Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2004-2006

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.

2005

Neogeo Battle Coliseum(SNK): It could be a coincidence that SNK’s company crossover title came out not long after Capcom’s, but it’s just as likely that, per the title, the game is a send-off for the Neogeo and its long history.  Either way, it does everything right that Capcom Fighting Evolution did wrong.

It’s a 2-on-2 fighting game, but unlike CFE, NBC actually has tag team action and switching on the fly, kind of like KOF 2003.  In CFE, all you did with your team of two was choose one to go into the next round of a match and that was it.  In NBC, you not only get some cool tag attacks for using a certain team, but there’s the important mechanic of the red life.  A lot of tag-based games give characters a certain amount of health when they take damage that can be recovered when they aren’t tagged in.  Neogeo Battle Coliseum is very generous with this recoverable health and thus players must use team-up attacks in order to greatly reduce it, which works for NBC because it very much encourages aggressive play, making it even closer to Marvel vs. Capcom.

This must be the Ryuuko no Ken.

Capcom Fighting Evolution ripped all but one character straight out of other games and it made for huge clash of art styles, but for Neogeo Battle Coliseum, SNK went out of their way to make new sprites for the majority of its cast.  Some are obviously carried over from The King of Fighters and SVC Chaos, but all the characters that got new sprites and animations outweigh the re-uses.  They even gave characters like Ryo and Robert new sprites when they didn’t have to and in the case of Ryo it’s because it’s the older Ryo (who inherits the name Mr. Karate) from the Hyper Neogeo 64 game Buriki One.

With NBC I get the feeling it was more about what was truly a wide selection of Neogeo history over what they could rip from other games, really showing how much of a labor of love it is.  To name a few, it has Cyber Woo from King of the Monsters 2, Kisarah from Aggressors of Dark Kombat and the Metal Slug hero Marco, all of whom bring their moves from their respective games with them to clash with characters from Samurai Shodown, The Last Blade, Fatal Fury and KOF.  The two heroes of Neogeo Battle Coliseum also utilize objects and devices from throughout SNK’s history.

Backgrounds in CFE were practically walls of images with little depth or animation, filled with ripped artwork and awkward animations.  NBC’s stages aren’t always jumping with life, but they do have layers, 3D depth and sharp artwork cameos of various SNK characters that may be largely still images, but are at least made for the game.  NBC also has stages with more background details that are interesting to look at, with my favorite being the theme park based on SNK’s Japan-only Dreamcast game Cool Cool Toon.

Capcom Fighting Evolution had players fight Pyron as the final boss, who played a little differently from his game of origin, but was still ripped straight from Darkstalkers with nothing new.  Neogeo Battle Coliseum has 4 different final bosses, all of whom have all-new sprites.  They’re very aggravating final bosses that heal damage almost instantly, forcing you to use the health reduction continue bonus, but the effort was there.  2 of them are final bosses taken straight from older SNK fighting games and one is a man-made simulacrum of one such final boss, further painting NBC as a celebration of Neogeo history.

In CFE, endings were just drawn comic panels over a lame guitar track.  I think Neogeo Battle Coliseum is overall better with its endings, but you could argue in CFE’s favor for this aspect.  The worst part of NBC’s arcade endings is that it’s another game in which you’re expected to be ridiculously good to reach the requirement to fight the true final boss.  Arcade mode is a time trial where you have to try and beat as many opponents as you can before the timer runs out.  You can get a provision every 3 wins, like more time, and depending on how many teams you beat and how many of the provisions you used, you fight one of the final bosses, each of whom gets an introduction and an ending for when they are defeated, with some fantastic hand-drawn art.  We’re no longer dealing with pixel art on the Atomiswave.

However, only defeating the true final boss of the game, the main villain Goodman, who is extremely hard to get to, will give you your character’s endings and even then those endings are scrolling text.  The text endings convey nice closure, character cameos and references that will please fans of each character, but they didn’t even try to make the character endings finish the game off on a high note.  Would  having the text scroll over a a piece of artwork for the character be too much to ask?
It’s a trade-off situation when compared to Capcom Fighting Evolution.  Instead of a bunch of images with no text, NBC is a bunch of text with no images.  I still like NBC’s endings more because at least the text conveys a story while the CFE endings are random events irrelevant to the rest of the game.

