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Some of my favorite fighting games include the likes of Marvel vs Capcom 2, X-Men vs Street Fighter, Marvel vs Street Fighter, etc. The appeal of these games was simple, fun fast arcade gameplay with cool easily-known characters (I did always have a fondness for Gambit). Along those lines, SNK was introduced into the series as a logical step around 1999 in the game series SNK vs Capcom. After SNK filed for bankruptcy in 2000, the company re-formed and was called SNK Playmore. In 2005, SNK Playmore decided to bring out a game that played very much to the old versus games in NeoGeo Battle Coliseum. In the last breath of 2007, NeoGeo Battle Coliseum makes it to the states for the Playstation 2 system. Now in my greedy little hands, I explore the game and see if it stands up as a true fighter.

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Wrestling games are near and dear to my heart. From the first time I played Pro Wrestling for Nintendo or WWF Wrestlefest at the arcade, I knew I would be playing wrestling games as long as my fingers could mash the buttons. I’ve played some of the greatest wrestling games (Smackdown 2, Touken Retsuden 3) and some of the worst (WCW Nitro, ECW Hardcore Revolution). The Fire Pro series I’ve had a long relationship with. It’s been love/hate mostly. I want to love it but I find myself more often than not hating the interface and struggling to play it. I’ve bought all three import games for the Turbo Graphix 16 system and the Fire Pro (6 man scramble) game that was released for Sega Saturn. However, when Agetec announced that they would be releasing it for the stateside Playstation 2, I was very interested. Maybe since I didn’t have to import it, I would finally be able to see the menus in English and figure out the difficult interface. Every wrestling fanboy would tell me that it was the greatest thing ever. But what would I think?

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Opening

ROUND ONE, FIGHT. I’m something of a Mortal Kombat junkie especially in my younger days. I started playing the original arcade game when I was very young and played 2 (still the best to date), 3, dealt with 4 and even dabbled in Deception. I adored the movies, though for obvious reasons I was poed at some parts of the second movie but still liked it. I even bought one of those silly MK controllers for the Playstation 2 (Scorpion naturally). So when I heard that the…

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Opening

The Rainbow Six series of console and pc games has always been about realistic tactical warfare. These games are not for the faint of the heart as with any Tom Clancy shooter. In their latest offering: Rainbow Six Vegas; they take that realism and then put it in the anything but real land of glitz, glamor, and high rolling. Las Vegas, Nevada. A town where nobody sleeps and that’s unfortunate because you are going to need all the skills and firepower you can muster at all hours …

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Gameplay

Hype. Hype is a piece of the media that we never want to admit to ourselves, or anyone for that matter, we let get the best of us. After all, how many times has the hype for something become so huge that it turned out to be a real bummer once you finally played it? When message boards started rambling in 2005 about a game coming from Microsoft Studios (made by Epic) entitled Gears of War, a small look into Microsoft’s history of product release, would easily entail a game that would …

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With all of the grand first person shooters out there like Halo, Doom, Quake, & Unreal, many titles of the same genre tend to fall into a void. Titles like Po’ed, the Medal of Honor series & Blake Stone (yes I said it, Blake “I am a Wolf 3d clone” Stone!) tend to fall by the waste side. Another of those titles is XIII. Brilliant in concept, and gorgeous graphics make this title a must have for anybody who loves FPS (or even third person aficionados).

Based on a French comic book, the concept of the sto…

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London is known for several popular things: Fish and Chips, Big Ben, the river Thames, but one thing it will probably never be credited for is being the centerpiece of an engaging, fun videogame–at least if one only looks as far as The Getaway. It’s a guarantee that nothing will confuse and frustrate players quicker than a game that can’t make up its mind what it is. Is it a movie? Is it a game? Well, whatever it is, it should choose a path early and then stick with it.

The plot…

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