If the Neo-Geo Pocket Color is to succeed, or at least gain a real foothold in its uphill battle against the Game Boy, it requires a library that is both large and varied. Getting large is something that will simply take time. But variation isn't something that SNK is exactly known for, and Gals Fighters definitely proves that.

Gals Fighters is an all-girl fighting tournament to determine the queen of fighters once and for all, and it mostly contains characters from other SNK titles. The character roster includes Mai, Shermie, Whip, Shiki, and Iori. Yeah, we know, Iori's a guy, but he's in disguise as Miss X, the game's boss. A good portion of these fighters have appeared in other games on the NGP, and for the most part, sprites and animation have been reused. Much like other fighters on the system, Gals Fighters has a collection of earnable items that open up as you play through the game. Here, the items do things like max out your power meter, give you an automatic win, or create other various effects.

The fighting is - you guessed it - about the same as in most of the other fighting games on the system - you can perform counters, reversals, and super combos. There is one new graphical effect that makes the game stand out a bit from the rest of the fighting games: When you finish off your opponent with a super combo, a few full-screen pictures flash, usually depicting various King of Fighters characters in different poses. Very odd, but very cool-looking too. The sound is good, and the music is about what you'd expect from a handheld SNK fighting game.

Gals Fighters isn't a bad game. Unfortunately, it also isn't an original game either, and as such, it's a little hard to recommend it to anyone but the most die-hard fan of SNK's female lineup - or anyone who has been waiting patiently to see Iori in drag. If you only own one fighting game for the system, that game should be SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium, which outmuscles Gals Fighters in every way imaginable, from character selection to game options.

ClayFighter was originally a Super Nintendo game. At the time, it was a welcome change from all the other fighters out there. It made use of Street Fighter-like gameplay, but replaced all the characters with clay figures such as Bad Mr. Frosty (a snowman with an attitude), Icky Bod Clay (a ghostly pumpkin-head), and the Blob (a mass of clay that formed into various shapes like a block or a buzz saw when necessary). ClayFighter 2 continued the tradition, stretching the already-hair-thin premise to the breaking point. ClayFighter 63 1/3 picks up where the series left off and goes right back to boring players to tears with its derivative gameplay, pathetic graphics, and annoying sound effects.

The gameplay in ClayFighter isn't simply stolen from Street Fighter anymore. Now the game has the moves and super moves of Street Fighter, the already-ill-conceived combo system and dual life bar from Killer Instinct, and finishing moves a la Kombat. The characters can sidestep, but it doesn't prove to be a very useful technique, aside from dodging the occasional projectile. Unoriginality aside, the game is also pretty uninteresting to play. The CPU AI is sketchy at best - most of the time it simply can't fight, but from time to time it unloads a 13-hit combo on you without any warning. Then it simply goes back to fighting like a dolt.

Graphically, ClayFighter falls somewhere between average and horrible. The backgrounds are polygonal, and look fairly nice, although there is a lot of pop-up and fogging at longer camera distances. The characters look pasted on top of the world. They may have several more frames of animation when compared to the old SNES games, but they still look very choppy. The game's sound is atrocious. The only thing it has going for it is the fact that it uses lots of speech. Unfortunately, it uses so much speech (and what they're saying is so stupid), that it becomes instantly annoying. The music is also quite bad.

You really have to wonder what a company is thinking when it puts out a game like this. It simply can't compete with a real fighting game in any category. Even if the graphics and music were great, the game would still play terribly. If you're so starved for N64 games you're considering picking this game up, do yourself a favor and at least rent it first. You'll probably have a good laugh, but not in the way the developers originally intended.

Flying Dragon may not have the best graphics, sound, or gameplay, but what it does have is a whole lot of options. So many options, in fact, that what each different setting does isn't automatically clear.

You can choose between two distinct modes of play. SD mode is a mode targeted for younger players featuring pint-size 3D fighters, while virtual mode features normal-size 3D fighters and moves. Both settings have various modes like tournament, training, and versus. One significant difference between the two modes besides gameplay and visuals is that SD mode has an RPG side to it, where you compete for items that will allow you to learn new moves.

