ACA NeoGeo Fatal Fury

I accidentally stumbled across a collection of old Neo Geo games on the Xbox Marketplace, most of which had a fairly easy achievement lists and low completion times. I got Fatal Fury as I thought I had fond childhood memories of the game. This thought was erased after about five minutes of playing.

Fatal Fury is a fighting game with three playable characters and six opponents for fighting in six arenas. The fights themselves are carried out in two planes of 2D that seem to change willy nilly without any control from the player – this may or may not be true, I only played it for 55 minutes total but it felt like I was being mugged off by the game the whole time.

I may have mentioned in the past that when I feel the AI is cheap, I do not take it well and Fatal Fury is no exception. When you get to the end of the arcade game, you have to fight this Wrestler called Raiden and he can hit you from miles away and stop any of your special moves by swinging his arm in your face. Which he does a lot.

So between the changing planes and cheap AI, it was probably the least enjoyable 55 minutes of gaming I’ve done for a while and it served as a reminder that adapting controls from one console to another is an episode in frustration. I found the controls to be really shit. From memory, a Neo Geo has two buttons which translates to kick and punch in Fatal Fury. This means that any special moves you might want to try involves having to use the analogue stick. When you do, the game seems very fussy about whether you moved the stick backwards then forwards and whether you did it fast enough or not. I felt like the fight I was having with the controller was more challenging than the fights in the game. Except for the wrestler, that cheap-ass mutherfucker can do one.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

There are three game types to play, each of which carry achievements. Two achievements are available for posting scores to the online leaderboard which immediately makes me nervous as there is likely a chance this could be removed in the future.

All of the other ten achievements are for attaining scores and one of these is just for setting a high score). You need to get 200,000 in Arcade mode and this is the most frustrating. The scores stack even if you lose the match so if you win round 1, then lose round 2 and round 3, you do the fight again from round 1 keeping your points so you can rinse this out in normal arcade mode. I got to the wrestler before I realised this which meant it took me longer than it should as I kept losing the first two rounds many times.

There are another two modes that you need to get scores in. High Score mode basically has you play until you lose and you have to score 150,000 points. Then there is caravan mode which is the same as high score mode with a timer where you have to get 80,000 Points.

It’s all a bit stupid as you can get them all by picking Bryan and trying to spam his speed attack but it all depends on whether the game will let you do the move. More often than not, you will just stand there like a lemon waiting to be hit.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fatal Fury is a quick but frustrating completion. Personally I did not find it an advert for the rest of the Neo Geo collection but that doesn’t mean they won’t appear here in the future.