90's Fighting Games Top 5- Number 4

Capcom policy in the 90's: No Sequels past #2
Better portraits of the characters

Good sex appeal (though quite cheap) Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers
Capcom

1993
Released for Snes, Arcade, Genesis and plenty other systems

Sometime the lighting strikes twice and sometimes its better than when it struck before. This game really should be called 'Street Fighter 3: The Last Time We At Capcom Do This'. I'm not at all ragging on or bringing down the first Street Fighter 2, that game really set the standard and gave us a good foundation for what a fighting game should be. The problem was that Capcom repeated themselves. This game rocked in my opinion and rarely left my Super Nintendo when I had rented it from Blockbuster, it was the best '3 Night' rental ever.

This game doesn't deviate from the style of fighting that the first game offered, there is still the 'rolling the joystick' special moves and the fluid movement remains as well. This game offers us a speed-up boost that was sorely lacking from the original SF2. This update was fun and versitale but still kinda lame in one regard: we had seen it already and all that was different was 4 new characters. The beauty part is that these characters were cool and none of the others were taken out.

With the same 6 buttons and 4 new faces there was a lot of fun to be had. The 4 new faces were:

Fei Long: A total rip-off of Bruce Lee, but still fun as hell. Bruce Lee really has been ripped off plenty of times in other fighting games (IE: Mortal Kombat).

Cammy: A blond cutie with twin braids of hair who loves to fight in a uniform that looks more like a swimsuit. This was a blantant attempt for cheap sex appeal but dammit who cares? It was fun watching her bounce around.

Dee Jay: A Jamaican kick boxer in baggy pants and a cool Bob Marley-Esq persona. At least He isn't a derivative character like Balrog (the Mike Tyson stereotype of the SF games).

T.Hawk: The native American Indian stereotype that would be repeated in plenty of more fighting games later on in the form of Mortal Kombat 3's Nightwolf, and Killer Instinct's Chief Thunder.

Cool new fighters but all in all the same action. Your still just jumping and doing as many special tricks to boost your score and also drian the other man or woman's life bar. Same bonus rounds where you attack barrels, bricks and parked cars. Same bullshit with M.Bison being the cheap douchebag that he is. A new boss and updated story would have done more to make this game a legit sequel and not just another 'update' of what was already done.

The the story of SF is about the tyrannous leader M.Bison getting the worlds attention and daring the world to take him down if they are so tough in an effort to stop him from taking over. No matter what the game though, that story never really changed. We had 4 new fighters added to the mix but with very little else like a reason that suddenly this fighting tournament has started all over again and why these 4 added challengers are so damn necessary.

Regardless, it was fast, fun and furious as we had liked. The fighting action is impressive even if it is repetitive. Matches can get very heated especially in a 2 player match between 2 experts. Combos are the added challenge, and players can easily link moves together but the beauty part is that the other can escape at the right time, thus avoiding a humiliating ass whooping. This version wasn't mind blowing my any means but it sold and was the best update of SF 2 ever.

This game wasn't Capcom's best nor is it the SF series's best, but honestly I never played the SF series after this. In my research prior to writing this, I found that Street Fighter 3 didn't come out until 1997. It wasn't until the near turn of the new millennium that Capcom got the hint that a new SF game needs new number and updating wasn't going to cut it. Yet, I also can defend Capcom's decision however to NOT title this SF 3 because its not much of a change, which is why this game doesn't make it to the top of this list. What puts this game on the list is that its best SF2 version ever made, hands down, which is why this version of this legendary fighting series is number 4 on this list.

The SF series has been called 'the other Mortal Kombat' . This could be due to all the hype of SF2 and MK being alike in so many ways. You can find Action Figures, Shirts, and even the second worst movie based on a video game, Street Fighter: the movie (man it sucked, made Mario the movie look like Shawshank Redemption) and then a game based off that crappy movie (which I will review). The animated SF movies rocked, and is one of the few animes that don't make my eyes roll. Capcom profited from this series and it sold well enough no matter HOW many versions of each game it made.

Well maybe... at least not for long. Street Fighter began dying when the millennium changed and now its all but over for the franchise. There is a loyal fan base that is begging for a revival of the series but those cries are falling on Capcom busy ears.

