Fatal Fury Special

Well, at least part of the title bears some relation to the feeling you get while trudging through SNK's 'legendary' beat-em-up. Here's a hint; it's not 'special'. No, a feeling akin to pure rage, a sense of wanting to plant a foot through the beautiful HD television you spent months paying off so you could play Bioshock the way it was intended. That is much much more common.

Before the calls of heresy start flooding in it's important to note that the game itself is not bad and it's the bastard-hard difficulty and the 360's terrible D-Pad that ruin the game in many ways. The real shame is that the series is a true beast and the only 2-D beat em up that comes close to toppling Streetfighter off its 16-bit pedestal that paved the way for other triumphs in old-skool combat, namely King of the Fighters, Samurai Shodown and Garou: mark of the Wolves to name a few.

What becomes obvious from the offset is the graphical depth on display here. it looks stunning with large-meaty sprites knocking seven shades out of each other on top of scrolling parallax backgrounds. The rich palette is a feast for the eyes and coupled with a killer soundtrack and audio production every bone-crunching blow sounds strikingly brutal.

Following a similar format to almost every 2-D scrapper players select one of around 15 fighters and travel the globe taking out opponents to become world champion. Characters such as Mai, Terry Bogard and Geese Howard have become household names in SNK's canon, appearing in over 20 titles since this first hit the arcades and fans of the series will recognise many of them. Each is balanced and have many powerful special moves yet the real downer is how difficult it can be to pull them off.

It's a sad fact that the 360's D-Pad simply wasn't built for this kind of game. It's very easy to press a direction by mistake and executing the rolls and spins required to launch a simple fireball or dashing punch is a nightmare. You will find yourself dead a lot of the time as a result. And you can forget about the achievements, this one niggle almost renders them almost unobtainable.

The woe doesn't end here either. It's a known fact that arcade games are designed to take peoples money hence why they are ridiculously difficult, the more you die, the more you feel that putting one more pound coin in the slot will take you closer to victory. It's a feature that preys on the addictive nature of gamers but why SNK felt they had to transfer this difficulty over to this version is baffling. Even on the easiest setting this a grind and it makes the experience off-putting.

Unless you are a master of the genre you wont get far in this and had this been easier and suited to a better control pad then it would have been a hit. Sadly though it's a wasted chance.