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dextervexter · 4 years

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god it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been but it certainly wasn’t the best. I will say it was definitely no where near as horny as everyone is making it out to be.

so first of all, I’m opening with I’m not gonna talk about the ENTIRE movie but just some parts of it but there will definitely be spoilers

I was right about a LOT of stuff going in, like Macavity whisking away a lot of the contenders for rebirth so he could be chosen. I was also right about Taylor Swift not being in the movie for more than five minutes, I was right about Tugger not having a massive role, I was right about Grizabella being given a past with Macavity, and I was right about the dancing being fuckin bad

I was also unfortunately right about Jenny eating her cockroaches and I literally could not look at the screen during her whole number I was so upset I felt so trapped The Gumbie Cat Number Is A Fucking Hostage Situation

H o w e v e r -wheeze-

Over all, it was Cats. It was a really REALLY weird take on Cats, but it was consistent with the stage play save for some changes with characters and pacing. Hooper clearly watched multiple versions of the play to try and get the vision he liked the best. He understood that this would be difficult, and he did what he could to try and get this weird ass musical on screen. There are parts of it I liked, there are parts of it I didn’t care for, and there were parts I astral projected to get away from. But if you go see this movie, you will be seeing Cats as it was when it first arrive on Westend in 1981. Original arrangements of the songs are used as well, for example, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer is sung as the jazzy and insidious number from the OLC rather than the bouncy and fun 98 version. I don’t think it’s awful but it’s definitely not what younger fans are familiar with.

I think the only issue with the musical arrangements I have was the singing because Hooper once again insisted on having everyone sing live and it really hinders a lot of talented people. Often times I found myself wondering if these people were capable of singing in the slightest. But I think that’s just bad choices on Hooper’s part.

Let’s talk about the Good:

The best part of the film is definitely Skimbleshanks, and not just because he fucks and later kills a man with his supreme tap skills. The visuals are great, this is the only part with actual good dancing, and Steven Macrea has fantastic energy. Skimbleshanks is already one of my favorite numbers in the stage musical, and they get pretty creative with this. It was one of the moments in the movie where I could say for sure I was REALLY having a good time.

Also Les Twins were absolutely a treat to watch. They were funny, talented, clearly having a ton of fun, and played off each other as though they weren’t in a movie, they were just goofing around like real siblings do. I found myself actually missing them when they weren’t on screen

Robbie Fairchild does a decent Munkustrap and has some fun exchanges with the other characters. I also thought Jason Derulo did a wonderful job as Tugger despite not being in the film a lot. He’s self centered, clearly caught up in his own world, and is so obsessed with himself he doesn’t really flirt with anyone or focus a lot on Victoria for too long because he’s just so in love with himself and what he wants. And honestly that is basically just tugger.

The visuals are also really nice. The sets and practical effects help the movie feel more real and bring a great sense of life to this world that is happening right under the human one. The whole movie has this lovely, dream like quality to it, and it helped remind everyone we weren’t supposed to take it so seriously.

There were also a moment with Munkustrap that I thought was really cute, where Jenny complains she’s just as good as Tugger because she can break dance too. You hear Munkustrap chuckle and say “oh yeah? show me.” in a really playful way and it was adorable, even if it resulted in me seeing Rebel Wilson pop and lock,

Lastly, and this is a big one I know a lot of fans were angry about: Misto is implied to like victoria, but it’s never stated that they end up together. Actually a lot of their interactions can be interpreted as Just Friends Being Pals. It’s definitely not as big of a problem as a lot of people were making it out to be, but it’s just not interesting and doesn’t really matter to the plot.

I liked more of it than I was expecting, especially the little shout outs to Eliot’s original drafts of the poems. I’m seeing it again tomorrow with friends so I’ll probably post more about the things I missed (i seriously missed a lot of the gumbie cat number because i was too horrified to look so maybe i will be braver this time)

NOW THE BAD!!!

This is literally the worst fucking Macavity ever and Idris Elba had every right to be as piss drunk as he was at the premier. In fact I’m pretty sure he was drunk for a majority of the film. It’s very clear he is not having a good time, he is not enjoying the story, and he doesn’t want to be there. Granted, I’m willing to place a lot of the blame on Hooper’s take on the story, which required Macavity to be a greater presence, but a lot of what we see is a clowning, pathetic, loser who is throwing a tantrum because he isn’t getting his way and he’s very very naked for most of it. His last moments in the film were so laughable, so embarrassing, and so unbelievably desperate that I could barely watch. There is no dignity in Elba’s performance, and nothing mysterious or threatening about him. It’s not just 2019 Macavity that hurts this movie though, it’s how Macavity changes a massive part of the story with his nonsense, but I’m saving that for last because it’s a big one and I hate it!