'Busy doing what', you might ask? Hey, Resident Evil 7: Terror in Antarctica might be a better project for 'Cap. (sarcasm)

What of our favorite characters? Where are they now since they're fighting days are behind them? Is E.Honda SELLING Hondas? Does Daulsim work tech support for a cable company? Are Ken and Ryu finally 'domestic partners'? Has Chun Li found a career as a porn star? Is Cammy coke-whoring out Paris Hilton? What about Guile, I've heard something about his court martial and the Abu Girab incident. Shit, I don't care.

I just wanna know one thing: what the fuck does 'HADUOKEN!!' mean?

The Death of a Once Great Console Developer

Between each entry of this top 5 list, I will be taking a moment to write, criticize, rant, praise or maybe even cry about something from the lovely 90's era of gaming. There is really not much logic to this, living in the past is bad for us, so they say, but these are undoubtedly the very things that made gaming what it is now.

These little reports will be classified and filed in two forms, weather this innovation or game is a diamond that made gaming rock, or dogshit that failed. This is the Diamonds and Dogshit report. I'll start with dogshit, its more fun to write about a failure rather than remembering and groveling at the feet of something that everyone loves. Failures are also way more important because the rest of the world can learn from it.

Entry 1

Atari's last stand.

I am too young to remember the Atari 2600 when it was in its prime, but I have messed around with one. When I was little, and long before my parents finally broke down and bought me a Gameboy, I got to play an Atari system at a mom's friends house. The NES was already in full swing and was blowing people away all over the world, but my mom's friend wasn't that far ahead. This friend was a black woman with a family that lived out in the 'hood (no this is not a bad joke I’m writing). Whenever I came over to their home I immediately ran into their sons room and fired up his Atari 2600 and played games like... damn I can't remember, but in all seriousness few people do. With all due respect to the first big video gaming system, most of the Atari 2600 games look the same. That is how I remembered the Atari company name years later when I was a SNES fan, and Atari released a system that was supposed to outperform and REPLACE my beloved SNES system.

I was an avid reader of EGM in those days and at that time the magazine was about 30% content, articles and reviews and 70% ads. Those ads featured some promising products, some obscure some major, and most not worth your money. In the pages of game and peripheral ads, a new system was emerging on the horizon called the Atari Jaguar, a 64 bit system with a familiar name behind it. I was impressed by some of the screenshots that I saw from some of its games like Alien vs Predator (plus the idea of playing a game based on Aliens, marines and Predators fighting was bad ass to me).

The console itself looked cool. Black and sleek like the Genesis, but compact. It was a cartridge system and from the pics I’ve seen it only has one button on the console to turn it on, no reset button or eject lever. The controller looked a little odd. It was huge and had a numerical keypad on it, but what made it a controller for games was that it also had three action buttons and a directional pad also just like a Genesis model 1 but with 13 extra buttons. How this thing was going to be used to play a 6 button fighting game I had no idea but the whole thing sparked curiosity to my 13 year old mind.

I didn't really realize in those days that Atari had a bad reputation. I never even knew about the horrors of its Pac-man translation and the failure of the ET game on the 2600 system. I had no knowledge of the gaming crash of 83-84, and how should I know these things? After all I was 13 years old and eager to find something that could replace my SNES and the only other new system on the market at that time was the 3do, a system to complicated for me to really follow not to mention cost about $700 (whoa). There was also the Sega CD attachment but at that time I wasn't interested in Night Trap (who the hell was?) I guess back then I was afraid of CD's. It was truly a big decade for gaming and every company including Phillips were making video gaming machines that we all know now really sucked.

I gawked at the cool screen shots of the 'Jag' in action. AvP looked like and awesome riot of a game, shooting aliens and even playing as one, what wasn't there to like? I was a Doom fan in those days and was dying to play it on a system and was in awe of seeing that it was a Jaguar title. Another great shooter was Wolfenstien 3d and that made it to the system. It seemed like all the great first generation FPS's were being made for Atari's new 64 bitter.

I won't lie I wanted one of these things. I believed that Atari's new system was 64 bits. I was young and stupid and as it turns out... that was the kind of consumer Atari wanted. I, however was also a poor consumer unwilling to shell out $300 dollars for a system when I already owned an SNES and a Genesis (both bought from pawn shops). As time went on I heard less and less about this machine and I never really knew why until now.

