Sam's video game collection essentials

Capcom wasn’t going to just stop at X-Men vs. Street Fighter. For a follow-up, how about getting a variety of Marvel icons in on the action rather than just limit the cast to X-Men?? And so, now fan favorites like Spider-Man, Hulk and Captain America get in on the action!! MSHvSF has mostly the same tag-team mechanics as the first game, so I’m not gonna recap all that again. It does add a very significant feature, though, that being the “assist”. As long as both your characters are still alive, when you press the “Medium punch” and “Medium kick” buttons together, your character who’s currently tagged out will jump onto the battlefield and perform a specific special move before retreating. It adds some good spice to the gameplay and helps when you’re playing as a character who may have a specific shortcoming that can be helped by this attack. There’s a bit of risk to it, as the assisting character can take damage from enemy attacks, although while tagged out they will slowly recover. O...

Capcom obviously struck gold with Street Fighter II in the early ‘90s and set the standard for a new genre that was suddenly booming in popularity. And Capcom didn’t stop at making just Street Fighter, either. In 1994 they started a new series of Darkstalkers, and later in the same year they teamed up with Marvel to make a Street Fighter-style fighting game called X-Men: Children of the Atom. They even included their own villain Akuma from Street Fighter in that game as a secret character. And not long after that they would add a second Marvel fighting game, called “Marvel Super Heroes” which featured a variety of iconic superheroes from the Marvel universe and not just X-Men. Those two Marvel games were on Sega Saturn, but I don’t currently own them and they didn’t make my list. Crossovers weren’t really a big thing yet, but the next step may have been obvious. What if Capcom included their own characters along with Marvel’s in one single fighting game?? This was an excellent idea, an...

Another “Virtua two-for-one” post about two different games.  Launching in arcades in 1993, the first Virtua Fighter game was one of the first fighting games ever to have fully 3D graphics, which was a big deal. It didn’t factor much into the gameplay as players were still restricted to a 2D plane, but it still played great and the game was a big hit. Virtua Fighter 2 would come out the following year, around the same time that the Sega Saturn console was to be released in Japan. And so, Sega made Virtua Fighter a big part of their plans for the Sega Saturn. A port of the first game was the big title to own at launch, and console buyers knew that a port of the second game was coming down the road. These games were the main reason why the Sega Saturn was the company’s best-selling console in its home country, because Japanese gamers went absolutely nuts for Virtua Fighter. For the North American launch, Sega decided to include Virtua Fighter 1 as a pack-in game included with every c...

I don’t do this very much, but I’m gonna highlight two games in one today, mostly because they’re similar, in the same series, and I don’t have a ton to say about them. As you may know, I dig light gun games. I already talked about The House of the Dead on Saturn, which came out later in the console’s lifetime, and is my current favorite light gun rail shooter. The Virtua Cop games can sort of be seen as a predecessor to them. Not as great, but still plenty of fun and respectable as trailblazers. Up until Virtua Cop’s arcade release in 1994, most light gun shooters used 2D sprites or digitized actors of some kind. Virtua Cop was one of the first to use full-on three-dimensional polygon graphics.  As you might guess from the title, Virtua Cop has you (and perhaps a friend) playing as law enforcement taking on areas swarming with armed criminals in an attempt to save the day. The core gameplay mechanics aren’t super revolutionary, as it’s mostly stuff that was already established in ...

This game is also known as Darkstalkers 3 outside Japan. Darkstalkers is a really cool series of 2D fighting games from Capcom, the same company that brought us the incredibly famous Street Fighter, and this series unfortunately isn’t anywhere near as popular. Darkstalkers is very similar to Street Fighter in a lot of ways, but immediately stands out very much due to a very different setting with very different characters. You could kinda say it’s like “Halloween Street Fighter”, with much of its cast being inspired by mythological creatures such as werewolves or Bigfoot in a sort of horror-esque anime-style setting. There are gameplay differences between Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. And, well, we are talking about the third Darkstalkers game here in particular, and I actually haven’t played much of the first two games at all so I don’t know all the little differences between them. Darkstalkers actually wound up introducing gameplay elements that went on to be adopted in Street Fig...

