Martial Champion
Sept 17, 2017 15:04:13 GMT -5
Post by toei on Sept 17, 2017 15:04:13 GMT -5
I agree more with the tone of the article's writer than the comments on this thread; I actually think this is a decent game, and I do mean the arcade version. Certainly not "borderline unplayable"; it's quite easy to play, like every basic SF2 clone that sticks close enough to its source of inspiration. In fact, if you put it in context as one of the very first wave of post-SF2 fighting games, it's above average; Namco had Knuckle Heads, which outright sucked, Sega had that weird and terrible Burning Rivals game, the first Mortal Kombat was cheap & stiff, and so on. SNK was pretty much the only company beside Capcom that knew what it was doing.
By '94-'95 most developers of any worth had gotten it together, so that even a simply average fighter released in those years was probably a bit better than Martial Champions, but I still have a soft spot for it. I like the big colorful sprites and the way it prefigured Tobal's high/mid/low control scheme rather than imitating SF2's six-button setup, even though it didn't matter as much in a 2D fighter.
edit-On a related note, I find is fascinating that a company like Konami, which produced some stellar examples of almost every major genre of the '80s and '90s, could never put together a truly notable VS. fighting game (after Yie Ar Kung Fu, which is basically fighter prehistory). And they tried more often than you'd think, but most of their efforts were bizarrely low-key and unambitious. I wanted to write an article about it at some point, but most of these games have already been covered here, and a straight-up essay isn't the sort of thing HG101 typically publishes.
By '94-'95 most developers of any worth had gotten it together, so that even a simply average fighter released in those years was probably a bit better than Martial Champions, but I still have a soft spot for it. I like the big colorful sprites and the way it prefigured Tobal's high/mid/low control scheme rather than imitating SF2's six-button setup, even though it didn't matter as much in a 2D fighter.
edit-On a related note, I find is fascinating that a company like Konami, which produced some stellar examples of almost every major genre of the '80s and '90s, could never put together a truly notable VS. fighting game (after Yie Ar Kung Fu, which is basically fighter prehistory). And they tried more often than you'd think, but most of their efforts were bizarrely low-key and unambitious. I wanted to write an article about it at some point, but most of these games have already been covered here, and a straight-up essay isn't the sort of thing HG101 typically publishes.