Pulstar(SNK): The first thing that sticks out about this space shooter is that it’s gorgeous. SNK must’ve really seen the appeal of 3D graphics because Pulstar takes the pre-rendered 3D visuals of Dinosaur Isle and cranks it up to 11. It’s one of the best demonstrations of the Neogeo’s power. Your ship, the opening and every time you continue has fluid animated 3D renders in equally beautiful environments. It’s a marvel how much of this game almost looks like a 3D game on a 2D plane, but it’s all done entirely through pixels.
The second thing that sticks out is that the game is way too fucking hard.
This game is jam-packed with all sorts of bullshit, as if it was designed just to point and laugh at you. If it’s not something coming out of nowhere to kill you, it’s swarms of enemies at choke points where it’s impossible to avoid getting hit unless you do a very specific thing at a pixel-perfect angle with perfect timing. It’s a trial and error game. The worst kind.
To make it worse, you cannot power through the bullshit like in Ikari Warriors. You die in one hit and when you do you are sent back to a checkpoint and some of the checkpoints are so sparsely separated that you’ll be doing the same thing over and over again unless you’re playing a version with save states to abuse, but even then it won't make the game any more fun. If you don’t die the actual game is only about 40 minutes long, but it will take you hours and hours and hours of infuriating trial and error to actually win. I haven’t played as many space shooters as a lot of other gamers, but from my experience this game is the NES Battletoads of space shooters and let’s not kid ourselves, that game sucked too.
Mega Man: The Power Battle(CAP): I have fond memories of this one. There’s a pizza place my family went to when I was a kid that had this in an arcade room and I thought it was awesome. Decades later I still think it’s awesome. It might be my favorite non-fighting game up to this point.
You play as Megaman, Protoman or Bass and fight 6 robot masters from across the classic Megaman games up to that point plus a sub-boss and finally Doctor Wily. It skips straight to the boss fights, which are my favorite part of a Megaman game. Just like the game you can slide, jump and charge shot to avoid enemy attacks while taking opportunities to get your own hits in. In true Megaman fashion, you then take the weapons of defeated masters and each one is weak to another’s.
Depending on the difficulty, you can actually beat a session of this game in less than 15 minutes or even less than 10 minutes, but there are 3 different courses to go through, with every boss except the final boss being different so that’s more longevity for an arcade game than it might sound.
To this day I think this game and its sequel are the best classic Megaman has ever looked and sounded too, with fun-looking arenas and remixes of stage themes from the classic games done with the CPS2’s sound capabilities. It’s a Megaman experience in an enhanced and compressed arcade format and I love it.
Samurai Shodown 3(SNK): Samurai Shodown got another visual overhaul with this one and the results are impressive. The animations and stages are even more detailed than they already were in Samurai Shodown 2 and it’s clearly going for a much grittier game than the series already was, with darker colors and even more violence. It’s a shame about the rest of the game.
For starters, there’s next to no plot to latch on to. Since Samurai Shodown 2 was so conclusive, Samurai Shodown opts to go back to before the conclusion by having 3 take place between the first and second games. The story goes that a big bad murderer named Zankuro goes from village to village on a killing spree and now the different warriors are hunting him down for one reason or another.
That’s a sound premise, but there is no real storytelling at play in the game, a big letdown after the previous two games. The only cutscenes are brief, have little animation at all and don’t amount to anything. You just fight the rest of the cast and then have a final boss fight followed by endings that are just crappily translated text on top of a drawing of something belonging to your character.
Somewhat of a saving grace is that Zankuro is an awesome and imposing villain by design and the fight against him is just as exciting as the previous bosses, with a new spin on boss fighting styles in that he doesn’t seem to actually use supernatural abilities. He’s just a crazy good swordsman who looks like he can cleave you in half with one swing. He can’t, of course. He does it in 2 swings. It’s worth at least one playthrough just for that, but there isn’t anything else substantial to keep things interesting. Not even the gameplay is refined enough to put it above Samurai Shodown 2
Hitboxes and invincibility frames tend to be off. I lost count of how many times my weapons went right through the opponents and there's a particularly notorious property of Hanzo's projectile that makes it still hurt even after it seems to have disappeared. Compounding this is that the computers, in a departure from SS2, are cheating bastards that seem to know their way around the hitbox dissonance and often beat you to the punch to take full advantage of the new counter damage system, in which beating the opponent to the punch does extra damage. They aren't quite as bad as they were in the original though.
It made major advancements and all the new characters it introduced are winners, but Samurai Shodown 3 is ultimately a downgrade from 2 and reeks of a rushed production. It is still a functional Samurai Shodown game so there’s fun to be had at the base level to make it worth playing, but it's a tad disappointing.
Real Bout Fatal Fury(SNK): Strictly speaking this game is a sequel to Fatal Fury 3, but it’s really more of an updated version. Every character’s sprites and music from Fatal Fury 3 is re-used except this time the bosses are playable and some of the characters from previous games return with updated sprites.
The gameplay has been refined and it introduces a new combo system not unlike Capcom’s chain combos. Characters got new moves, the computer opponents aren’t quite as bad and the ring-out system adds some situational strategy to the combat. All this makes Real Bout Fatal Fury a better game to play, but everything outside the core gameplay is lacking.
Stages are still gorgeous, but there are substantially fewer of them. There are no win quotes or dialogue exchanges from the characters and the plot is almost non-existent. It seems to be something of a throwback to the original Fatal Fury in its simplicity and Geese as the villain, but I think even that game had more story than this. There’s such a lack of new content overall and such a short time between this and the last game that it’s obvious Real Bout Fatal Fury was rushed. It’s a good fighting game at its core, but it’s not taking the award from Fatal Fury 3.
19XX: The War Against Destiny(CAP): Yet another one in Capcom’s war shooter series and it’s what you expect. You’re a plane and you shoot war vehicles in a futuristic setting. This one benefits from the upgrade to the CPS2 board with much, much better visuals, including some of the 3D visual effects Pulstar was doing. The environments and enemies have variety and depth to keep things interesting and the bullet hell shooting action is a hearty challenge that never repeats itself. Bosses are some of the best multi-phase lazer-barrage explosion fests in a vertical shooter yet and the big guns you can be equipped with can match their firepower. It’s easily the best game in the series and matches up with the best shooters I've played for this series, like Carrier Air Wing and Bermuda Triangle.
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