I'm a bit less enthused about my old-school crawl than I used to be. I spent some time last night with the Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1 collection last night, and it wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. Part of that was the slap-dash nature of the collection. SNK gave us a color edit mode, but there's not even a training or practice mode? There's no in-game skill list when I hit pause? This is basically just the arcade ROMs and an emulator slapped together on one DVD.
Not only that, although I anticipated this, after not having played these games in quite a long time, I didn't think that they would feel as clunky and primitive as they did. Even such "classic" titles as Fatal Fury Special really felt... well, primitive. And in some cases, poorly designed. I blasted through the bosses fairly easily, but struggled to get past a handful of the regular characters at the front of my run, who had a surprisingly difficult AI.
I did notice that the localization was even worse than I thought. The grammer, pronunciation, spelling, and English usage in general is just embarrassingly bad. In the original Fatal Fury game, for instance, Billy Kane's last name is pronounced to rhyme with 'con', Raiden is mis-pronounced (and once, even mispelled!) as Riden, and at the end of Fatal Fury Special, the credits say that the game was "Prodused by SNK". And that's just the tip of the iceberg; nearly every winquote is ridiculous. What in the world is "Wubba wubba, I'm in the pink today!" even supposed to mean?)
Anyway... I had a good enough time with my little jaunt through nostalgia, but really, the gameplay for many of these older games just doesn't hold up anymore. It's too primitive, too imprecise, and riddled with problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment