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Join the Game Boy Player Land blog in its ongoing quest to survey the arcade-centric landscape of the Game Boy's history in this latest installment that is so creatively titled Some GBA Fighters. As you might imagine, this post is going to focus on GBA Fighters, but as usual I'd like to point out that it's not a comprehensive list of every GBA Fighter. Nor is it a Best-Of or Worst-Of list. All it really is is me talking about games that I have. So let's get it on...
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Dual Blades is a nice little original game that seems to pay pretty good homage to the Arcade Fighting craze of the early 90's. There's no doubt that this game borrows heavily from the Samurai Shodown series for inspiration. However it's certainly refreshing to see an original title make its name on the GBA and do something so interesting. As you can see from the screens above, the 2D graphics are spot-on and the blood flows heavily. The music is also like a soundtrack to a game you've played in an arcade, but can't put your finger on. Having said all that, the controls feel a bit clunky and awkward. I never really feel like I know what I'm doing 100% while playing this one, which brings it more into the button-mashing realm than the sort of strategy-learning-curve kind of concept that makes other classic fighting games, well... classics. I wouldn't say that this game is no fun, but it's definitely pale by comparison to some of its competition.
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King Of The Fighters EX: Neo Blood is a pretty good entry in the long-lasting King Of The Figthers series. It certainly looks and plays similar to the older 16-bit iterations, which is welcome. The roster is deep, which is something fans of SNK Fighters should come to expect at this point. It uses the tag-team style of choosing two fighters that can be swapped in and out throughout matches. How you feel about this is up to you. I've never really been of a fan of this concept myself. However, the game is a lot of fun for the most part and has a big enough roster to keep you busy for a while. My only real complaint is the visually underwhelming backgrounds and overly generic music in a lot of the stages. I suppose I just expected more, though I've heard that the sequel more than makes up for all of this. Sadly I haven't played the second installment yet myself, though as it was published by Atlus, I certainly plan to pick it up as soon as possible.
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Mortal Kombat Advance is basically a port of Mortal Kombat 3. Visually and audibly, the GBA does a stunning job emulating the PS1 or similar hardware that most players were used to seeing Mortal Kombat 3 on. The characters (and there's a lot of them!), the backgrounds, the music and sound effects are all great. Sadly, there's one majorly unforgivable problem with Mortal Kombat Advance. The AI is way too fucking hard. I mean really, unbelievably, brutally hard. You will not beat anyone unless you either (A) get super lucky, (B) figure out some repetitive cheap move that sucks the fun out of the game, or (C) set it to Easy. I have no idea who the game testers were on this one, but whoever they were they ruined what could have been an amazing game. Too bad.
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I should confess my bias up front on this one. Super Street Fighter II: Turbo Revival is most likely my favorite GBA cart of all time. So I'm definitely going to say nice things about it.
Turbo Revival does an amazing job of bringing what I loved so much about Turbo on the SNES to the GBA. Amazingly, it takes the 6-button format that Street Fighter II is so well known for and converts it quite naturally to a 4-button layout without losing any of the comfort or intuition. The character sprites, levels, music and sound effects are all wonderful. This is in my opinion one of the first carts that any new GBA owner should pick up. Trust me.
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Street Fighter Alpha 3 is incredibly impressive and shockingly ballsy. It pulls a huge roster into a GBA cart and manages to keep up quite well with it's PS1 and Dreamcast brothers. I personally never played the console editions myself, but I am a fan of Capcom Vs. SNK 2 EO which was released for the Gamecube. Incredibly this GBA port seems to hold up even against that title as well when discussing the sprites and fluidity of the controls. Although nostalgia keeps me a bigger fan of Street Fighter II, there's absolutely no denying what an incredible GBA title this one is.
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Tekken Advance is brilliant. Or at least Namco is. What they did was take the roster and gameplay mechanics of Tekken Tagteam Tournament which had been released on PS2 and then completely de-made it into a 2D Fighter that would work to the strengths of the GBA. The result is amazing. The characters look just as awesome as they did in their original PS1 incarnations -- again demonstrating the true 32-bit power of the GBA -- and since the game wasn't forcing the GBA to pull off any 3D trickery that it wasn't capable of, instead we get a fantastic 2D Fighter that plays perfectly. Highly recommended.
So as you can see, with the exception of the completely destroyed Mortal Kombat Advance, there are some fantastic games out there for GBA if you're a 2D Fighter fan like myself. Personally, I'd still like to find King Of The Fighters 2. Also, I'm slightly interested in how well the quasi-3D Mortal Kombat titles are. But what other GBA Fighters am I missing out on? And which are just terrible?
