Ah, Fatal Fury. Despite having spawned a series of 7 games in total (8 if you count Garou: Mark of the Wolves, or 31 if you count the King of Fighters games), there's a measured technicality and simplicity to the original game that just feels lacking in later games. It was arguably the only game in the series that openly rewarded the ability to anticipate what your opponent was going to do, relying less on combos and flashy supers.
Fatal Fury uses only 3 buttons, punch, kick and throw - quite simple. To switch lane you have to press two buttons at once. In later parts you have quick and strong attacks, I prefer that. Fatal Fury Special is still my favourite of the whole franchaise.
What I like in Sega games music is that composers worked hard to compensate for the lower capabilities with good composition. Type of instruments and notes placing seems to be nicely put. Lack of innate power tends to bring out hard work, it seems. And not just in Naruto, haha!
24 megs would've been the sweet spot for those 16-bit ports... More modes of play, a hidden character (Jeff Bogard), better controls, and less muffled/garbled sounds!
@@Patrick2480 As far as I know, the original Fatal Fury AES cartridge was 55 megs... If the 16-bit ports were on 24 meg carts, they would only need to compress it by 50% and would've still been able to produce a pretty impressive port that is near-arcade perfect with reasonably good graphics and sound quality. However tho, megs were WAY HELLA EXPENSIVE back then in those days, and the following sequels of those games would have no doubt forced them to use even BIGGER carts; which would definitely jack up the COSTS! If you could somehow get 16-bit gamers to fork out something like $100 per game back in the early 90's, then maybe there would be a good chance of successful sales. But, with SNK struggling to sell their games for at least $200+ over on their system, would NOT be happy about it tho. Cuz if the 16-bit ports were already near-arcade perfect, and like 50% cheaper; then NOBODY would ever buy the Neo Geo or its games!
Well you will be happy to learn that there is a 32 Megabit version of Fatal Fury coming for the Megadrive/Genesis - Hopefully be finished before the end of the year. I have been playing the Demo and its awesome. Fantastic control when compared to the Original Megadrive. And its using the Arcade character sprites as well as the sound samples from the Arcade.
@@OtomoTenzi The MVS cart was also an identical 55 megs. The NEO-GEO is 16 bit, just like the ports. The ports were NOT EVEN CLOSE to the genuine NEO-GEO versions. Not by a long shot, they played like total garbage compared to the NEO-GEO and had loads of things missing, ran at half the speed and a fifth of the frame rate. The MVS and both home versions (home cart and CD) are all 100% identical to play. The intro varies slightly on MVS mode, but it does this regardless of which cartridge you use, MVS in home mode plays the home intro, home cart in MVS mode plays the arcade intro. You can switch between MVS and home cart system in the UniBIOS, and can also switch region so the game is called Garou Densetsu in Japan region and the moves are slightly different. The ROM chips are identical between MVS and home cart NEO-GEO games regardless of region.
Fatal Fury: Buy me instead of Street FIghter II! Me: Why? Fatal Fury: I have THREE selectable characters for story mode, AND all the home ports of me in your price range are several compromised! Me: You're not making a very strong case...
ohhhh i remember buying that shit back in 1993. I dont understand why in the hell i bought FF for SNES when for a few bucks can buy SF2. Okay, baddest buy in my life (after MotoCross Madness for 32x LOL).
The Genesis port is the most enjoyable one, takara fixed those awful controls and music sound nicer, is even better than the arcade version, despite the lack of bonus stages, 2 characters and 2 fighting stages.
I wonder when that arranged soundtrack was produced. A few of the early Neo Geo CD games, like Fatal Fury, didn't have arranged soundtracks, so maybe the PS2 one was produced later. Anyway, you can select the original Neo Geo music instead if you want.
I was under the impression that the Genesis port played alot better than the SNES port. Was this your experience when making this compilation? The Genesis graphics actually don't look too bad to be honest. I can see much worse color banding and interpolation being used but they do the best they can it seems. The sound really sucks on it though.
@@retrosutra Sega was always really adamant to make sure these kinds of games played properly. Like they did with MK and MK2. Control was very important.
@@TurboXray I didn't say they made the port. But they were the guardians of the standard and branding of the system and could refuse to license the game. Yes, they did enforce standards onto third parties. They were not as tyrannical as Nintendo but for the AAA titles they were VERY involved in their development and quality to ensure they played as good as possible. This is well documented for MK and MKII. Those two games were a huge win for Sega.
Honestly, I see little difference between each port (although the SNES soundtrack is quite boring and muffed and the PS2 has a remixed soundtrack which is pretty nice).
It isn't exactly a filter- Many classic re-releases on PS 2(gamecube and Xbox as well) suffer from this issue. They render at 480i instead of their native, original resolutions
@@DragonSlayerKyo I never really liked those re-releases on those 'newer' systems back then, to be honest... I always felt that they had quite a bit of noticeable INPUT LAG!!!
I think what's happening is the PS2's hardware is being used to scale the original graphics to the PS2's output resolution, which according to PCSX2 is 640x224 in this case. What confuses me is that the Neo Geo's output resolution should perfectly scale into that with no blurring. That might have produced small borders though. If you run on PCSX2 with higher than native res rendering everything becomes sharp, suggesting that filtering isn't being applied in the normal sense. Scaled down graphics don't lose detail like they do on real hardware either, suggesting that the PS2 versions aren't using purely software emulation.