Pong and Beyond

416th played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: Dreamcast
Year of Release: 2000
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

Some time ago (scary enough, two and a half years ago now) we got a Dreamcast and played a bunch of games from it in what we called Dreamfest. Since it has been a while, we need more Dreamcast games on our pile and we had the time, we decided to go back to it and have a (slightly smaller) Dreamfest 2.

Leading us off is a fighting game crossover. We recently looked at the SNK stable of fighters in King of Fighters ’94, while we’ve played a few of Capcom’s Street Fighter games by now. No foreign territory at some point, but will they mix?

Our Thoughts

Of course, the issue here is that I’m not as familiar with SNK’s fighters, making it difficult to judge that side of the equation – a necessity in crossovers. Although there is a choice between two playing styles, related to the charging of power bars, at my level I couldn’t detect many differences.

 The game plays pretty well – it’s fairly straightforward to get a grip with the controls and the bouts go off as easily as they should. Even on our first playthrough we both did well – and that seemed surprising considering how little I tend to know about the genre.

One of the more interesting features comes in at character selection. The game is ostensibly a team-based fighter – multiple characters on each side, switching when one of them gets knocked out (no tag team options). To keep it balanced, acknowledging that not all characters are equal, each character has a point value assigned, from 1 to 4. When building a team, you get to spend four points – you could use the (initially locked) four star fighters on their own to overpower and hope it doesn’t backfire, or you could combine one and three, two and two, or come in with four one star fighters. It’s an interesting acknowledgement of the different tiers, and a good way to allow the mix of fighters to exist without having to compromise their fighting style or stats, instead adding some strategy into the mix (the order of fighters helps here as well, of course).

Final Thoughts

The game played, to me, like a straightforward fighter, nicely accessible, but with the nuances of the different franchises probably lost on me. It still doesn’t actually feel like a bad fighter to start with, I just had trouble connecting with – as is usually the case with me for fighters.