The text also scrolls too fast.

I love what Neogeo Battle Coliseum does as a celebration of 14 years of the Neogeo systems, but it’s clearly targed squarely at the fans.  If you’re not big on Neogeo games then it’s good, but has a lot less appeal.

Samurai Shodown 6(SNK): If Neogeo Battle Coliseum was a celebration of the eponymous system, Samurai Shodown 6 is a celebration of its eponymous (2D) franchise.  It’s a non-canon game with every single character that has ever been in a 2D Samurai Shodown game and uses a style system similar to Capcom vs. SNK 2’s grooves, where you can make any character play like any previous 2D Samurai Shodown game, with a couple new styles thrown in for good measure.  This means the Samurai Shodown 2 style system lets you break your opponent’s weapon and use the toy transformation command for yucks, you can have the maneuvering button from 5 or you can go for the plain old Samurai Shodown 1 style, which does practically nothing but make you deal more damage.  You can play who you want how you want.

All the characters that weren’t in Samurai Shodown 5 or 5 Special, like Earthquake or Cham Cham, got new sprites and a handful of new characters are introduced.  My favorite is of course anime Andrew Jackson, who fights with hit bayonet and shoots flaming eagle shots.

Each character has their own story with a beginning, middle and end, complete with rival fight dialogue and ending with a fight against Samurai Shodown’s equivalent to Omega Rugal.  The translation is awkward and sometimes too literal, dialogue doesn’t flow, there are odd word choices and typos, but it’s understandable and at least a step up from the garbage translations of the earlier games.  While they’re all non-canon, the endings are fairly lengthy and some are emotionally touching conclusions that would’ve been a satisfying way to end a character’s story in canon.

Samurai Shodown 6 is definitely not starved for content, but the reason I can’t put it as my favorite is because it doesn’t feel like a Samurai Shodown game.  It’s a celebration and the plot is that Yoshitora throws a big worldwide fighting festival for everyone to have fun at.  As such, the game is bright and colorful, all the venues have spectators, the music is more energetic and there is no blood or dismemberment.  Hit effects are done with lights and dry slash sound effects like in an Arc System Works game.  In fact, the gameplay itself feels like someone played Guilty Gear and thought Samurai Shodown should be more like it.  I think one of the new styles even gives you a Guilty Gear-type gatling combo.

The original idea of feeling the weight of the blade is gone.  A heavy slash does about as much damage as a fierce punch does in Street Fighter instead of blowing away half of a player’s health.  There’s less hit stop and recoil, players move quicker and it’s even possible to air juggle, something the final boss really loves doing.  Instead of fights being intense staredowns as both players try to land the perfect hit, they’re speedy clashes of characters running up and down the stage applying pressure, trading blows and using the occasional item that gets thrown on the stage.

This doesn’t make it a bad game so much as a different one.  As a fast-paced weapon-based 2D fighting game, it’s great in its own right, but it can be jarring if you go into it expecting a Samurai Shodown game like the previous ones.  If you can accept that and maybe treat it as a spin-off (as seems to be the case in Japan, where there’s no numbers in the titles), it’s a must-play, but if you’re only interested in the mainline, darker Samurai Shodown games, there’s no harm in skipping this one.

The King of Fighters 11(SNK)

Take everything that made The King of Fighters 2003 good and amplify it to new heights.  KOF 11 is easily one of the very best fighting games ever made.  It has a huge character roster, bringing back several, introducing new ones like Elizabeth and Oswald plus there are even more mid-bosses you can fight, making one of the biggest character selections in any game played thus far.

It continues the story from where KOF 2003 left off and ups the story presentation.  The artwork is now hand-drawn and scanned into the game without the need of pixel art, making the cutscenes absolutely gorgeous and the story itself has big twists to prepare for the next not-disgraceful game in the series.  The bosses Magaki and Shion are an effective pair of villains for the story.  They may not get a lot of character development, but they play an important role in painting the greater picture of the underlying villains and both are unique and memorable in how they look and fight.

