SNK's first shot at a swordfighting game turns out to be an instant classic.
This game really takes a lot of precision to master (and a bit of luck). There are pretty much four basic attacks... weak slash, strong slash, weak kick, and strong kick. Pushing different combinations of these will give you even stronger attacks. All characters also have special abilities such as Haohmaru's Tornado, which is performed in the same fashion and Ryu's fireball from SF. However, moves in SS are not executed extremely fast, so there may or may not be a bad consequence performing one. Let's take said Haohmaru move... it is useful, but if the oppoonent is even anywhere close, Haohmaru is really slow with this move so the opponent can just jump over it and HS+HK, taking 1/4 of your health bar.
With 10 characters and a few bosses to attend to, put Sam Sho on Normal mode and have a blast.
Good luck finding a good copy of this....I paid 50 bucks for mine. But that's better than other Neo AES games like Mark of the Wolves, which will set you back $600.
Jon