Fatal Fury Special Review for Xbox 360

Fatal Fury Special Review

If you already know what Fatal Fury Special is and want to play more, come on in--but anyone else probably won't understand what makes this game worth playing.

The Good

Emulation quality is fine, with good renderings of the original game's great soundtrack and audio
Serves as a good history lesson for people looking to remember the old days.

The Bad

Can be very tough to find players online
No obvious way to disable blurry graphical filtering.

Fatal Fury Special was originally released in 1993 as an update to Fatal Fury 2 that made the boss characters from that game playable while also adding a few other characters to the mix. These were simpler times, before SNK went character crazy with the King of Fighters series, and taken in that context, this emulation of Fatal Fury Special is still worth playing if you're interested in the history of 2D fighting. New players, however, probably won't get too much out of this Xbox Live Arcade update.

Hey, come on, come on!

This is your basic 2D fighter for the most part, but the early Fatal Fury games put a bit of a spin on it by adding an additional plane to fight on. You can jump from the foreground to the background and back again, you can launch attacks that move from one plane to the other, and so on. It's a bit cumbersome and seems to get ignored more often than not when playing against another person. All of it works fine on the Xbox 360 controller.

The roster in Fatal Fury Special is quite good, starting with SNK's golden boy, Terry Bogard, and going on to also include Mai, Kim Kaphwan, Duck King, Billy Kane, Geese Howard, and more. There are 15 characters available right away, and you can unlock Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting, as well. Each has a decent variety of special attacks.

This is a good emulation of the original NeoGeo game, and it's worth noting that the Xbox Live Arcade version emulates the home version, not the arcade version. The only real difference there is that you'll select your difficulty when you start a single-player game, and you're limited to four credits per side when playing single-player. The audio is spot-on with the original release, though the graphics have undergone a filtering process, not unlike other Xbox Live Arcade games like Contra have received. The catch is that there doesn't seem to be any way to turn the filtering off and get back to a pixel-perfect rendition of the original game, which is unfortunate.

The inflection used by the announcer when speaking character names is hilariously classic.

Online play in Fatal Fury Special is handled pretty well, though it's not without issue. For starters, there aren't many people playing it online. When playing in the US, it can take five minutes or more to find a willing opponent, and you often get the impression that the two of you are the only people in the world playing. Playing at times when Japanese players are likely to be awake nets a few more players, though when you play against players in distant lands, you're likely to get a less-than-perfect connection, which causes lag. The game doesn't beat around the bush with connection-quality lights or anything like that; instead you just get to see their ping time. Once you get up to around 250 milliseconds, there's a noticeable lag between you hitting a button and the action happening onscreen. Anything much higher than that is just unplayable. In our experience, though, we found more good matches than bad ones, when we could find one at all. Of course, your experience depends on your time zone and Internet connection quality.

Fatal Fury Special is a pretty good fighting game, but it's hard to recommend it to people who aren't already familiar with the original. If you're a fan looking for history lesson, by all means pick this one up, because it's a bargain at $5.

By Jeff Gerstmann, GameSpotPosted Oct 15, 2007 5:30 pm PT

Fatal Fury Special Quick Links

GameSpot Score
6.5
fair
Critic Score6.210 reviews
User Score6.8124 votes
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Player Reviews

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huskerman34

6.5
fair

classic 2d fighter . Amazing if it was in hd!!! Continue »
G-Ivanski

7.5
good

Not a bad fighting game...only 400 points so its not a bad deal. But multiplayer isnt really available (no one gets on). Continue »

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IGN 6.7 / 10
TeamXbox 9 / 10
Eurogamer 7 / 10
GamingExcellence 3.5 / 10
Mygamer 5.8 / 10
Game Positive 7.3 / 10
Official Xbox Magazine 5.5 / 10
X360 Magazine UK 7 / 10

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