"A nice little game if judged by the right standards"

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Fatal Fury
3 characters! 4 special moves each! What more do you want?!
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Well, let's face it. Fatal Fury is a game past it's date of popularity. As of my writing this, the year is 2002, and SNK is bankrupt. *Sniff* So, I'm reviewing Fatal Fury strictly as a RETRO game. For all you kids out there that don't like reading reviews of otherwise archaic games, that means it's old. If you really want to compare the graphics to present day, go run off and play whatever you think is a good game now, Goldeneye or some other hackneyed title, I don't know.

Now, for all of you l337 gamers ready to hear what I want to say about this, let the review commence!!!

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GRAPHICS
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For the time it was made, 1990 I think, the graphics are good. I mean, this is the Neo Geo we're talking about here, and that system has been a console survivor up until present day. For god's sake, people marvelled at this thing when I was in elementary school, and when in my first semester at college this thing was still respected by anyone familiar with video games.

So, the graphics are good. More vibrant than its competitor, the infamous Street Fighter II. Not only that, but I actually liked some of the characters better. Street Fighter, while a classic, never really did it for me with the ''I wear a ripped karate gi! I am a hardcore streetfighting rebel!!'' Sure. We've got our heroes: Terry, a guy with jeans, a jacket, and a hat. Andy, his otherwise flamboyantly dressed brother, and Joe, the kickboker with vertical hair. They all look pretty good, punches and kicks and other moves are fluid (all you can ask from 2d games, really), and special attacks are cool without looking really hoaky.

All in all, we've all seen better graphics, but at the time they were really damned good.

Graphics: 8 / 10
Nice at the time, decent present day. Marginally better than typical 16 bit.

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GAMEPLAY
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I'll say this much for it: the gameplay is functional. It's fun in its own way, but as a fighting game it doesn't hold its own. As a 2-player game, it's really lame. So, that having been said, the only way to look at it is as a one-player action game. You have punch, kick, and throw, which are actually more useful than special moves if you know how to apply them.

Each enemy is very patternistic, and figuring out a way to defeat that pattern is really the only way to beat the boss. Because of this, the learning curve is a flat line. The first couple of quarters, you'll die without fail. Until you learn the pattern of the boss (which is really easy to do), you'll be struggling. In this light, the game is less a fighting game than it is a puzzle game, that is to say that you never win because the computer put up a fight and you were better than it, but because you figured out an exploit in the system to let you win.

Strangely enough, that's not a bad thing. The second to last boss, the stick swinging Billy Kane, can be defeated as soon as he throws his stick, if you know the pattern. Walk over, throw, repeat. Easy. Other characters have some tricky attacks, but can be easily learned and avoided. Fortunately, the computer is pretty stupid. If you throw a projectile right as they're getting up, they'll run into it. This takes away some of the anger when the computer cheeses you.

And cheese it will. Geese Howard is one of the most infuriating bosses ever in a 2-d game (still beaten by Justice of Guilty Gear though). Yes, his name really is Geese, and the name grows on you. He'll throw a shockwave (Rep- POO KEN!) and if you get smacked by it, half your life is gone. Jump over it and kick him, and he'll reverse it and hurt you for a third of your life. I think I've beaten Geese twice, and I've gotten to Geese on one quarter countless times. 20 minutes of play for a quarter? Sure! But I'm sure as hell not gonna fight Geese at the rate of 50 cents a minute. I can call some far away country for less money than that, and it'd be less infuriating than getting nailed with 2 reppukens and dying.

Also kind of irksome is the fact that Fatal Fury has some asinine dodge system where the computer shifts up and down every now and then in the background. Your only thing to do then is hit any button (it doesn't matter, really), and jump kick the other guy out of the air. You have an 80 percent chance of beaning the guy with your foreground to background / background to foreground Jump kick, so usually it's a free hit. When isn't it? When you fight Raiden or Geese. I don't know why this is.

Oh yeah, and periodically you get to mash the A button in order to get points from an arm-wrestling machine. Okay. If you're a chronic masturbator and want to get your name on the high score screen, go for it, but I give up on it after the first cyber-wrestler so my thumbs don't turn into hamburger.

Overall, Fatal Fury is real fun, but the gameplay is definitely not the stuff dreams are made of.

Gameplay: 6 / 10
Fun, but there's a feeling that you shouldn't like it so much.

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SOUND
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Oh yeah! I love playing old games that have japanese sound effects that sound nothing like what they should sound like! My favorites:
Hurricane Upper = ERRIKAY PA!
Power Wave = POWAA WAY!!!
Crack Shoot = KATCHAAAA!
Hisho Ken = SHOOO KEN!
Reppuken = Rep- POOKEN!
Tornado Upper = Tornaydupa!
Burning Knuckle = Ba-unaka!

I love these things. Other sound effects are fair, like punches and kick sounds. Not realistic, but then again I don't think they'd fit anyways. I'm a sucker for broken english in games, especially those that have a story SET IN AMERICA, so....

Sound: 9 / 10
EEETSA GOORAYTU! (it's great!)

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OVERALL
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Really, the biggest thing I can say for the game is that it's pretty fun. There are overwhelming amounts of problems with the game, and other things that should have been added or omitted, but all in all it's a solid trip down memory lane, or if you're fortunate enough to pull your neo-geo out of the closet. It's not a fighting game so much as it is some weird beat em' up where you only fight one character at a time, and you have no combos.

The real question many of you might ask though, is ''is it better than Street Fighter 2?'' No. Less characters, more gameplay imbalance, less 2-player interactivity, and the graphics are a little more lacking than SF2. However, I think it's more fun, and that really should say something about it.

Overall, it's really worth your time and at least some of your cash.

Overall: 7.5 / 10
A fun game that forces you to like it despite how problematic it can be at times.

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*Goodbye SNK, us l337 folks will miss you.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/01, Updated 02/18/02