The X Button

Three Things

SNK is one of the most depressing game companies still alive. During the 1990s they built a good reputation and an all-too-loyal fan base on the strength of their fighting games and the Metal Slug series, but today's they're mostly in the news for unfortunate reasons. So it was last week when rumors spread that Masaaki Kukino, producer of SNK's very important The King of Fighters XIII, had departed the company in November. Those same rumors had it that Ryo Mizufune, the current president of SNK Playmore, wants to shutter all new game development and concentrate instead on re-releasing and licensing out SNK's older titles.

A PR rep at SNK Playmore was quick to clarify that no no no they're still releasing games and all. Yet the picture isn't rosy. SNK doesn't have any major new properties, and there's far too much riding on The King of Fighters XIII. Despite its impressive hand-drawn animation, The King of Fighters XII emerged with lousy online play and a small roster devoid of new characters. The King of Fighters XIII may well be SNK's last chance.

SNK always had a difficult time letting go. The Neo Geo, a console version of SNK's arcade hardware, was an amazing feat back in the early 1990s, when home versions of arcade games were rarely perfect. Yet SNK clung to the Neo Geo and its zealous owners well into the next decade, supporting the console after bootleggers and ROM dumpers had cracked and emulated it. Even Sega knew when to quit the game-system business, but not SNK. So they made the portable Neo Geo Pocket. It was released in a black-and-white version a year before a color system was available, and the poor thing was swiftly dispatched by the Game Boy Color and the Pokemon craze. Then SNK filed for bankruptcy.

The company was rescued by a merger with Playmore, but nothing's gone right for SNK since then. They've lost most of their interesting prospects, such as the developer Sacnoth. Formed by ex-Squaresoft employees, Sacnoth made the solid strategy-RPG Faselei! and a weirdly compelling historical-fantasy RPG series called Shadow Hearts (including Koudelka). But it didn't catch on, and the franchise was snatched up and later put to bed by SNK's former backer Aruze. SNK's made mostly fighting games and Metal Slug sequels for the past few years, with only occasional hits. What's the only successful new SNK property? It's Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. You know, the DS game about groping anime witches.

Nowhere is SNK's misfortune more obvious than in comparisons to Capcom. As major players in the fighting-game market, the two companies had friendly competitions and crossover fighting games, but they're the Goofus and Gallant of the game industry. Capcom builds profitable franchises like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Phoenix Wright, and Mega Man to support their fighting games; SNK stakes everything on yet another slightly different version of The King of Fighters. Capcom wisely avoids competing in the costly world of game systems; SNK takes on Nintendo's insanely popular Game Boy. Capcom is one of Japan's biggest game companies, in image if not financial size; SNK is not.

Fix yourself, SNK. Re-issuing Nam 1975 and other old Neo Geo games is not the answer. Try reviving your past successes, perhaps with the help of other companies. Get Arc System Works to do a new Ikari Warriors. Get Treasure to do a Metal Slug reboot. Get someone good to do a Crystalis sequel. They might succeed. They might not. But it's better than putting everything behind The King of Fighters XIII and waiting for more people to quit.

NINTENDO NAILS DOWN AMERICAN 3DS LAUNCH
Want a Nintendo 3DS? Well, you can get to the store on March 27, pay $250, and pick from two colors: Aqua Blue and Cosmos Black. Nintendo's quick to point out that you'll have about 30 3DS games to buy between the March launch and June's E3 gathering. They're vague when it comes to naming all of those games, but at least a dozen arrive on March 27: Super Street Fighter IV, Dead or Alive Dimensions, Pilotwings Resort, Nintendogs + Cats, Resident Evil: Mercenaries and Nintendo's submarine side-scroller Steel Diver are the standouts. Ridge Racer 3D, Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 3D, Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, Madden NFL, Asphalt 3D, and Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs 3D fill out the launch. Square Enix's Bust-A-Move Universe might also make it, though the publisher's giving it a more conservative “spring” release window.