I've done my homework on this system recently, I don't know why but I was curious after all these years as to know just WHY this thing didn't move. The most well known and talked about reason is that this gaming system might NOT have been truly 64 bits and the worst part is that its debatable even all these years later. In the 90's of gaming people cared about BITS. Bit were like inches on the dick of your gaming system, the more the better. Atari's 64 bit system had 2 32bit processors inside it that worked together, but according to many of the Jag's critics that doesn't cut it as being truly 64 bits. The system really performed at a level of a 'cart based' 32 bitter. As a result, Atari had an ad campaign called "Do the math" and the company worked with that slogan thinking that companies like Sega, Sony and Nintendo would never strike back. Boy did Atari screw up.

Games continued to come out for this system and they got reviews that would make Simon Cowell cringe. Look at a 'worst games ever' list and expect a few or more Jag titles to show. Many of the games suffered from poor graphics that didn't look all that better than what an SNES could do. To make matters worse for Atari and its feline system, Sony was getting ready to unveil a finished product that was on their drawing board since 1986, The Playstation and Sega was already making some waves with their Saturn System.

Sam Tramiel, Atari's president and CEO in those days must have been getting desperate and he should have been. Their Jag wasn't doing well and just because you have a few good shooters doesn't mean you have success. The system was currently on life support in terms of sales, and it games were not the prescription to help heal it. They hadn't sold as many units as they had wanted, even when the price was dropped to $149. Sam decided to put his foot down... too bad it was onto a nail.

He was interviewed shortly before the release of the Sony Playstation. Maybe it was the desperation, maybe it was the lack of sales but he had to say something to appease the industry into thinking he was going to win come hell or high fuckin water. The interview is available (go ahead and google it) but in short, its all overly optimistic crazy talk. it’s a funny little thing to read, something that gaming geeks can chuckle over.

Here is a little gem quote from it, straight from Sam's mouth:

"The PlayStation, I must say, is a little, little bit more powerful in certain areas -- but not in others -- it's a little bit more stronger machine than Jaguar. A little, little bit."

A video of this interview would be something to see. I wonder if this man's nose grew. Anyways, he even gave Atari's potential future customers something to look foward to, the Jaguar 2 system that was in the works at the time of that interview. The rest of it is fancy talk and touting about how the future looked for the Jag. One thing was certain and was going to happen regardless of what mr.Tramiel said: The Playstation was ready to stomp a mud hole into the Jaguar's ass.

Sony debuted the Playstation, Sega released its Saturn and Nintendo came out with a 64 bit system that was believably and undisputedly 64 bits. Atari's fate was sealed. It didn't matter WHAT game it made, it made no difference, they were competing with the big boys. Atari came out with a CD drive that attached to the Jag, but it was like trying to revive a skeleton. 13 Jaguar CD games exist, I haven't played or even really seen them but I’m sure they suck.
Atari closed shop and ditched the Jaguar 2 project, rumor has it there are probably prototypes of that 'Jaguar Duo' floating about but screw that noise, its just a damn rumor about a shitty system. Atari has left the console market, and I must say its kinda sad. Atari's console days had a traveled a long road only to swerve off of it and hit a tree due to it being drunk on 'bad marketing' rum or 'bad idea' gin. Atari’s 7800 got outdone by Nintendo when the NES came out. Atari would have been the distributor of that now classic and famous NES but when a CEO working for Atari back in the early 80's blew his stack in rage at Nintendo's suits during an electronics convention and accused Nintendo of double dealing when he saw that another company called Celeco got the rights to Donkey Kong, Nintendo cancelled the deal and went into the US market without Atari's help and became the new kings in home video gaming. Atari may have missed out on billions (billions with a ‘B’ ). The Atari Lynx- a handheld with a full color screen- got creamed by the less powerful green-and-white-screened Nintendo Gameboy, and it could be blamed due to the Gameboy being cheaper at the time to appeal to a parent when shopping for their kids' holiday gift. It might have been easier for Atari in the 1970's when your competing against PONG machines but innovation- the father of invention- must step in eventually and another great electronics company will try to strike you out.