Victoria is basically really bland. There was absolutely no reason to try and make this from her perspective. Like Webber and Hooper say they wanted her to serve as the character we see the world through but she’s bland, uninteresting, and just very boring. I understand their reasoning for making her the lead, as Victoria is a very recognizable character and easy to follow in dark lighting and crowded dancing, but she just simply exists to stare in wonder and ask questions that are answered in songs that she will stare in wonder over. If they wanted to have the audience experience the world through a character they probably should have gone with Munkustrap or something considering he’s narrating a majority of the film and knows what’s going on and can explain things a little better. He’s also a stronger character. Victoria is boasted to be this strong but shy little thing who approaches this new world with curiosity and hope and she’s really not. She doesn’t really get the chance to do or say anything that would help with the plot. she barely speaks to anyone but munk or misto, and it is very much a downgrade from her stage counterpart. Frankie Hayward is a very pretty dancer, but she’s not given much to work with and I found myself not caring in the slightest what she was up to.

This also leads into Beautiful Ghosts, which I posted about before so I’ll just leave this here and move on because I’ve said all I can say and I have more important things to talk about regarding Grizabella. to summarize, I was right and the song sucked.

The dancing is lamentable mess as well. God I sometimes forgot they were dancing. They are moving, but it’s not dancing. I would say only Les Twins and Jaih Bote were the clear dancers because they were pretty much the only ones allowed to put their own personal spins on the choreography. I’ve said it so many times and I will say it again Andy Blankenbluer is a fucking awful choreographer. His work is claustrophobic and ugly to look at. You lose the person in the movement but in the sense that you really don’t care if you see them again. Blankenbluer has stated so many times he feels as though audiences don’t have the attention spans for long dances sequences anymore and want more than one thing to see, but for the love of god could you give us something to look at? The dances are quick, ugly, and the moves are put down before they can make a good impression. He has no understanding of how to define a character through movement, which makes telling everyone apart very difficult, especially since the designs are already so unrecognizale. His work was atrocious in the 2016 Cats Revival, but at least he had Gillian Lynne’s original choreography to lean on. Without the backing of better choreographers, his work is downright forgettable.

Now the Big One, the inexcusable and awful part that I hate hate hate: Grizabella.

God I was rooting for her we were all rooting for her. Remember how in the 98 film she’s this broken down, cast aside, character barely hanging by a thread? Yeah in this she not only is given a throw away past where she chooses to side with Macavity for some unknown reason, but she’s chosen as a last resort. Yeah. Remember how I said Macavity’s plot paves the way for the mishandling of a beloved and tragic character. This is it. After Macavity steals literally everyone who is competing for rebirth, after Old D is returned, the Jellicles realize they have no one to choose from for rebirth. Victoria goes outside, brings Grizabella in, they sing memory, and she gets chosen. It is framed in a way that the cats all realize how badly she has it, but oh my god does it come off as heartless, careless and pis aller. Old D has no interaction with Grizabella until this point. The Jellicles don’t really interact with her unless to shoo her away. She is basically a background character for the whole movie. Giving her a past with Macavity was pointless. It never comes up. Macavity never sees her in the film. It’s never stated why she chose him or what she did with him. There is not a shred of dignity in Hudson’s performance, and I fully attribute that to Hooper making all his actors sing on set. Grizabella comes off as pitiable, but not enough to want to see her be reborn. It was downright heartless.

OVERALL!!

I give this movie a 6/10 stars. When they are doing Cats, it’s pretty enjoyable. Not everything I wanted, and some things I genuinely didn’t fucking ask for, but overall it is not as big of a problem as I thought it was going to be. I think if you’re apprehensive or angry about the film, I think you should give it a watch and you’ll either like it or you won’t.

you should definitely not expect the 98 version, because no version will ever be that perfect, but go in with an open mind and give it a chance.

#cats #cats 2019 #cats movie #probably the only horn dog scene #was when munk was high out of his mind #and writhing on the table like he was getting rawed to kingdom come #that was certainly a scene i watched with my eyes #and enjoyed

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freespeechfandom-blog · 7 years

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Romancifying the Chanceverse

@natsing wrote: Louis-Cesare is my favourite Karen Chance man

@grimmwatson wrote: They're one of my favorite in Chanceverse guys!

