16 bit home consoles can do a lot.
They can make great space shooters like Starfox, amazing adventures like Chrono Trigger and
Earthbound, and... well, whatever the heck Out of This World was.
But as we’ve seen, time and again, one piece of fruit was just out of reach: the SNK fighter.
They were cooking for their own super-premium arcade hardware, after all, and leaving the
weaker home consoles (read: those costing less than 600 bucks) to fight over the scraps.
As a result, the non-rich among us got fairly lackluster ports of otherwise great games
like Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting.
(We’ll leave World Heroes off to the side, because who are we trying to kid.)
Behold then, Samurai Showdown and/or Spirits, as it was never meant to be: Tiny sprites
and more lag than Quake on a 14.4 modem.
In the style of pretty much every SNK game of the era that didn’t have the words “Metal
Slug” included somewhere, your goal is to beat the bejeezus out of your opponent, most
likely using some manner of sword.
It might be a katana.
It might be a rapier.
It might be a bird...
no, wait, that’s just Nakoruru.
I wish I could say more about the gameplay, because I actually played a good bit of Samurai
Showdown back in the day, but this Super Famicom version kinda mangles it beyond recognition.
I realize that the pace of the game itself is a bit slower and more deliberate than other,
more combo-heavy offerings, and that’s by design.
But the bottom line is... this version just doesn’t work very well at all.
It’s more an exercise in frustration, and why we should count our lucky stars we have
much more faithful emulations of the arcade original available to us today.
Heck, even the chronology doesn’t make sense.
According to the interwebs, this first game in the series is meant to take place in the
spring and summer of the year 1788.
If this is the case, the two “American” fighters, hailing from Texas and San Francisco,
should rightly be Spanish, as America hadn’t really gotten that far yet.
C’mon, Japan.
History books.
Returning from Fatal Fury is the License mode, where you’ve got no health bar and a mandate
to pummel your way through as many oncomers as possible within a three-minute time limit.
It’s a mode I liked then and I still do; I just wish the mechanics were such that it
wasn’t just three minutes of beating my head against a wall.
So what did this game leave me with?
Honestly, after fighting Hanzo, all I could think was, “Man, I miss Nagase.
I haven’t played King of Fighters 2006 in almost a year.”
Honestly, just pick up Samurai Showdown Anthology for the Wii or PS2, or download it for your
PSP.
I think we’ve proven Neo-Geo’s hardware dominance, at least in that moment in history
for that genre.
I’m gonna go drown my fears and convictions in Clay Fighter.