Sonic Gems Collection - Sonic the Fighters.

Sonic the Fighters was released in Japan in 1996 for the arcades. It was on SEGA's Model 2 arcade board. The game featured polygonal characters from various Sonic games and some other SEGA games to round out the lineup. It was a 3D fighter based on the Fighting Vipers engine. Fighting Vipers was a serious fighter with a lot of depth that was designed as a counterpoint to SEGA's Virtua Fighter. Fighting Vipers featured walled in stages to Virtua Fighter's ring outs. Fighting Vipers allowed for trapping people against the walls, as well as slamming opponents into the walls. Fighting Vipers also allowed for running at the walls and leaping off of them into attacks. Sonic the fighters retains these elements. Virtua Fighter, Fighting Vipers, and Sonic the Fighters were all made by SEGA's AM2 division. AM2 knows fighting, pure and simple. AM2 took its Fighting Vipers engine and added some cute cartoon animals. They left in everything else. They've also added a shield system. Each player starts out with five shields. Shields will block lesser attacks entirely. