Welcome to Deleted Saves on this episode.

Take it outside, a retrospective review of the fighting games I have played.

Dear listeners, I have a confession to make.

I'm really, really bad at fighting games.

From the first instance of this offshoot of the brawler game genre appearing in arcades across the land, to the rise to dominate those same arcades, to their global assault with massive tournaments like EVO and similar corporate sponsored championships, I have remained terrible at the genre of games.

I view this kind of skill, desire and ability to learn in a frame by frame manner.

The multitude of patterns of parry, thrust, twitch response with a sort of quiet reverence.

The way one would watch 2 world class chess masters study the board before them in tournament play, making 6 to 10 calculations ahead of their opponent regardless of the situation.

Only in this case with a lot more flashing lights and split second timing resulting in a powerful digital ballet.

It is a skill set I am sadly lacking and one I have no real desire to invest time in to develop yet.

I played a bunch of these things over the decades with varying degrees of enjoyment or curiosity.

Sometimes you just have to put your quarter down to see what the fuss is all about.

For the record, I'm an SNK fan.

Sure, all the Capcom output and everything tied to its competitors have been well animated, flashy, gory, or just plain absurd, an effort to gain attention in a crowded space.

But it was SNK that I felt had the best sort of game I was looking for in my fighting game experience.

More down to earth, a less complex, more blue collar of an experience.

The studio knew what it was making.

It didn't go much beyond that.

What it did make was the kind of game that was more similar to direct to video martial arts films, where actors on the climb up or the come down after a successful career where perhaps those who were never really quite has there could strut their stuff and show off their moves to the world.

While games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were the Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jackie Chan of video game brawlers, the S&K catalog was more like the Cynthia Rothrock or the Ernie Reyes Junior of Fighting Game tournaments.

Of course, I have to bring up Miss Miss Rothrock because she is also a Scranton product and, well, it would feel incomplete if I did not include her.

In any case, I would be remiss in the history of my show if I did not include my time in the Arcade Dojo battling it out over these sorts of games by myself or against other players.

Losing repeatedly Against chain smoking arcade rats too young to be able to obtain tobacco products legally.

Or against others who approach these titles in a technical, career minded and far too serious manner.

Only to be left wondering how someone like myself would be just so damn bad at video games.

Mostly because I play games for fun and enjoyment, not like a coked up Wall Street trader sweating out a bad day on the market.

The following list is hardly comprehensive or exhaustive.

I could only get my hands on certain titles over the years, and this genre is generally beyond the scope of my preferred type of game.

But Despite that, we'll jump into the ring, fists up, chin down, keep that guard up and get on the way.

If we're going to start this list, let's start it off right.

And that, dear listeners, would be with 1991's Street Fighter Two.

If anything, this was the game that started it all, at least as far as hyper competitive fighting games exist.

When this first appeared in my local arcade, a small 2 shop franchise called Top Dog, the lines to play this game were out the door with kids and young adults lining up to slap down there.

Got next game quarters in between rounds of shitty overcooked chicken sandwiches.

The place sold and the big beat em UPS on offer the same year as Street Fighter two.

This is also the first I heard anyone making anti Asian racial slurs over.

Especially when our small group of local Asian kids, almost all of them the children of the various Chinese food restaurant owners across the Wyoming Valley, started beating the pants off the white kids like it was their job for it's time.

It was one of the most beautifully animated games on the market and the most responsive, and the one that set the standard for how most every fighting game mechanic functioned or tried to riff off of.

My character of choice was Blanca, the electric monster man of the crew, who stood out like a sore thumb compared to the remaining human fighters.

And I really tried to make it work for me, but I was just so bad with the character.

Of course, I wasn't any better with any of the other characters, and I certainly didn't beat the game until I brought bought the home version on the SNES, one of the more than 6.3 million cartridges sold for that system and played as a single player.

But at least I can say I was there for the cultural flashpoint that would be this game and would guide games going forward.

What is there more to say really?

A collection of social outcasts?

The extreme martial arts training in a world where one can imagine guns were never created or placed as the common means of self-defense and no one actually needs to work a day job to earn coin for basic necessities.

