So I just finished SNK Gals’ Fighters and found it to be a quick romp that is perfectly suited to a handheld device, with often tense and fast fights, decent spritework, okay sound/ music, and great and surprising game play/ fighting mechanics that feel fairly fresh from fight to fight with little staleness or predictability with what your enemy will do.
I put forth a longer, more detailed review on the game page if anyone is interested as well.
Nice! I checked it out and it looked like something I could try. I’m not at all into fighting games, but the graphics look cute.
My first thought: Wow, they had very few pixels, but they did their best to use them to draw cleavages and bouncing boobies. 
I’ve been playing it off and on since it was released on the Switch, and have found it a good fun time. It’s not my first experience with Neo Geo Pocket Color fighters, so it’s not an entirely new experience for me. If you’re enjoying Gals’ Fighters, definitely check out the portable’s other offerings, most of which play very similarly. SNK knew what they were doing when they brought over their fighting franchises to the small but capable handheld.
I think it’s a relatively good fighting game to jump into for newcomers – it’s still challenging of course, but the combos are generally just forward and backward sweeps. Here is a nice page to check out for the moves – I recommend picking a character and just spending some time practicing one move at a time.
The struggle had to have been real… but the SNK team sure tried their best! Mai’s presence demanded it (maybe).
At any rate, I’m currently liking Shiki the best out of all the characters (that teleport), but I still need to give more of a fair shot for some of them.
Amazing! It’s super helpful!
I was curious about the Neo Geo Pocket Color and wanted to get a feel for the games that were available at the time. Don’t know if this is a “good” list, but what struck me is that virtually all the fighting games looked the same.
Now I’m a little bit disappointed. I thought that Gals’ Fighter’s cutesy graphics were unique, but it turns out, they were the same skins used in all of those other KOF games. :\
I did say they all look and play similar! shrug.emoji
I personally have to pick Yuri as the power behind her fist just feels so good if it connects and you can get a good amount of hits in before you have to jump away and wait for the inevitable recoil.
I do have to say that Yuki is the absolute worst though, mainly due to how cheap she can be with it being fairly easy to spam her slap move to beat your opponent into a corner, literally. lol
I started to play as Mai (since she’s the first on the list 
). It took a while to get comfortable with her moveset and I’m just now moving to other characters.
This is old, but is the screenshot for my first tournament win. 
As an aside, I’m playing using retroarch and using shaders is delightful. That’s how I get the cute LCD screen effect in the image above. You can get this nostalgicful recreation of an old CRT television.
Or, if you want to modernise things a bit, you can upscale the resolution. A very good shader is xbrz, which gives surprisingly good results:
I know it’s all subjective, but that last image hurts my soul.
As nice as CRT-filters can look, I’m not sure I’d use one when emulating a handheld device with an LCD-screen.
I also have to agree with the previous speaker here, that smudge makes me wanna cry.
Hi y’all sorry I disappeared for a while 
I’ve been working so much I literally haven’t played a video game for like 2 weeks other than a couple of my favorites here and there. I never finished Ecco the Dolphin, though for me personally I found the visuals of it to be far more enjoyable than the actual gameplay. But maybe I’ll get back to it one day!
I’ll check out SNK Gals’ Fighters this month, I won’t stress out too much about trying to complete it though, I never know what might come up at work or in life so I’m better off just chilling and dipping my toes in these retro games rather than stressing myself out trying to commit myself to completely finishing them. 
It’s an interesting experience for sure, but actually playing through the whole thing is indeed a big effort! Especially if you’re not using any kind of save states or cheats. It could be worth checking out a playthrough of the game on Youtube:
And if you want a laugh, apparently someone beat the game in less than 18 minutes, thanks to a lot of glitch tricks:
That little shimmy Ecco does to clip through walls off-screen… Just delightful.
I’ve been slow to dive into Onimusha, just been busy with other stuff lately. I was hoping other people would discuss it in the meantime, but oh well! Here are some of my first impressions.
First of all, it’s always good to see this. The sure sign of a classic!
But speaking of tank controls, I’ll go ahead and share some thoughts on that. On one hand, I find them useful for basic navigation, when each spot you run into has a fixed camera angle. But on the other hand, it does add an extra layer of difficulty for the combat in this game. I find myself preferring to use the joystick when I have a bunch of enemies to fight off. (I’m playing on Switch, by the way.) The game devs were at least nice to have your character automatically face the nearest enemy when you’re swinging your sword… But this can lead to trouble sometimes. You might want to be finishing off one enemy, but you end up facing a different enemy at the wrong moment.
