I’ve always enjoyed Tekken (the games at least, the film I can give or take…), but it’s always been secondary to the 2D fighters I’ve loved from the likes of CAPCOM and SNK. Still, I have fond memories of being round a friend’s house and him showing me the game and how you can unlock certain characters, and I remember renting it out for a long weekend. How does it hold up now, after many… many sequels and spin-offs? Let’s find out!
Captain Commando, to me, will always be a fun character to play as in Marvel vs. CAPCOM 2. I didn’t know of his game back then, I just knew he was from an old CAPCOM game and enjoyed playing as him. When I eventually got the CAPCOM Legacy Collections on the PS2 I was happy to find that the game itself is really fun too, pretty much just Final Fight with weird sci-fi characters and themes… Which to be fair, reviewing the game now 15 or so years later, that’s still a pretty apt description! Let’s take a closer look…
My first Neo Geo review! … of very few, to be fair, not having owned one. Still, it was easier to get a collection of NEO-GEO games on the PS2 / Wii than it was SNK Arcade game collections. To be fair though, I wanted to start at the start and eventually cover the whole KOF franchise down the road, but I could’ve sworn I played this on the PS1. Looking into it, it must have been KOF 95 I played on that console… Oh well! I got them all in the various PS2 collections of the franchise, so let’s just crack on, after covering a CG anime series, a crossover fighter and a manga (not to mention a live action film alongside this!), it’s about time I actually covered one of the games!
Alien Storm is a game I had on the Master System, which wasn’t as different as you’re probably imagining, but still, for this review me and my friend played through the Mega Drive version as … well, it’s actually two-player, for a start off. Plus being able to take screenshots easier helps too! The game is pretty much Golden Axe with a sci-fi setting rather than fantasy, but with one key difference: first-person reticle shooter segments! Let’s take a look.
WWF Attitude was quite the big deal when it came out, to me it was mostly because it actually had a career mode with a calendar screen, house shows, the works. I was really excited, and thankfully I wasn’t disappointed, and the create-a-wrestler suite was amazing (at the time) to top things off. I’ll admit the Dreamcast version, which did have improved graphics, is only in my collection because it came with the console, but I did play it a bit, and used it for the purposes of this review, meaning I probably played the Dreamcast version more in 2020 than I did in 1999/2000… Anyway, let’s take a look!
So back in the “Countdown to Smash Ultimate” I covered the first three versions of Street Fighter II, and with the first SF film I looked at the first SF game, so to take the sting off of “Legend of the Chun-Li” I thought I’d look at the only version of SFII I actually owned back in the day: Super Street Fighter II on the Mega Drive, and then I thought “why not?” and threw in the Arcade Super Turbo in as well, as I technically own it on the Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 for the PS2 (though I played a MAME emulation for this as I hear the PS2 port is glitchy). So let’s take a look at the final vers- Oh, right. Well, let’s take a look at the final versions of SFII that were released in the 90s…
Unlike the previous game, it’s not surprising I didn’t know Golden Axe III existed, as it was never released here in the UK. Hell, it wasn’t really released in the US either! Rumour has it the localisation team thought the game wasn’t worth porting because it was ugly looking and didn’t play very well… Can’t say they were wrong either, at least not graphically…
When I was planning out this marathon and realised this was going to turn up due to the often forgotten film I was really happy. Max Payne was the coolest game ever when it came out, the bullet time system was frankly “awesome” and I really enjoyed the noir graphic novel style story telling. Does it hold up in 2020? Let’s find out!
It’s funny how I’ve only been running this blog for five years, and for a good chunk of those years I wasn’t even covering games, and yet here we are once again covering a PS4 remake of a PS1 game I’ve already covered on the site! Admittedly, this is less a complete remake and more of a partial remake… that’s also a sequel? Sort of? Well, either way it really fun to play, and that’s the main thing! Let’s take a closer look!
The two Golden Axe sequels have the same story attached to them as the two Final Fight sequels did: me and my friends had no idea they existed until the early 2000s when we saw them on a list of ROMs, though this time a Mega Drive list rather than SNES. Still, 2001-ish is nearly two decades ago now (?!) so I can still take two separate looks at them, even if the first one isn’t contemporary. Golden Axe II is as a sequel plays it extremely safe, but does it improve enough to overcome the lack of nostalgia?
Hogan Reviews 