Over the past couple months I've done a lot of posts surveying various arcade-centric genres of games to play using an arcade stick. In that time I've developed a certain new-found fondness for Shmups. But the truth is the real reason I bought my Hori Fighting Stick in the first place was to play, well... Fighting Games. Now many of you out there probably scoff at the thought of a Game Boy Fighter, but there were actually quite a few commendable ports released.
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When the Playstation was first released, it took me forever to save up for one. And one I finally was able to get my hands on the console, I couldn't actually afford to buy any games for a while. Thankfully it at least came with a demo disc that contained a demo for a new game called Battle Arena Toshinden. And though I never actually played the full game, I rocked that demo for quite some time. The concept of a 3D Fighter was still very new and impressive to me at the time.
The Game Boy port of Battle Arena Toshinden obviously removes the 3D perspective. But what's most impressive is that Takara was able to strip the game of its selling point, and still make a rather awesome 2D Fighter out of the remaining game. All eight characters are present as well as an exclusive hidden character, Uranus. Takara wisely chose to use a super-deformed approach to the sprites which allows for more screen-space to play with. Perhaps most importantly is the fluidity of the controls. Special moves are pulled off with ease. Battle Arena Toshinden is an incredibly impressive port that stands on its on as a great portable Fighter.
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You have to hand it to Rare for at least trying to port Killer Instinct to the Game Boy. However it just didn't fare as well as the conversion that Donkey Kong Country had made from the SNES to the Game Boy. First off Cinder and and Raptor were cut from the roster. And though the the remaining characters are recognizable, the backgrounds are rather boring. The controls are decent enough, though. So if you're a huge fan of the series then this might be a passable portable version for you. It's also notable that Rare was able to implement a 2-Player capability when using the Super Game Boy.
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Mortal Kombat is bad. Really bad. Looking back on it now, the arcade game itself wasn't even really that great of a game. It certainly didn't have the excellent controls of Street Fighter II. But what it did have was digitized actors and lots of blood. In fact it had enough blood to make us overlook how poor the gameplay actually was.
Sadly the Game Boy port does nothing to detract from how terrible it is. The controls are obviously worse than the console ports due to the button limitations of the Game Boy. In fact most of the special moves are incredibly difficult to even pull off. It's almost astounding that Acclaim even decided to release the game, though at the height of MK-Fever it's understandable why they would have wanted the product out there.
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When Mortal Kombat II was released in 1994, the clear winner to me was the SNES version. This was my chosen version, and got played a hell of a lot whenever a friend would come over the house. However, in all honesty it's a portable version that's remembered almost equally as fondly to me now when thinking back.
Sure the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat II is not without its faults. Baraka didn't even make the cut! But at the same time it seems that Acclaim did everything in its power to right the wrongs of the first Game Boy game. Here, the characters don't look like shit; the controls are fluid so that special moves are actually possible to pull of; the frame-rate is suitable; and most impressively each character can do an individual fatality, a level-specific fatality and even a babality! As stripped down as this version is, it's actually quite a lot of fun.
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Primal Rage is another example of a developer trying to cram too much into a small cart without understanding how to properly play to the strengths of the Game Boy's hardware. Which is to say that the game looks pretty well -- it does a nice job of attempting to mimic the impressive graphics of its console counterparts. But unfortunately, all the details put into the characters force the game to flicker pretty badly due to the frame-rate of the action. I can't say the game isn't fun, but at the same time the port leaves a lot to be desired and really is more of a curio than lost gem.
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Takara's port of Samurai Shodown is similar to what they did with Battle Arena Toshinden. Which is a good thing. The character sprites are all super-deformed and excellently detailed. The controls are wonderful and easy to pull off special moves. There's twelve characters to choose from -- an impressive feat given that the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat was forced to cut its roster down to six, for instance. This is definitely a game I'd recommend to any Game Boy Fighter fans out there.
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The Game Boy port of Street Fighter II is far from perfect. The frame-rate is choppy, the characters move slow, and you're limited to only nine of the original twelve characters. But at the same time I have to give credit to Capcom for how hard they tried visually. The character sprites look rather awesome (look at Blanka!) and the backgrounds attempt the same level of detail as the SNES port. Though it's easy to say that this is a pretty lousy port of a 2D Fighter when compared to something like Battle Arena Toshinden, if you're a huge Street Fighter II fan like myself, you're going to at least be interested in giving this one a shot.
Now I'd like to think that this post was pretty exhaustive. But of course the Game Boy library is so vast, it's certainly possible that I missed out on some of the absolute best and worst Fighting Games out there. Please let me know via the comment box below!
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