Review: Fatal Fury Special [Xbox 360]

Let me tell you… I was excited to hear SNK Playmore had gotten on the XBLA bandwagon which means we may soon see Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown, World Heroes, and maybe even King of the Monsters hah hah. Now onto the dirt…

Graphics: 68/100

The graphics are great, they look exactly as I remember them, pretty much arcade perfect though the game does show it’s age since they use such old school techniques as dithering. This version is also uncensored so you can see Mai in her bouncey glory *wink wink nudge nudge.* The character sprites have all their animation which is great seeing as the SNES and Genesis releases of this game had to scrap animation to fit it all in, next to no home version has been arcade perfect until now.

Sound: 80/100

As for the sound, it’s all there in it’s cheesy engrish mixed with japanese glory with all the old school BGM. I’m not sure if they redid the sound for Stereo Surround but it sounds really nice on my sound system.

Gameplay: 57/100

The game plays great, all the moves and strategies from the original Coin-op version are all intact but there is one very irritated thing that also translated over.. the difficulty..Did SNK decide to give all the damn characters SNK Boss syndrome? Am I just that bad at this game? I lost every match even on Easy with the CPU character reading all my moves before i did them and countering with no chance of blocking.. I nearly smashed my controller listening to Terry’s engrish victory phrase over and over and over again.. Whats even weirder is I was kicking ass when I played the trial version. As for the controls, well I still find the 360’s controller setup poorly suited for 2D fighting games, I had extreme difficulty pulling off moves with the Analog stick, to the point where you try to do a move but instead you do a playfield change instead (i.e. you jump to the background if you’ve never played the Fatal Fury games) and the D-pad sadly is so awkwardly placed for me I found it unusable.

Replay: 50/100

The difficulty is way over the top so unless your great at fighting games you may be swearing like a sailor between losses…

Overall for you fighting fans you can’t beat the price of Admission at a paltry 400pts for an arcade perfect piece of SNK history. I just hope they release more SNK arcade games on XBLA.