Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1999

In the real world, not a lot of note was going on in 1999.  I think there was a guy who said he did not have sexual relations with a woman and some kids shot up a school, but the big impacts were being felt with our friends/enemies Capcom and SNK.
 
Late in 1998, SNK put out the Neogeo Pocket, a handheld system of their design not unlike the Game Boy.  SNK had already done some portable work on Nintendo’s handheld with a port of Samurai Shodown as well as KOF 95 and 96, but this time they made their own system to put their games on.  By that point, however, the Game Boy Color was out so it wasn’t long before they upgraded to a color system as well, the Neogeo Pocket Color.  The Neogeo Pocket Color had a selection of miniaturized SNK games that were effectively ports of their Neogeo games, retaining the core gameplay experiences with only 2 buttons.

It had all the SNK essentials like Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown, KOF and even a few sports games plus its very own Sonic game.  In fact, the Neogeo Pocket Color games are where the Japanese game developer Dimps got their start, who would go on to make the outstanding Sonic Rush games on the Nintendo DS.  That’s all great, but one of the biggest and best games on the Neogeo Pocket Color was the one that would finally let Capcom and SNK settle things personally.

For the first time, SNK and Capcom would truly go head to head, as M. Bison and Geese team up to run a fighting tournament where all their company’s fighters would fight as a part of their evil plan!  Finally you could show those Street Fighter peasants or KOF losers that your company is better and use your skillz with your favorite character!

 
Technically SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash came out first, but that game isn’t a head-to-head crossover of SNK and Capcom as much as it is a game where Capcom and SNK’s characters and creators come together in a friendly little card game where Capcom and SNK characters are able to support each other, which is just wrong!  Capcom and SNK are enemies!  I would review those crossovers, but neither were in arcades.  I will say both are absolutely fantastic games though.

This manpower being put into their handheld system is presumably why there aren’t as many SNK games for this year.  Capcom’s reason for fewer games was because apparently not doing as hot in the arcades and they put more effort into releasing just a few big games instead of the numbers they were pumping out in previous years.

That may have paid off because holy smokes is 1999 one hell of a year.  This year has both companies at their best and there is not going to be a lot of negativity  The year’s winner might be down to the wire.

Power Stone(CAP)

They cut the voice line off before he said “can I go home now?”

This is the first of either company’s polygonal arcade games I’m able to play, albeit not quite the original arcade version.  I bought the Power Stone Collection for the PSP for this one (that’s where your ko-fi donations go) and it’s a great package with several improvements for both the original Power Stone and Power Stone 2.  Luckily for the sake of some semblance of arcade authenticity, this collection lets you modify the game to be just like the original.  I switched the aspect ratio to the original (meaning it didn’t take up the whole Vita screen), switched the UI to the original’s and turned off the extra items that weren’t in the original.  The only thing I can’t comment on is how the original performed, but I can say it runs crazy smooth on the PSP.

Anyway, Capcom went in a wild new direction for Power Stone.  Similar to SNK’s Aggressors of Dark Kombat, Power Stone plays more like a beat-em-up on stages populated with items and props.  Each character’s attack move sets are very simplified, with one punch, one kick, one jump button and no means of guarding, only quick dodging.  Grabs are done by pressing the attack buttons together and actually using the attacks is never more complicated than mashing the buttons when you’re close to your opponent.

The actual one-on-one combat is not the focus of the game and has none of the finesse of a traditional fighting game.  The real focus is on the items, particularly the titular power stones.  There are 3 stones that scatter about the arena and when a character picks them up, they enter a super form for a limited time.  In their normal forms characters play largely the same, but the super forms give them more unique attacks and using the boon the super form gives you efficiently is where a lot of the strategy and damage dealing lies.

The super forms have a lot of obvious inspirations, like Goku, The Thing and Silver Samurai.

The rest of the strategy is getting the stones in the first place.  When a character is hit particularly hard (often by an item hit), they drop a stone and the scramble to get them while both fighters are also throwing, shooting and smashing each other, and while navigating the different stages, is a novel concept that could only be done this well with 3D hardware.

Power Stone certainly stands out, being closer to a competitive party game than a fighting game, but it feels like a first attempt, even if it’s a successful one.  There are only 8 playable characters, 2 bosses (one of whom has a second form), almost no story or characterization, a very limited selection of items and what I perceive to be some gameplay imbalance.

Sometimes I feel like the announcer might as well start the match by shouting “death from above” because the dive kick attack is way too good.  It automatically targets the enemy, practically makes you invincible for the duration, instantly makes the opponent drop a stone (without an item, you normally need to do a combo or throw for that) and spamming it seems to carry little consequence.  It’s practically necessary to abuse dive kicking on the final boss because of how fast he can react to and strike back against everything else.  There were several times where me and the computer would do almost nothing but divekick at each other, which makes me think this is where the eponymous game got its first spark of the idea.

