Most fighting games have some kind of flimsy story as the explanation for the characters fighting each other, but if this one does, then I wasn’t able to divine it. It appears that this game was just an excuse to have a big lineup of lots of Tekken characters just slugging it out because that’s what they do, and I can respect that. But this time they do it in teams of two, and you can switch them up at any time

Now, I’m fully willing to admit that I’m not very good at these kinds of games because I don’t play them enough to get good at them. And the main reason I don’t play them is because of what happened at one particular arcade one Saturday night.

I, being a complete newbie to the game, was just kind of jacking around with it, learning the ropes and trying to feel my way around. Then some jackass comes up who’s apparently pretty skilled at the game and throws money into the machine (without asking me if I minded, of course). So he picks his guys, I pick my guys and we start fighting. Round one ends with me getting a pretty savage beatdown, but that’s OK. I can take a loss to a better player. Round two started and then WHAM! He hits me with some kind of move that I had never seen before (I was completely new, remember?) that completely KO’d me in one hit. I was a little upset and probably yelled a little. “There’s a move in this game that KO’s your opponent in one hit? That seems a little unfair.” “Only if you’re dumb enough to get hit with it,” he answered. Right then, I decided that if the game had moves that unbalanced in it, then it was a game I didn’t need to be playing, especially in an arcade where, if I’m hit by said moves, I blow through my $0.75 in less than two minutes, including time at the character select screen. And I’m no economist, but that doesn’t seem like the best use of my dollars.

Killer Instinct tells the story of super corporation Ultratech and their mysterious fighting tournament that they put on. See, Ultratech has fantastically advanced technology and dabbles in genetic engineering, cybernetics, capturing aliens, opening interdimensional portals, you know, regular stuff. They put on this tournament apparently to test out their projects against whoever wants to participate.

So, pretty standard stuff. But where the game really sets itself apart is the combo system. In other fighting games, if you’re good, you might be able to pull off a combo of 5 or so hits. In this one, lengthy combos are the name of the game.

Nearly every move in this game can be chained with other moves to produce combos. For instance, you do your opening move for two hits, then hit the ‘autodouble’ button for three more hits, then hit the finisher for two more. MASTER COMBO! Longer combos have more impressive names, and are harder to pull off. They culminate in the over-20-hit Ultra Combo that usually finishes your opponent off. This is all mitigated by the combo breaker. The guy getting pummeled has a move that interrupt the combo, and the longer it goes, the easier it is to pull off (you have more chances).

There’s more to this game than that, though, no mercy moves, humiliations, general silliness that I won’t go into here. I ended up playing this game a whole lot in the arcades, mostly because it was similar enough to Street Fighter that I could pick it up really easily, and different enough that I really enjoyed it. It also didn’t hurt that at my local arcades the game was ridiculously popular for a long time, and there were often crowds gathered around. And crowds meant that you got to play against real actual people, which is absolutely the best way to play any fighting game, and, in the days before the Internet, the best way to pass around notes and learn everyone’s moves and finishers.

Later on, I would actually be able to purchase this game for my Super NES. Normally arcade to Super NES ports suffer greatly, but this game came through remarkably similar to the arcade version, which was no small feat. But the real icing on the cake was that this game was compatible with the XBand modem. And what that meant is that even though the players in my neighborhood quit playing this game pretty much as soon as they started I still had an entire nation of willing opponents, each ready, willing, and able to flog me repeatedly. Which kind of sounds like it’d be a frustrating thing, but it really taught me a lot about the ins and outs of the game by collaborating with real actual people. Strange, I know, but that’s how we did it way back in the ’90s.

I don’t pretend to know much about the X-Men universe outside of what I saw in the animated series, I never really was that into comics or anything, so I don’t really know that much about the characters or their motivations. But what I do know is that this was a pretty good game. It plays a lot like the Street Fighter game, but a lot more cartoony. The moves are a lot more exaggerated, and with the mutants’ superhuman abilities, the action goes way over the top.

But, I didn’t really spend a lot of time with this game. Mostly because it was in my local arcade for about three days. That particular arcade had a ridiculously high turnover rate for games for some reason. The downside to that is that I didn’t get very good at many games, because I didn’t get to spend time with them, but the upside is that I got to play lots of really mediocre games…

Um… Is that really an upside?

Really, other than those couple of changes and a few minor technical changes that only the hardcorest of players would care about, this game is otherwise identical to the old title, just refined a little. I guess the older one was successful enough that Capcom didn’t want to mess with the formula too much. But they’d end up tweaking it some more and releasing a few more versions over the years.