Fight it out to stop a third world dictator from doing third world dictator shit I guess.

In increasingly colorful environments and with supernatural techniques that border on sorcery, said dictator who holds no real power beyond that of a bully with magic and Nepaulette fetish, has somehow influenced or ruined the lives of all these fighters.

And by Christ, the only way to fix this deep psychological trauma is by fist to teeth in the most garish way possible.

That's the plot.

But Street Fighter Two didn't have to care much about that, as it earned a grand total of 10 billion in total revenue by 2017 and received no less than 7 updates in the form of new arcade cabinets that included new fighters, increased game speed, additional moves, and graphical updates, which is impressive by anyone's standards.

I stopped playing Street Fighter too long before the 1990s came to an end, long past the repeatedly defeated by other players and bored of the title as a whole.

And I can guarantee you I'm still as bad at this game today as I was back then.

But that hardly matters.

And regardless of that, I am glad I played it, glad I tried my hand at this, glad I found out that this was not really ever going to be my jam.

Street Fighter 2 is still an important title, the critical title many might say.

And it did, in a roundabout way, lead to games I loved and mechanics that I that have bled into other titles that I would spend far more time with.

The next time I would even touch a Street Fighter title would be 2010 Super Street Fighter Four.

I'm not going to lie to you, I only bought this game because the characters from Final Fight were available to play as in this case Cody, and that was the only character I used to play the game with.

By and large, I realized so much had changed.

Many of the characters were from other games in the series that I didn't recognize.

I still don't know who the final boss was supposed to be, even though I beat it and had some kind of back story I couldn't care less about.

I never attempted to play the online matchmaking on the Xbox 360, which the game was clearly designed around and with online competitive play in mind.

Mostly I wasted money on this title during a time when money was tight just to spend a few hours beating up a new group of wizard martial artists with a character from a game I truly loved from almost 2 decades earlier.

And once I beat the game, I sold it off as soon as I could.

Sorry if that upsets any Street Fighter diehards, but this is all I know of this title.

Never really tried the other characters, but I like the bigger, chunkier art style of the characters where all the dudes looked like ridiculously overblown brick shithouses and the ladies were almost all voluptuous muscle girls and otherwise the game sucked.

Moving on.

Next on our tour is another landmark fighting game title and that would be 1992's Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat stood out for two reasons.

The digitized actors portraying the characters and of course the cartoonish blood and gore that caused no small amount of pearls to be clutched by the But who will think of the children, vapid, empty between the ears type of parents, slow witted politicians and backwoods ambulance chasing lawyers looking for more money in social capital.

The fighting, if it could be called that, was bare bones at best.

The cast is a pastiche of borderline racist and culturally appropriated character tropes and third string Hollywood tough guys.

The plot is thin, a quick write up about the Earth's best warriors holding a secret lethal tournament to keep the forces of parallel dimension from invading and somehow crushing Earth's resistance through Mystic means.

But it was that childish splatter that separated mortal combat from the herd and was able to catapult it to superstardom that is still ravenously appreciated even to the current day.

Not too shabby for a game developed within one year of the release of Street Fighter 2 with the express purpose of competing with that game.

And also not too shabby to help usher in the era of the ESRB in the United States, along with a few perceived gory and unrelated games.

So congratulations on changing the cultural landscape.

See folks, low culture can hit just as hard as high culture, but often with a visceral and bone crunching shot to the jaw rather than a mind bending Galaxy brain intellectual experience.

I played this one too, usually a sub Zero the ice ninja, and I was just as bad as this one as I was a Street Fighter too.

Additionally, I could barely pull off the fatalities even when I knew what the code was, how to do them.

I had the debates on which was better, the SNES sweat version where the blood was censored to keep Nintendo's family friendly reputation squeaky clean, or the Sega Genesis full gore version because they were trying to court the adult and middle school edgelord market.

And you know what?

In the fullness of time, both console versions sucked.

Only the arcade version was the good one that I enjoyed.