The lack of characters and items isn’t a problem in the Power Stone Collection, where you can unlock new items, the bosses and characters from Power Stone 2, but the pure original arcade version is a bit underbaked.  I think I’m a little spoiled on the format because of the awesome games it later inspired, like One Piece: Grand Adventure, but for the time Power Stone was a novel concept and it’s a fun game to play nonetheless.

Giga Wing(CAP): Giga Wing is a bullet hell shooter done right.  It has the usual massive clouds of enemy fire, but unlike Pulstar or Blazing Star, a lot of the time the gunfire is avoidable and the game gives players a major lifeline.  There’s the usual screen-clearing bomb that removes any gunfire to get the player out of a tough spot, but the big game changer is the reflector shield.  You have to take a moment to charge it and once you do, every shot that touches it is reflected back at the enemies, allowing you to completely bombard them with their own cloud of attacks for massive damage.  Since it has both a charge time and a cooldown time, knowing the right moment to use the reflector shield is the key to playing well.  It’s an odd feeling seeing a large mass of condensed lazer shots that can kill me in one hit and rather than dreading it, I look forward to charging into it.
 
It also looks nice, sounds nice and it even has a little story with character dialogue for each of the 4 different pilots.  That’s some mighty fine shooting.
 
Metal Slug X(SNK): This updated version of Metal Slug 2 has a lot of small changes and one big change.  There are a few new enemies, different enemy placements, altered environment colors, a few new weapons, a new credits sequence and two of the bosses swap their placement in the game.  The big change is NO MORE SLOWDOWN!  The slowdown is almost completely ironed out!  The one thing holding Metal Slug 2 back is rectified and with the other additions further polishing the game, Metal Slug X is the run n’ gun masterpiece Metal Slug 2 had the potential to be.  If you have to play just one Metal Slug game, make it this one.

That said, I don’t think it’s a great look for SNK that the most notable part about Metal Slug X is that it corrects a mistake that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike(CAP): After two unimpressive installments, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike gives the game a major shot in the arm.  5 new characters (including Chun-Li) is a major leap in content from Second Impact and a new jazz and rap mix for the sound design makes a soundtrack that has far more memorable tunes and music that fits for the game’s pacing.  It has the single best character select theme in the history of fighting games too.

The refinement of the gameplay is the biggest upgrade though.  It doesn’t make any drastic changes to the mechanics, but it’s all the little adjustments that made all the difference.  Knowing when to strike is more important than ever.  Missing an attack or having it blocked can be a death sentence in Third Strike.  In Second Impact you could play with the mindset of previous Street Fighter games without adjusting to the new game too much, but in Third Strike, missing an attack or having it blocked can be a death sentence.  That all goes triple when it comes to the new character Q.

It is one of the weightiest 2D fighting games I’ve ever played and that can be attributed to the adjustments to how much impact the game presents.  Attacks have weight to them because the windup and cooldown to everything has just the right balance of speed and feedback.  The old “get one good hit in” is especially true in Third Strike because you really feel the impact and the damage when you land a hit as the opponent goes reeling back.  It no longer has the unpolished feel of the previous 2 Street Fighter 3 games.  It’s fine tuned to near perfection.

Even the single player content got an upgrade.  They brought back the car destruction bonus stage with a very nice-looking car sprite and now the rival battle conversations at the end are actual conversations instead of one line of text from each character.  Returning characters also have new endings this time, as Third Strike is kind of an epilogue, with the endings having more to do with the aftermath of Gill’s defeat.  The actual plot was still vague in English though.

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike is considered by many to be the greatest fighting game ever made, which is an overstatement (I personally would’ve liked more story than what we got by 1999), but it didn’t get that reputation from nowhere.

The King of Fighters 99(SNK): With the Orochi saga getting its big sendoff with the last game, SNK moved the King of Fighters story along and brought some big changes.  Kyo is no longer the main character and has instead gone missing.  Now K’ is the new main character.  That was a pretty ballsy move and shows how different SNK was from Capcom, where even though Alex is supposedly the main character, you can’t really tell because Ryu and Ken have just as much of the spotlight.  K’ and Maxima get considerably more attention in the plot for this game.
 
The gameplay got shaken up too.  Teams now have 4 members to necessitate one being an assist character and that means new characters joining the usual teams, all of whom are excellent new additions.  Returning characters also got some new moves or outfits, most notably Kensou, who has lost his powers and now fights through purely melee attacks.  There’s so much that’s new, but the overall gameplay hasn’t changed a whole lot, meaning it’s familiar to returning players and yet has a lot of new things to do.

Safe!