@emberfaye wrote: I will say that currently this pairing is definitely my favorite established couple.

I really like Dory and LC too! The next part is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really hope they don’t end up like Cassie and Pritkin. (So trigger warning: if anybody is in love with Pritkin, they probably don't want to look at him as a boring trope or romance cliché.) But this post has been long overdue, so here's my two cents on how to and how not to write believable original romance arcs in urban fantasy.

There’s been an issue with KC’s books, that they were initially ‘miscategorized.’ TtD was apparently in some parts of the world mismarketed as a paranormal romance or young adult novel or something (hoping it would sell better), which made many fans angry and disappointed and turned them off the series entirely. Every time somebody complained about the lack of perfect romance arc they expected from a PNR novel and didn’t find in Cassie, KC kept repeating that she is not writing a romance novel, she’s writing urban fantasy, which made me immeasurably glad because her characters were a breath of fresh air, and her books lacked the expected romance clichés that make other books boringly predictable cookie-cutters. They stood out, they defied expectations, they weren’t just another variation on the same old same old soulmatey I-want-to-have-your-babies Happily Ever After just with a bunch of fantasy hot guys instead of realistic hot guys.

Cassie had a hot vampire roommate, and we all know how that would have turned out in any other novel, but KC has been refreshingly hitting the ‘not a romance’ buttons from the start. He is exposed as a traitor, and is replaced by another man in an out-of-the-blue last minute insert. Cassie also has a sexual experience while stuck in another hot guy’s body, and her first sex is second-hand via another woman. She also starts having the hots for a demon lord and his son soon after, and has sex for the first time with a quasi-friend. In the next book, she has sex with guy #2, but even that is void of declarations of eternal love and other tropes. From book four, she starts being intimate with guy #3, so there’s more stuff added to the horizon. She’s not following your everyday romance cliché screenplay, and that’s great. It’s original, interesting, it’s not predictable, it’s awesome. There’s no moon-eyed soul-gazing, no angsty romantic pining, no sentimental but meaningless platitudes, no making smooch-faces at each other.

And then comes a change in the nonconventional, original, not-writing-romance formula via the development of the ‘Pritkin romance arc’ which brings exactly those clichés that have been helpfully avoided so far. Well, to say that it was disappointing is putting it mildly, as it was less a ‘development’ for him and more a downgrade of his character into a selection of romance clichés. To take such a rich back story and basic premise as Merlin and utilize it only as the damaged hero the heroine must save with her love was already a bit tropey. From that turn onwards, Pritkin’s most interesting qualities, including his flaws ceased to exist. He became the perfect troubled dark knight the heroine can put back together, but who otherwise follows her unquestioningly and exists only to cater to her needs as a side rib with no life other to be an accessory. He starts delivering hallmark lines like ‘you’re the strongest person I know’ which is hilarious coming from a guy who’s been to Camelot and the demon realms and lived for a long time on Earth too doing badass warmagey stuff.

Pritkin is straight out of the pages of a romance novel, which is so out of place in the Cassie series. Perfection is boring, clichés are boring, and that’s exactly where KC took an otherwise promising set-up for conflicts and spicing up an unconventional urban fantasy storyline that suddenly had this teenage-romance-level totally-oblivious will-they-won’t-they meant-to-be plotline inserted into it that has been done a thousand times before. Another reader voiced her fear that she might lose interest in them if they eventually have sex, because there’d be nothing to look forward to. Indeed, Cassie and Pritkin seem to be heading into the eternal love direction as one could almost hear the wedding bells ringing in the background when Cassie whispered his name before she almost died, or just before Pritkin tried to tell her something. I made a post recently about how I’d like to see Pritkin fleshed out a little more than just a romance tropey white knight into somebody with his own character development, but of course there’s really no way of knowing for certain what direction KC is planning to take the books, this is just a hope of mine that we can get something with less wish-fulfillment with more believability.

