games from 1990, this is a judgement for a 2-year time span, where most of Midway’s games are from 1990 and Namco’s games are in 1991.  Once again, Namco’s failure to release arcade games in English has them going in with a very low ammo count.  Technically one of their games for this year, Tank Force, didn’t even initially come out in English at all, but since they would otherwise only have one game for entry, I need to throw them a bone.  Maybe it will be the game that comes in clutch.

Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 3

With Nobunaga dead, the last 2 parts of the Extra History videos cover Hideyoshi, his death and the battle of Sekigahara.  This post is going to be shorter than the other ones because, well, the videos go into a lot of backgrounds that Sengoku Basara chooses to push to the wayside for the sake of an exciting action story, but there is still a fair bit to note.

 

Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 2

I've held off on discussing Nobunaga's Sengoku Basara design.  Everyone knows it.  He's portrayed as an evil overlord with a spiky and intimidating outfit with a blood red cape and he laughs at the carnage and atrocities he commits.  Up to this point in the Extra History videos though, Nobunaga has just been a very tactical and pragmatic warlord, not a lot worse than the others.  It's starting around here where we start to see where his reputation comes from.

Extra History: The Sengoku Basara Way: Part 1

We aren't done with Sengoku Basara yet.  In the first part of my Sengoku Basara retrospective I directed people to a series of videos from Extra Creditz, specifically their Extra History sub-series.  This 6-part series of short videos does a good job of detailing all the most important moments of the Sengoku period while making them fun and expressive through the use of artwork.  Even more fun an expressive is one of my favorite franchises, Sengoku Basara.

 

It's always funny to me when I learn something about history and think back to how the madcap action of Sengoku Basara interpreted that, especially with Sanada Yukimura Den steering closer to real history.  As such I thought it would be fun to go over some real history and how that was interpreted into what we see in the games.  The Sengoku era of Japan is already pretty crazy, as the videos show, so watching it become more crazy is pretty entertaining.