There is no chance that Atari will go back to consoles but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the greats that they once made. Go to a wal-mart and you'll find plug and play devices that allow you to relive the classics like Pitfall or Space Invaders and more for around 20 bucks. You can also find roms now on various online emulation websites for free. There is even Jaguar emulators that play the Jag games (if you simply just can't let go). Atari made games for everyone, and there is still even a homebrew scene of people that make games. Atari isn't dead to the world yet, and to this writer, I am glad.

Atari is now a publisher, making games for the companies that handed their ass to them. Atari's mark is on games like the 90's dino-fighting hit Primal Rage and the over-hyped Enter the Matrix, and the multiplayer FPS Unreal Tournament series. There is even a band called 'The Atari's'.

So maybe the industry is wrong, maybe there is a chance for Atari to make a comeback. No one would see that shit coming, an Atari system competing against Microsoft! No doubt it will be named after an animal. The Atari Marmoset?

Don't hold your breath.

I still want a Jag. I've got a Jaguar emulator on my computer and I’ve played AvP and to be honest im not impressed, nor would I be at the age of 13 or even 6. I'll have more on that game later but at least I got to experience the best the Jag could offer and I now know why it flopped. Perhaps I’m just a man looking to collect something that I grew up hearing about, and maybe in about 40 years from now- I can be on Antiques Roadshow and have an appraiser of electronics tell me that my 1990’s relic ain’t worth squat. There is a chance for some gaming systems to be worth money, like the Commodore 64, and the Neo Geo (granted the Neo Geo still rocks after all these years) they’re people out there that would sell their car for a Neo Geo. Someday when I’m at a Goodwill I'll find a Jaguar in a stack of 8 track players I’m still gonna buy it, after all its Goodwill and its for a good cause.

90's Fighting Games Top 5 List- Number 5

Mortal Kombat (1992 Midway)

Why is this game at the bottom of the list instead of like, 3 or 2? Because without its additions of controversial blood and gore, this game would have surely died. This isn't saying that the original MK sucks, its... OK, but play it now if you still have your copy and tell me if it still is as fun or legendary as you remember. The first Mortal Kombat might be the most overrated game ever made, and when compared to its later sequels you'll find that the first game has some flaws, but before I cluck on about that lets look at why it rocked the gaming world.

Digitized Graphics- This wasn't the first fighting game to use digitized footage or actors in order to create its sprites. Pitfighter, one of Atari's many failures, was the first fighting game to do this. But rather than give us muddy movement and choppy animation like Pitfighter, Mortal Kombat gave us characters with some great personalities. Each character was believable and cool for the most part. MK even gave us a stop motion animated four armed monster to fight against: Goro. For the first time in gaming history we really began to feel and believe that REAL people were beating each other into a paste on screen.

Blood- The sight of bodily fluids when I first played MK was enough to scar my mind. This was 92, a time before it became the norm to have blood in a game.It was enough to also spark congressional hearings and even made it a game believed to be responsible for the rating system that now graces the cover of every game that gets released. The gore of MK is now so tame to today's standards that you almost can't believe that it caused such a problem. The added fun was being able to maim your opponents or be maimed by executing 'Fatalities' in order to finish someone off. These moves included:

Punching off someones head

Pulling off someones head

Burning your opponent into a crisp

Ripping out someones heart

Blowing up someones head

or doing whatever satisfies the Ed Gein in you.

This was another reason for controversy. It wasn't enough that your characters bled (too much sometimes) they also could murder each other. Street Fighter 2 didn't really involve KILLING anyone, which is why that game never got the attention and censorship that MK eventually received. The oppression of censorship wasn't fully realized to me until its console release.

MK on the SNES was released and was widely disappointing to many. WHY? Because the SNES might have had a near perfect arcade translation but they made a bad move, they cut out all the blood and modified some of the Fatalities to make the game more vanilla. The Genesis version gave us all the blood and was accessable via the famous 'Blood Code'. The assholes of Nintendo's marketing department may have made the biggest mistake in allowing this, and it may have been done because of the demographic of younger kids owning and SNES system and older kids owning a Genesis. The drawbacks may also have come from the 'Lets test the market' strategy of what will win: Better graphics or better action? Whatever these bozos did to ruin MK for Nintendo owners, it was short lived, because Sega and its shittier Genesis version of MK blew away Super Nintendo version in terms of sales. This move caused Nintendo to rethink things and when Mortal Kombat II arrived it pulled out all the stops and gave us all what we wanted: Blood and gore.