Because I really hope Dory and LC will not go down the same path. That’s two characters who have had their share of dark and troubled past, they lived through the worst parts of European history, and should be accordingly mature. Dory is introduced into the series as a badass would-be baby killer and LC as an arrogant guy with a misguided sense of murderous honor. Soon enough, they establish themselves to each other as ‘one thou shalt not mess with’ with a later addendum of ‘even if we’re attracted to each other.’ Their dynamic is great. But then coinciding with the later Cassie books, there’s this trend in the Dory series too which I hope won’t drag those two down into lukewarm tropeland. Like, wanting a teddy bear in the Dory#4 teaser chapters, or cutely trying to fluff her thigh in Lover’s Knot. KC has mentioned that Dorina might have something to say about Dory dating a vamp, or that there might be some adjustment to be done, and while I really hope that there won’t be another contrived triangle, I do hope we can stay away from quoting romantic one-liners at each other straight out of a romance serial. I’d just really appreciate it if we could keep paranormal romance clichés from taking over urban fantasy.

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#karen chance #cvgr #cassie palmer #dorina basarab #romance tropes

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spicynbachili1 · 6 years

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Neo Geo Mini outshines the PS1 Classic, could pave the way for a GBA Mini

But it’s not without its missteps

I don’t know what’s going on with the Neo Geo Mini. Shortly after I got my hands on one, SNK announced that an upgraded Holiday version of the hardware would be going up for pre-order in the coming days. That’s not a good sign. I have to guess that the initial SKU failed to sell as well as SNK had expected, leaving them scrambling to rework the units they already produced into a more marketable package. Their apparent lack of confidence in their product leaves me pessimistic about this weird little machine’s future.

It’s a shame too, because this is by far my favorite plug-and-play mini console to date, at least in terms of its library. I bought the NES and SNES Classics day one, and I love them to “bits”, but there’s no denying that nearly all the games on each system are outdated. That’s the point of the nostalgia-powered novelty collections though, right? To take a trip in your mind back in time?

If so, then that’s probably why the Neo Geo Mini isn’t selling. These are not the games that many grew up loving. These are the games that most of us could only afford to play for ten minutes a week at the local arcade, before going home and sinking hours into The Legend of Zelda or Sonic the Hedgehog. That said. there are several games on the console that stand up to the best that 2018 has to offer in their respective genres. Garou: Mark of the Wolves looks and plays better than 99% of today’s fighting games. Metal Slug 3 is still the best looking 2D run-and-gun action game I’ve ever played. There are also plenty of quality games on here that I’d never heard of before. For instance, if you told me that Ninja Masters was as all new indie fighter, and not a Neo Geo title from the ’90’s, not only would I have believed you, but I would have been more than happy to pay $15 for it.

That’s why, despite my love of Jumping Flash and Super Puzzle Fighter, the Neo Geo Mini beats out the PS1 Classic for me this holiday season. It’s also why I am more optimistic than ever that Nintendo will skip the N64 when it rolls out its next Classic console, and will instead jump straight to the Game Boy family of systems. I’ve already taken my Neo Geo Mini on the go with me a few times, and I’m sure people would love to do the same with a similarly versatile handheld/home console pre-loaded with games from Nintendo pre-DS portable generation. The Neo Geo Mini has issues, but its definitely worth looking into once Black Friday rolls around.

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The Setup

The Neo Geo Mini is a better handheld than it is a home console. I have fairly large hands, but I’ve had no problems with the stick and buttons on the console itself. The screen is also bright and clear. The console doesn’t take batteries, and instead runs off of a USB port, similar to most cell phones. I’ve played it running off my car’s cigarette lighter USB adapter, a mobile cell phone battery, and hooked up to my laptop on the train, and as of yet I’ve had no problem with power supplies, or pulling off special moves in KoF 2002 while on the move.

The optional control pads (sold separately) aren’t nearly as nice. The analog stick is loose and the buttons are loud and clicky. They aren’t impossible to get used to, but its strange that they are such a downgrade from the stick built into the console itself.

In some misguided attempt to replicate the arcade experience, all the games are programmed to have a set amount of tokens for both players, You can tone down the difficulty ,or increase the amount of default lives you have for most of the games, but your starting token count never changes.

These are not arcade original roms though. Most have been altered for the home market to let you save then restart from whatever stage you last made it to. You can also open up the emulator’s menu and activate save states. It’s a pretty weird system that is cumbersome and confusing at first, but that’s easy to forget once you acclimate.

The emulator also has some real bare-bones features, like the ability to turn on pixel smoothing and stretching. It’s extremely small-time stuff, and for the most part, will make each game look different or worse, but never better. With the correct aspect ratio and smoothing off, the games look about as good as they do on the Switch or PS4, at least to me. I haven’t had my eyes checked this year, so maybe I’m missing something, but pressed my face up right up to the screen to look for artifacting, and my 41-year-old eyes didn’t detect any. So that’s good news. The bad news is, the only extras here are a couple of stickers. No in-menu history section, no bonuses, nothing but a instruction booklet for the hardware itself.

