Street Fighter Alpha Review

The Game Boy has never been a particularly good system for fighting games. This is mostly because few companies have tried to release a fighting game for the Game Boy. Street Fighter Alpha is a surprisingly good port of Capcom's arcade fighting game, with pretty amazing graphics and excellent control.

As previously stated, the graphics are pretty impressive. The backgrounds of the arcade version are duplicated pretty well, right down to the walking cat in the Return of the Dragon-inspired scene. The fighters may be a little low on facial detail, but they animate extremely well, and each has his or her own fighting stance and moves. The smoothness of the animation leads to better gameplay - no jerky motion like the GB version of Street Fighter II. The game is also nice and colorful, making good use of the Game Boy Color's palette.

The game uses one button for punch and one for kick. Quick button taps execute light attacks, while full presses are used for fierce and roundhouse. Oh, and the select button taunts. Yes, taunting isn't all that useful, but it just shows the attention to detail put into this game. The game's sound isn't going to win any awards, but it's definitely adequate.

Overall, Street Fighter Alpha stands alone as the best fighting game to ever hit the Game Boy. The gameplay is almost as solid as the arcade version, the animation is superimpressive, and most importantly, it's still a whole lot of fun.

X-Men: Next Dimension Review

Everyone's favorite band of mutants is back in X-Men: Next Dimension, a straightforward 3D fighting game released simultaneously for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, with an Xbox version not far behind. Created by Paradox Development, a company that's already done a couple of similar 3D fighting games (X-Men: Mutant Academy and its sequel) for the original PlayStation, X-Men: Next Dimension boasts a lineup of two-dozen popular Marvel Comics characters and the voice of Patrick Stewart. The game itself is decent, offering up a variety of different moves and letting players dish out long and damaging attack combinations--but it's not going to replace or even come close to your fighting game of choice, if you even have one these days. Then again, it's not like X-Men: Next Dimension is aimed at fighting game fans, since it's clearly geared toward fans of the X-Men comic book characters. These players will appreciate the wide selection of fighters in Next Dimension, as well as its story mode, though they'll wish the game did a better job of evoking these unique characters' personalities.

X-Men: Next Dimension features fully 3D renditions of all its characters, as well as interactive 3D backgrounds. However, the gameplay itself is clearly modeled after Capcom's Marvel Comics-based 2D fighting games such as X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes. Capcom's games are a lot older than X-Men: Next Dimension, but they did a lot of things better: Their controls were a lot more responsive, their gameplay was deeper, and they did a far superior job of bringing Marvel Comics' intriguing characters to life, thanks to some excellent hand-drawn 2D animation. X-Men: Next Dimension does sport 24 different characters, but they have just a single victory pose each, and many of their moves are awkwardly animated, making the fighters in the game seem far less interesting and entertaining than their comic book counterparts. Still, some fans will use their imaginations to fill in the blanks--you have to do that with comic books anyway--and will appreciate having so many of their favorite characters in a single game.

The game offers a number of different modes of play, including the usual suspects found in most any fighting game these days: There's an arcade mode in which you fight one computer-controlled opponent after the other in three-round matches, there's a practice mode for experimenting with moves and combos, there's a survival mode that challenges you to defeat as many opponents as possible without getting knocked out, there's a versus mode for two players, and there's the story mode that adds some much-appreciated context to the action. The GameCube version also has a time attack mode, in which you're trying to win matches as quickly as possible, and a team battle mode, in which you can select multiple fighters for a battle royal.

The story mode is fairly unorthodox, insofar as it actually tells a story, unlike most fighting game story modes. The plot unfolds in numerous prerendered cinematic cutscenes interspersed between obligatory one-on-one matches, and it's about how the evil Bastion is attempting to do in mutantkind with his army of robotic sentinels and a dastardly plot to use the powers of one of the X-Men against them. The X-Men retaliate, but they also run into their nemesis Magneto, whom they'll have to join forces with if they hope to stop the greater threat. It's a good enough plot, and during the course of the story mode, you'll switch between having to control particular characters and getting to choose to play as one of several. You won't get to control all the game's characters in the story mode, but you'll also be glad that you don't get stuck with just one character for the duration of it.