OOOOK... there you have it. The secret to success. Digitized graphics and Blood. This game also had other things that made it great, like its story. The games plot seemed to be a mix of Enter the Dragon with a slight fantasy film (name whatever one comes to mind) angle to it. 7 people have entered a tournament to take down the 2 corrupted leaders of that tournament: Shang Tsung, a shapeshifting sorcerror, and Goro, a 10 foot cheap sonofabitch with four arms. Whatever, did anyone really pay attention to that or were we all just too busy learning how to pull off Rayden's fatality?

These 7 fighters were a colorful lot of criminals (Kano), agents (Sonya), ninjas (Sub Zero and Scorpion) , noble warriors (Liu Kang), an egotistical actor (Johnny Cage) and even the God of thunder (Rayden). All of these fighters worked and looked great in full realistic glory (for its time), each of them with their own story and persona that made them into icons of many fighting games after. Sub-zero and Scorpion were both palette color swaps of the same ninja (along with the secret and unplayable character Reptile), this following the Ken and Ryu of SF2 idea of getting the most out of 1 design, I'm surprised they don't do something similar to that or, at least more often, in Hollywood movies. Sonya was kind of the 'token woman' that you see in a lot of fighting games, even being able to shoot pink girly rings off of her wrist, to this day I always wished they would have tried harder in developing her, it feels like they didn't try. Johnny Cage pissed me off to no end. He fought with his shirt off in a pair of spandex shorts, and he's a candy assed, Hollywood actor that loves to gloat at the end of a match by putting on his sunglasses and stare at you with a crooked smile, he just BEGS to be 'Finished' at the end of a match. As annoying as Cage was, he was so fun to hate. Sub Zero is a ninja with the ability to freeze, and Scorpion is a ninja from hell that can breathe fire in order to kill you off. Kano is a thug criminal that throws knives and rips off Blanka's Barrel roll from SF 2. He's the token badass of this game and I loved his Fatality of ripping out someones heart, too sweeeet. Liu Kang is a kind of bland kung foo master inspired by Bruce Lee, not much else to note other than the games epilogue thats explained later in MK2 suggest that he won the tournament. Then you have the God of thunder Rayden who can fly at you, pasting you to a wall while screaming something in a lauguage that I'm not even sure exists, damn that was a fun move!

But it wasn't all so sweet. The SNES version proved that this game was quite bland without all the carnage. The controls were my big gripe. I was used to holding the joystick away from my opponent in order to block attacks, but here they added a button for it. I never used it much unless I was blocking an incoming projectile. There was 4 other buttons for high-low punches and high-low kicks, but there was really no difference between a high or low attack.

The action was slow moving and felt very stiff, like the characters and their controls were 'stuck'. The fighting method of winning this game was dependant on using 'juggle' combos that consisted of hitting your opponent into the air and using whatever hits you could dish out to keep them from hitting the ground. Some arcade junkies made a lot of enemies by memorizing tricks and combos that literally gave them a 24 hit hollow victory. This is a style of fighting in a game I've never preferred because it offers you no opportunity to counter attack, you just have to sit there and wait till your plastered to the floor. Thankfully this was only something that experts you played against could do, if you played against the computer you fought someone that was either too easy or too cheap.

MK 'you vs the computer' tip: Stay away from the corner, you'll get a barrage of punches or other hits you'll NEVER escape from.

It just goes to show you, looks aren't everything. MK had flaws but the beauty part is that Midway listened to the cries and bitching of its players and delivered a sequel that gave us all that was missing from the original. This is the difference between Midway and other companies that made fighting games (like Strata), while their first show was a success, they didn't get lost in it when it came down to repeating it. In fact, MK 2 wasn't even close to a repeat of the original, it was a totally different game (more on that as this list progresses).