I would presume that this game is tangentially related to the first Street Fighter game, but I’ve never actually played it or seen it anywhere. But that relation isn’t important. All you need to know is that there is some kind of evil organization running a martial arts tournament and folks from all over the world are competing. Each character is distinctive and unique. Bear wrestler from the USSR, yoga master from India, boxer guy from Las Vegas, the two identical generic martial arts guys (one from Japan and one from the USA), and a few more.

I played this game a lot. I played it in the arcade, I played it at home, I played it against friends, I played it against strangers. Essentially I used every excuse I could think of to play this game. I don’t even know why, I was never that good at it. I just really liked it for some reason. Until Capcom started refining and rereleasing this game. Then I started fawning over them instead.

Right?

Well, they do. In the Super Puzzle Fighter series, for example. This game is kind of like an amalgam of Tetris, and Kirby’s Avalanche. Multi-colored gems drop from the sky and you have to arrange them optimally so that like-colored gems touch each other. Then you have to use sparkly gems to make the normal gems disappear. Doing so will send garbage blocks to your opponent. Your goal is to make your opponent’s stack reach to the top of the screen, and then you win! Like most puzzlers, this game is easier to show than it is to tell how to play so…

Like a lot of puzzle games, I like it, but I’m not very good at it. Unfortunately for me, the computer is very good at it, and I did a lot of losing. I would have really liked to have had someone to crest the learning curve with, but it was not to be. And since there’s no single-player mode, and no practice mode, I gave it up pretty quickly.

The XBand itself was a large purple cartridge that stuck out of your Super NES by about twice the amount that a regular cartridge did, and you put a game on the top of it, creating an impressive tower of plastic. Once you turned on the system, you had several options at your disposal: a buddy list, newsletters, email, and a matchup service, plus several more sundry activities that I’m not going to go into here.

The feature that I used most frequently was the game matchup feature. You could choose to search for an opponent either in your local calling area or nationwide. If there was an opponent waiting to play someone in the same game you were seeking with, then your SNES would dial up their SNES, you would connect, and play would begin. Sure, that doesn’t sound too impressive now, but this was before most people had even heard of the Internet, much less had access to it outside of their local library. The system, it should be noted, did not use the Internet at all, but rather directly dialed your opponent. This was fairly important as it helped reduce latency (the time between when you press the buttons and when it appears on the screen), but caused two big problems in my house:

1. When I was in the queue, folks would dial my number to play. If I didn’t tell everyone in the house what I was doing, there was a near 100% chance that someone would answer the phone, completely screwing up the connection.
2. While dialing out, I could disable call waiting by prepending a sequence of numbers to my dial-out number. This was fine unless I had to wait on a call. When someone called me, I had no way to disable call-waiting. This meant that inevitably someone would call, there would be beeps on the line, and I would get disconnected

Each match you won gave you a certain amount of points, these points weren’t really for anything except for giving you some meaningless ranking on your profile screen that only you could see. Unless, that is, you had access to the Internet. The site, which is now long-defunct, allowed you to look up players by name and see their stats. It was pretty bare-bones, but pretty useful for seeing if the person that trounced you in Game X was a veteran or just getting started.

There was a fair selection of games supported by the service, though the only ones I ever played were Super Mario Kart, Kirby’s Avalanche, Killer Instinct, and Super Street Fighter II. There were also several sports games like Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball and NBA Jam, but I couldn’t imagine tying up the phone line for the length of time it would take to complete just one matchup in those games. Late in the life of the service, support for Super Mario World and Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past was added, though neither allowed you to play the games. Mario let you dial up a random user and chat with them with the built in chat interface (think Instant Messenger with only one person available at a time), and Zelda allowed you to compete with someone else in a silly maze game. These late additions, in hindsight, were probably meant to bolster the use of the system.

Even at its peak, which is right about when I joined, I had trouble finding people to play with. There were virtually no other players in my local area, there were two other then the three I made buy one, and searching nationwide took upwards of 10 minutes to find an opponent, if I could find one at all. After a couple years, the service tanked and the company was absorbed by MPlayer, who was, in turn absorbed by GameSpy. The system was immediately shut down, and now exists only in the memories of those that played it. If you look hard enough, though, you’ll find the occasional player whose eyes will light up at the mention of the ground-breaking service.

It’s a touch violent.