Multiplayer party games can provide a room full of people with hours of knock-down, drag-out competition, especially if you're playing them on the Nintendo GameCube or the Microsoft Xbox. Since both systems already have four controller ports, all you need to get a shindig going is a game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros. Melee, or Fuzion Frenzy and one or two of your friends to bring over any additional controllers you might need. While this setup works fine on a system such as the GameCube, playing multiplayer party games isn't nearly so easy on a handheld console such as the Game Boy Advance. In order to start a game with four players, you'll need four systems, four game cartridges, and at least three link cables. Nonetheless, if you're in the mood for a melee fighting game on the go, and you can find two or three other people willing to make the investment necessary to duke it out with you, then Sega's Sonic Battle is a good choice.

The easiest way to describe Sonic Battle is to call it a portable version of Super Smash Bros. Melee, except that instead of using Nintendo's characters to fight your battles, you and your friends can choose any of 10 different characters from Sega's Sonic Adventure series. The goal in Sonic Battle, much as it is in Super Smash Bros., is to score more knockouts than your opponents by the time the match ends. This isn't a fighting game in the traditional sense, though. The combat system is remarkably simple, and the pace is lightning fast. Most attacks are performed using a combination of the directional pad and the B button, while the A button and the L trigger allow you to jump and guard. There are numerous ways to juggle an opponent in midair, and attacks generally dole out massive amounts of damage.

Besides the portability factor, there are a few other key differences that distinguish Sonic Battle from Super Smash Bros. First, each character in Sonic Battle has three different special attacks, which you can designate as airborne-, ground-, or guard-based. Sonic's spin-dash, for example, acts as a dive-bomb move if you select it as an aerial attack, but if you assign it as a ground attack, it launches a powerful gust of wind across the screen. Another of the game's unique aspects involves your ability to regain health and to store energy into a power reserve just by holding down the guard button. Once the bar is full, you can unleash a one-hit knockout using one of your character's special moves. Whereas you might go 30 seconds or more between knockouts in a game like Super Smash Bros., the typical span between points in Sonic Battle is more like 10 seconds or less. That sort of frantic, intense pace is perfect for a portable game system like the Game Boy Advance.

If you're a fan of the Super Smash Bros. games, the biggest gripe that you may have with Sonic Battle is that the layouts of the arenas don't play a strategic role in the outcome of matches. In Super Smash Bros., you need to be aware of jet cars whizzing by on the F-Zero stage or of bombs falling to the ground in front of the princess's castle. The arenas in Sonic Battle provide a great degree of three-dimensional movement, but they're generally rectangular in shape and don't offer much in the way of interactivity. You can toss opponents into walls and perch atop boxes, but the majority of combat takes place on flat ground. This shortcoming doesn't have much of an impact on the game's fun factor, though, because the combat itself is so lively and satisfying.

Publisher Agetec has made something of a name for itself by publishing ports of the Dreamcast port of The King of Fighters '99 by SNK didn't have this issue and will seem strange if you've played the original NeoGeo version, but it doesn't detract greatly from the game, and you'll get used to it quickly enough.

Mark of the Wolves for the Dreamcast could be described as a doubly nostalgic game--it's a port of one of SNK's last great NeoGeo games and is the last console port that SNK ever did. It's also one of the last great games for the Sega Dreamcast console, since the console itself will be discontinued soon. Considering all the newfangled 3D games that feature advanced graphical technology, it might not seem surprising that 2D games like this seem rarer and rarer these days. But if you own a Dreamcast and have any interest at all in 2D fighting games, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Mark of the Wolves.

Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles Review

If you're finding yourself asking questions like whether it's really pronounced "Zack," or what a mamodo is, then you need not read any further. Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles quite simply isn't for you. This dumbed-down anime-inspired fighter--which bears a striking resemblance to One Piece: Grand Battle and Inuyasha: Feudal Combat, two other dumbed-down anime fighters from Bandai--exists solely for the sake of those already smitten with Zatch Bell!, though that still doesn't fully excuse the game's short and clumsy story mode or its shallow and unbalanced gameplay.

Zatch Bell! easily could have come from the same cut-rate anime factory responsible for Yu-Gi-Oh!--both are saddled with weirdly high-concept premises, and both teem with spiky-haired youths who like to kick it with strange and often grating extradimensional beings and who like to fight a lot. If you want more specific details than that, you'd better go read a FAQ or something, because you're not going to get much from Mamodo Battles. To a point it seems unfair to expect the game to be completely choked with exposition, but there's a soap opera quality to Zatch Bell! that makes it nearly impenetrable to outsiders.