KOF 99 is one of my favorite games in the series because it hits all the things like in a fighting game while the previous games fell short in some area.  KOF 96 had the incredible music and an engaging story, but the gameplay was a little janky.  KOF 97 had no jank and a good story, but dropped the ball on the music.  KOF 98 succeeded in the gameplay and the music, but there was no story, although it did have some fun with story references.  The King of Fighters 99 has the gameplay, story AND music.  In fact it’s easily in my top 10 for greatest fighting game soundtracks of all time.  KD-0079 is one of the best songs ever composed.

Games like this are why I consider The King of Fighters to be the best fighting game franchise there is.  The gameplay is fast-paced and exciting, the characters are full of personality, the plot is well-presented and relatively simple in the moment, but effective at building a bigger narrative, the characters are changed enough to not feel like I’m playing the same game again, stages are full of detail, and even change between rounds now, and the music should win awards.  This was the perfect game to start off a new saga.

 
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure(CAP)

I asked for more characters and I have received.  This update of Jojo’s Venture drastically ups the character count with several more of the villains from Stardust Crusaders and all of them have the same level of care and attention as the characters carried over from the original.  There are 2 different versions of Hol Horse (one with J. Geil and one with Boingo), Mariah, Pet Shop, Anubis’ other hosts and Vanilla Ice now has a playable version as well.  They were even able to put in my favorite villain, Rubber Soul (renamed Robber Soul), who in the manga spends most of his panel time simply waiting for Jotaro to be killed by his stand.

Since there was so much effort put into making sure the main heroes all got into the first version already, there wasn’t much left to add to their side.  The only new hero is a new variant of Kakyoin after his eye surgery (something the original game never brings up).  Part of the narrative strength of Stardust Crusaders is a focused traveling party, after all.

Every new character is unique and fun to play with stands that work very differently from the original cast, but sadly none of them were very utilized for single player content.  Every single newcomer’s story mode has one intro screen, a series of fights with no context or dialogue and then a brief ending with maybe one new piece of art.  Even if Capcom wasn’t going to put as much effort into everyone’s story mode, they could’ve at least had one or two intermittent story scenes.

The story modes of the returning characters are completely untouched.  I get that this is an updated version and maybe they didn’t want to risk damaging what were pretty great single player adventures, but there was so much opportunity to add variety and bring the stories closer to the original.  Instead of Jotaro fighting D’bo, why not have him fight Rubber Soul like in the manga?  Instead of Joseph fighting Alessi, why not have him fight Mariah like in the manga?  Instead of Iggy fighting Midler, why not have him fight Pet Shop like in the manga?  I don’t want to call Capcom lazy because the new characters have a lot of effort and thought put into them, but would it have been so hard to do something more with them?

The Super Story mode in the PS1 version of the game is exactly what I mean.  Sure the core game is downgraded a bit from the arcade version, but it uses all the new characters plus minigames and quick time events to tell the entire story of Stardust Crusaders from beginning to end and it might just be the best story mode I’ve ever seen in a fighting game before the PS3 and 360 era.

Alas, this is the arcade version and even though they dropped the ball in one area, the new additions to the roster elevate Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure to being on par with the best fighting games of the era.

 

Prehistoric Isle 2(SNK): SNK was really on their faux-3D kick with their shooter games.  Once again this game looks gorgeous for a 2D game simulating 3D graphics.  The dinosaurs look better than ever!  It’s like you’re shooting the cast of Primal Rage at times!

It’s no doubt enhanced by the Neogeo’s extra power compared to the original, but once you get past how it looks it’s not much different.  The key difference is that the action starts in an urban area in what appears to be the modern day, rather than the titular island, and there are short missions where you have to protect civilians while they run to a rescue chopper.  There isn’t a lot to say about Prehistoric Isle 2 because it doesn’t really innovate or try much of anything new.  It’s just another dinosaur-shooting adventure, this time with civilians.  It’s alright.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves(SNK): It’s hard not to draw comparisons between this game and the different versions of Street Fighter 3 (mostly Third Strike).  Both games are distant sequels to their previous games taking place after a previous villain’s defeat, both have a cast of almost entirely new characters except for the series mascots (Ryu and Ken for SF3, Terry for MOTW), both have extremely smooth animations, both have a mechanic in which hitting the control stick in a direction with perfect timing gives players a moment of invincibility (forward for the SF3 counter, backward for the MOTW just defense) and both are often cited as one of the best fighting games of all time even to this day.  Hell, I think they even both had a slow start.  Not many people paid that much mind to Third Strike when it came out after the underwhelming reception to the first 2 versions and Mark of the Wolves barely got an arcade release at all in English, but both got more attention from fighting game fans as the years went on.