Regardless of slow fighting, funky controls and cheap or unimaginative AI, MK is now a classic. Right up there with Pac-man and Galaga. This game might have made MILLIONS of dollars on its arcade release alone. Rarely does a video game inspire such widespread controversy and at the same time, get so much merchandising behind it. I can remember MK action figures, trading cards, T shirts, books, a cool movie (and a shitty sequel to that movie), and apparently even a live martial arts stage show (this game even had an off Broadway spin off, amazing). Mk also has laid foundation for many fighting games after in that it told developers to not be afraid of anything. Without MK giving the mainstream the violence that sells, then even games like Grand Theft Auto (not even a fighting game) would ever be made.

All this hype over red sprites of blood that didn't even look very real in retrospect. I'm sure Midway secretly thanks the US congress for making a big deal of MK's violence, after all that was and still is the best free advertising any medium can get.

What makes a good fighting game?

In the 90's it was all about fighting games. Action filled the screen and provided something violent and powerful to gamers. Arcades at some point might have had more fighting games than shooters and maze games which really were the only games that arcades could get quarters from. Could you imagine Final Fantasy or other RPGs in an arcade?

As arcades profited hand over fist with games like Capcom's Street Fighter 2 and Neo Geo's Samurai Showdown and Midways' Mortal Kombat, gamers at home were playing the latest Mario spin off. Platformers ruled at this point, around the early 1990's.

Street Fighter 2 wasn't Capcoms first game from arcades to make it to the home systems but it is arguably one of the most successful. SF 2 was the first game cart I owned on the SNES and it was a lucky break for me, because I loved the arcade version of that game. In those days I didn't really care about the play mechanics, graphics or even the games story, I just digged how fun it was to kick ass. Every fighter had moves that made them unique, each fighter had a culture and storyline. My favorite character that I had learned every move for was Ryu, but as is turns out he was EVERYONE's fave. Every character was pretty kick ass to me, and they all became the token characters that every fighting game afterwards had to have. Without Ken and Ryu there wouldn't be a Sub-Zero and Scorpion.

But this article isn't all about Street Fighter 2, in fact this is merely an example of what you do right in a fighting game. I could mention better fighting games, like Samurai Showdown on the Neo Geo, but I'm going for commonality, who the hell really owned a Neo Geo system (I sure didn't)?

There is an ingredient list for a fighter and it goes a little something like this:

Good variety of selectable characters- A game should have a hero or heroes, but you should always be able to choose which you like, playable villains are a good treat as well. The characters need to me cool looking or at least interesting. Masks, costumes, uniforms, crazy hair, a clown suit, SOMETHING, don't just have them fighting in jeans and a concert tee unless its necessary to the character.

Fast paced but smooth action- The animation of a fighting game must be smooth, there must be many frames or at least enough so that you know what is going on and you don't suffer from that "what the hell was that" syndrome. As smooth as it all should be it needs to be fast moving as well, that is the fuel for action: speed.


Special Moves- The punch and the kick are required but just as much needs to be specials. Fireballs, spin kicks, something that knocks more off the opponents life bar other than punches. These moves are also a good way to show off to all the other putzes at the arcade or on the home system.

Good controls- Dammit NOTHING fucks up a game more than bad controls, not just fighters but ANY game. For a head to head fighting game there should be a directional pad or joystick that helps the opponent walk left to right, crouch and jump in any direction. What grinds my gears is when the game developers try to make a button for jump (Ala' Power Moves one of the worst fighting games ever). Hitting back on the D-pad should be block and Mortal Kombat broke that rule which is one thing I never liked about the MK series. There should also be buttons for the punches and kicks and another good piece of spice that most fighters do is have 2 or more different kinds of punches and kicks, otherwise it just gets boring.

Challenging (NOT CHEAP) Opponents (single player rule)- A challenge is when your opponent reads you or mirrors you. The AI of a fighting game should keep you on your toes by having a system of defending themselves and not letting you kick their ass. What the AI controlled character should NOT have is a set of moves and attacks that drain 1/2 of your life bar and never even let you try to bring them down. Most bosses in fighting games are extremely cheap so cheap that you lose no matter what you do. Kintaro and Goro were cheap, they had punches and specials that drained and trapped you into defeat. They however were able to be brought down by sticking to a pattern or combo that works (that takes forever to learn). Shao Khan was a bit easier, his specials could turn your fighter into mincemeat but his personality made him an easy target, but it was a challenging target nonetheless. During a match he would point at you and taunt you, giving you an opportunity to strike. I am a calm man, I should never need to throw my controller at the wall because Eyedol of Killer Instinct recharged his health after knocking me clear across the screen and took me out as soon as I got back up, that is just cheap bastard AI not challenging AI.

