This year I finally bid farewell to my old cell phone. It was a real antique, scarcely a step up from one of those World War II radio phones that some grunt would have to wear as a backpack while another soldier shoveled coal into it. It sported an ultra-low-res monochrome screen and came with a single game, a minimalist Arkanoid clone called Brick Attack.

Having shattered all high score records for Brick Attack, I finally decided to take the plunge and invest in a more advanced cell phone. Once my eyes adjusted to the dazzling full-color screen, I began browsing for games. Imagine my delight when I learned that I could be playing King of Fighters M2 instead of keeping my eyes on the road for a paltry $6.99!

As I eagerly downloaded the file, I wondered, “How did they cram all the excitement of the arcade game into such a tiny package?” My question was more or less answered when I clicked through the tutorial and saw these ominous words:

“PRESS 6 TO ATTACK”

That’s right: Every punch, kick, and throw has been abridged into one keystroke. I know my phone has more than enough keys to simulate the sophisticated 4-button layout of a Neo-Geo joystick, so I figured there must have been a good reason for the game developers to strip down the controls so drastically. And there is: They are lazy and evil.

In addition to pressing “6” to attack, you can dial in a request to move, jump, block, or taunt, all of which will get you killed. The formula for victory is a combination of button mashing and super moves, and nothing else.

The super moves are truly the icing on the turd. Whenever you activate a super, the fighting is put on hold for a few seconds while you play a simplistic mini-game. For example, when you perform a “Deadly Move,” the game freezes and the words “FILL THE BAR” appear on screen. If you mash the attack button thumb-crampingly fast you’ll automatically land a combo when the fight resumes. There’s another kind of super called a “Stylish Move” which kicks in if you land five hits in a row without taking any damage. Stylish Moves also throw you into a mini-game, but the mini-game is different for each character. Terry’s game has you hitting the attack button rhythmically a la DDR; as Mai you have to punch in a sequence of numbers within a time limit (a literal dial-a-combo!); Kim has to play Simon Says on the keypad; Leona’s game involves pressing a button when a bunch of fluctuating gauges are lined up.

Story mode begins with a brief cinematic showing the wax-sealed envelope that heralds the beginning of a new KoF tournament, followed by the silhouette of Eolith-era oddball K9999. There is no character select in story mode; you are assigned a four-man team of Terry, Mai, Kim, and Leona. In the first round of fights, each character has to beat every other character in a best-of-three one-on-one fight. Only the characters that beat all three of their teammates without losing are allowed to advance to the thrilling final round, where K9999’s silhouette reappears to inform the heroes that he has stolen their DNA so that they will have to face off against…clones of themselves! You heard correctly: After fighting through every possible match-up of those four characters, you get to fight them AGAIN.

King of Fighters M2 will be remembered as the game that finally found a cure for Overpowered SNK Endboss Syndrome: There is no endboss. I slogged through the umpteenth survival match against palette-swaps of my own team, hoping the game would redeem itself in some small way with an epic showdown against one of my favorite KoF characters (K9999 is so underrated), and all I got was a one-page text ending and a $6.99 charge on my phone bill.

After suffering through King of Fighters M2 many more times than what was actually necessary to write an article explaining how awful it is, I decided to give Street Fighter II a try. I shuddered at the thought of witnessing another beloved franchise reduced to an unplayable shadow of itself, but I was driven on by one journalistic goal: To declare a winner in SNK and Capcom’s battle for mobile phone supremacy, even if it turns into a taste test between poop and pee.

As it turns out, Street Fighter II is a pretty terrific little time-killer/nostalgia trip. Given the limitations of the platform (and the low bar set by King of Fighters M2), I was blown away by a game that looks like Street Fighter II and play slightly better than Street Fighter 1.

Remember how all the color drained out of the room when I discovered that King of Fighters M2 had one measly attack button? Well the overachievers who lovingly ported SFII to my cell phone actually took the trouble to retain the full-flavor six-button layout. Steering your fighter with buttons 1 through 6 while attacking with the other six keys is kind of like learning to play with your feet, but I have to give the programmers an “A” for effort for actually trying to recreate the experience of playing SFII instead of throwing their hands in the air and churning out the “Street Fighter M2” that I was bracing myself for.

This is a port of World Warrior, and all eight SFII originals are playable. Every character’s WW-era specials are intact, but some of the inputs have been mercifully simplified (dragon punch = forward, down, punch, for example). Crouching is a bit wonky since you have to “toggle” between crouching and standing by tapping down, but this is still a win for SFII since you can’t crouch at all in King of Fighters M2.

All four bosses made it into the game, too. Considering that the programmers went through the trouble of including them it’s a shame they didn’t go all out and make this a port of Champion Edition so that the bosses would be playable. Win quotes are intact, but there are no character endings, so after you knock out Bison you’ll have to close your eyes and picture Zangief dancing with Gorbachev using the power of your imagination.

King of Fighters M2 and Street Fighter II both succeed at capturing the look of their parent games on a screen the size of a Wheat Thin, but SFII offers more visual substance since there are three times as many characters and backgrounds. SNK’s offering looks pretty shabby once you realize that you have to fight in front of that damn aquarium 25% of the time. The mini-games are as detrimental to the graphics as they are to the gameplay, since they consist of nothing more than a bunch of lines, dots, and numbers that are artlessly superimposed over the otherwise decent graphics.

I’m not tech-savvy, but apparently there is something about the design of my cell phone that does not allow music and sound effects to play simultaneously, because SFII has music but no sound effects, while M2 has sound effects but no music. SFII is the clear winner again, with faithful reproductions of every theme from the original game. King of Fighters M2 is played in silence, except it goes “honk” when a fight starts, “whoosh” when it cuts to a minigame, and “deedily deedily deet deet” when someone is knocked out. That “whoosh” is the sound of fun escaping.

Judgment: Capcom wins.

King of Fighters M2:

• Publisher/Developer: I-play
• Score: 5%
• The Accessibility: 3
• The Audio & Visuals: 6
• The Depth & Lastability: 1
• The Features: 1
• The Plot & Characters: 1

Street Fighter II:

• Publisher/Developer: Capcom USA
• Score: 70%
• The Accessibility: 7
• The Audio & Visuals: 8
• The Depth & Lastability: 5
• The Features: 5
• The Plot & Characters: 8

• Reader Review by: Anonymommy