Old School Fighting Games
 

As I said in the obscure games thread, I think we need a thread just for classic fighting games. While today first-person shooters are all the rage, back in my day *shakes a cane*, it was all about the fighting games, thanks especially to the popularity of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Which were your favorites (or least favorites)? I'm talking about games like Eternal Champions, Toshinden, Killer Instinct, World Heroes or whatever else you remember. Share your favorite characters, strategies, or memories about these games. Discuss!

Well, besides the obvious Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats, I totally dug Eternal Champions, too.

I remember reading the biographies for all the fighters and finding out that they all friggin' died. That was epic to me back then, especially as a kid.

Screw a fatality. These guys were fighting for the chance of resurrection.

But the real reason was the music. To this day, I still think Blade's theme is one of the most badass fighter themes ever.

I really miss those days sometimes. Me and my brother would veg out for hours playing The Street Fighter series, Mortal Kombat, Eternal Champions, Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury 1 and 2 (Never had Special.) World Heroes 1 and 2, and good lord there must have been several others.

At the time, we owned basically every system there was available. So we had a lot of Fighting Games at our disposal, and as you said it was really the thing to do back then.
One of my favorites was when I got Ranma 1/2 Super Battle for the Super Famicom for Christmas one year, it was likely 1994. Me and my brother had been in to Ranma for several years at that point, so it was really awesome to get to play that. We had no idea who characters like Mariko and Herb were yet, they weren't that far in the Viz translations of the manga. (And the anime had only just started getting released.)

I picked up Street Fighter II at age eight. Nobody assumed I would be any good at the game, so it was totally easy to shark teenagers and even college kids at the arcade. Mom would give me fifty cents and I could clean four or five "new challengers" out.

My other love was Killer Instinct. It was like the comedian's Mortal Kombat. Humiliations were awesome. Heck, its been so long since I played, I doubt that I could pull off a decent Combo Breaker now. The home port made the SNES look really bad though, because the arcade game was beastly.

Honestly, I know its weird, but I could never get into Mortal Kombat. I enjoy watching the games, and always wanted to get involved, but never could figure it out. Its the total opposite of Street Fighter, and the special moves were so darn difficult to memorize. And forget about the fatalities. Just a bunch of confusion to me. With Street Fighter, you could kind of accidentally roll into some of the specials with experimentation. Not with Mortal Kombat though. If ever there was a game made to sell a Player's Guide, that was it.

Man, I love Eternal Champions. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to rent it all the time and stay up late trying to do all the deaths. I even had a poster of the box art at one point. Xavier had the coolest level, and you could knock your opponent into that burning stake if you knew how.

I'm still all about fighting games, old-school and new, to this very day. Street Fighter II was probably the first one I ever played, followed by Mortal Kombat and Fatal Fury. I also recall playing Yie Ar Kung Fu in arcades way back when, and obscure Namco platformer/fighter "The Outfoxies" was pretty popular in the local arcade.

I also liked Eternal Champions, but man-oh-man, was that game hard, especially the final boss. I think I managed to beat him once in my entire life. If memory serves, you had to beat him like 3-5 times in a single round, it was insane.

Is Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 old enough to be considered "old-school"? I love the Capcom Vs. engine and MvC2 is my favorite remix of that formula.

I consider Dreamcast old-skool at this point. Some may disagree.

Dreamcast came out in 1999. That's old enough for me.

Anything that's been around for at least a decade is considered old skool in my book.

I don't own any game system unless it's at least 10 years old! :D

Exception: My Retro-Bit Retro Duo, but that's old school in a different sort of way.

I dug the Clayfighters games if only because of the wacky characters. I really need to track down CF 63 and a 1/3.

I never got to play that franchise. Looked interesting though.

Does anybody here find the "World Heroes 2" SNES port to be any good? I was a bit disappointed with it as the fighting mostly consists of throwing each other around. And the small character sprites don't help either. Poor Neo-Geo home conversions. :ohwell:

Clayfighters was my favorite for the SNES because of the opening song and I always was The Blob. Also the creative name of "Bad Mr. Frosty" made me laugh.

Street Fighter II started it off for me in the fighting genre. Another game that I liked was the "Art of Fighting" because it had good graphics and the storyline was cool.

If you've got a PS2, there's always World Heroes Anthology. It'll make everything right.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/GenAn/pic23.jpg

My all time favorite. Followed closely by Street Fighter II, King of Fighters 98, Soul Calibur, Red Earth and Garou: MOTW

I think the port of WH2 for SNES is pretty good. I also have WH Anthology for PS2, so that's what I play now, but, considering how few Megs it has in comparison to the Neo Geo version, the SNES one is pretty impressive.

I though Clayfighters was all right, nothing special, but okay. I remember playing Clayfighter 63 1/3 over my friends house and wasn't all that impressed with it. I'd stick with the originals on the SNES.

Nobody ever played Clay Fighter to play a good fighting game, only for the humor. The older ones were "okay" in this regard, but the ones on the '64 were a mixed bag. Some of the parodies of other fighting games/culture were chuckleworthy and the voice actors were culled from the greatest, but the lamest Claytalities were shared across several characters, and there were some stupid stereotypes. If they ever produced a new Clayfighter, hopefully they avoid all of the previous trappings.

They cut out several characters from Clayfighter 63 1/3 too--if you look at the old ads for the game you can see some of them. There was a Statue of Liberty character, my personal favorite "Hobo Cop" (a drunken bum dressed up in garbage Robocop "armor"--he obviously got cut 'cuz he wasn't PC enough), etc. Sumo Santa was awesome.