Then again, you don't have to care about character motivations when you're just kicking the crap out of everyone you meet, which is the crux of the "story" mode in Mamodo Battles. Playing as a pair of characters, one human and one otherworldly "mamodo," you hop around 10 different locales, running into and throwing down with other couples. Each stage is supposedly set in either Japan or England, but the menu that you select stages from doesn't give you much sense of place, and most are generic-looking enough to have been set anywhere. In a halfhearted bid to pad out the six incredibly short stories, the game sometimes has you go to a location to find points, which you can use to buy character enhancements or replicas of Zatch Bell!-branded collectible cards; sometimes you'll go to a location and find nothing at all. Still, it won't take you more than 20 minutes to tear through each of the six scenarios.

Once you've wrung the two or three hours of gameplay from the story mode, your options in Mamodo Battles are limited. You can test your might in the time attack mode, which challenges you to beat a series of opponents in the least amount of time; you can square off with the AI or player two for one-off fights; and that's about it. That the actual combat is rather mindless doesn't help the game's case, either. Though you'll play as a team of two characters, they effectively act as one, with the secondary character only occasionally becoming active for special team moves--and, realistically, there's only half a character's worth of moves in any given team.

You can mash on the X button to perform a canned melee attack routine, you can hit the square button to cast a ranged spell attack, and if your special meter has filled up, you can press and hold L1 to unleash an exceptionally devastating special attack that more often than not will end the match. How your special meter fills is dictated by how many multihit combos you can pull off, which brings us to Mamodo Battles' biggest problem. Many of the characters have attacks that will overwhelmingly net them big combo points, thus rapidly filling up their special meter. Though the game does offer several different difficulty settings, the AI is never particularly cunning, making it easy to use the same techniques over and over again, turning the whole experience into a monotonous grind. Live opponents can prove to be more challenging since they're more prone to mix up their techniques, but the two-player game is still plagued by poor character balance, and once both players figure out just how powerful the special attack is the game quickly turns into a race to fill up your special meter.

Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles distracts from its stupid gameplay with some flashy cel-shaded graphics, and it works well, to an extent. Despite a total disregard for any aesthetic consistency, the characters look uniformly sharp and colorful, though the thick black lines around the cel-shaded models often reveals some pretty harsh aliasing. The attack animations can get a little repetitive, but they do a fine job of capturing Zatch Bell's goofy, exaggerated style. The game adds a lot of punch to all of the attacks with an overwhelming amount of crazy special effects. All of this glitz has a price, and even though the scope of each level is extremely modest, Mamodo Battles is still prone to some slowdown.Though all of the story sequences are told with minimally animated portraits of the characters, the game gets added authenticity by way of the American voice cast for Zatch Bell! Unfortunately, a number of the characters are so achingly annoying that you wish they were mute. Additionally, since each team has a very limited number of attacks, you'll inevitably hear the same handful of attack sound effects over and over again. Though the music occasionally treads into the kind of schmaltzy synthesized lounge sounds usually reserved for mahjong or horse-racing games, it usually backs up the action nicely with energetic and catchy tunes.

It's understandable that the audience for something like Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles might not be bothered by the game's rather low ambitions--save for the anomalous Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games, the standard for anime-inspired fighters isn't high, and the typically young fan base is primarily concerned with the representation of their favorite characters. But if fans don't expect better, these games aren't going to get any better.

Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution is an anime-based fighting game with a backstory that's more interesting than the game itself. The game was released earlier this year in Japan as Naruto Shippūden: Gekitou Ninja Taisen EX, which featured the teenage versions of the Naruto characters, as seen in the Naruto Shippūden anime series currently running in Japan. Since Shippūden hasn't made it to the US yet, publisher D3 chose to gut all of the older characters, along with the main storyline, and replace them with the younger versions that American audiences would be familiar with, and a story to go along with it. It's a move that makes a certain amount of sense, except that the result is a game that, aside from some remote-waggling control options, is nearly identical to the Clash of Ninja games that previously appeared on the GameCube. Those games were already fluffy pieces of fan service that were liberal about recycling content, and Clash of Ninja Revolution ends up all the more inessential for it.

Keeping with series standards, the action in Revolution is fast and simple, though still fairly evocative of the confrontations you might actually see in Naruto. You've got a strong and a weak attack that you can mix up for attack combos, and you can perform a basic throw. Incoming attacks can be blocked or dodged, and a well-timed dodge will trigger your substitution jutsu, which causes you to immediately appear on the other side of your opponent, giving you the drop on them. You'll build up chakra--the magical ninja energy that powers the fighters in the world of Naruto--as you both give and receive damage, and once you build up enough chakra, you can unleash one of your character's special jutsu attacks--big, cinematic attacks that usually shave off a good portion of your opponent's health.