I’ve talked about Mortal Kombat 3 before, the SNES version. But this is the version I want to talk about more, since it was hands-down the best version of UMK3 released in the ‘90s. You can refer to that post to read more about some of the changes MK3 brought to the series. The first Mortal Kombat 3 was very different from the previous two games in various ways, and one of those ways was the cast of characters. Many characters did not return for the third game, even really popular ones. The game decided not to include any ninja characters at all with the exception of the three “cyborg ninja” characters they introduced. Sub-Zero did return, but his mask and ninja outfit were gone, de-ninjifying him. The original Mortal Kombat 3 is the only main game in the entire series where the iconic character Scorpion does not appear. So the biggest addition to UMK3 is the seven ninja characters, six of which are from past games and one of which is brand new. And as you’d expect with an updated ver...

Here’s a fun game that’s not usually one of the first titles mentioned when talking about the Saturn and what it has to offer. Three Dirty Dwarves is a “beat ‘em up”, an arcade-style game, but was never released in arcades, only coming out on the Saturn and later PC.  The story is pretty weird. There are these four children who were created through genetic engineering in a military installation. They are geniuses and created another actual dimension in order to play a role-playing game. There is a gate between that dimension and the real world, and the children wish to use their three dwarf avatars from that world to come save them in the real world. Many monsters follow the dwarves through the game, so they must defeat them on their quest to save the kids.  Up to three players can team up to take on this game. But even if only one person is playing, all three dwarves are on the screen at all times. When one or two players are playing, they can switch control of the dwarves at...

“Street Fighter Alpha” is called “Street Fighter Zero” in Japan, and the Saturn version of the third entry only came out in Japan, hence the name difference. The reason this version stayed in Japan is because it was a very late Saturn release, coming out after Sega’s NEXT console was already on store shelves, way after the Saturn was completely and totally dead and gone in the West. There was also a version of this game that came out for Sega’s next console, which actually came out before this Saturn version, and the funny part is that the Saturn version is generally considered better as it has more features (notably a “reverse dramatic battle” mode where you try and fight two opponents simultaneously). Alpha 3 continues building on the strong foundation of the previous two games. There are some changes from Alpha 2’s mechanics, so it’s not a strictly better game and some actually prefer Alpha 2. But 3 definitely has more content and modes to offer, with lots of characters and a single...

What we have here is a compilation that includes three titles across two discs. The first disc contains the last two of the many interactions of Street Fighter II, those being “Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers” and “Super Street Fighter II Turbo”. The second disc contains an updated version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 (the sequel to the previous game I talked about) called “Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold”.  Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers didn’t make quite the splash that the previous versions of Street Fighter II did. It was still popular of course, but the four characters the game introduced are not nearly as iconic or famous as the previous 12. It’s not too surprising, since releasing updated versions of the same game too many times means that fewer and fewer people are going to be interested in keeping up with whatever the latest version is.  Now, Super Street Fighter II Turbo similarly didn’t approach the levels of popularity of the earlier versions of...

Street Fighter II, as I previously discussed and as you already know if you are at all familiar with classic games, was one of the biggest hits of the early ‘90s in all of gaming. Over the next few years after its release, Capcom released several versions of the game which expanded and tweaked it in various ways, adding playable characters, faster gameplay, and eventually a meter that can be spent to unleash a super-powerful attack when full. But no matter how big these updates were, none of them were truly a new follow-up entry. This here is the first brand new Street Fighter game afterward, first released in arcades in 1995.  But rather than make “Street Fighter III”, Capcom decided to make the next game a prequel, hence the “Alpha” in the title. The game features some characters first introduced in the not-very-good original Street Fighter game, and it also has characters from their popular arcade beat ‘em up, Final Fight. This game also introduces a hidden character named “Dan”...

Also known as “Terra Diver”, this is one of very many high-quality arcade shoot ‘em ups that got ported onto the Saturn, which was known for having a strong library of these games. This one was by a company called Raizing, who later changed their name to “Eighting”.  I don’t have a ton to say about Soukyugurentai, or “Souky” as I like to call it personally. It doesn’t really bring anything different of note to the genre. It’s just really a remarkably well-made game and manages to stand out with that alone, which is remarkable considering how incredibly crowded the shoot ‘em up genre is. As is normal for the genre, you have a few different ships to pick between which have differing attributes. Gameplay consists of flying around the auto-scrolling screen dodging bullets and constantly using some form of attack to destroy hordes of enemies before they can destroy you. In addition to a regular shot that you’d expect to see in this type of game, each ship also has homing lasers. When yo...