One major feature the game has that hasn't been seen since Culture Brain's last fighting game, Ultimate Fighter for the SNES, is the mind's-eye feature. This mind's eye rewards you for attacking one portion of your opponent's body. If repeated attacks land in one spot, a little purple light will appear over the tender spot. If you can strike this fatigued part of your opponent, the damage inflicted will be greater than usual.

The control is supersimple. There's one punch button, one kick button, a special move button, a block button, and two sidestepping buttons. You can customize the control of the game however you like, but the fact remains that the game has little to it. This may be good if you're in the market for an easy fighting game, but experienced fighting-game players will see how shallow Flying Dragon's play depth is after only a few matches. Even on the secret superhard difficulty setting, the AI is pretty poor. Most of the time it can't even figure out that it should dodge fireballs instead of just taking them.

Visually, Flying Dragon is kind of boring. All of the fighters are relatively plain looking, and the camera view doesn't change. The backgrounds are flat and aren't all that interesting. The game also has that trademark blurry look that a lot of third-party N64 games have. The sound and music are pretty bad. None of the songs stands out, and a few of them just sound out of tune.

Flying Dragon isn't a bad fighting game, but it does little to differentiate itself from the pack. It lacks interesting characters, doesn't have any unique moves, and the sound and graphics don't help. There are plenty of other fighting games worth checking out before you resort to this one.

The King of Fighters XII Review

The King of Fighters series has offered team-based 2D fighting game competition, in arcades and on multiple console and handheld platforms, for 15 years. But other than the forgettable Maximum Impact series (which used 3D graphics) and a few obscure handheld versions, the series has generally reused the same 2D "sprite" art assets for its characters year after year. Until now. The King of Fighters XII offers a big visual overhaul that introduces huge new character sprites, along with brand-new background stages and music to go with generally solid fighting game action. But in exchange for the new paint job, the console versions of the game come stripped down with limited play modes, a thinner character roster than usual, and serious online problems.

KOFXII is a one-on-one fighting game that lets you choose a team of three different characters to challenge your opponent's team of three, and the game's fundamental fighting mechanics are pretty sound. The game's roster has a good variety of different abilities, strategies, and combination attacks, and the pace is good and brisk--about as fast as that of more recent games in the series. The characters also seem balanced--a team of any three characters has a good chance of beating pretty much any other team of three. KOFXII even has some new gameplay additions that really change the way matches are played, such as the new-and-improved knockdown attacks, which set up new offensive possibilities. There's also more emphasis on advanced "juggle" attacks than in previous games in the series--there are more opportunities to knock your opponents skyward and then hammer on them before they hit the ground, so skilled players have new ways to punish their opponents' mistakes.

The last new gameplay feature is the "critical counter" system, which rewards your well-placed counterattack by briefly stunning your opponents, opening them up to a huge offensive flurry. It sounds interesting in theory, but in practice, it tends to encourage both players to be a lot more conservative because nobody wants to open himself up to a critical counter followed by a giant knuckle sandwich. Also, even though the game has several of the gameplay accoutrements of the more recent games, such as the ability to roll forward and backward, as well as multiple jump levels, there's only one level of your character's "power meter" to perform only one level of superattack--the spectacular hyper and leader attacks of recent years are gone.

If you can accept KOFXII on just those features, you're all set to enjoy what the game has to offer. But if you've played any recent games in the series, you'll be disappointed by the relatively small character roster. For many years now, the KOF series has offered character rosters with more than 30 characters; this time around, you get only 22. This includes the addition of two forgettable console-exclusive characters, Mature and Elizabeth, as well as the conspicuous absence of SNK's iconic female ninja/geisha girl, Mai Shiranui. To be fair, KOF XII's all-new art assets make the game something of a restarting point for the series--but if you're a longtime fan, you'll still probably find yourself wishing the game hadn't cut this or that character you used to play.

