Fatal Fury

The Good
In the early 1990s, Street Fighter II-style clones were claiming much of the real estate on the arcade floors. Some were great, others were novel and unique, many were just plain unremarkable. For some reason, Fatal Fury on the Neo Geo has always been my very favorite on the beat-em-up genre.

What I liked first and foremost about this game is the music. A little known fact about the Neo Geo arcade units is that there are two standard 1/8-inch headphone jacks underneath the joystick console (along with a Neo Geo memory card slot, but who knew how to find those?). I was so good at this game that I could win it on 1 token using any character. But I still plugged in my headphones and played from start to finish just to listen to the music. I particularly liked the music from the penultimate fight (Billy Kane). But the fight was so easy that I would string my opponent along for 3 rounds, even let him win the second round, just so I could listen to the music a little longer.

The graphics were phenomenal, naturally, and made great use of the Neo Geo's vastly superior sprite capability. The rain added a wonderful effect in the bout against Tung Fu Rue. And the sprite scaling facility came in handy during one of the games most unique features-- multi-plane fighting. Typically, these fighting games occur along one line. Fatal Fury took that one step further and allowed the characters to jump between 2 planes.

The Bad
The multi-plane feature, unfortunately, is really not really as useful or versatile as it sounds. I also would have liked to see more than just 3 playable fighters, just so I could play more characters as I cruised along to the last fight, jammin' to the tunes.

The Bottom Line
Hopefully, one of the Samurai Showdown franchise games is not playing on the same Neo Geo unit as this game or you will never get a chance to experience this fighting gem. Just don't forget to bring your headphones.