For a series called Capcom vs. SNK, I think it’s only fair to take that comparison further.  In gameplay, Mark of the Wolves is faster and though there’s a lot of weight and more cooldown to attacks than a game series like KOF, whiffing and being blocked isn’t nearly as dangerous as in Third Strike.  Which game plays better depends on what you’re looking for.  Mark of the Wolves has a lot more pressure game and a few mechanics unique to it, like the universal overhead attack and TOP attacks.

 
Outside of the gameplay, which I could go either way on, Mark of the Wolves kicks Third Strike’s ass in every way.
 
Mark of the Wolves has a clear story from the get-go, hinted at through the opening.  With Geese dead there’s a power vacuum and a new villain is holding another King of Fighters tournament in South Town.  This is different from whatever Street Fighter 3 was trying to say at the time.

MOTW also conveys how long it has been since the last canon game, as characters have been moving on with their lives in the intermittent years.  Kim has two sons, Mai and Andy are raising an apprentice, Terry has an older look (clothes-wise, at least) and Marco Rodriguez/Kushnood Butt is a new disciple of Kyokugen Karate (used by Ryo in the apparently prequel Art of Fighting games).

MOTW has rival conversations like Third Strike, but unlike that game, there’s also one after the fight as well as cutscenes before the bosses to introduce them to the player, as opposed to every SF3 game dropping you into a fight with Gill with no preamble.

Characters in MOTW also have way more character and expression than MOTW.  In Third Strike, characters do a little pose when they win, like Ryu crossing his arms, Alex taking his bandana off, Necro and Effie singing out a note or Q turning his back to the camera.  In Mark of the Wolves, victory animations are full of life.  Dong Hwan having his brother come up behind him with a menacing glare, the Lillian Knights tossing B. Jenet up in victory or Marco ripping his gi by flexing all convey what those characters are about more than a simple victory pose.

They also all have unique victory lines for each character.

Stages in MOTW are also more full of life and more animated.  The stages in every version of SF3 look nice and have background details that react to certain actions in the fights, but there isn't a lot actually going on in them and some of them seem to be used by characters that don't really have a connection to the actual stage.  In MOTW, every stage is tailor-made as a spot showcasing the corresponding character and animated well.  Before each fight in arcade mode you get a bit of dedicated animation showing off the stage before you start fighting in it.  In SF3 you just choose your opponent’s character select screen sprite and get a static versus screen.

It has the edge in the audio too.  Mark of the Wolves’ music is some of the best ever.  Third Strike’s music is kind of calming and helps you focus, but MOTW’s music brings the hype to every single match and when I’m playing a fighting game, I want hype.

To top all of this off, super moves in Mark of the Wolves really feel like they hit hard, helped by the way a super attack finisher is accentuated.  In Third Strike, finishing off an opponent with a super attack changes the background, stops in that brief moment so you can really take it in, makes a little warping sound effect and calmly says “KO.”  That works well enough, but in Mark of the Wolves, finishing off an opponent with a super attack in a deciding round changes the background and triggers a sick guitar riff while a big red animated “K.O.” smashes onto the screen and the metal victory song specific to the occasion plays!  It’s the best feeling.

There’s only one thing about Mark of the Wolves that peeves me and that’s the endings.  I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an ending for Mark of the Wolves and I’ve played it for well over 8 years.  Outside of those very scant few times it always ends with defeating the first boss before he says goodbye and the game cuts to the credits.  Supposedly the way to fight the true final boss and get an ending is by getting a high enough average in the grades you get after each round, but I get the bad ending even when I absolutely dominate every enemy and don’t lose a single round!

Finishing Mark of the Wolves’ arcade mode isn’t as long as other fighting games so you can keep trying, but this nigh-impossible task of getting the endings is the biggest blemish in what is otherwise one of the greatest fighting games ever made.  It’s not just game of the year.  It might be the arcade game of the decade.  If I’m at an arcade and someone asks me if I want to play Third Strike, I’ll only play it if they don’t have Mark of the Wolves.

The Winner

This might be the hardest one yet.  Both companies brought out some of the very best games ever made at this point in time and the games that weren’t the best were still varying degrees of great with not one weak game among them.  With how close this call is, I decided to rank the games and use a point system, where first place gets 8 points, second gets 7 and so on.

1. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

2. Street Fighter 3: Third Strike

3. The King of Fighters 99

4. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

5. Metal Slug X

6. Power Stone

7. Giga Wing

8. Prehistoric Isle 2

SNK score: 19; Capcom score: 17.  That was really damn close, but ultimately Mark of the Wolves, a game that excels in its every aspect, is what carried SNK to victory.

Going into the new millennium, the score for this series is Capcom: 8, SNK: 7.  It’s almost a tie and if SNK keeps up with the quality they showed this year, Capcom may not be able to keep their lead.  Nothing short of total bankruptcy can stop SNK now!