A rare opportunity… Wasted…

One of the most unfortunate things about being a videogame reviewer is seeing the potential of a game be wasted just to make a quick buck. What may be a classic or excellent videogame, gets turned into rubbish by sloppy programming, lack of polish, or just plain not caring about what your doing. Samurai Showdown 5 is one of these games. It’s a classic 2D fighter, the kind that any fighting game fan drools over. But it has numerous design flaws and game choices that boggle the mind.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the gameplay itself. On the contrary, like any good 2D fighter, it takes practice, skill, and patience to become a great fighter. Fights can turn on one good swing, but more often the more skilled player will destroy the less skilled one. There is a lot of variety between each character, so odds are there is a character type that either by design or move set, that you will find and like to play. The games second saving grace is its excellent Xbox Live play. During the twelve online game sessions we played, there wasn’t a hint of lag or slowdown.

The first odd design choice in the game, however, shows up in its basic design. Like every great fighter, each character has his/her/its own set of special moves. But none of those moves on any character match up to the damage of each character’s basic power attack. So while it can be cool to pull of a powerful uppercut like attack with Genjuro, there really is no point in using it as simply pressing one button takes less skill and does more damage.

The graphics are really where the game takes a serious gander into ‘what were they thinking?’ territory. The game hasn’t been advertised as a retro classic, but everything about it screams retro. Graphically, this game will make you feel like you have been time-warped back to the mid 1990’s just about the time Street Fighter 2 came out in the arcade. The game’s best graphical effect is parallax scrolling, which went out with the SNES. The sprites used to make the characters are poorly defined, poorly animated, and a pale comparison to better sprite based games like… Oh SNK vs Capcom 2 which starred some of the same characters. Text and dialog is subtitled, which isn’t bad, but it’s off-centered and typed like a three year old was spacing it. Don’t mind the poor translations, they are a hallmark of the series, but it really should look like a professional was doing the work and not a two year old.

Sound is another questionable choice. Sound effects are sampled at a low bit rate, and consequently sound awful. Like something coming out of an old PC speaker, the sound effects range from poor (sampled Japanese Dialog) to nerve grating (what is that little white creature that follows the archer around? I need to kill that). Voices have a faint tinge of distortion, and the English voice actors seem out of place (the announcer sounds like John Goodman).

So instead of bringing a great classic fighter to a modern console, Samurai Showdown turns out to be a disappointment. This game belongs on a SNK budget compilation disc with other classics like Art of Fighting and World Heroes, but on its own, the game will have little value to those outside the diehard Samurai Showdow fans.