Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1996: Part 2

Continuing from the first half for this year, there are a couple games I was unable to play or couldn't include.  I was going to include SNK's Ironclad, but it was made for the Neogeo CD, a home console, and never got an arcade release.  To counterbalance that, because of health complications, I haven't been able to go to the arcades I need to, which is the only way for me to play almost all of Capcom's Marvel licensed games, meaning I can't include X-Men vs. Street Fighter.  If only the lawyers would let us have those games on home consoles again.

Yeah while I was getting this post ready, Capcom announced a new fighting collection with every Marvel fighting game and their Punisher game for good measure.  It's kind of cheating the premise that I'm playing each of these games by order of release, but once I get that collection, I'll edit my thoughts on each one into previous posts and try to get back into the mindset of their respective year when playing them.  I doubt any of them are going to change any of the winners of the year.

For now, we're in 1996 and SNK brought back their crossover fighting game idea in a big way.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1996: Part 1

In 1996 3D gaming was the hottest new thing.  Sure some 3D games started trickling out the previous year with the launch of the Sony Playstation and pre-rendered 3D visuals had been around for a bit longer, but now that 3D graphics could be rendered in real time with real polygons the sky seemed to be limit.  Several of the lesser-selling 2D consoles of yesteryear bit the dust and Nintendo came out with the Nintendo 64, making the 3D capable systems the dominating force.  All the big names paving the way for the evolution of gaming as were coming out, including Super Mario 64, Resident Evil, Bubsy 3D, Crash Bandicoot, Duke Nukem 3D and Wave Race 64.

For fighting games, the 3D train continued.  Capcom started to dabble in their own 3D fighting games beginning with Star Gladiator, which I won’t be looking at for this one because I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, though I do recall playing it once at a convention.  I don’t remember much except that I wasn’t impressed and it was right next to a cabinet with KOF 2002 Unlimited Match and that awesome Arc System Works Fist of the North Star fighting game was there too so those games overrode my memory.
 
With other companies, Sega released both Virtua Fighter 3 and Fighters Megamix, Namco released Tekken 2, the ever-popular Mortal Kombat Trilogy came out for home consoles and of course Tecmo began the Dead or Alive franchise with the very first game, building off Virtua Fighter’s foundation.  This all combined with smash hit fighters like War Gods, Pray For Death and Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft, which I imagine made it harder for Capcom and SNK to get people to their good old 2D arcade cabinets, which by all accounts had their own strengths that home consoles still didn’t have, as evidenced by still less than stellar home ports.
 
As for which among these two arcade giants did the best this year, I’ll be the judge of that.