Publisher: Capcom

Genre: 1 on 1 2D Fighting

Platform: Sega Dreamcast

# of Players: 1 or 2

ESRB Rating: None yet, assumed Teen

Difficulty: Easy

Fat: Here we go again, with another review, hot out of your radiation blastin' monitor...

Geeky: Yep, that tingling in your scalp isn't head lice... but enough fear-mongering, we've got a game here that a lot of people have been waiting for.

Fat: When you're old gamers like we are, it seems like only yesterday when we first started playing a revolutionary fighting game known as Street Fighter 2...

Geeky: That was way back in the early '90s. I remember it well. It was a balmy spring day, and baggy clothes weren't fashionable on girls In fact they used to like to wear...

Fat: Enough with the fashion report! The original Street Fighter (known as Fighting Street on the old Turbografx 16 CD system) started the trend a little slowly. It was good, but a bit hard to control, with not enough character variety (Ryu was the only character you could play; the second character would be Ken). Street Fighter 2 is what really set the stage for fighting games. Never before had there been so much variety of characters and moves. The 1 on 1 competition between two players was advanced tremendously with this game. As we all know, Capcom has continued advancing (milking) this series up to today.

Geeky: Capcom indeed set the standard for what we know as fighting games. Seeing the success Capcom was getting, some other game companies jumped on the bandwagon and made fighting games of their own. Most of the games were cheap knockoffs with little play value, but a game company known as SNK had success with a game series called Fatal Fury, as well as Art of Fighting and (the game series that perhaps actually equals Capcom's quality standard) Samurai Showdown. Eventually, SNK combined their modern-day characters into the King of Fighters games, which is their most successful series.

Fat: Recently, SNK as we know it has ceased to exist. They're not out of business (they still are making a Last Blade game for Dreamcast), but most of their original fighting game developers have gone on to start a company of their own. A while ago, Capcom, recognizing SNK as their main competition in making fighting games (mainly because a lot of employees were going back and forth between the two companies), saw the potential in making a game where their most popular characters clashed with SNK's heavy hitters.

Geeky: The first realization of this dream was Match of the Millennium, an excellent fighting game for the Neo Geo Pocket, now discontinued in the US. Though it was limited by the power of the system, it still showed how great a fighting game featuring all of these characters could be.

Fat: And now, this idea is realized once more by the power of the Dreamcast. The concept, of course, is simple: You get to choose from a team of Capcom and SNK fighters from past game series to battle with. In this game, you can have up to 4 characters on a team, but certain characters take up more "slots" than others. For example: You could create a 4 player team with Blanka and Dhalsim from Street fighter, and King and Yuri from Art of Fighting. If you want to play the standard Street Fighter, Ryu, however, he takes up two slots, so you can only have 3 characters. If you want to play with a powerful boss character such as Sagat or Geese Howard, you can only have 2. Certain special characters you unlock must fight alone.

Geeky: You can choose an SNK or Capcom "groove" to play with. The main difference between the two is your power bar for special attacks. With the Capcom groove, you have 3 power meters that go up as you attack and defend, just like in Street Fighter Alpha 3. The SNK groove is more like the King of Fighters series, where you hold down two buttons to charge your power meter. I can see advantages and disadvantages to both styles. Another cool difference in the grooves are that your characters are represented with different art from the two companies' artists.

Fat: One other interesting mechanic this game has is a grading system. Each and every attack, defense, and counter is graded from D, (crap), C (ok), B, (good), A, (very good), and S (Perfect). Your score depends on your grade point average. High Greade Point averages may also unlock certain things...

Geeky: Speaking of unlocking, this game has a point system similar to Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. That is, you get a number of points you can spend at the secret store each time you play the game. With these points you can unlock secret characters, moves, backgrounds, and playmodes. To open new secrets to buy, play through the game with the character you want secrets for. You can also get points by playing the "olympics" mode in the Neo Geo Pocket game, Match of the Millennium, and tranferring the points to the DC via an (expensive) link cable. You can get a lot more points a lot faster this way, actually.

