I LOVED the Saturn. One of my all-time favorite consoles.
Shame Sega’s blundering decisions hindered it so. Design wise, its dual-CPU & quadrilateral polygon architecture made it super-tough to program for, and Sega’s terrible business decisions & PR did the rest.
While the PSX was a dream for game programmers and thus much cheaper development costs and 3rd party interest(The PS2 however was the opposite, but unlike the Saturn, it held such strong market share that developers had more than enough incentive to figure out its wonky programming design).
4 was like my baby, played the crap out of that (UWashington had it in their Student Union, and it was popular). I honestly always thought 3 got kind of a bum rap though, I think it was just too much of a shift for people to be comfortable with (although the balance problems around special thows are what tends to stick out to me). It could be that I give it more credit now, years later, because it did get such hate tho’.
Honestly, I’m just thrilled to have found someone else who actually has any kind of opinion about these games
And yeah I had a hacked saturn too, with the RAM carts. the Vampire collection did indeed have a language switch, and I think ALL the Samsho games did, I suspect its just something that SNK did as a default. There was a PSX version of Samsho4 that brought back the SS2 characters (or at least Cham Cham, her bust was kind of like bust Kazeki), but it was messy and slow and PS controllers sucked beside Saturn ones, so I didn’t end up playing it a great deal.
Their most recent title came out after SF4, but it really didn’t do well and wasn’t well received, so yeah I suspect its back burner for now. They don’t really know what to do with the series.
The name confusion with the 3d ones is tricky, so here’s a clip of the PSX warriors rage.
[media=youtube]mLFKjJl5qBM[/media]
The character designs and sound were good/interseting, the gameplay was all kinds of slow and messed up.
Continuing on what i meant earlier with terrible ports, i had the port of SS4 for the PSX and it was inexcusably bad. Long loadtimes, bad frame rate, the damn game actually had to stop to load in-game character victory poses & music right after a match had ended, etc.
Gahh. The PSX was nowhere near that bad when it came to 2D…whomever worked on that port just SUCKED.
Plucked down $40 bones for that import back then i’m sorry to say. To this day i’d like to track down whatever lazy asses were responsible and make them eat the disc.
I got into samsho 2 awhile back but had to quit cause the flashing red screen after every hit started to give me hurt my brain. Would have been great if they had a function that you can toggle to remove the flash.
1 and 2 are mostly for people who hate sub-systems and combos. Never was a fan of the gameplay of either but I like the atmosphere, music, and graphics.
3 and 4 are the direct opposite. If you like to kill people really fast, all in one combo, then you’ll dig these. Frankly, 3 has more of a SF2 feel than 1 and 2 because of the way you did combos with the stun mechanic. 4 just said fuck it and let you do KI type combos.
5/5s is like 2 and 3 put together so that’s mostly why it always gets a special mention. Not a big fan of it either but I can play it.
6 is pretty godlike once you get over the fact that there is no blood and that every character is decent in some way if you choose the right spirit. Probably my most fave one. I hated it at first because I got the Japanese version and I didn’t know shit. It pretty much bridges the gap between it and Last Blade.
I never thought of 4 as being that combo-centric, not counting the CD combos and the comeback mechanic, which were honestly an atrocity. Having just done some reserach, the game’s developed a lot in the last decade and a half (edited again, oops not as bad as the combovideo meisters would imply, I forgot about the behind thing)
I don’t hate 6 but I can’t really like it either, it lacks that certain spark.
It’s kind of an aside, but its always a bizarre experience. You play a game really heavily back when it was first out, and then lose track/quit playing, and when you look back to what people have done with it, its an entirely different game.
Edit: either 5 I will always hate. I remember being so excited seeing they were working on it, especially after the SNK bankruptcy. I followed the official website every day, and watched for character reveals. THEY BROKE MY HEART!!!
the last time i played Sam Sho was on the NGPC and it was very enjoyable (pretty much like ANY fighting game on the system). thing is though is that 3D is just more cost effective than 2D sprite work and Sam Sho is just not as popular as it used to be, unlike KoF, so it seems silly to make a very expensive 2D Sam Sho game that isnt gonna make an ok profit. would it be nice to have a new Sam Sho that is 2D out? sure, id at least play it. but i wont pay $60 for it. maybe $30…
I always thought Samurai Shodown was SNKs best franchise. It was certainly the first fighting game I remember having weapons used in combat as opposed to bare hands and I loved the Japanese vibe and atmosphere of the game (I credit it to my love of Japanese classical music actually.)
