Time for a little good news/bad news. The bad news (since that's always requested first) is that Michael Latham, the creator of the short-lived Eternal Champions series for Sega game consoles, passed away on April 10th according to Sega Retro. Was Eternal Champions my favorite versus fighter? Not particularly... it didn't feel as well constructed as the Street Fighter games, and there was an emphasis on status effects and location dependent fatalities, features which were both pushed to irritating extremes in the 3DO release Way of the Warrior.
Still, Latham gets credit for making Eternal Champions and its Sega CD sequel one of the most ambitious Western-designed franchises in the early 1990s. Too many Sega Genesis games developed in America felt like they were just good enough to justify being released, whether they were original creations (Kid Chameleon, Greendog), based on television and film licenses (Batman Returns, TaleSpin), or just titles meant as an alternative to whatever Nintendo had released the month before (Art Alive, which forced you to draw with a joypad and should have been banned under the Geneva convention as an instrument of torture).
Eternal Champions had some of the same issues as these games, like grainy graphics and an underwhelming soundtrack provided by the GEMS sound driver, but one complaint you couldn't make is that it was designed out of grim obligation. It's clear from the detailed back stories of the cast alone (there was a hotline you could call to learn more about the fighters! Really!) that this project was important to Latham and his team. In fact, Eternal Champions was more important to Latham that it was to Sega, which cut the series loose out of concern that a Saturn version would distract players from Virtua Fighter. It certainly would have had the edge over that game in violence, if this footage of the Sega CD version is any indication.
It probably goes without saying that this video is pretty graphic. We're talking way over the top, disturbing even by today's standards, "Stop, stop! He's already dead!" graphic. Special thanks to Laser Time for the footage, and thanks to the late Michael Latham for being one of the rare Sega Genesis game designers on this side of the pond who actually seemed to give a damn about his work.
Okay, now onto the good news. If you were annoyed that Capcom didn't include one of your favorite arcade oldies (cough cough Black Tiger) in their recent collection for the Switch, they're selling a fourth game pack in the near future, and including suggestions from fans. Personally, I'd like to see the aforementioned Black Tiger, Pocket Fighter, one of the Darkstalkers games, and 3 Wonders... the last one is technically three games, but they're all very good and I'm very greedy, so I'm sticking with that selection.
Games that probably won't make the cut include demanding titles like Power Stone which will be too difficult to port, licensed games like Marvel vs. Capcom and The Punisher, and games that fit both descriptions, like that wretched Spawn game for the Dreamcast. If you want Spawn, just play as him in Mortal Kombat 11... don't subject yourself to this little slice of hell on Earth.
One other thing. Capcom will sell an invincibility patch for the rest of the games in Capcom Arcade Stadium. I'm not convinced that this will make much of a difference in quarter inhalers like Final Fight and 1943, but Ghouls 'n Ghosts...? Fine, just take my damn money. Anything to kill Firebrand, that swarthy red gargoyle bastard.
No comments:
Post a Comment