This was also a game where the schoolyard was buzzing with game rumors before the days of the Internet, filled with half remembered and badly misinterpreted snippets from articles in Game Pro or electronic scamming Monthly about secret characters being found at a certain conditions, or rumors of extra moves and character nudity.

Because if you're going for grindhouse gut busting sleaze, why not throw tits and ass into the mix?

Most of that would be proven false in time, but all of it helped to grow the legend of Mortal Kombat from simple knock off with exploding skulls to bonafide cultural juggernaut.

And yes, I was there too.

1993 would see the release of Mortal Kombat 2, an expansion on the lore of the first game from a year earlier, and the character roster as well.

Having not quite been able to seal the deal, the defenders of the Earth Realm would be transported to Outworld where the boss enemy slash Elder God that the final boss of the first game worked for is now the final boss of this game.

Most of the roster of the first game returns, but is assisted by some new ally warriors and more enemy warriors that are needed to the out world.

Many hideously mutated by the energies and sacrifices made just by living in this twisted reality.

The plot is still thin enough to see daylight through.

Pick a character, kill everyone in your way until you kill Shao Khan, the out world Supreme Leader.

Receive your canned endings.

The fatalities were more excessive than ever.

There were more of them.

The graphics were still digitized actors doing shadow boxing and jump kicks against a blue screen and slapped together like Barbie dolls, but they were cleaner and more detailed.

The game won awards, continued to court controversy wherever it went due to the blood and explosions of ridiculous amounts of bones and sloppy organ meat, and it was just more of the first game in the best high definition of fidelity 1993 could offer.

Continuing my history of picking overly complex characters I was bad at playing.

I would routinely be Baraka, I guess, because I had a poorly disguised rage issue then, and then playing as the persona of a terribly mutated and hideously ugly blade monster was the persona I wanted to portray during that time, and I thought he was cool.

But I would get my ass handed to me pretty much by anyone who walked into the arcade and plunked their quarters into the machine next to me.

So the shine wore off pretty quickly after the first six months of the release of Mortal Kombat 2.

That would be the last time I would play the game myself and the Mortal Kombat franchise entirely.

But for all you continuing fans, good for you.

Keep going with your love of the series and always remember Grand Theft Auto somehow and against all odds made an actress in a revealing outfit sawing a man in half of the metal fan like something out of the Terror Fire movie franchise seem quaint by comparison.

1991 would also be the birth year of the Fatal Fury franchise, again developed by X Capcom employees who left after the 1987 debut of the original Street Fighter title.

The game was developed completely separate from the knowledge that Street Fighter Two was even in development, and was released many months after.

Street Fighter Two was already an absolute phenomenon.

Fatal Fury, much like Samurai Showdown, would be the first time I'd be able to get good at fighting games, mostly because no one around me was really interested in playing Fatal Fury or SNK titles when both Street Fighter Two and Mortal Kombat were on offer.

I mean, in a world of wash and cheaply available filet mignon, why would anyone willingly choose a cheeseburger?

But I did just that.

The S&K games just suited me better.

They were slower paced, more reliant on proper timing of attacks than combos and speed.

The 2D pixel art graphics were perhaps not as crisp or vivid as Capcom's landmark titles, but they had a charm I could not deny.

And often the games used a technique where the characters in the action would zoom in when they got close in proximity and zoomed out to encompass the greater background and distance when the characters pulled far apart, and would even use different planes of the fighting field to create depth and perspective and add to the chaos of combat.

In Fatal Fury, you got to play as terrier Andy Bogard, the adopted sons of martial arts legend Geoff Bogard, or their friend Joe Higashi, A Muay Thai expert.

All three get set on the trail of villain Geese Howard, Jeff's old rival who murdered him in cold blood years earlier.

With the Bogard boys witnessing the heinous act already, the story feels more personal than a World Warrior competition, and all the enemies are just the various gang leaders and tough guys around their hometowns Southtown.

When Geese calls for a tournament called King of the Fighters and brings all these small time hoods together, the boys see an opportunity.

Fatal Fury has a simple plot, but boy, it sure feels like more sane and workable than the wild swings bigger franchises took.