Boogerman. 'Nuff said.

God. I forgot they stuck that abomination of a character in Clayfighters. Not that characters like Kung Pow and Houngan were any better.

Blockbuster actually had an exclusive copy of the game that had the Statue of Liberty character, as well as some other random sh*t like a severed hand and some kind of weird dog. The worst part about the whole thing was that all the original characters lost...pretty much all of their special moves. Awful.

I did like the Terminator-based box art for the sequel.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/cove...5259634-00.jpg

Pathetic awesomness at it's best. :lol:

As much as I hated Houngan, I still get a chuckle out of "Fly de Voodoo Skies!" for some reason.

I almost forgot about Pitfighter.

Damnit.

I was kind of a fighting game lover back in the day, but most everything I liked was big-name stuff. Of course I loved Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II (the first one felt like a prototype, and the third one on sucked). As Benvenuto mentioned, Pitfighter was another awesome arcade game. The Marvel vs. games were great, too. Samurai Shodown was fun, but I played it when I was no good at fighting games, and I always got my ass kicked. Of course we can't forget TMNT: Tournament Fighters. That was a game that I loved on my Sega Genesis back in the day.

This simply isn't true.

I'm late to this party... but yes. Enthusiastically yes. I still play that game on a daily basis -- thanks to the magic of emulators and savestates and whatnot, I'll routinely pull it up to fight against Hanzo or Dio or Janne. It's pretty much my solitaire.

The seesaw match thing is pretty awesome too -- when you win one of those fights, you never feel like you just got lucky. You earn those wins.

All fighting games should have seesaw matches.

What part would you argue? The part about the first game, or the part about the third one? I suppose the first game's quality is up for some debate, but I think that the lackluster quality of the third one is not at all questionable. The total replacement of the ninja characters was my biggest disappointment with the third, along with the fact that the dial-a-combo system was terrible.

The part where you said the 3rd one and on sucked. The 3rd may not have been as "classic" as the 2nd, but it had its place, especially UMK3. And past that, they may not have been "great", but they certainly haven't sucked. MK vs DC in particular was a lot of fun, and a really good start towards the next MK game.

And while not really a fighting game, Shaolin Monks was awesome.

Was Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 the one where they brought back all of the characters? I know Mortal Kombat Trilogy had all of the characters in it, but I can't remember Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 too well. As for Mortal Kombat vs. DC...I can't comment on that; I disliked the concept so much that I never bothered with it.

And yes, Shaolin Monks was pretty awesome. So was Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero.

Yes, they brought all the ninjas back in, balanced a bunch of the combos and moves, and added some new modes. Honestly, you shouldn't be hating on MK3 if you haven't spent significant time with UMK3, because it really is a lot better.

And you should give MK vs DC a try. I was also against how stupid the idea was, but it actually turned out to be really fun.

The thing about MK3 that I don't understand is...if it was supposed to be so good, why did they roll out like three versions around the same time? First there was regular old MK3, and then there was UMK3, and then there was MKT. They must have known there was *something* wrong with MK3 if they had to fix it up and rebrand it as UMK3. And if UMK3 was so great, what was the point in releasing MKT?

MK3 was broken, there's no denying that. And people were pissed the ninjas were gone. But I feel like you don't understand what MKT even is. It's not another version of MK3, it combines things from MK, MKII and MK3, using a lot of the mechanics of 3. It was also made to bring MK to the new consoles (64 and PS1) instead of doing the lazy thing and just porting UMK3 over.

So, facts. You know. They're good.

*Actually*, MK3 and UMK3 were on PS1 before MKT. So how was MKT bringing MK to the new consoles, when UMK3 did that over a year before MKT was released (although MKT *was* new on the N64; I give you that much). And while it's true that MKT did combine elements from all of the previous games, the core gameplay was all MK3, albeit with the Aggressor added.

(By the way, I'm certainly not attacking your opinions, and I hope you're not attacking mine, either.)

UMK3 wasn't on the PS1, as far as I know. MK3 was, however. And I know it was based on UMK3, that's why I said it used the mechanics of 3.

And I'm not attacking you. I honestly don't really care. I'm not even "defending" the game, because there's no point in trying to change opinions. I'm just trying to set you straight on it.

I stand utterly corrected. UMK3 wasn't released on PS1. I could have sworn it was, but I must have just been thinking of MK3. I guess doing some fact-checking would have been helpful.

Also, I am far from a genius when it comes to MK knowledge. I am not a huge fan of the series aside from MK2. I stated what I thought was fact, and I've been shown wrong. You've caught me twice in like...what?...ten minutes. Next time you see that I'm wrong, you should let me slide.

Yeah, UMK3 was never on PS1. Technically, though, MK2 was (... in Japan....)

I actually got done with mini-reviews on the first four games. MKII got the highest marks, 1 and 3 got rather low ones, and UMK3 is headed back towards the area 2 is. I have a feeling Trilogy will match or exceed 2 when I get finished, then 4 and Gold will dip back down before Deadly Alliance comes around. I've already given good reviews to Deception and DC Universe (although I may have to go back over Deception since I initially wrote it at release).

I honestly think Trilogy is a lot worse. UMK3 is still the definitive MK game to me.

Haha. I wasn't trying to do that, man. No worries.

I've been mentioning it this whole time and I still forgot to mention that I also love MKT. I think MKT combines all of the best elements of all of the 2D MK games into one package. Are you going to review the PS1 version of MKT?