The Games

There are 40 games on the Neo Geo Mini. The console costs about $110, so you’re getting each one for less than $3, about $5 less than what they might go for on digital storefronts, assuming they are available anywhere else at all. They fall under the genres of fighters, wrestling games, run and gun, shmups, beat ’em ups, sports games and unnerving Tetris knock offs. There’s actually only one of these here, but it’s worth mentioning for how bad it made me feel.

The range of quality here is pretty enormous. Some of these games are a sincere waste of time unless you go in strictly to marvel at how much gaming has changed over the past 20 years. Others are games that I sincerely believe are some of the best ever made. I’ll break them up into three categories (Oddballs, Mid-tier and Classics) and do my best to describe them for you.

The Oddballs

Blue’s Journey, one of the oldest games in the bunch, is relic from a bygone era, not unlike a cigarette commercial starring The Flintstones. It has a decidedly launch era TurboGrafx-16 feel to it, with overly detailed backgrounds and very small characters. They don’t make them like this anymore for a reason. It’s generally messy, but in a sort of “manic toddler eating a $1 box of sugar cookies” sort of way.

Robo Army is so bad that it’s funny, but not that funny. The opening cinematic is completely bananas, promising unhinged Sci-Fi violence on whole other level, but when you finally get control of your character, things slow down quickly. It’s a beat ’em up where you play as a cyborg that can randomly turn into a car, as you blow up other cyborgs, giant dogs that turn out to be cyborgs, and angry cars. It’s clunky and sad, but those with a morbid curiosity for what people used to be willing to play for $.25 microtransactions might find it interesting in a scientific sort of way.

Mutation Nation starts off feeling similarly janky, but after a few minutes, you’ll see that a lot of the animation here is pretty solid. Charge moves lie at the core of the game’s combat system, which is novel for the genre, and the Akira-meets-Cronenberg character designs are surprising, sometimes genuinely disturbing.

Ghost Pilots is a top down WW2 shmup that was probably trying to leech off the popularity of 1942 and 1943. It’s totally fine, but nothing to write home about.

Crossed Swords is another beat ’em up, but this one plays from a Punch-Out!!/Pato Box perspective. It’s more polished looking that Robo Army, and the RPG elements add some depth, but the combat is a total mess. That’s bad news for a game that’s about, uh, combat.

Puzzled is the Tetris-knock off I brought up at the top. It really makes me appreciate all the little quality-of-life improvements that are found in recent Tetris games like Tetris Effect and Puyo Puyo Tetris. All you can do is move, rotate and drop you paces, so even the most basic of advancements like the T-spin is out of the picture. The game has a campaign mode and different stages, based around trying to free pixies who are trapped under some blocks? I don’t know guys, video games just sort of do their own thing sometimes.

The Mid-Tiers

Magician Lord is one of the first games I ever blew $20 on at an arcade in order to see it to the end. Playing it now is not that great. In many ways it feels like Castlevania with larger characters, but the controls are just as stiff, making it hard to keep your giant hitbox out of the way of enemy attacks. It’s got a cool transformation gimmick though (you can turn into a dragon, a ninja, or even Poseidon for some reason) and one heck of a creepy womb level.

Kizuna Encounter is a fighting game that probably started of in development as a two-player beat ’em up. Two of the games ten playable characters are beautifully animated, while the rest are serviceable but unimpressive in their appearances. What’s really interesting about the game is it’s tag team system. Unlike in recent tag fighters like Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite, you have to get close to your partner before you can tag them in. They don’t automatically jump in when the character you’re using is out of health either, adding an interesting layer of strategy to the otherwise standard Street Fighter II-style fighter.

Ninja Masters feels like it was supposed to be the first entry in a series that would work as the Ninja equivalent to Samurai Showdown. They clearly didn’t have a lot of RAM to work with for their ambitions, as the characters are relatively small, but it has some really smartly executed animations. If I were game designer and one of my students wanted to learn how to make realistic, non-pandering breast physics for their game, I’d probably point them to towards Ninja Masters. The whole thing culminating in battle with good old Nobunaga, which is a lot of fun for fans of magical Japanese history games like myself.