Sonic the Hedgehog is obviously, far and away, Sega’s most popular, successful and iconic character and franchise. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that Sonic is not strongly associated with the Sega Saturn. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the console didn’t sell very well outside Japan. When it first launched, there was no big Sonic title available or even one coming within a reasonable timeframe for fans to look forward to. It would take a full year and a half for a Sonic title of any kind to appear on the system. And even then, it was a spruced-up version of a game that had been developed and launched for the Sega Genesis at the same time (Sonic 3D Blast), and primarily developed by a foreign company rather than the series’ creators, so it wasn’t even really an exclusive or all that special. A brand new Sonic game was planned for a Saturn release, but eventually got cancelled. Sonic Jam launched over two years after the system’s American launch. This is basically the...

We’re STILL not done with Shining Force III! Shining Force III was such a big and ambitious project that Camelot felt the need to produce a bonus disc of extras. This disc was not sold in stores. Any fans who had purchased all three games in the trilogy could send proof of purchase to Camelot, and in return Camelot would send them a free copy of this Premium Disc.  Some of the bonus features contained on this disc are fairly predictable. There’s an art gallery where you can browse various artwork for the game. There’s a sound and music test feature where you can listen to anything the (Japanese versions of the) games have to offer. There’s a video gallery where you can see stuff like TV commercials, 3D cutscenes from the games, and a developer interview. One thing that’s perhaps a little different than what you’d expect is a 3D character model viewer. This lets you choose literally any character or enemy from the games that has a 3D model for battle sequence, and you can view any v...

The epic conclusion. Scenario 1 and 2 took place at the same time, with the two games having you control different characters. The events of Scenario 3 start out much later, over halfway through the first two games. The main character, Julian, is a mercenary who is not affiliated with the republic or the empire. He joins your army in the first game temporarily, and does the same in the second game, until he leaves at the point just before when Scenario 3 begins. And of course, if you carry over your save files he will retain his exact level and items held throughout the three games. The story of Scenario 3 is a little less about politics and war, with the focus being on taking down the evil cult that has been working to stir up trouble the entire time. Again, the gameplay features are the same as in the previous two games, so do refer to my post about Scenario 1 for that information. I do think that Scenario 3’s gameplay is the most fun out of all three games. What really helps it is t...

Here we have part two of Shining Force III, tragically stuck in Japan. Speaking of that, I want to start this post by mentioning that this game (the very copy shown in the photo) was the very first game I ever imported from Japan, in December of 2004, which as of this writing is coincidentally just a month shy of 20 years ago. The possibility of importing Japanese games was first planted into my head by my late friend Brian Castleberry who I saw posting on the warppipe.com forums. I had previously been aware from sources such as Nintendo Power magazine that there existed cool games that only came out in Japan. And then I saw Brian talking about how the Saturn has a lot of cool Japanese games worth importing. And then I found out that two thirds of Shining Force III is games that have to be imported, and being a big fan, that was enough to get me to pull the trigger. Twenty years and well over 300 acquired Japanese games later, the rest is history.  While this is part two of the sto...

Here’s a big one. The previous game I covered was in Sega and Camelot’s “Shining” series, but “Shining Force” could sort of be seen as a sub-series, as seeing that word “Force” let gamers know that they were specifically in for a strategy RPG (well...that was the case when this game out anyway; later on they would break that rule). These are definitely the most popular “Shining” games, and I’ve covered a few of them already. For the third mainline entry, the developers wanted to really deliver something epic. And boy, did they ever. First of all, what’s super cool about Shining Force III is that it’s not just one game. Well…this entry I’m talking about here, what you’re looking at in the photo, is actually just one game. But in the span of less than a year during 1997 and 1998, Sega would release THREE games with the “Shining Force III” name to deliver an epic experience that covers one long storyline. Now, sadly, the Saturn was almost literally dead outside of Japan when these games w...