And that's not saying a whole lot.

The special moves are not executed the same way Street Fighter Two, but I was able to accomplish them with greater ease and consistency than that title.

I got really very good with Terry and Joe and was easily able to defeat the CPU opponents.

I bought the SNES version of this title too, and despite some necessary cuts to the SENES version due to hardware limitations, I got just as good at that game as I was in the arcade.

Unfortunately, I was never able to test my skills against a live player at the cabinet because, as I said, I was the only one playing these titles at the local game dens and bowling alley arcade areas.

But of all the fighting games out there, I enjoyed these the most, and I stuck with them the most.

Or at least until the arcade owners got rid of the cabinets to make way for newer titles that were making more money, of course.

Oh well.

Released one year later in 1992, Fatal Fury 2 quickly became a fan favorite in Japan in just under the success of Street Fighter that year.

Yeah, Street Fighter 2 is really the early 1990s metric we are measuring everything against.

Why was it beloved?

It may have been the marked improvement of the graphics, possibly the availability of an improved and more complete roster of playable characters beyond Terry, Andy and Joe, or the improved complexity of the execution of the game play.

Or perhaps the new stable boss characters that led up to Wolfgang Krauser, a man seeking to defeat the man who killed Geese Howard.

Or maybe it was the introduction and inclusion of my bouncy Shiranui, who right off the bat had two big reasons why a mostly male audience would love her characterization that had nothing to do with her personality or intelligence.

Who can really say what happened in the year to change things?

But in retrospect, the game did well.

It had a good reputation in its time, as critics saw it trying to reach the level of its aforementioned direct competitor, and in retro reviews it has also been seen as favorable, if not exactly great, but a shining example of a product of its time.

I also got the SNES copy of this game and that I mastered, and at the time of this recording, the home console port is available on Nintendo Switch Online.

At least for those of you who haven't already totally legally emulated it somewhere else.

Sorry, not all of us have the fucking time or patience to go poking around dodgy websites looking to play abandoned Ware versions or hacks of 25 plus year old games the primary development companies can no longer support and no longer care to support.

What I do know is that my local arcades growing up this title set as empty as a ghost town.

I think the only time it got played was when I was playing it usually once a week on Fridays or Saturdays when the local small town coal cracker youth had too much time on their hands and nothing much to do with said time aside from work, low paying jobs, or ignoring overdue homework and beginning to plan what they would do post high school.

Most of which started with the phrase once I get out of this town dot dot dot.

And unfortunately, Fatal Fury too didn't last long when the Arcada was placed in two months after it was.

Arrived, it was gone, replaced by a crane machine that was already bringing in more coin from the suckers than any coin op brawler ever would on its own.

1992 would bring another under loved SNK classic to arcade.

It's called Art of Fighting, which was set in the same fictional universe as Fatal Fury.

You can only play AS2 characters Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia, who are on the path of finding Rio's kidnapped sister Yuki by beating up every street tough in 1978's version of Southtown on the way to a mysterious figure known as Mr.

Big, who will then lead to Mr.

Karate and Yuki's recovery.

And right before she blurts out the identity of the mass Mr.

Karate, the game ends on a cliffhanger.

You only get one guess, dear listeners, as to who this Mr.

Karate may be related to in Fatal Fury.

When Art of Fighting did stand out on its own was firstly making the sprites of the characters quite large and they would grow larger as the fight zoomed in.

Second, the team at SNK was trying to go for a fully dramatized and realized story, something not much seen in fighting games till this point.

Additionally, the fight showed real time damage to the characters that they were taking, such as swelling, bruises, and bloody noses as things got worse.

Finally, this was SN KS introduction of various super attacks, or what they called the desperation attacks that could only be performed if the character's health was low, ensuring that you could pull victory from the jaws of defeat provided you could discover and perform the maneuver properly.

I think for the time, this was one of the first examples of a shared universe in fighting games that wasn't a direct sequel of sorts.

I enjoyed the hell out of this title, but I wasn't good as it as I was the other SNK fighting games of the era and I didn't own the home port.