Sengoku 3 is another ninja game, a beat ’em up this time, one that’s gotten a lot of praise from retro enthusiasts over the years. I’m not 100% sure why. It’s got good art and a varied cast of characters, but nothing about it really stands out about it. Maybe I’m just unfairly comparing it to the Capcom Dungeon and Dragons games without realizing it.

Blazing Star (sequel to Pulstar) is a pretty good shmup that works on a upgrade system that extends the length and strength of your charge shot meter. Picking up power ups doesn’t always make your basic shot better, but it does give you the potential to fire off huge payloads of neon energy if you play your cards right. Other than that, a standard sci-fi anime shmup.

Last Resort is more up my alley, with a novel take on R-Type‘s bit system and even greater attention to detail to make the world you destroy feel lived in. The open levels takes place in a city under siege by giant robots, featuring little civilians driving – or even running – away from the carnage in a futile attempt to survive. It’s adorable and sad in a way that few modern shmups bother going for anymore.

Shock Troopers and its sequel are Ikari Warriors-likes with an added evasive maneuver (a roll or a jump) to get you away from bullets, though it has a fair amount of a cooldown so you can’t spam it. The animation is better in the second one, but some of the backgrounds and characters have a weird pre-rendered look that can be a bit of a turn off, whereas the first one has more consistent art direction overall. Still, both are fun enough if you’re in the mood for some hard boiled co-op arcade action.

King of Monsters, King of Monsters 2 and 3 Count Bout, are all wrestling games that are a nice alternative for people who want to beat up their friends without having to worry about too much depth getting the the way of the immediate violence. The King of Monsters games are based around Kaiju films, which adds an extra layer of charm if you’re a fan of the classic rubber suit Toho movies of old.

3 Count Bout plays it more straight faced, but it’s definitely very “videogamey”, as are Foot Ball Frenzy, Super Sidekicks and Top Players Golf, the other three sports games found in this collection. Technical limitations permitted them for going for anything that approaching “realism”, but the sprite-based graphics have a loving, hand crafted feel to them, and the respective designs of each game play like cartoonish approximations of the source material.

World Heroes 2 Perfect has a special place in my heart, as its has both the most superhuman fake Bruce Lee in the history of gaming and a psychic monk based on Rasputin, Russia’s famous love machine, but I have to admit that it’s not as deep, original, or well crafted as most of the other fighting games here. Still, it’s the best World Heroes game of them all, so if you were ever curious about what the Battleborn equivalent of ’90’s 2D fighters was like, then you’re in luck.

The Classics

A lot has already been written about the Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, and King of Fighters families of games, so I probably won’t go on and on about them here. Like I said at the top, I think Metal Slug 3 is one of the best looking games ever made. Metal Slug X/2 and the original game in the series come close behind it. Metal Slug 4 and 5 are notably less visually impressive than the games that came before them, with little in the way of new enemies other than bosses. So you can stop after 3 if you want, but if you don’t, go into the next two with lowered expectations.

There are only three Samurai Shodown games here, and they stand out as some of the most extreme iterations of the franchise. Sam Sho 2 is is essentially the first game but with more characters. Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa’s Revenge retains the new and improved sprites and Slash/Burt systems from Samurai Shodown III while (you guessed it) adding more characters. Samurai Shodown V Special is essentially an apology for Samurai Shodown V, bringing together characters from every chapter of the series for one last hurrah.

The King of Fighters games are a little more difficult to break down, as they work as a giant crossover of various SNK franchises. Technically, Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury Special (an enhanced version of Fatal Fury 2) work as their prequels. They are both dated compared to the games that followed, but they have significance. Fatal Fury Special is the first game to officially start the shared SNK fighting game universe with it’s hidden battle against Ryo from Art of Fighting. Real Bout Fatal Fury is also on this collection. I almost put it on the oddities list, as its weird, three-plane fighting system is pretty strange. In the end though, I threw it here with the classics because it’s definitely a significant part of the evolution of fighting games.

From there were have King of Fighters ’95. ’97, ’98, 2000, and 2002. The offer a nice overview of how the franchise evolved during the height of popularity enjoyed by fighting games in the late 90’s into the early 2000’s. From a visual perspective though, they largely pale compared to The Last Blade 2 and Garou: Mark of the Wolves. For my money, they are the two most beautiful SNK fighting games of that era, or any era for that matter.

[These impressions are based on a retail build of the hardware provided by the publisher.]

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reviewed by Jonathan Holmes

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from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/neo-geo-mini-outshines-the-ps1-classic-could-pave-the-way-for-a-gba-mini/

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