A World To Fight In- It doesn't have to be a very creative place but an interesting place. Behind the characters there should be something that gives us the impression that its a cool place to be duking it out. MK2 had great backgrounds, it was a surrealistic cornucopia of wastelands and armories and rooms in the sky. Things moved around like floating monks and people on fire, and I loved the giant bats on the 'Kombat Tomb' level. MK3 on the other hand gave us city streets, banks and subways which is the same shit we see everyday in the real world, that is laziness right there as if the design team just went to New York and took snapshots. While backgrounds should be cool, they should never be distracting. The Street Fighter: The Movie arcade game literally had clips of the movie playing on giant TV screens in the back of one of the levels which was total overkill.



A Reason To Fight AKA a good story- There are people fighting in a game, OK WHY? Post-nuclear war? International tournament? Revenge? Bringing down a criminal gang of mo-hawked thugs? Why is my character beating or getting beaten in this game? Gaming is a lot like Hollywood and plots, while ignored by many, offer home gamers a chance to really go deeper into the game and add to the replay value. I can remember trying to beat Mortal Kombat 2 with every character just to see the different endings, and that's getting your moneys worth. A fighting game can win bonus points with me if the story is original, there was so many games based on the idea that a 'tournament' was going on, and that gets stupid after awhile.

Good Graphics- Attention developers! Be as creative as with this, just make sure its interesting and I can see what the fuck I'm doing. This also can go hand in hand with the character rule.

Sound- Today's games have real MTV bands writing songs for games to supply background music. But in the old days developers had to get creative and get behind a synthesizer to give us the killer sound track that we heard in Killer Instinct. Another good layer to please the aural orifices is sound effects, and that's when you hear the bones breaking, the grunting, the screams, the kung foo yells, the body blows, and splatter of human remains of Mortal Kombat. On a system like the Super Nintendo there is no excuse to hear a blip or beep unless I've kicked a robot character in the throat.

These are not official rules but they are things that I pay attention to when I play a game. Many game developers break these rules and the results are never good. The aforementioned Power Moves game was a load of shit in so many ways but the main rule they broke was using a button to make your character jump, and that just fucks with me. Rise of The Robots only let you play as one character, which automatically made me hate the game and I hadn't even begun a fight yet. Bullshit! I could mention others but I'll refrain and save it all for my "Best of the Worst" segment in a later article (I can't wait to get to that one).

Sometimes developers bend the rules, and that works out well sometimes. As time goes by the rules change but the song should remain the same, so to speak. Mortal Kombat's 'block' button was and is a fine example, it took some getting used to, but it worked out. Killer Instinct sacrificed a good story in favor of fast action and great graphics, and I was still satisfied with the end result. The point is, a fighting game or any game needs these basic building blocks as a foundation, but a little extra here and a little less there never hurts but, go to far with or away from something and you've got a recipe for disaster.

These are also the things I'll be basing my reviews on. Its going to be tough because most of the games I've played are older and dated, but the point of most of my reviews should be this:

A true classic never ages.

How I got into Video games (and why I love the old shit better)

Before I drone on about the 'good ole days' of 1990's fighting games, I think its important to put that time into perspective, and also share just a bit about myself.

I really don't remember a whole lot about the 90's. Clinton was president through most it, terrorism was starting to become a buzzword, sitcoms like Friends ruined television, movies like Jurassic Park gave us a look at what kind of hollow entertainment we could all get out great special effects.

I was growing up in a family that was separating and my mother suddenly had me to raise by herself. Ask any single mother and she'll tell you its hard work, even more so when your son is around 10 years old. I needed something to do at that age that could shut me up, or at least get me out of her hair as she worked 2 jobs PLUS did college. She did what any mom would do, she bought me a Super Nintendo (or the SNES).

The only system I owned prior to the SNES was the Nintendo GameBoy. The Gameboy was and still is an unexpectedly cool, successful system, but in those days that thing was just a toy. My friends in my neighborhood all owned the Sega Genesis and Sega Game Gears that looked WAY cooler that my little toy with 2 buttons, a green and black screen and a horrible penchant for eating 4 AA's in about 3 hours.

