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silveradeptThe seventh Electric Challenge asks us to talk about a game that we think is underrated. It doesn't have to be popular, it doesn't have to be obscure, just underrated, in our opinion.
That's on the tougher side, because I play a lot of popular games and a lot of games that are recommended by others to me, or that look like they'll have a good gameplay experience. So they get their rating pretty honestly.
I guess I'm going to reach into the bag, then, and pull out one of the many iterations of Capcom's Vs. Series that hasn't had a whole ton of sequels, which might have something to do with SNK as a company having significant financial troubles due to the Neo Geo not being as successful as it could have been. There have been three official arcade games in the Capcom vs. SNK series, two produced by Capcom and one by SNK. The second of the Capcom-produced ones is one that I played significantly at university, on a Dreamcast (which was a great machine but a terrible controller) and then played more effectively on the Playstation 2.
The series itself is a crossover between the two companies, and after the first game proved the experiment could be done, the second refined the concept into something very playable for newcomers and experienced hands at 2D fighters alike.
I'm not all that fond of the Ratio System they put in place, which allowed for teams of up to three characters who would split 4 levels of power between them, however the player would like to set them, because it made fights against single team characters, like the midway sub-bosses and the True Ending bosses, remarkably hard to handle when only a few hits could defeat the entirety of your team. Naturally, you needed to do well in the game to hit the sub-boss milestone, and then continue to do well to hit the True Ending boss, but both of those fights were against a single Level 4 character with moves that could break rules or be performed at computer speed, rather than human speed.
The thing I want to praise, and that I think was underrated about this particular game, was the Groove system. Building on the success of games like Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III: Third Strike, as well as the many iterations of Art of Fighting and The King of Fighters games, Capcom vs. SNK 2 offered six "grooves", three from Capcom games (the C, A, and P groves) and three from SNK (the S, N, and K groves). Each groove was closely modeled on the fighting system present in a particular game. The C-Groove and A-Groove were meant for players of the Street Fighter Alpha series (And C-Groove was basically the three-tiered system common to many of the Vs. series to this point), the P-Groove was for Third Strike players, the S- and N-Grooves were for King of Fighters players, and the K-Groove was for players of Garou or the Neo-Geo classic Samurai Showdown. And the really nice thing about this select-a-Groove idea is that no characters were locked to specific grooves, so you could play as all the characters you were intrigued by without having to learn how to play a completely different fighting system than the one you were the best at. Each of the Grooves had different elements they could perform, such as rolls, runs, or parries, but the replayability of the game was such that even if you had all the characters unlocked and present, you could constantly switch between characters and Grooves so as to figure out which combinations worked best with what Grooves, both for characters in one company's roster, from the other's, or from those awesome crossover teams that the whole game is essentially made for. There's a lot of fun seeing what other characters' movesets are and how they can be used with the different Grooves.
Plenty of games after this one have experimented with super meters, with different characters having different types of meters to gain and manage, or different ways of invoking their supers, but it seems like everything after that, with the semi-exception of Super Smash Brothers, has leaned very hard into making the game faster and having everyone have to not only recognize what's happening, but also the memory to know, sometimes not even on a conscious level, what the correct button input is as a counter, and have the twitch speed to react to it.
More detailed information on the Groove System at StrategyWiki, and I'll admit that some part of this is nostalgia for earlier days, but I think there's real benefit to the 2D and 3D fighting genres if they take the idea in mind that players are going to want to be able to set things up to help their playstyle and win. So some customization is probably not actually a bad thing.
Bring back the Grooves.
That's on the tougher side, because I play a lot of popular games and a lot of games that are recommended by others to me, or that look like they'll have a good gameplay experience. So they get their rating pretty honestly.
I guess I'm going to reach into the bag, then, and pull out one of the many iterations of Capcom's Vs. Series that hasn't had a whole ton of sequels, which might have something to do with SNK as a company having significant financial troubles due to the Neo Geo not being as successful as it could have been. There have been three official arcade games in the Capcom vs. SNK series, two produced by Capcom and one by SNK. The second of the Capcom-produced ones is one that I played significantly at university, on a Dreamcast (which was a great machine but a terrible controller) and then played more effectively on the Playstation 2.
The series itself is a crossover between the two companies, and after the first game proved the experiment could be done, the second refined the concept into something very playable for newcomers and experienced hands at 2D fighters alike.
I'm not all that fond of the Ratio System they put in place, which allowed for teams of up to three characters who would split 4 levels of power between them, however the player would like to set them, because it made fights against single team characters, like the midway sub-bosses and the True Ending bosses, remarkably hard to handle when only a few hits could defeat the entirety of your team. Naturally, you needed to do well in the game to hit the sub-boss milestone, and then continue to do well to hit the True Ending boss, but both of those fights were against a single Level 4 character with moves that could break rules or be performed at computer speed, rather than human speed.
The thing I want to praise, and that I think was underrated about this particular game, was the Groove system. Building on the success of games like Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III: Third Strike, as well as the many iterations of Art of Fighting and The King of Fighters games, Capcom vs. SNK 2 offered six "grooves", three from Capcom games (the C, A, and P groves) and three from SNK (the S, N, and K groves). Each groove was closely modeled on the fighting system present in a particular game. The C-Groove and A-Groove were meant for players of the Street Fighter Alpha series (And C-Groove was basically the three-tiered system common to many of the Vs. series to this point), the P-Groove was for Third Strike players, the S- and N-Grooves were for King of Fighters players, and the K-Groove was for players of Garou or the Neo-Geo classic Samurai Showdown. And the really nice thing about this select-a-Groove idea is that no characters were locked to specific grooves, so you could play as all the characters you were intrigued by without having to learn how to play a completely different fighting system than the one you were the best at. Each of the Grooves had different elements they could perform, such as rolls, runs, or parries, but the replayability of the game was such that even if you had all the characters unlocked and present, you could constantly switch between characters and Grooves so as to figure out which combinations worked best with what Grooves, both for characters in one company's roster, from the other's, or from those awesome crossover teams that the whole game is essentially made for. There's a lot of fun seeing what other characters' movesets are and how they can be used with the different Grooves.
Plenty of games after this one have experimented with super meters, with different characters having different types of meters to gain and manage, or different ways of invoking their supers, but it seems like everything after that, with the semi-exception of Super Smash Brothers, has leaned very hard into making the game faster and having everyone have to not only recognize what's happening, but also the memory to know, sometimes not even on a conscious level, what the correct button input is as a counter, and have the twitch speed to react to it.
More detailed information on the Groove System at StrategyWiki, and I'll admit that some part of this is nostalgia for earlier days, but I think there's real benefit to the 2D and 3D fighting genres if they take the idea in mind that players are going to want to be able to set things up to help their playstyle and win. So some customization is probably not actually a bad thing.
Bring back the Grooves.
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Date: 2020-02-15 06:34 pm (UTC)