WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Fatal Fury Special

Publisher: JVC Developer: SNK (original)/Funcom (port) Release: 1994

You know how publishers fall all over themselves to release first-person shooters nowadays? Well back in the early '90s, the hot genre was one-on-one fighting games. Street Fighter II ruled the world, while everyone else scrambled for Capcom's table scraps.

Most failed. But one publisher/developer in particular managed to gain a foothold in the genre by pumping out one fighting series after another – many times taking character designs and moves right out of Capcom's playbook – on their own hardware. SNK seemed almost entirely focused on beating Capcom at their own game back then. Their Neo Geo hardware was home to series like Art of Fighting, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, World Heroes, and of course, Fatal Fury.

And each of the games in the above list was a series. Fatal Fury Special is actually an update to Fatal Fury 2. This was a pretty common practice during the time – Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Street Fighter II Turbo, etc. Fatal Fury Special features all of the fighters from FF2, along with playable boss characters, extra fighters from the original Fatal Fury, and even a cameo by Ryo Sakazaki from the Art of Fighting series.

While they were generally good, SNK's fighters tended to be pretty experimental. While SNK was attempting to emulate Capcom in some ways, it was also trying to create its own, unique style of fighting game. And so a lot of these earlier brawlers had their share of warts.

Fatal Fury, for instance, featured a multi-plane level design, where characters were able to leap from the foreground to the background whenever they liked. Although this added an element of depth not seen in a lot of other fighters, it also made things pretty confusing. As I played I found myself spending more time hopping from plane to plane than actually engaging my opponent.

As far as quality goes, Fatal Fury Special on the Sega CD doesn't stand up to the Neo Geo original – the animation is relatively choppy and the voice samples disappointing – but it's still a very strong port. In fact, most of the SNK fighting game ports for the 16-bit consoles were pretty decent back then, and I remember the Genesis ones in particular garnering some praise.

Fun fact: this is one of the first published games developed by Norwegian software house Funcom. Their first three games were all SNK fighter ports for the Sega CD (along with a port of World Heroes that was never released). Some of you may recognize the name as the publisher/developer of the long-running MMO Anarchy Online, which has been going strong for over a decade now.