Fighting games are coming back with big succés and thats great for us who love fighting games, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Mortal Kombat and King of Fighters were pretty much none existing for a time and because of that games like Tekken did very well.
It looks like even Darkstalkers who is a goldie might be returning and thats realy godo news, but Samurai Showdown which was a big succés in its time and a great game is forgotten, i have no doubts that Samurai Showdown today would do really good.
Is there any possibility that we might see this great game make a comeback like others or is it just dreaming?
They did try with the 360’s Samurai Shodown: Edge of Destiny AKA Sen, it… didn’t work out.
Still crossing my fingers that V Special’ll get a surprise release on PSN one day.
Yeah…samurai showdown hasn’t really been a success really. They have their master pieces but their over all track record been low compare to others. Sen was just bad and all the games that were consider worthy cause split in the community as each game made drastic changes from visual to mechanics.
SS2 seems capture the true essence of the series and many consider it the best over all.
SSV special introduce alot of character and applied mechanics thats been success in other fighters. So other people not familiar with the series could adapt but the changes alienate the purist of fans.
SS6/Ten really juts mishmash of everything that SS-SSV had with all character presents. from fan and design point this is good but on competitive level this was night mare as certain mechanics was not initially design to mismatch with others thus some stuff were just useless or too good.
The secret of the Shodown games is that it’s best to put them into 3 sets of 2 (not counting 3d nightmare games), where the even numbers are the odd numbers, but refined and fixed
1/2 are the basic fighters, but fun
3/4 are the weird ambitious ones (and personal favorites)
5/6 are the outsourced, scaled back ones.
4 is essentially entirely forgotten but it’s really the best of the series, only challenged at all by 2.
5 is the only one after 2 that the damn kids actually played though, so it gets most of the attention these days. Even special is just dull as fuck and broken compared to 1-4 though (yes, even 1).
SNK should stay focused more on making new games (like samsho, a new HD Metal slug, Last Blade, etc) after the great reception of KOF XIII instead of wasting time on worthless handhelds.
I like SS, but making the last one in 3d was a bad idea, having Soul Calibur as a 3d weapon based fighting game is enough. Not to mention that SNK/SNKP never made a great 3d game. And what was the point of having Galford, but no Poppie fighting at his side? I’m only interested in a new SS only if it’s in 2d, hand drawn sprites FTW.
Another thing people have to consider about Samurai Shodown was that when it was at the peak of its popularity in the West (between SS1 and SS2), it wasn’t available in arcade-perfect format for home consoles aside from the Neo Geo home console (cartridge-based)! The system itself was expensive enough but those Neo Geo home-ported game carts were averaging around $200 mid-1990s.
SNK was late in the game doing decent ports to other consoles and it could be argued most of these ports were half-hearted and constrained by the limited resources of other systems. SNK was also competing against its own hardware which may have been another factor in how well the translations were done.
(Honestly, I don’t even think SNK did the 16-bit ports of Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, and other Neo Geo series. I think Takara was subcontracted and actually did the SS1 ports for the SNES and maybe the Sega Genesis.)
The SNES and Genesis never had the system memory to do the Neo Geo arcade games justice and there were cuts in both. The SNES cart version of Samurai Shodown 1 deleted the scaling and used small character sprites because it would have required more memory and caused system slowdown which the SNES was infamous for. The Genesis version had bigger character graphics but because of cart memory limitations (anything above 16megabits back then was horrendously expensive to manufacture!) had to delete Earthquake since he had the largest character sprites. The SNES version was generally considered superior due to better animation and sound but both 16-bit versions lacked the oomph the arcade original had. In the West, the blood was also censored and colored white… (Which I frankly think was a sicker decision in retrospect than just keeping it red!) There was too much that had to be compromised because of system limitations and primary party (mostly Nintendo) rules.
Sam 1 was also ported to the 3DO (which I owned for all of about 6 months!) but suffered horrible load times and the worst slowdown of any version of the game that I’ve played. It was just not worth getting for 3DO!
The Sega Saturn could have technically done an arcade perfect port of either SS1 or SS2 – with the Capcom 4MB RAM expansion cart – but SNK a) never bothered to port SS1 or SS2 to the Saturn; and b) SNK would never have used hardware developed by its primary competitor! SNK did use their 1MB RAM cart with the Saturn ports of SS3 and SS4 but a) SS3 was a lousy game to begin with (!), good port or not; and b) SS4 on the Saturn suffered from some slowdown even though it was still very playable.
The PS1 did get ports of SS1 and SS2 in the infamous Samurai Spirits Fencing Pack but the less said about that disaster the better!