This is another one that disappeared quickly from my local arcades, mainly due to Say It with me now Kids Street Fighter Two and Mortal Kombat being a thing at the same time, as well as several high profile beat em UPS all competing for limited space and limited quarters.

It's too bad this game got 2 sequels that I never got to play, and while there is a dedicated fan base of old fighting game codgers out there who love this title, I don't really think a God's due in the time in which it existed.

Man, I just can't stop talking about SNK.

My next title of theirs I would play would be exclusively on home console for me, in this case the early days of the PlayStation One with King of Fighters 95.

This is the title that would introduce me to the concept of team battles and fighting games well before Marvel versus Capcom, in which you would pick three random fighters from across the pool of SNK games that were available by 1995 and keep fighting through other three person teams until every single member of that other team was defeated.

Often these would be devolve into endurance battles more than anything else, slugging it out until whoever I had left and whoever the game engine had left.

We're down to our last regs of health, and it would be more of a lucky shot to determine the winner.

I don't know then and I don't know now who most of the characters were, and I couldn't care less, but I know they all have significant plots tied to the extended SNK fighting game universe.

Which is an odd thing to say that these games had a plot not just being flashy Sprite or digitized active expositions.

I usually had the following team members on my rotation, Terry Bogard, Kim Kapwan, King, Kiyu Kuzunagi, and Robert Garcia.

Usually my favorite team members.

Although I did try the other fighters, but I found I didn't like their move sets as much.

I wish I could say more about the game.

I know I played it a lot, beat it frequently in story mode, and never played it against anyone but the computer, but it was a lot of fun.

One more in the fighting game library.

That was great for me and that's all that mattered.

Here's a weird one for you folks.

1995's Fighting Vipers was based around the fully 3D theme in fighting games that was inspired by the 1993 release of the title Virtua Fighter, a title I only played once where everything looked like the PlayStation One's older, uglier cousin.

But the big idea here was the chubby Polycon crew were all wore homemade armor that could be broken off in chunks, and the fighters were armed with things like a skateboard, electric guitars, and other unusual combat instruments.

The whole thing had a grimy feel to it, like a low stakes and even lower class Tekken with a fighting crew made-up of junkies, middle schoolers, drunks, escapees from a group home, and for some reason Meatloaf's character from Fight Club thrown in before that was a thing.

All ineptly brawling and dirty piss soaked in needle strewn alleyways for the privilege of beating up the mayor of their small town.

I'm sure there was a plot here, but I was less than interested.

This cabinet was loud, bright, flashed like it was trying to induce epilepsy and passers by, and I only played it a few times before deciding that for all its high jinks and outside the box approached fighting games, this one was just not for me.

In 1998 the fighting game world would see a new evolution with the arrival of Soul Calibur, a fully rendered 3D arena based fighting game where everyone had a weapon of some sort and they were all fighting to obtain a powerful sort of cause style artifact known as the Soul Ledge which would try to dominate the world with them.

By 1998 the sprites, while highly stylized and anime looking, were a giant leak away from the simplistic look of Virtua Fighter or early Tekken games and flowed better in combat.

The performance was smooth and throngs of players flocked to the cabinets, becoming the third most successful game of 1998.

The Dreamcast port of the game sold 1,000,000 copies in 1999, becoming the second most successful game of that system of all time.

This was also the game where our now slightly larger throng of Chinese restaurant order Scions in Scranton had migrated to once they got tired of being called every sort of incorrect Asian slur over Street Fighter 2.

Really.

You haven't lived until you heard a Chinese kid stare down a fourth generation Irish Italian white kid and reply I'm not a gook, I'm a chink moron, Get it right and left the budding white supremacist with nothing to say.

Now As for Soul Calibur itself, I kind of low key hated this title.

I'm not saying the game was objectively bad, it has no inherent flaws in play.

I could detect the graphics went above and beyond for 1999 3D fighters, but I thought it sucked.

I didn't like the look of it, having grown up on 2D pixel art.

I didn't like the play of it, and I really could do nothing but lose against players who played this like it was their job.