You have at your disposal the ability to punch and kick your enemies until they fall down and then kick them some more. Occasionally your character will be kicked in a very tender area, with the appropriate ringing sound, or smacked around by one of the weapons that the thugs decide to bring to the party: lead pipes, switchblades, and pistols. You can punch the Bad Guys and they’ll drop the toys for you to use, although when you get punched and drop whatever you’ve picked up it disappears as soon as it hits the ground.

Each stage ends with an disproportionately deadly boss character who will bash you repeatedly, often resulting in the death of several of your quarters. You then go to the next stage for some more carnage.

The game is pretty fun, hardcore cartoony violence aside, until the very end. At the end of the game you get to fight all the boss characters from all the stages again, all at the same time. That stage hurts. A lot. If you plan on playing the game, I’d suggest bringing lots of quarters. That or a posse.

It seems like game companies, when strapped for new ideas, will take some scoops out of the pile of their old steaming crap, package them together with something recognizable, and then release it as a ‘retro’ collection. Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced comes with six games: Frogger, Gyruss, Time Pilot, Scramble, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and Rush’n Attack. Each of these games is identical to their arcade counterparts, for good or ill. By putting in the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) you can access something different in each game, ranging from Improved Graphics(tm) to Extra Lives(tm). If you’ve played any of these games in their arcade forms, then you know full well what to expect here. The only difference here is that you don’t have to bring a stack of quarters with you to play.

Frogger

I’ve never liked Frogger. I’ve played several versions of this supposed classic, and I just can’t get into it. I understand that there are fans of the game out there, and if you are one of them, then you might consider getting this collection for this game alone. If you’re like me, however, you’ll look for something else. Your goal in this game is to get your frog (who can’t swim) across a busy highway and then across a busy river, picking up girl frogs and flies along the way. Fairly simplistic by today’s standards, but so were most of the games at the time.

Gyruss

For those who’ve never heard of Gyruss (don’t worry, I never heard of it either until I got this collection) the game plays a lot like Galaga with the exception that your ship can move along all four sides of the screen. Enemy ships will come out from the center in waves, eventually landing in a formation where they will peel off and attack your ship. While playing the game, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had ‘been there, done that.’

Time Pilot

In Time Pilot, you have to take your craft through the unfriendly skies shooting down enemies and rescuing parachuters. Do this enough times, and you can go along to the next era of war and get updated ships. I found the game to be a little slow for my tastes.

Scramble

What is up with the flying games? In the third flying game, your goal is to go through a tunnel and shoot the enemy missles, ships, miscellaneous gee-gaws, and fuel tanks. Shooting the fuel tanks will replenish your fuel supply (obviously) and will allow you to continue on your quest to rid the caverns of their missle problem. This game tries really hard to be fun. It has the constantly-draining fuel mater, the ability for you to shoot in two directions (straight ahead and in an arc downward), and wave upon wave of easily destructible foes. The main problem that I found with this game is the lack of action. The missles come from the ground fairly slowly, and the enemy ships just kind of hang out in their predetermined flight paths. The game just turns tedious right away.

Yie Ar Kung Fu

Proto-fighting game Yie Ar Kung Fu should be one of the stand-out games of this collection. It should be one of the games that makes this package, but it’s probably the game I spent the least amount of time with. Perhaps it’s my lack of experience with the game talking here, but I couldn’t find very much to like about it. I cut my fighting-game teeth on Street Fighter II, so perhaps I’m spoiled. The moves in this game are fairly easy to pull off (e.g. push a direction and press a button) and the fighters control well enough. I was just left wanting more.

Rush ‘N’ Attack

Rush’n Attack is one of those classic action games. Your goal is simple and to the point: “Save the Prisoners of War!”. You are a soldier who can take one hit going up against waves of heavily armed enemies (who, thankfully, also can take only one hit) in your quest to protect freedom for another day. This game is sickeningly hard (or I’m sickeningly bad at it) since enemies are placed such that if you don’t have perfect timing/precision, you’re toast. The amount of cheap kills in this game is staggering. This game (along with Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Frogger) is one of the primary reasons to own this collection.

The only extra feature worth mentioning is the multiplayer. You can play multiplayer versions of the games provided that you have another Game Boy and a link cable (only one copy of the game is required). These games are definitely more fun when you can get someone else in on the action and they’re simple enough that it’s extremely easy to just jump in and play if you’ve never tried any of them before. Once again we have a compilation that takes some mediocre, mixes it with some stuff nobody’s heard of, and manages to throw in a couple of extras. Had this collection been more than Konami’s B-list arcade games, it might not have been so bad, but as it stands, it’s just OK.

Game Name: Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: EBGames
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Passable