Magaki has a lot of design parallels to Mukai, which highlights them being of the same race.

Backgrounds are gorgeous, lively and varied.  They’re some of the best stages in the franchise and the music matches that quality with a soundtrack topping even KOF 99, with not a single bad track among them.

Of course, the gameplay saw an update as well.  Once again it’s a fast-paced tag-team fighter, now with even more tag options, more ways to cancel into other moves and they brought back the blowback attack by giving it its own dedicated button (even though they could’ve just made it the same button command as previous games).

It’s hard to find anything to criticize it for.  Everything from the looks to the sound to the controls is the best KOF has ever been.  Everyone should play The King of Fighters 11.

2006

Metal Slug 6(SNK): By every measure, I should love this game.  It should be my favorite Metal Slug game.  It’s on a stronger system, it returns to the plotlines of the best games in the franchise, it adds Ralf fuckin’ Jones and every character has their own special ability.

About that…

It’s on a stronger system, but what they did with the Atomiswave’s power is make hand-drawn backgrounds, which look sharper than what was on the Neogeo, but they’re also static and clash with the pixel art.  A big part of what made the previous Metal Slug games look so great is how animated everything onscreen was, including the backgrounds and how some of them contributed to the action.  That can’t happen with the way Metal Slug 6 does things, ultimately making the presentation a downgrade.

It returns to the plotlines of the best games in the series, but I don’t think it does much with that.  I’m not sure if it’s an interquel or sequel, but what begins as another battle with the rebels and Mars People gets intercepted by a new, stronger alien race that eats Mars People.  It doesn’t have many twists or unexpected developments like Metal Slug 2 & 3 past the main villain’s introduction.  You go and fight the invaders, then the invader leader and you win.  Fighting more aliens also feels like SNK playing it safe when one of the things I liked about Metal Slugs 4 and 5 was that they tried some new ideas.

It does add Ralf Jones, who makes anything better, but Ralf and fellow Ikari Warrior Clark’s special abilities are situational and the very implementation of making each character unique caused the biggest downgrade of all.  See, Fio’s ability is that she gets as much ammo for special weapons as you would in previous games, but everyone else gets half except Ralf, who gets even less than that.  That you can now hold two special weapons to switch between on the fly doesn’t help the fact that you’re woefully underequipped in a Metal Slug game, a franchise all about going in with tons of weapons and blowing stuff up!

What this means is that for a lot of the game you’re forced to use you pistol, which is not ideal because the invader enemies can take noticeably more punishment than the regular enemies in previous games.  This causes two problems.  First, the pacing is slower because there’s a lot less running and gunning when you have to stop to take down a bunch of enemies that can tank a lot of handgun fire.  Second, many enemies charge at you and unless you have a special weapon (the ones with scarce ammo), they will most certainly hit you because they take so much damage that most of the time you can’t kill them in time and they’re so big that they’re difficult to get out of the way of.

Bosses are either very easy or very aggravating.  One of them is only vulnerable for brief moments so you can only get a few shots in before playing the waiting game and those shots will likely be from your pistol because of the ammo problem.  The final boss is on a ceiling, meaning your grenades can’t reach it and you have to rely on your shooting weapons, which again, will be your pistol before long against a big damage sponge bombarding the screen.  The worst one of all is a boss that’s also an auto-scrolling stage, meaning you have to both move away and every once in a while get some shots in, turning a run n’ gun game into a run, stop to turn around and gun for a moment game.

I think Metal Slug 6 could use a tweaked version in the style of Metal Slug X, maybe with more ammo drops, different boss behaviors and small adjustments to make it play smoother.  The potential and ideas are all there, but they come together haphazardly and make for a frustrating experience.  I guess it’s worth a play to see some of the things it does differently from the other games, for better or worse, and some of the visuals on the new enemies and hand-drawn environments are pretty to look at, but Metal Slug 6 isn’t up to the standards of the Neogeo games.

SNK has gotten a serious leg up on Capcom for this competition.  They outclassed their inter-company crossover fighting game AND made one of the best fighting games ever.  Next time we'll see how Capcom responds to that in 2008 and whether their efforts will be able to surpass SNK's for this period of time.