...how does this game from a handheld from 25 years ago slap so hard?
I have tons of fond memories of this game from my childhood, mostly on emulators. Whenever I had to go somewhere and there was a big line or nothing to do, I'd jump to the phone and play this little gem, and it was good fun every time.
But when I first heard of this game being ported to Steam, I was undeniably a little hesitant. Allow me to explain why.
In SVC MoTM (let's call it that for now), you have two buttons, one for punches, one for kicks. Press it softly for a light attack, and press it firmly for a heavy attack. That's what the slight lag is for, by the way, it's the game understanding whether it was a soft press or a hard press. But why would you go through the work to port a game just to play it with two buttons? Do you want SNK Heroines? Because this is how you get SNK Heroines. xD Fortunately, you can easily circumvent that with the input settings on Steam Input, making this a 4 button player and playing it properly.
One inconvenient thing also was the method of unlocking characters. In the original, every time you beat the game, you'd unlock certain blocks covering the secret character (9 for every one, to be exact). The amount of blocks vary among difficulty and every time you unlock a character, the easier settings would unlock less blocks. There's just one small problem with this. The original version would be randomized. So you could pretty much beat the game for no reward at all, imagine that. Fortunately, this port fixed that, now ensuring that every block you unlock for beating the game helps in unlocking a character, which is a MASSIVE time saver. Props to Code Mystics for that.
Also present in this version that the original one lacks? (on emulation at least) An actual, honest to god, versus mode!
Since it's a handheld game, you would have to link two of them together for multiplayer, which is fine, it's how the console is designed. But for them to work this out in this port is a much MUCH welcome addition. It's no online with rollback and lobbies (laughs at KOF XIII Global Match), but hey, it's something! :D
And oh yeah, let's talk about the game itself, shall we?
It's a decent roster, even though Akari in a crossover game will ALWAYS be strange to me, lol. You have Single mode, Tag mode, and 3 on 3. You even have 3 different grooves, predating CVS1 in that aspect. The gameplay is good fun, the combos are all there as you'd expect, which is downright amazing for a NeoGeo Pocket game, the only caveat they took was for the Raging Demon input, which yeah, fair enough. It's just two buttons, anyway. It's understandable. Also this has to be the ONLY game I know where you can combo from Ryu's overhead punch. That's crazy. xD
You have an Entry mode which is just a little thing where you register some quotes and select the theme song for your character of choice and not much else. It's cute that it's here, even though there's not much use other than giving your main some funny quotes for a laugh. xD
Last but not least, Olympic mode. Tons of challenges and minigames to earn points to unlock secret level 3 moves for everyone. These are fairly pricey, but some of them are worth it. Not all of them, though. Terry gets a super he should already have to begin with, and Iori and Orochi Iori get the same super, also Bison gets a measly projectile that just stuns on hit. It's not perfect, but not mandatory either. The minigames in question range from survival mode, a mode where you need one hit to win, but also to lose, time attack, Jubei slashing straw dolls, a dancing minigame with Felicia, a Ghosts and Goblins inspired minigame where you jump left to right collecting treasure while avoiding Red Arremer (getting some real SVC Chaos flashbacks here), and shooting Mars People a lot. These can be HARD, but with enough time, you'll get the hang of it. Rimururu and Karin are also there to guide the player, they can be pretty funny at times. xD
This is ABSOLUTELY worth it, and it's cheap as hell on sales. I had zero expectations for this port, but they went above and beyond to improve the experience, adding some QOL changes like the local versus mode and speeding up the character unlocks. I heard you can play this online via Remote Play, but I never tried it myself. All in all, a very good addition to Steam. Thumbs up!