I even lost to the CPU consistently.

Soul Calibur truly was not the game for me, but I can at least appreciate it was where games were heading and the lessons learned there have gone on to benefit games I love now.

But still, fuck this game and this whole series.

1995 would see the release of Samurai Showdown 3, although it wouldn't get to.

I wouldn't get to play it until 1997 at a failing cut rate and discount.

Mall Arcade at the Viewmont Mall, repurposed from a local pizza restaurant in its food court into a cheap as shit arcade meant to keep kids busy while their parents shopped.

I was in college then and I spent a lot of my time 1 semester on the break between my the end of my 8:00 AM class and

the start of my 2:00 PM class running down the road to the mall to get lunch and play this title.

I've talked at length about the first two titles and even have done separate showcase episodes on both of those titles, but not the third one.

Why?

Because this title marked a much more serious turn of the series.

Showdown 3 is far more dark, sometimes unnecessarily gory and overall more melancholic than previous entries.

A lot of the light hearted characters were removed, new characters, all the tragic backstories were added, and the lead character of Hamaru was scaled back to the new lead of Shizamaro Hissame, a young boy with amnesia wielding an umbrella in his search for the warrior who destroyed his life.

So he believes while this game is set between the first two titles, you'd never know it.

The game also introduced the slash and bust system, which is a good aligned or evil aligned version of each character who where moves and outcomes were altered slightly.

This showdown didn't feel like Samurai's showdown despite the characters in the title.

It felt mean, spiteful somehow, like it had lost all of its charm in trying to keep up the grim and grit of other games in the fighting game world and what they were doing, rather than making its own identity.

I fell out of love with the series at this point, and I never went back to it.

I really tried to play the other titles in the series, and I do think the pool of fans of these games shrank significantly afterwards.

It's too bad, really.

But lesson learned, I suppose.

Holy cow did this next title come out of nowhere in the late 90s to shake up the complacency of the arcade scene in the States.

1998 saw the release of Marvel Versus Capcom where the select roster of the two publishing companies fought it out tag team style against some of the quite literally biggest villains in the Marvel Universe.

This is the result of a successful working relationship Marvel had with Capcom on the beat em up for the Punisher.

With a roster of 15 characters to choose from and build a two person team, there were even more assisting characters from both worlds that could be called in to help in battles.

I didn't play this one as much as the throng to get to.

It was unbelievable, but it certainly helped the arcade scene limp along for a few more months until the shine wore off.

It certainly had spectacle, I'll give it that.

And when I did get to play I would routinely pick Wolverine and Gambit.

2 hard characters to play for new players solely on their strength as Marvel favorite characters of mine and I completely ignore the Capcom side of things.

And for my trouble I got my ass handed to me by players and the CPU.

But I'm not mad about it.

I felt with this title like it was the last opportunity to be part of something great in the arcade scene as it limped along to its death to be part of the moment and the conversation had a lot of fans back in the day but got buried in the property owners over the decades since.

I'm glad for the fans around the world who saw this title and its sequel resurface in a proper modern playable mode.

And since with the recently released Marvel Versus Capcom Fighting bundle, Marvel Versus Capcom was the last truly special quintessential arcade title before it all went to home console or disappeared entirely, this series was a worthy send off or a nearly 3 decade niche of the American popular culture, at least in my opinion.

In 2011, I figured I would have a shot at reclaiming a crown I had long since thought had passed on.

That year saw the release of Marvel Versus Capcom 3, but some things have changed.

The teams were now three player, not 2, much like King of Fighters and the pixel Sprite graph graphics were replaced with a more modern graphics that made all the characters look like they had an oil slick Halo surrounding them at all times.

I think trying to capture the look of the comic books.

The rosters had changed to include characters that have come along since 1998, but somehow this title felt less epic than its previous two installments.

More flat somehow.

Why did I even get this title then?

Well, much like with Super Street Fighter Four, in the trailers I saw a few characters from old franchises that I hadn't seen in some time as playable again.

Mike Hagar was there, Tron Bonn was there, the dude from Bionic Commando was there.