And a few characters have actually been revamped with interesting new fighting styles, such as the devilishly debonair Iori Yagami, whose old abilities have been replaced by close-range, slashing attacks. However, most of the other characters have lost the newer tricks and fighting maneuvers they acquired in recent editions of the series. In some cases, they have the move sets and abilities of much older versions of their characters, such as Kyo Kusanagi, who plays like his KOF '95 version.

Still, the character roster is pretty well rounded and has most of the popular characters from the series, so if you're a KOF fan, you can probably find at least one team you'll like. You will have more trouble with the game's online multiplayer, which was patched on day one of the PlayStation 3 version's retail release (the Xbox 360 patch has not yet been released). Both versions still suffer from lag--in some cases, extremely bad lag. This is annoying for any fighting game, but it's a bigger problem for KOFXII because the critical counter attacks (which can be hugely damaging) require specific timing to pull off, and that timing gets completely thrown in a match that lags. KOFXII's online play is buried in unintuitive menus that make it hard to find players with decent connections, and for some bizarre reason, you can't quit out of Spectator mode to find another game. So sometimes, you'll find yourself stuck watching other people's matches.

Because the online play is such a bad experience, you might think you can get by with offline play, at least until the problems are all patched out. Unfortunately, KOFXII doesn't have much to do offline. There's a single-player Arcade mode (which is actually a Time Trial mode) that lets you fight five matches against other in-game characters but then immediately ends because there's no boss character. There's also an offline Versus mode that lets you challenge the person sitting next to you, and a Training mode that lets you practice on a dummy character. And there's a picture gallery where you can unlock some character art. That's it. There's no Story mode, no Challenge mode (like the robust Challenge mode of KOFXI for the PlayStation 2), and no Survivor mode--a staple of home KOF versions for the past 10 years.

Even though KOFXII's new sprites and backgrounds are big, vibrant, and well animated, when you sit down to play the game for a bit, you'll find that the soundtrack is mostly unexciting ambient music and background noises. Sitting down longer with the game will probably make you yearn for more offline modes or your favorite KOF characters that didn't make the cut. And trying to play the game online--at least at the time of this writing--will probably make you want to stick to playing the game offline, with friends who are sitting next to you. If you're lucky enough to have an in-house fighting game competition, you're probably in the best position to enjoy KOFXII because despite the thin roster and gameplay changes, the game still offers a decent head-to-head experience with bona fide new gameplay features and some overhauled characters with interesting new abilities. If you're not, you might have trouble justifying the decision to pick up this game when there are other excellent 2D fighting games out there with stronger online multiplayer, more characters, and more offline content.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Review

It's one of the most searched Internet terms, one of the most popular animated series, and one of the most popular Japanese comics of all time. It's Dragon Ball Z--a series that has enjoyed unprecedented popularity for almost 20 years now. Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball Z, has had past success in the field of video games as the character designer for such landmark RPGs as Enix's Dragon Warrior series and Square's Chrono Trigger, but, curiously, Dragon Ball Z games themselves have never amounted to much more than bad cash-ins on this huge property. That was until last year, when Infogrames released Dragon Ball Z: Budokai for the PlayStation 2. It was a pretty basic fighting game that didn't offer anything that was too outstanding, but its production values were good, and, most importantly, it made excellent use of the Dragon Ball Z license. Now, a little less than a year later, Budokai has been ported to the GameCube, gaining a little extra graphical polish in the transition. It's a game that only a DBZ fan could love, but it's a proficient enough fighting game that others might like it.

In case you've been a recluse for the past few years, Dragon Ball Z follows the adventures of a group of superpowered fighters from across the universe, most of whom want nothing more than to be the single most powerful fighter anywhere. The titular dragon balls are a set of powerful orbs scattered across the globe that, when united, can summon a giant supernatural dragon who has the power to grant wishes. This is, admittedly, a pretty simple explanation of the series. Truthfully, though, unless you're already steeped in Dragon Ball Z lore, suffice it to say it's a cartoon soap opera that tends to cater to boys with power fantasies. There have been few cartoons that have begged to be translated into a fighting game, and Dragon Ball Z is one of them.

