My mate Steve turned up at my fifteenth birthday party in ’96 with this knowing smirk and a Mega Drive cartridge hidden in his jacket pocket like he was smuggling state secrets. “Right, forget whatever else you’ve got planned,” he announced, which was exactly what you wanted to hear when you’d been politely enduring my mum’s friends asking about my GCSE choices for the past hour. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 wasn’t just another fighting game—it…
I’ve been analyzing fighting game balance since Street Fighter II in 1991, which means I understand when a fighting game is genuinely balanced versus when it just appears balanced. Soul Calibur on Dreamcast is legitimately balanced. Not “balanced for 1999,” not “balanced considering the hardware,” just genuinely balanced. Every character is viable. Every matchup is winnable. The frame data works. The physics work. Everything works. Coming from an accounting background, I appreciate systems that are…
Here’s something people forget about arcade-to-home conversions – they used to be terrible. You’d get watered-down versions with missing features, reduced enemy counts, simplified graphics. There was this assumption that home hardware couldn’t handle what arcades could do. Then Sega decided to prove everyone wrong by bringing Crazy Taxi to Dreamcast essentially perfectly. I spent enough time defending Sega’s arcade approach to understand something about their philosophy – the arcade cabinet wasn’t just a revenue…
Joe’s hill to die on: Streets of Rage 3 is better than Streets of Rage 2. Yes, I know this is controversial. Yes, I know Carl disagrees. Yes, I know most people prefer the second game’s accessibility. But Streets of Rage 3’s additional complexity, branching paths, and combat depth make it the superior experience for players willing to invest the time to master its systems. Fight me. Released in March 1994, Streets of Rage 3…
Carl moderating this one, because if I let Joe write about Streets of Rage 2, he’d spend half the review arguing why it’s better than Streets of Rage 3, and we’d never actually discuss the game itself. So here’s the truth about why Streets of Rage 2 remains the definitive beat-em-up experience three decades after release. Released in December 1992, Streets of Rage 2 took everything that worked in the original and made it better.…
Look, I need to establish my credentials upfront – I’ve been playing Street Fighter II since it hit arcades in 1991. I spent quarters I should have been using for lunch. I practiced dragon punches until I could do them blindfolded. I learned frame data before I knew what frame data was called. So when the New Player Ready crew started debating our SNES rankings, I came prepared with tournament footage, win-rate statistics, and a…