Even if it was the crappy newer 1.

I think I really just wanted to play a bunch of old Capcom titles from their glory days again while they were in their Crapcom era, and this was the only way I was going to get to do it.

I didn't hate this game, but I was sad for it.

It was a shadow of its former self, no longer fresh or great, more of an annual product that was 10 years too late.

If you had told me Ubisoft or EA had developed this game, I would have completely believed you.

It didn't feel like Capcom or Marvel, and it certainly didn't feel good to play.

I beat it, but I never touched it again afterwards.

There was no crown to be found here, just an empty throne awaiting a king that would never come again.

Before we leave the Marvel and Capcom spheres behind, I would be wrong if I didn't mention my time with 1996's X-Men versus Street Fighter.

Playing more like Street Fighter Alpha in approach and appearance, this limited 2 on 2 battle system hailed from only the two name franchises, which made the rosters much smaller and more manageable.

Magneto versus Rio, Wolverine versus Ken.

It felt more like something had happened where in the middle of a round of the X-Men Beat Him Up game, the neighboring Street Fighter to arcade cabinet got tipped over and crashed into X-Men, spilling all of the street fighters into the world of mutants superhuman powers.

It was like mixing your two favorite types of sugary breakfast cereal to find a whole new flavor that you loved.

This one set the standards for the future Marvel versus Capcom games, and the plot was very thin, amounting to nothing more than two franchises beating each other up until they earned the right to take on and take down a few of the most powerful Marvel mutants and the mutant killing Sentinel robots.

But the game certainly made you feel like a bad ass doing so.

I had more success with this title in competition against other live humans and almost made it to the end against the computer.

Maybe because it was simpler to control and not so focused on complex combos and frame by frame timing.

And this one had an unusual amount of longevity in the top dog arcade environment until it was replaced by the 1st Marvel Versus Capcom game a few years later.

Quite impressive considering the things that happened to the other two cabinets on this list.

1994's Killer Instinct.

I don't really know why so many people and players suddenly didn't about face away from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, a jump on the bandwagon of this game, but they did for about a year or so.

Killer Instinct always struck me as a way more violent Donkey Kong Country with a fairly rodent unimpressive graphics and play, but I at least tried it.

Much like with John Talbane and Dark Stalkers.

I play exclusively played Sabre Wolf.

I guess I was in my werewolf gaming era.

I did OK at Killer Instinct, but it never really got going to be the title.

I stuck to.

A buddy of mine growing up loved it and it became his game where he was the one beating ass left and right in the arcades.

With it, I could only stand and watch in a reverence, but considering I destroyed anyone who came my way with Samurai Showdown, I finally understand what that feeling was like.

I can only assume it's the same feeling a high level player like Justin Wong feels every time he gets behind the controller when he sees a newbie coming his way.

And I've said the story before, but it bears repeating.

The one anomaly from the Top Dog salad days around this game was our first appearance of our gamer girl.

And this is where I lose any female audience I ever had.

You see, any time anyone female appeared in Top Dog, it was because they were a hairy chain smoking mother, or a bored girlfriend, or possibly one of the chicken sandwich serving employees who couldn't wait to get off shift out of that noisy and greasy pit.

But this young lady and I never learned her name came to play, and her cabinet of choice was killer instinct.

It was obvious that she was a few years older than me at the time, so I was too shy to go and say hello and be friendly.

But I'm glad I didn't back then, as being the only lady in the room interested in gaming got her way too much of the bad kind of attention, and me being awkward and chatty was only going to make it worse.

She was an absolute demon with her chosen character of Orchid and routinely thumped the shit out of the cool guy.

Try Hearts lit, cigarette dangling from their lips and scarred over cystic acne, turning their faces into mock ups of the lunar surface who always went away grumbling about the quote UN quote crazy bitch who just embarrassed them.

So ladies, I get it.

I get why you have to interact with men a certain way.

This woman even showed up around Halloween that year, dressed up as Orchid to continue her reign of supremacy, which I give her a lot of credit for.

And then she was gone, like a legend on the wind.