While most fighting games tend to offer a single-player game that essentially mirrors what you'd experience in head-to-head competition, such is not the case with Budokai. The primary single-player mode plays like a Reader's Digest version of some of the more significant portions of the Dragon Ball Z cartoon series. You'll start off with the Saiyan saga, which is the beginning of the series, jump to the Namekian saga, and end it with the Android saga, which culminates with the Cell Games. The story mode is, for the most part, just a series of increasingly difficult one-on-one battles, but it's sprinkled with lots of real-time cutscenes to move the story along, as well as an occasional minigame, both of which do an impressive job of faithfully re-creating some of the more famous moments from the show. It took years and years for the Dragon Ball Z cartoon to work through all of the story presented in Budokai, but the game's story mode is over in just a couple of hours at most, and it makes a lot of assumptions about how familiar the player actually is with Dragon Ball Z. If you don't already know the ins and outs of DBZ, the story mode may come off as somewhat disjointed, but if you do, it can be really exciting and fun to watch the story play out again, this time in full 3D.

But there's much more to Budokai than just the story mode. Completing the story mode will unlock many of the fighters in the duel mode, which is basically the game's multiplayer mode. More goodies can be unlocked in the ladder-style world tournament mode, including more hidden characters and arenas, as well as cold hard cash, which can be used in the edit mode to purchase more fighting moves to customize your fighters with. You can hone your skills in the game's practice mode, which functions much like the practice modes found in recent Tekken and Virtua Fighter games. Finally, there's the game's survival mode, the "Legend of Hercule," which follows the misadventures of the most egomaniacal and least powerful character in the DBZ universe as he attempts to hog the spotlight and glory in the Cell Games. All said, Budokai features 23 different fighters, including all the important players from the Saiyan, Namekian, and Android sagas, and one hidden fighter from a post-Android saga storyline. There are nine different locales to fight in, including such recognizables as the world tournament and Cell Games arenas, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, Kami's Lookout, and those endless expanses of rocky desert where so much of the action in the Dragon Ball Z cartoon has taken place.

You may already be familiar with the Capcom vs. SNK 2D fighting game series, which was intended to be a dream-match fight between popular characters in Capcom's Street Fighter and SNK's King of Fighters games. Other than a few Marvel vs. Capcom games, it's the only "new" 2D fighting game series that Capcom has released in several years, and even then, the series heavily recycled old game characters and animations. So, you probably wouldn't expect too much from Capcom vs. SNK Pro: Millennium Fight 2000 for the PlayStation, a port of a game that originally appeared on the Dreamcast console two years ago. But it's a surprisingly competent port. Unfortunately, it's a port of a game that most fighting game fans consider to be completely obsolete.

That may sound like harsh criticism, but the fact is, most serious 2D fighting game fans have been playing Capcom vs. SNK 2--a game with an expanded character roster, new background stages, six standard "groove" modes of play, and a six-button attack setup--for the past year or so. While some fans aren't especially happy with Capcom vs. SNK 2, nearly all of them will agree that it's difficult to go back to the original Capcom vs. SNK after playing it. And since Capcom vs. SNK Pro is merely a slightly updated version (with two additional characters, a few new options, and some balance tweaks) of the original game, it's just as hard to go back to. Capcom vs. SNK Pro's two play modes ("Capcom groove" and "SNK groove"), its limited character selection, and its four-button attack setup will seem very limited to anyone who's played any version of Capcom vs. SNK 2.

That said, Capcom vs. SNK Pro reproduces most of the gameplay of the original Dreamcast and arcade versions. Unfortunately, that means it also reproduces some of the same problems. The PlayStation version does in fact play like the original game--the most effective way to defeat your opponents is to unleash devastating combinations of standard and special attacks in sequence. The game's timing has been successfully transferred to the PlayStation version, so if you're familiar with the series, you'll feel right at home with it. Capcom vs. SNK Pro lets you pick a team of characters using a total of four ratio points--medium-strength characters are worth two points, weaker ones are worth one, and the strongest characters in the game fill up an entire team at four points. Unfortunately, the game's character roster isn't very balanced, a fact that will be much more apparent if you've played Capcom vs. SNK 2 and are familiar with the different modes and ratio points you can spend to even out your teams in that game. And unfortunately, Capcom vs. SNK Pro for the PlayStation also reproduces the same stiff, sometimes unresponsive control of the original game. Pulling off some maneuvers on the PlayStation's Dual Shock controller is even more difficult than on the Dreamcast's four-way D pad.