The SNES looked pretty tame on the outside, a gray box with purple and lavender buttons that made it look like something Richard Simmonds would throw at you when angered. The SNES was truly better on the inside, its games sounded better then the Genesis, its games also looked way better too. For a 16 bit system it was shocking to see Nintendo have the same processing power of its competitor, and yet make games that looked and played twice as good. 16 bits was big in these days and game companies were determined to squeeze as much out of those 16 bits as possible, but to be honest I as well as most of the 10-16 year old gaming community had no clue what '16 bits' really meant (truthfully, I still don't know).

Another plus was that the SNES produced arcade games that I loved and dump my allowance quarters into like Street Fighter 2 and the eventual Mortal Kombat. The difference between the Genesis and the SNES really began to show when these arcade translations because SNES versions ROCKED! For example, the Genesis only had 3 buttons on its controller, making SF2 impossible to play. It was and even bigger pain in the ass to play Mortal Kombat on the Genesis. The SNES gave us all the versatility of the arcade and almost perfect graphics to boot.

The Genesis wasn't ALL bad. The Genesis had good games as well. I always thought of the Sega Genesis as the game system for grown-ups. The first Mortal Kombat really looked like shit on the Genesis but it sold way better than the SNES version. Why? Because the Genesis kept all the blood and gore in the game (via the blood code) The SNES version of Mortal Kombat suffered from censorship and it was because the folks at Nintendo didn't want to cross anyone seeing how the SNES was owned mainly by a younger crowd.

Hope was in the air for Nintendo however, Mortal Kombat 2 arrived and gave us ALL that carnage that we young gore-hungry gamers begged for, money or Nintendo that was lost from MK1 was paid back in full red glory. MK2 on the SNES made me feel like I was in the arcade. No codes, no modified fatalities, no BS, just the fun that cost nearly $59.99 to play. I might be wrong on that price but I remember when games were expensive enough to make me a blockbuster customer quite often.

Remember game carts? bloody hell, I sure do. These things were good but only for about a year. Constant removal of these cartridges would wear at the electric contacts, thus giving us gaming experiences that would freeze up or go blank. I can remember going nearly faint because I to blow like a hurricane into certain carts just to get a game to work (which is a trick that game manuals advise you NEVER to do, but we all did anyways). The cost of these things wasn't easy to swallow either, about 50 a pop. Some games would go on clearance back then (because they were games that sucked) and you could find them at the bottom of a rack at Wal-marts, and nowadays they are practically free on e bay or thrift stores, but when the only viable medium is a buggy gray cart that went dead after a year of serious playing, you settle for it and blow like hell into the cart until the games' start menu looks right. I still giggle when I think bad on that, I almost blew blood vessels trying to get Contra: Alien Wars to work.

At one point in my life as a youngster I owned a Gameboy, a SNES and even a Genesis, and like the idiot I was, I sold ALL of those just to buy a Playstation one (which was my last system i ever bought and now I don't own anymore). But in these days of Roms and emulation, I rediscovered all the classics I used to love. I loved the fighting games, I loved the Beat-em-ups, and the shooters always are a treat of nostalgia coolness. Remember only seeing the ONE side of a character? That was all that was needed in those days, and damn was it fun.

These days video gaming really just sucks in my opinion (MY OPINION). Games are too long, the controller has about 10 buttons, the games are too complicated, and they seem like a lot of WORK and no FUN. Games lately have no good versus evil, its just evil versus even worse. I like Grand Theft Auto, but honestly its not much of a game, its just a criminal simulator. Running over hookers in a stolen car and taking her money to buy a machine gun so you can kill a zombie sounds like the premise to a shitty horror flick and many video games are following that formula. It wouldn't shock me to see what happened to the industry back in 1983-84* happen again today as a result of this kind of this dull monotony. If it does happen, it'll really suck because the industry is currently trying to get us to buy a game system for $700, and if game developers can't come up with games that are truly fun again, then you might be owning a $700 DVD player.

I'll stick to the classics that never bored me and are uncomplicated. If you, the reader, feel the same, then stay tuned because I'll be writing often about the classics of the 16 bit era, before those games became garage sale fodder.


*look up video games and 1983-84 on a search engine and you'll know what I'm referring to.