I played the hell out of 1 when it came out and have recently via MAME caught up on the rest of the series. I haven’t gotten too deep into any of them except 1, but I really have grown to love 5s. I mean, they’re all good and fun games from a casual perspective, but something about 5sp made me really want to learn it and I wish I had the means to be able to play online.
If the game were to make a comeback, it’d have to be in 3d and even if they were able to really make a great and compelling fighter in 3d, people would probably just compare it to Soul Calibur or something and so it STILL wouldn’t have a chance.
Samurai Shodown (Note: It’s “Shodown” not “Showdown”. The rumor is that it’s a sort of pun, with “Sho” meaning “Up” in Japanese, but I don’t know how true that story is.) is the reason I play fighting games. I messed around with SF2 a little when it came out, but I never really felt the magic until I started playing SS1. SS2 built on that and made a wonderful game, though it could’ve stood a little more balancing polish. SS3 was… an interesting experience, but the outrageously high damage, broken air throws, and reduced roster really hurt it in my estimation (Plus the Slash/Bust thing was badly underdeveloped in SS3). SS4 seemed to correct a lot of SS3s faults, but they added some weird and unnecessary stuff with the CD combos and instant-kill nonsense.
I never played SS5 or onwards, so I can’t comment on them, though I did get the “joy” of experiencing SS: Sen when a friend bought it for $10. It was hilariously bad on so many different levels that I was rendered nearly speechless. It was like they were trying to make a Soul Calibur game, without the benefit of Soul Calibur having existed for a decade and proofed out what works and what doesn’t in this format.
I own SS2 for the 360, and have had some fun with it, but there’s not really much of an online community. I would dearly love a GOOD modern SS game, but I don’t really see that ever happening unless I hit the powerball lottery or something and can throw a couple of million bucks at the idea.
Edit: Oh, and part of the reason it’s unlikely is that, from what I understand, SS was actually more popular in the US than it was in Japan, whereas the reverse was true for KoF/FF. Apparently folks in the US think Samurai are cooler than American Guys punching each other, but Japanese players really liked the “foreign” feel of FF with its blonde protagonists. Who knew?
The SS series stopped making SNK money right when they released SS3 and SS4 for being busted games. When SNKP was formed they farmed out development of SSV to Yuki enterprise (who trivia: would go on to create the Arcana Hearts series) and V was broken but V SP was rebalanced and is a damn good weapons-based fighter. I donated to get it on GGPO, so go play SS V SP on GGPO nigga’s. Only thing I don’t like about V SP are the lack of tech-throws. SS2 is on GGPO, high-level Chinese players still play it and the connections are pretty good with them, go play it.
6 was good but was underexposed outside Asia just like with KOF XI and NGBC. Then Sen came out and basically killed the franchise.
Surprised Black Shroud hasn’t posted in this thread yet.
the 3/4 people vs the 5:SP people. (everybody likes 2 and 6, at least to some degree).
It’s probably based on when you came in actually, seems like most of the people who played the old ones didn’t even bother with 5, or gave up after that.
They cut corners on the look and animations (say for example, Mina’s super), they replaced slash/bust (which was perfectly functional, cool even) with utterly ass/embarassing ‘new’ characters, the spirit system they added was dumb as fuck. I followed the development of V with great excitement when it was coming out, checking their reveals every day, and the actual game was just such a letdowns.
I know SNK/P was still having problems at the time, but they lost track of the whole series there, imo.
Lmfao, this reason has to be the most scrub reason why anyone doesn’t like the game. You want to know why 5 vanilla sucks? Because it wasn’t finished at all. It was rushed and was pushed to release. It is exactly the reason why KoF12 came out and sucked. 5special fixed all the system problems, infinites and glitches. If you actually played 5 you would have easily figured out why it was bad for the real reasons. To me you just sound like some shitty fanboy who mashes 5AB and don’t even know how to play the game proper.
