Gaming off the Beaten Path

 It's back to the Neo Geo this week, I've been in a fighting game mood and it's quickly become the first console I turn to when that happens.  I've always found it weird how often I remember some of these games I come across from when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong, I had never played Kizuna Encounter: Tag Battle, or its predecessor Savage Reign, in my life before I did it for this post. But from the second I booted it up, everything about it seemed so familiar. I guess that happens a lot with fighting games, they almost always feel some level of familiar to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I guess in the SNK universe, it's Fatal Fury that many of these fighters feel similar to. But that wasn't really the case with KETB. It took me a while, but I finally realized where I had seen this game before. I've said this before, in fact I dedicated an entire post and podcast episode to it, but I was a huge connoisseur of video game magazines when I was a kid. Ho...

  I'm going to keep going with my tradition of opening the year with an old sports game. But this time, I'm going to go about it a little bit differently. Usually I go with either an old title in a current series or I check out a title from a once prominent sports series that died out. I mean, that was kind of supposed to be the whole point of this thing when I started. But after last year, where I started looking more into titles on obscure consoles, I found myself looking for sports games in other places. While it was somewhat difficult to find more mainline sports titles on these systems, there were certainly plenty of other examples to be found. For better or worse, most of these tend to be more arcade style sports games, they don't really try to accurately simulate the sports they represent. I personally think this tends to lead to better results for older sports titles. It was really hard to reproduce the feel of an actual sport on a 3rd, 4th or even 5th generation co...

  It's time to check another obscure 90's console off the list. Okay, it's not really THAT obscure, but it's definitely not one a lot of people, or anyone I know really, grew up with. Arcade giants SNK are very well known in the gaming community, especially among fighting game fans. Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, you could go all day just listing out fighting games that they were responsible for. Of course, they also had plenty of other well known titles like Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors. SNK is actually still in business today, though it's technically not the same as the original company went bankrupt in the early 00's. Normally I try to include some basic background about how these companies end up where they do, but I am going to spare everyone thousands of words of legal jargon and just simply describe the company's history with an emphatic "it's complicated." Either way, most gamers knew about their titles from either arc...

So today, we are going to talk about a fighting game. This game is the second entry in a well known 90s tournament fighter franchise.  It’s sort of a sequel to a sequel, with extra modes and the ability to make the action a little faster.  It features a colorful cast of characters representing various countries, each with their own unique fighting styles and special moves.  You all know which one I mean. Of course, I’m talking about World Heroes 2 Jet!  What? Street Fighter II Turbo?  Never heard of it.  In all seriousness, World Heroes was one of many tournament fighters SNK produced in the 90s. Fighting games were incredibly popular in those days, but most companies stuck to one or two franchises.  Capcom had Street Fighter. Akklaim/Midway had Mortal Kombat.  SNK had World Heroes.  And Fatal Fury.  And King of Fighters.  And Art of Fighting. I think  there are others that I am forgetting, maybe I’ll p...