Episode 6: Zombies Ate my Neighbors/Final Fight

Sean C. says:

While I love Final Fight, in the arcade, the SNES version was just really dissapointing. I used to love playing Guy and his ommision, along with player 2 was really baffling. So not only was streets of rage 2 better, which is mentioned alot because that is generally considered the best of the series by most, but streets of rage 1 was better.

If you remember at the time the SNES Final Fight and Streets of Rage were released together. By this point Final Fight had been out long enough that it could be improved upon the original design. So SNES does a version that looks great but was a step back from the arcade. Sega does its own version that while being derivitive, is better in almost every way. Obviosly Final Fight looks better on the SNES, but thats about the only advantage it gets. Streets of rage has 2 player. 3 playable charachters. It has a much wider move set, something like 40 moves along with more complex combat. It pioneers two player co-op moves where you can do combo moves that can only be done with two players. It has a wide variety of enemies. The game is not as cheap as Final Fight and is more skill based, mostly due to not having to be based on an arcade game thats designed to take your quarters. Sure some bosses are cheap but can be beaten by learning there patterns and what attacks are effective. It has multiple endings based on wheter you decide to join the final boss or not. You even have to fight player 2 if you choose differently. Overall the fighting with more moves and throws and combos just feels smoother and flows better. The music is better. While not a good looking as the SNES it still was a good looking game had a visual style that was consistent with the setting. Even EGM rated these two games side to side and Streets of Rage came out with all 9’s in the AUG 91 issue. Sega knocked it out of the park and really strucka blow against where to go to play fighting games. Nintendo didnt get its fighting game rep back until Street Fighter 2 came out.

And of course SOR2 improved upon 1 alot and had much bigger characthers and better graphics to pretty much own this genre in the 16-bit era. But if you ever get a chance to to play the Sega CD Final Fight I would totally reccomend it. It is basically arcade perfect except for a slight loss of color depth. All characthers, voice acting and cutscenes with the full arcade size sprites and gameplay. I love FInal Fight and this was the way to play it, even though by the time this came out on the Sega CD it was pretty dated and other games suppased it in the game mechanics dept.

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