This is how the other Clash of Ninja games handled, though Revolution tweaks the formula in a few ways. You'll find that there are objects like rocks and wooden crates in the arenas that you can hide behind, though their refuge is temporary, as they only take a few hits to demolish. The arenas are multilevel, kind of like in the Dead or Alive games, where you can knock a player out of the starting arena and into a new one. As you travel between arenas, the attacker can choose to squeeze in a quick attack during the transition, or move ahead of the other player. But, if the other player can predict which choice the attacker is going to make, they can cancel out the attacker's move. With only two options it's about as strategic as a coin flip, but it does help make the fights more dynamic.

There are 20 different characters in Clash of Ninja Revolution that you can unlock and play with, which is coincidental, as that's how many different control schemes there are to choose from. OK, that's a bit of hyperbole, but with five different control schemes, there are still a lot to choose from. The default controls use the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk and have you waggling the control to perform weak attacks, and pressing the A button for strong attacks. There's also an alternate control scheme for the remote-and-nunchuk setup. The big difference is that rather than waggling the remote, you press down on the D pad to perform weak attacks. When you're playing with either of these control schemes, there's a little interactivity during your jutsu attacks. You'll be prompted at specific points to move the nunchuk and/or the remote in a specific fashion, and if done correctly your jutsu attack will do more damage. That the defending player can't do anything here to mitigate damage makes this system unbalanced, and with the little diagrams it's not always clear what kind of gesture you're being prompted for.

If you're short on Nunchuks, the game can be played with just the Wii Remote held sideways, which works surprisingly well, and the game also supports the Classic Controller and the GameCube controller. Giving all of these control options seems like a friendly gesture, but the fact of the matter is that most of them feel awkward and compromised, requiring you to do some odd finger-wrangling at one point or another. That the GameCube controller is probably the ideal way to play Clash of Ninja Revolution is telling.

The gameplay modes offered in Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution cover the basics, and not much more. There are training, time attack, survival, and versus modes, none of which have any real surprises to offer. There's a mission mode that starts off right around the time the Chunin Exams end in the standard Naruto storyline. The story hits the ground running, though Naruto fans will pick up the plot pretty quick. Not that the game puts much care into the story, which is relayed through quick bits of dialogue and still images between fights. You'll actually spend a good deal of time in the story mode playing as characters other than Naruto, and your objectives are often more specific than just beating your opponent, providing a little bit of variety. Unfortunately, your objectives can be rather ambiguous, leaving you to try to interpret just what you're supposed to be doing. Having to play the same fight repeatedly because you didn't beat your opponent the right way--a way that the game is unclear about--can be extremely frustrating.

In its translation from Japan to the US, Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution has had all of its potentially unique characteristics sanded down smooth, leaving a game that is more reminiscent of its predecessors than it should be. The Wii controls are sloppy and awkward, the gameplay modes are determinedly pedestrian, and it doesn't look markedly better than its GameCube predecessors. Simply put, the only way to really enjoy Clash of Ninja Revolution is with low expectations.

Virtua Fighter 3tb Review

There was a time not so long ago when the words "Model 3" were acknowledged with equal proportions of awe and respect. It was Sega's newest arcade hardware, and a mighty three million polygons it did move. These days, such numbers are almost commonplace, with the arrival of the Dreamcast and the impending arrivals of polygon crushers from Sony and Nintendo. However, when the Model 3 hardware first debuted, it was with Virtua Fighter 3, the flagship fighter borne of Yu Suzuki's AM2 development team.

To think that in 1997 Virtua Fighter 3 almost made it to the Sega Saturn is, in hindsight, practically hysterical. To this day, the Model 3 hardware has only recently been superseded by the relatively inexpensive but comparable-in-performance Naomi arcade board. As PlayStation fans got every installment of Tekken ported right to their favorite console, Sega fans had to languish until more powerful hardware arrived.

Now that time has come, and the question is whether Virtua Fighter 3 (the complementary "Team Battle" tag amended), with all its encompassing history, has been worth the wait.