I don't want to say I pitied her, because I feel like that would have been insulting, but I feel like she wanted friends and camaraderie that was just never going to be there in Scranton in a rundown Chicken Shack Arcade in the Ninth in 1994.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

Maybe I should have at least said hello in solidarity.

I hope wherever she is in life she has done well and has continued to dominate at killer instinct or in whatever she ended up doing.

If this stupid show somehow reaches your ears, miss, whoever you were, I saw you and I got your back.

Some years ago I reviewed a game called Iron in Blood Warriors of Raven Loft or the PlayStation One, and now it has rightly been derided as one of the worst fighting games of all time.

But that at least got trapped on home console and I was invested in it as a Dungeons and Dragons property.

However, 1990s Pit Fighter was, by accident, a fluke.

Something of an abortion of gaming that is still regarded as absolute hail in the arcades, forgotten as soon as anything better came along.

One of the first use of digitized actors instead of sprites, and something of a cross between Mortal Kombat and Smash TV, The game played like a brick to the head.

It was slow, clunky, the digital sprites were muddy and fuzzy around the edges, there were no moves beyond punch and kick cycled at 3 frames per second.

And holy fuck, what a bad title it was.

The kind of that made you feel like you needed a shower afterward.

You could only pick 3 playable characters each.

Some type of pro wrestler, boxer, or martial arts trope fighting against whoever the hell Atari could round up out of Central Casting or off the streets for 20 bucks that week.

So a lot of the opponents look suspiciously like tired Los Angeles gym rats or the local unhoused population in desperate need of food and access to a shower at the shelter.

I found this game alone and abandoned at the back of the arcade, still plugged in and hungry for quarters, so I tried it for a bit.

The experience was not one I would wish to replay for fun at any point in the last year or so.

This game was even put up against Iron and Blood in the ongoing at the time of this recording.

List of bracket style worst fighting games being done by YouTube.

Matt Mcmuscles and Pit Fighter dethroned the Vampire Killers after a several month reign of shit supremacy.

It would be a long time before Pit Fighter would lose that crooked crown as well.

But Pit Fighter is at least interesting as a step in video game evolution, the same way the platypus or the narwhal is an interesting step in evolutionary biology and is yet still around instead of having died off.

Should we at least regard Pit Fighter for its contribution?

Stumbling drunk into the spotlight so Mortal Kombat could later run?

Who could say?

But for my money, well, I want my money back, thank you.

And there you have it, dear listeners.

Those are all the fighting games I ever got to try, beyond the few I have singled out for the show.

This is a bizarre list of heroes and villains, all Sarans and oddball favorites, well beyond the limelight occupied by the few.

There is definitely a certain level of nostalgia here for me, tied to a decade of my life surrounded by bright lights, greasy smells, access, and evolving view of the world from the living room to the wider society in which we all live.

As I stated, this is hardly my preferred genre of game, and while I respect the fighting game community, you have a passion for this type of game I can never truly understand.

That is not an insult or a bad thing.

We're just two people having gone separate ways in the road of gaming life.

But I certainly learned a few things by taking a walk in that world about the good and bad sides of competition, what I'm willing to put up with and what I cannot stand.

And I can at least say I am richer for the experiences.

I kind of had no choice for a long time if the arcade was your destination and fighting games was pretty much all there was on offer.

Maybe someday something will catch my attention again.

I will step into the ring one more time.

Maybe I'll find another series like the ones SNK produced that will become my new passion, and maybe not.

But like the characters in these games, every challenge, every victory is just one more step along the path towards a greater, more nebulous perfection of spirit or of an art, or of a passion.

A perfection that in truth, should never be reached and never be obtained as it leads to decay and stagnation.

Or, you know, sometimes it's just fun to be really good at punching dudes in the face.

Thank you for listening.

Deleted Saves would like to thank Brad Keith Gasper, Orton Wells Maslama, and Martin Kibbell for being patrons of the show.

If you would like to become a patron of the show, please go to patreon.com and check out Deleted Saves Podcast.

All donations go directly towards maintaining the show itself.

Thank you.