For most people here, they probably only played the original Samurai Shodown games on MAME or the PS2 collection (which was still very decent). It can be said that the series had a brief popularity but for a variety of reasons that popularity didn’t last in the West beyond SS2… Samurai Shodown is a tougher series to get into than Street Fighter, the whole SNK move system is generally tougher to master than Capcom’s, the character cast may not be as charismatic to Westerners as SFII, and the samurai/Eastern epic is foreign and unfamiliar to most Westerners… it’s easier to sell a game like SF II with more familiar “stereotypes” as it were and a way of fighting that seems more familiar and universal than SNK’s weapon-based games.
^Samsho 2 was also available free on ‘abandonware’ sites for a while (although not sure where those ended up coming down legality wise), it seemed to be a quite good PC port, but I hadn’t played the arcade for literally years by then. 2 is also available on Xbox Live (and I presume PSN)
George, why SS3 hate? I liked it a lot (noting that it had mid-90s balance problems), yeah it was weird as hell for a fighter, but that was part of the charm!
Was thinking of Samsho games specifically though, I thought ‘Samurai Shodown 64’ (I don’t know remember the JP name was, they had it at WOTC) was pretty good too, but it was a horrendous failure.
There are four 3d Samurai Shodown games I know of. 2 are just bad ( PSX one, Sen), and the other 2 are weird obscure arcade games for which almost no cabinets were made.
Whatever team was responsible for the ports of these games back in the day did a really shitty job. The PSOne despite not being the strongest in 2D, was still very capable of putting out decent/good quality fighters when developers gave a damn(Alpha series, darkstalkers, Guilty Gear, etc).
Ports of 1, 2, 3, and 4 were sinfully awful, lazy efforts. That team should have been fired.
Unfortunately this carried over into the recent era. SS collection for PSP was another crapatacular effort despite the 2D power of the platform.
Ahh Samurai Shodown. I Loved 1 & 2…but never knew how to feel about the remainder of the series though.
So which is regarded as the best out of 3, 4, and 5? From the casual perspective i had the most fun with 3, but can’t really say weither or not it was a GOOD fighter.
I know about the first two…but four 3D SS titles?!
Samsho 64 (longass japanese names for real titles)
Samsho 64 2
Warriors rage (Maybe one of the most dissapointing fighting games ever, you play it to hear the ending credits song)
Sen
As a series it needs more love though, its my favorite set of fighting games ever
i will never forget samurai showdown.I remember playing it for sega genisis as a kid and me and my older sister would laugh uncontrollably when we sicked poppie the dog on wan fu.good times…,hope to see another SS in the future.hopefully with the same kind of effort that went into the latest kof
Whoa, i always thought Samurai Shodown 64 and Warrior’s Rage were one in the same(AKA: Samsho 64- Warrior’s Rage).
I have fond memories of slugging it out in arcades on the first two back in the day(and part 3 when i came across it). Something tells me it won’t be making a comeback. Unlike Capcom, the SNK division seems way more…“limited” in the things they really put effort towards. 1-2 franchises at most.
And i don’t think Samurai Shodown is on that list.
Nope, SS2 hasn’t been released on PSN. There are very few SNK games on PSN right now. Around 8 perhaps? Out of all the SNK fighters, they released maybe 3, maybe 4 tops on PSN… and frankly the only one I care for is Samurai Shodown 1. Not an Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury 1 (WHY did it have to be one of the worst games in that series?), or KOF fan.
There are quite a few more retro-fighters on XBL… Why? Dunno. The PS3 is generally more popular internationally but the Xbox 360 is still the dominant home console in the US by a narrow margin. XBL does, however, have a much wider selection of retro-games.
I played SS3… It’s not SS4, let alone SS1 or SS2. It has a broken rules/combat system and there were a lot of people besides me who didn’t care for it.
Ironically, it was the better port of the two SS games that did make it to the Sega Saturn. At least it didn’t have the slowdown issues SS4 had. I still played SS4 a lot more back in the day. I still have both games and the RAM carts I bought but rarely touch the Sega consoles anymore…
Trivia – SNK port team did include an English language option for at least SS4. They knew they were selling a lot of copies of the game to import stores. Not 100% sure anymore but I think Capcom also included an English option on the Saturn port of Vampire Savior (which had ALL the Darkstalkers characters in it).
In its heyday, the Sega Saturn was one of the more popular systems to buy imports for. The strength of the 2-D hardware for that system made it a much better choice for traditional fighters. It still had a couple of good poly fighters – VF Remix, VF 2, VF Kids, Fighting Vipers, Fighters Megamix, and Dead or Alive 1 which was the most competent third party poly fighter ever released on the system. DOA 1 and Fighting Vipers 1 were probably my favorite two poly fighters on the system.