As fans of Virtua Fighter will attest, VF3 (as well as its predecessors) is one of the deepest games you will ever play. When it comes to technique, move combinations, and overall feel, few games can boast the sophistication of VF3's fighting engine. While not as instinctive, perhaps, as a 2D fireball-throwing, dragon-punching series that will go unnamed, VF3 features a depth nearly unsurpassed in the 3D arena. Certainly, button mashing will certainly get some gamers a fair amount of success in the one-player mode, but match a novice up against a skilled Virtua Fighter veteran, and the difference in their skills will quickly become apparent. Building on the simple three-button interface of the groundbreaking VF2, part three adds a dodge button to the mix as well as two new characters, Aoi and Takarashi. With the established VF fighting engine already in place, the dodge button adds a whole new slate of moves to the labyrinthine arsenal of attacks and defensive strikes. Unfortunately, since games like Soul Calibur have used the benefit of hindsight to further the genre in a more refined manner, VF3's dodge function could have, admittedly, been implemented in a more intuitive manner (see Tobal 2 for a good example) than simply having you thwack an extra button. After all, Virtua Fighter 2 had practically perfected 3D gameplay on a 2D plane, offering such an array of offensive possibilities that Tekken 2 could never seriously approach. By adding a fourth button to what was basically a perfect configuration, something was simultaneously gained and lost.

Aside from all that, how does the Dreamcast version of Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle compare with the arcade version? It compares very well, especially when you consider the newly released American version over the rushed-to-production Japanese port. While the American version adds little else aside from a versus mode, which was somehow omitted from the Japanese debut, it's not so much that the features that have been improved, but that little glitches found elsewhere in the game have been removed. Gone is the slowdown when the camera zooms into certain arenas. The shadows that were found to be so imperfect have also been patched up a bit, so that the breakup found on uneven surfaces (such as stairs) is not nearly as problematic as it had been. However, even in the original import version, these problems were merely superficial and never actually interfered with gameplay.

Graphically, the character models in the game suffer from a lower polygon count than the models found in the arcade version, resulting in some odd blockiness at times. Keep in mind that the occasional blockiness doesn't stop VF3 from looking better than 99 percent of the other fighting games out there. Other touches like the loose, fabric-like qualities of Jacky's jacket have been lost, along with a couple other minute inconsistencies with the arcade version. However, all in all, developer Genki did an admirable job with AM2's techno-baby, and almost all this is nitpicking. Certain stages have lost a couple bits of polish along the way, like Aoi's stage, where the water and snow aren't arcade-perfect, or the desert stage, where you no longer leave footprints in the sand. For the most part, the stages look absolutely amazing: Pai's rooftop level and Sarah's subway arena are practically pixel-perfect, and they offer unique strategic possibilities that no other fighter (until the approaching Dead or Alive 2 is released, anyway) has. The upside and downside is that aside from the standard game (team battle notwithstanding) there is little else to hold your interest once you have beaten the one-player mode. While it can be argued that the game itself is littered with endless replay value, truly there is little incentive for anyone other than the hard-core Virtua Fighter fan. For some, this may be enough, but for others, spoiled on the fruits of Soul Calibur, this game is little more than a direct port of the arcade game. That is no mean feat, considering that this game was the arcade elite just a couple of years ago, costing upward of $4,000 depending on the size of the monitor attached. Now it can be in your home, nearly arcade perfect, for 50 bucks. Unfortunately, Namco has since proven, on Sega's own turf no less, that this can be bettered by a sizable stretch.

Brand loyalty aside (and there are VF fans who take offense to anything other than complete adoration of the series), Virtua Fighter is a great game that has a few flaws. As a port, it comes up a little shy of what's considered standard nowadays. While the game offers everything that a Virtua Fighter fan would need, the average gamer - unable to master the complexities found in the fighting engine - will find the process and resultant award daunting and ultimately unfulfilling. While the TB addition may have seemed novel when it was released in Japanese arcades a few years back, it is all but standard practice now. The same goes for time attack, survival mode, and the rest. By now, these features are more obligatory than anything else, and Virtua Fighter 3 seems a little too late to be revolutionary. With hardware increasing in power on an almost daily basis, so are the ideas and concepts that follow. That said, Virtua Fighter 3TB is a nearly perfect port of an excellent game whose ideas and innovations are no longer the trendsetters they once were. For Joe Blow on the street, Soul Calibur is still the better choice, but Virtua Fighter fans will find all they need neatly wrapped in this package. Highly recommended if you know what you're doing.