Random Gaming Talk

[bork]

I'm reading that the new SNK joint is a total bomba. Era is of course blaming Ronaldo, but I wonder why no one ever points out the obvious: SNK just never really transitioned to 3D all that well?

City of the Wolves is just "welp, good enough" 3D you'd see in any random medium-good game. 

This seems like an especially serious problem if you're SNK, and your ancient reputation was built on having the best of the best of the best of the best 2D graphics and animation. Feels like when they transitioned to 3D they just threw up their hands and said fuck it. I mean, look at these comparisons:




It's not bad looking, but it certainly isn't remarkable in the way SNK 2D games have almost universally been. Which seems like an obvious historical appeal of the franchise.

There's a few things about this.

-The SNK CEO is stepping down.  People are speculating that it's because of the game doing badly, but we don't know if that's true and we don't know much about the sales.

-The doom n' gloom comes from a Steam active player count list and Japanese physical sales numbers.

-As it turns out, the game was among the top 12 best selling Steam games for April and for Japanese digital sales it was #9 last month.  

All I can say is that when I go to play the game, I have no trouble getting a match in seconds.  None of their previous games from the past decade had that kind of activity.  Whether or not this lasts is another story.

Ronaldo the rapist was a horrible addition, but I doubt that his inclusion had any effect on the sales numbers.  Fatal Fury was never as popular as some of SNK's other games and it has been 25 years since the last game came out.  I'm not surprised that it's not setting the world on fire, but at the same time, what fighting game not named Street Fighter does?  Even Tekken and Mortal Kombat have fallen off.

Lastly, visually this game looks very nice.  SNK's games keep looking better with each new release.  The difference between CoTW and KOF IV (their "comeback" game) are night and day.  

Props to them for including music tracks from other games, color edit, and the entire first season of DLC characters for free, plus being quick to release updates addressing character balance and bugs.  They're doing things that people bitch and complain that the other fighting game developers don't do and sadly it seems like most people don't care.