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Virtually Overlooked: Karnov
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.Talking about Fighter's History last week put us in a bit of a Karnov kind of mood (which we didn't realize existed until we were in it). Data East's Karnov is something that seems to have gotten into our NES collection by accident. Everybody seems to have a copy, but the game is too weird to have been intentionally popular. It's one of those games that someone lends you and then moves away, or that you get in a bundle at a garage sale, or from a closeout at a video rental store. There's not anything particularly attractive about Karnov, nothing that would cause kids to pick up the bald-fat-shirtless-Eastern-European-guy game off of the shelf. But, then, this was a system whose best-known mascot was a miniature plumber.
Virtually Overlooked: Fighter's History
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.Perhaps the best way to see the influence of Street Fighter II in early-to-mid-'90's gaming culture is to look at the other fighting games that sprung up overnight. Capcom is, of course, almost directly responsible for the rise of SNK, who made a longterm business from 2D fighting games. And Mortal Kombat is most assuredly a direct response to Street Fighter II, adding features the latter omitted, like ugly digitized graphics, over-the-top violence, and Claymation.But of all the copies, derivatives, and clones, the most clone-like may just be Data East's Fighter's History, otherwise known as "The game that Capcom tried to sue Data East over."