As with most new systems, the most intriguing games aren't making the launch. Kid Icarus: Uprising may arrive by the summer, and the same goes for Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked, an expanded port of the Atlus strategy/RPG. It may not be the first Atlus release for the 3DS, though, as Tomy has a side-scrolling Naruto game, Naruto Shippuden: Nin-rittai Emake! Saikyo Ninkai Kessen, in the works for the system, and Atlus releases Tomy's Naruto offerings here.

There's no Metroid game for the 3DS launch, but Tecmo's Dead or Alive Dimensions features heroine Samus Aran and a stage based on Metroid: Other M, complete with a fireball-spewing Ridley. Developer Team Ninja (which also co-produced Other M) stopped short of making Samus playable. That may be a relief to those who dislike the way Dead or Alive portrays women, but I think it's cheap to put Samus in at all if she's not controllable. Then again, I also think Dead or Alive should bring in Irene Lew, Robert T. Sturgeon, Ashtar, and every other forgotten character from Tecmo's old Ninja Gaiden NES games.

YUJI NAKA SHOWS OFF RODEA THE SKY SOLDIER
Leaving Sega did wonders for Yuji Naka's creativity. He helped make Sonic the Hedgehog, NiGHTS, and Burning Rangers for Sega in the 1990s, but the past decade saw him putting out nothing new besides Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. Since founding an independent developer called Prope (“Pro-Pay”), Naka's created the charming Ivy the Kiwi? and a new Wii-and-3DS action game called Rodea the Sky Soldier.

The game's first trailer presents a pastiche of other titles, some of them not even Naka's. The flying gameplay seems straight from his NiGHTS games and it's mixed with dashing and homing attacks out of the 3-D Sonic games, with a boss battle filched from Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus. Our hero Rodea isn't limited to simple, nonviolent attacks, though; he can whip out a gun in flight and blast enemies.

Rodea the Sky Soldier's setting steps away from previous Naka games. It's a steam-tech world of floating islands and the same sort of aerial anime adventure tone that games like Mega Man Legends and Solatorobo stole from Miyazaki movies. Rodea, clad in the finery of a sky soldier, uses a kitetail-like fin to maneuver through the air, while his begoggled sidekick Ion and a princess named Cecilia fret about his devil-may-care ways.

Publisher Kadokawa Games showed only the Wii version of Rodea and the Sky Soldier, but both it and the 3DS edition seem bound (and copyrighted) for North America.

PHANTOM BREAKER COMING TO XBOX 360
Phantom Breaker, a new fighter from boringly named developer 5pb, isn't based on any specific anime license or “visual novel,” but it may as well be. The characters were all designed by Hiro Suzuhira, best known for his work on dating-sim games like Shuffle! and light novels like that awful Akikan thing. Visual novels are 5pb's bread and butter, though, and now they've turned to the generic new world of otaku-baiting fighters.

Phantom Breaker is a simple effort at a glance. It stars a maid, a priestess, a gothic swordswoman, and other painful stereotypes pounding each other in the hopes of getting a wish granted by a mysterious stranger. It also clearly divides its characters into quick-and-dirty types or hardened tanks, and the game's “overdrive” system makes the fast fighters faster and the defensive characters tougher. The Xbox 360 version is out in Japan this April, and few in the fighting-game scene seem interested. But perhaps they're not the audience anyway.

IN BRIEF: FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 DETAILS, UDON'S VALKYRIA ART BOOK
Final Fantasy XIII-2 producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama cleared up a few things about the game: the new character shown in the game's logo is male, and he's a rival for established FFXIII heroine Lightning. The sequel will also expand on the original game's pantheon of godlike beings, and that's not terribly good news for anyone who disliked Final Fantasy XIII's prattle about fal'Cie and l'Cie and L'Arc-En-Ciel. It's more encouraging that Kitase and Toriyama also mentioned improving the Final Fantasy XIII battle system. Perhaps they'll let us control more than one character at a time.

Video-game artbooks are rarely released in North America, and when they are, they're usually thin promos for people who reserve games. Udon, best known for publishing Street Fighter comics, goes against the tide and brought out thick, informative artbooks based on Street Fighter, Mega Man, and Darkstalkers. Their next artbook is the Valkyria Chronicles Design Archive, a collection of illustrations and background details about Sega's World War Fantasy strategy-RPG.