Fat: Now, on to what we think. Originally, I was led to believe that All of the game's characters would be redesigned by artists from the opposite company: Capcom would redo all of SNK's characters, and SNK would make thier own rendition of Capcom's. While the character selection art is like this, apparently this idea fell through somewhere along the line, perhaps because of SNK's current financial turmoil. All of the SNK characters have indeed been re-created, with lots of detail and style by Capcom's artists. However, out of the Capcom characters, besides a few extra poses here and there, only Ryu, Ken, Evil Ryu, Akuma (Gouki), and M. Bison(known in this version as Vega, he looks like a total FRUIT here) have been redone. All of the rest of the characters are exactly as they appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 3. This is a bit disappointing, as it almost looks like there's a resolution difference between some of the characters. The animation here is nowhere NEAR as good as Capcom's Street Fighter 3 series (or Art of Fighting 3 for that matter), and not quite as good as Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, but it isn't too bad. All of the effects such as fireballs, flash kicks and the like are now rendered with nice 3D graphics and explosions, which give this game a nice new original look. This game has a series of totally new backgrounds, all of them locations similar to older fighting games, but nicely redone. My favorite background is a building under construction, where the building is falling apart as your battle ensues. There usually isn't a lot going on in the backgrounds, but they are well rendered. Some of the effects they tried don't really work, for example one scene is a big fiery car pileup, where there is an outline of pixels around the character to make it look like the fire light is reflecting off him or her. All it does is make them look like cheap 2D cutouts (which they are). Some effects should be avoided.

Geeky: The sound and music is pretty good here, with a lot of new techno, rock and hip-hop themes and no regurgitated Capcom crap (hey, I'm one of the few who LIKED Marvel vs. Capcom 2's music, because it was different). Actually, one of the things that was consistently better in the SNK games is the music (especially in the Neo CD games), so I wouldn't be surprised if that's who did it. The sound effects have a good amount of oomph to them, and most of the characters have quite a few new voice quotes (Sagat sometimes says"Try again Kid", just like the first character in the original Street Fighter. Classic). Sometimes the robotic announcer voice can get on your nerves, but it's nothing major.

Fat: Like most fighting games with Capcom's name on it, Capcom Vs. SNK has tight, solid control. Like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, this game has a 4 button layout (which I hate), but you can still get most moves you could in the 6 button games. At first, some players may be disappointed that some moves were removed from certain characters, particularly SNK fighters (probably to balance out the fact that most Capcom characters don't have a lot of special moves), but unlock certain characters, and you may get certain moves back. I'm sure I'll hear a lot of griping about controlling the game with the Dreamcast Pad, but I wouldn't know. I play it with the stick, like it's SUPPOSED to be played. On that, the control's quite acceptable.

Geeky: I tried it on the pad, and it's not too bad with 4 buttons. Do we have any other gripes? of course we do. The secrets thing is nice, and a good way to keep you playing, but I must admit most of the secrets you get are pretty lame. It would take FOREVER to get enough points to unlock all of the secrets just by playing the game itself, and what you get isn't particularly worth the time you'll have to put into it. We're just thankful we had a Neo Pocket handy, that makes getting secrets a LOT easier.

Fat: And besides the lack of redesign on the Capcom characters, as well as Bison's CRUMMY re-design (he was so much more impressive in Alpha 3), I have to question some of the character choices. Raiden? Why? He sucks! So does E. Honda. Of course, this is all opinion, and I'm sure everyone has their own opinion of who should've been in the game (I think Ralf , Clark, and Leona from KOF would have been good, as well as Gen and Karin from Alpha 3). I guess I would say overall, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is a better game, with more characters and incentive to play. On it's own, Capcom vs. SNK is a decent title, with a few elements missing I would have liked to have seen, but a solid playing experience nonetheless.

Geeky: I'm happy as long as I got lots of girl fighters to play with. Of course Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 has more, but there's a decent amount here, and none of the other chicks are quite as bouncy as Mai...

Fat: I'm surprised she can move with those things, let alone fight.

Geeky: That's what I like about fighting games. There's NOTHING realistic about them.

Graphics: (Fat)7 (Geeky)7.5

Sound: (Fat)8 (Geeky)9

Control: (Fat)9 (Geeky)9

Playability: (Fat)8 (Geeky)7

Worth a rent?: If you can find anyplace that rents imports...

Worth a buy?: It's kind of a must-have if you're a fan of both SNK and Capcom fighters. If you only like one and not the other, then you may want to pass.

Worth buying the system for?: Let us think about this...no, not really.

Fat & Geeky's Final Notes: This game may not be what everyone's hoping for, but it is a solid, good playing effort that you'll have a lot of fun with if you get into decent fighting games. It seems a bit rushed, but the play is intact.

Select the Groove that suits you. I personally like the Funky Chicken.

Vice shows that fast feet and stiletto heels make for a deadly combination.

Choose from ugly-ass Capcom art, or ugly-ass SNK art.

This is the "new" Bison. This is also what we think of him.

Sakura gives King a loving squeeze.

This one ain't right. Raiden's the one that bites...

A good way to get an S rating is to counter a move with a super.

Here's the main SNK boss, Geeese. And Blanka's Trippin'.

In one of the intros, Ken throws Terry his hat.

Don't let this happen to you.

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