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Review: King of Fighters ‘95 |
King of Fighters ‘95 is the second game in the King of Fighters series. It is a yearly event and SNK fans eagerly await each instalment in the series each year. SNK is, or rather was, a game company that prided itself on its fighting games - and it had a lot of them. These games included Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and Samurai Showdown and were released at a time when the Street Fighter 2 series ruled the arcades. SNK had their fans but it wasn’t until the King of Fighters series started when they started to get a cult following similar to that of Street Fighter.
King of Fighters takes some of the most popular characters from different SNK games, mostly Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, and puts them together to slug it out to find an ultimate champion. Now the Sega Saturn version of King of Fighters ‘95 actually got a world wide release and made it to both the US and Europe - despite needing an additional “ROM” cartridge to run it.
In order to play this game you need to insert both the cartridge and the CD - this is because the game requires a lot of memory to hold all the character animation and detailed background, which the Saturn itself doesn’t quite have enough of.
King of Fighters ‘95 has a lot of similarities to Street Fighter 2 and it is obvious this it is what influenced the game. Like Street Fighter 2, each character has an energy-bar and whoever depletes their opponent’s bar first wins the round. Moves are also done in a similar way to Street Fighter 2. You have strong and weak punch and kick buttons and executing complex button combinations can perform special moves such as projectile fireballs. However one thing that sets this game apart from Street Fighter 2 is the option to play team matches. This means you can select a team of three fighters and whoever defeats all their opponent’s fighters first is the
winner. The teams are already set up for you - but you do have the option to create your own. The teams include the Fatal Fury team (which features three popular Fatal Fury characters), SNK Ladies team (popular female fighters - and one transvestite) and some sort of army guy team where everyone is some sort of military dude. When you have selected your team it’s onto the fight, however there is more to using a team than simply allowing you to select three characters.
A nice touch to the game is the characters that aren’t currently fighting watch the fight from the background to cheer you on. Also, in certain conditions that never seem to arise, you can call one of your team-mates to jump in for a quick attack with the “L” button before retreating back to the background. When a character looses a fight they go to the background and sulk. It’s just like real life!
The backgrounds themselves are also quite good and have excellent opening sequences. My favourite was the London stage, which is set in a bar. The stage opens on a stain-glassed window where the stage music starts. It then pans down to the floor where the fight takes place in front of numerous onlookers. All the stages are quite detailed with little animations and things going on in the background. The music also works well with the stage it’s being played on such as the China stage music sounding all Chinesey and the military stage having some sort of military beat. I can’t say the music in this game is great but when it works with the background in this way it adds to the appeal.
The characters in the game are also interesting but seem to have some similarities to Street Fighter 2 characters. Kyo reminded me of Ryu, Andy reminded me of Ken and Mai reminded me of Chun Li. They’re not bad characters though and you grow to like them. However some characters, such as Chang and Iori, are quite original and great fun to use. It’s pointless going into detail about them all because there are so many and learning about them as you play is part of the fun.
However I had a problem with how the game plays. Each character can perform a dodge move by pressing the “R” button on the joypad. This means if you fire a projectile, such as a fireball, your opponent can dodge it without the need to jump. This isn’t too bad in two player mode but in single player the computer opponent will dodge pretty much every single fireball you throw. This meant I had to win fights by going in close and using traditional moves. I’ve heard players say it’s cheap to throw fireballs in games such as this but constantly performing the strong punch and kick moves just get boring. I found myself getting frustrated in some matches and it seemed pointless them including any projectile moves at all.
The game also plays relatively slowly such as if you sweep an opponent it seems to take them forever to get back up again. There are also annoying load times between the rounds. For example, if you have a close fight in the first round so you finish with a little bit of energy left, the second round will load - and if you then loose that character straight away in the second round then it will immediately start to load the third round. This gives you about two seconds of gameplay between the loading. I thought having the extra ROM cart was to avoid this.
At the time of its release, 1995 obviously, there were numerous other fighting games available that played and looked much better - namely Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Virtua Fighter 2 and Tekken. Compared with these it just looks and plays like something from about five years earlier. That doesn’t make it bad but it just shows that there are better fighters available.
Another problem I had with the game was the last boss - Omega Rugal. No matter how hard I tried I could just not seem to defeat him. It must have taken me about a hundred continues to finally beat him - and that was by accident. I mean if you jump at him he does this powerful kick thing that you can’t avoid and if you’re on the floor he’ll dash at you and slam you into the wall - which you also can’t avoid. Again, projectiles are useless here too. It’s quite a frustrating experience playing this game and it really takes the enjoyment out of it.
Also several characters look like transvestites.
This isn’t a bad game by any means but this is a game released after Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (and after Alpha on the Saturn) and just doesn’t compare. It gets marks for its presentation and style but plays like a game of Scrabble with your Great Aunt Mavis.