I want to share some screenshots I’ve taken. The general design of the environments is very cool-looking, in my opinion! I know this re-release was spruced up a bit, but just from an aesthetic standpoint this does look like a title that would’ve wowed people starting to get into the PS2. We’ve got some nice and creepy locales here, lots of little details that really sell the devastation left by war and monsters. I’m a big fan of the lighting too.
I like these weird dinosaur samurai creatures. They roll into a Sonic spindash, looking like spiked wheels as they do so.
I will sadly admit, it took me a while to figure out that I needed to open an item menu here, in order to use the rope ladder (which I had forgotten I had). I’m too used to modern games doing this sort of thing automatically for me.
Yes! Skull candleholders!
When it comes to classic horror games (or horror-ish games) like this, reading all the flavor text is a must. So long as it adds to the mood, and doesn’t go overboard with the amount of text. Onimusha is doing great on both accounts so far.
Ah yes, classic Resident Evil puzzles. Gotta find those keys, gotta open those doors. And there sure are plenty of locked doors to deal with in this one.
All in all my first impressions for this game are very positive. I think what stands out the most for me right now is how the combat is handled. It feels like just the right amount of simplicity to jump into, and the right amount of complexity to play around with. You have your attacks, but also your guard – and your soul-vacuuming. You’ve got a constant risk-reward to work with. You hit an enemy a few times until it staggers, then you have to decide: do you attack the next approaching enemy before it gets to you, or do you suck up some of the soul orbs before they disappear? And if the enemy is already attacking, do you guard, get out of the way, or just attack quicker?
I really like the soul-vacuuming in particular, as it means if you’re in a real jam, you can give it your all and hope you get health orbs to recover with. Or, if you get special attack juice orbs, perhaps you can pull the win at the brink of death, by going for a big elemental attack against the boss. It feels good! Especially when this is a game where if you die, it’s back to the last save point you happened to use. When there’s room after room of potential monsters ahead of you, those save points are precious.
One last aside for now: I’m intrigued by this game’s take on historical figures from this time period. I find it interesting at least to compare the portrayal of generals like Nobunaga and Hideyoshi in this game, compared to other games (and other forms of media). Onimusha goes all-out with Nobunaga being crueler than even the demons, while Hideyoshi appears strange and perhaps buffoonish.
I’ll be looking forward to playing through the rest of the game this month. It’s been more enjoyable than I expected it to be so far…
While there has been some discussion on SNK Gals’ Fighters here already, I had yet to see anything regarding Onimusha, so I was about to head into this thread and ask if anyone had hopped on it yet, which is when I saw this.
I’m about to fire it up myself, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Unfortunately I’m having some issues already with my ultra-wide monitor. Both borderless windowed and full screen mode stretches the image to fill out the screen, no matter what resolution I pick, as seen here:
I was able to finish it a week ago or so. I am at work so I can’t discuss it at too great a length currently, but overall, I found it to be interesting, especially with the ability to switch swords, I just wish it was more intuitive in it’s mechanics, with the ability to switch swords on the fly, and not have to double back into menus to take care of certain things or access this or that when it could’ve been handled with a button, especially when the map is concerned as certain parts of the world are just all types of confusing as to where I am and where to go.
Ah, that’s too bad the PC release is difficult to work with. I seem to almost always run into some technical issue like that whenever I try to play anything on my laptop, so I rarely bother these days.
Yeah, these are more or less conventions of the era this game stemmed from. I too wish for instant sword-swapping, but oh well.
I fortunately haven’t gotten lost in this game yet though. I tend to get horribly lost in horror games, old games, and especially old horror games – but Onimusha has been good so far about providing lots of landmarks and set pieces for me to work with. The way the game doles out loads of small maps is another “product of its time” dealie, but at least it marks where you’re at on it (and which direction you’re facing).
Well, luckily after the initial hiccup it’s running smoothly. But I agree that I often find myself tinkering a lot before actually playing games on PC.
Which release did you play? I can do this with the right trigger/R2.
Oh, you’re a life-saver! You’re correct, the right trigger swaps your current sword. The left trigger also gives you your bow and arrow. And, just as convenient, pressing down on the left joystick brings up the map automatically. I had seen the controls screen at the start of the game, but it was a lot to try to remember all at once.
Now I find myself facing a new challenge… A really annoying puzzle! It’s too bad our skilled warriors are unable to jump over square tiles on the floor. (You’d think the ninja at least would be able to magically leap to the ceiling, like ninjas in all other video games!)