The Capcom vs. SNK Pro series originated in the arcades, though it was brought to the Dreamcast console as a nearly perfect port, thanks to the Dreamcast's ability to handle both 3D graphics and 2D animation. The PlayStation is notoriously poor at handling 2D graphics, but Capcom vs. SNK Pro actually looks pretty good. For instance, the PlayStation version makes hardly any cuts in character animation, something the PlayStation was infamous for with other fighting game ports in the mid to late 1990s. Then again, the original Capcom vs. SNK generally had poor character animation to begin with, since many of the game's character sprites--especially those from the Street Fighter Alpha series--were already several years old. In other words, the characters in the PlayStation game don't look much worse than they did in the Dreamcast version, but they didn't look all that good to begin with.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the game's background stages or special effects. Capcom vs. SNK for the Dreamcast had several different background stages, and while none of these stages were particularly interesting--most of them were set in nondescript city or outdoor areas--they were detailed, animated 3D backgrounds. The PlayStation game's backgrounds have far fewer frames of animation, and though the port has every last one of the original game's background stages, they all tend to look fuzzier and less detailed. Some stages also suffer from some animation slowdown in some of the busier levels, like the "exploded tanker truck" level. Most of the original Capcom vs. SNK's special effects made use of colored lighting, and some of them, like certain projectile attacks, look decent in the PlayStation version, but other effects, especially the flames from fire-based attacks, look ugly and pixelated. This is especially apparent in the game's intro sequence, which suffers from both animation cuts and unattractive special effects.

The game's sound is actually pretty good. The PlayStation port has all the different character voice samples from the original game, and even though they tend to sound a bit tinny, they don't suffer from the odd sound bug in the Dreamcast version that sometimes caused voice samples to be muffled. The PlayStation game also has all the music from the original game, most of which is rather generic techno that isn't all that interesting, especially if you've all ready heard it in previous versions of the game. Unfortunately, as you'd expect from a PlayStation game, the game pauses to load between every match, so you won't hear any continuous music tracks. Capcom vs. SNK Pro for the PlayStation has between-round load times of around five seconds, and it tends to load a bit longer between fights. Thankfully, the game has a handy option that lets you press start at the end of a fight to immediately begin the next fight with your team in the same order.

Capcom vs. SNK Pro for the PlayStation obviously doesn't have the record-a-playback option or network options of the original Dreamcast game, so it attempts to compensate in terms of replay value with a new "price mode." Price mode is basically the character-buy system from the very first Capcom vs. SNK game--beat the arcade mode, and you'll earn points to unlock alternate versions of characters, as well as the game's two not-so-secret characters, Morrigan and Nakoruru. Otherwise, the game has regular arcade mode, a practice mode, and pair attack mode, which lets you play through a set of computer rounds as any two characters, including two of the same character. Unfortunately, choosing the same character doesn't shorten the load times at all--a full-on survival mode or continuous same-character match mode with shorter load times would definitely have been an improvement.

Capcom vs. SNK Pro for the PlayStation is about as good a port as it could be, all things considered. However, there are a lot of things to consider: The game is on the aged PlayStation hardware, it has some pretty substantial load times, it doesn't play very well with the standard Dual Shock controller, and, thanks to its lower graphical resolution, it tends to have less-detailed backgrounds and ugly special effects. It's also a port of a game that came out two years ago and has since been totally eclipsed by its sequel, Capcom vs. SNK 2. But all this seems academic, because if you're at all serious about 2D fighting games, you probably left Capcom vs. SNK Pro behind some years ago and have some home version of the much-better sequel already.