SEGA CD

Samurai Shodown

If you're a fan of fighting games and are miffed about the lack of them on the Sega CD platform, Samurai Shodown should be the cure for what ails you. It has great characters, challenge, blood, solid gameplay and hulking creatures swinging swords. Definitely a recipe for an evening of fun.

This is probably the best-playing version of the Neo Geo classic. The game was reproduced with all the moves and almost all of the animations and tricky little items in the backgrounds. The characters are very large, but it almost seems that the screen was cropped somehow in doing so. Still, all your attacks, strategy and combos should work like a charm. The character sounds are a bit weak, but the soundtrack is done well. It's a good version of a great game.

There are better fighting games out there. You just have wave you sword a bit to find them.

The graphics are improved slightly over the Genesis version, but are still light years behind the superior 3DO version. As you would expect from a CD game, the music and sound effects are pretty decent, but the action is sluggish, which greatly diminishes the fun. But the biggest letdown is the fact that the game's trademark scaling was NOT implemented in this version. What happened? I thought the Sega CD was capable of that! Instead of scaling, we just get long load times. This fighter didn't do much for me.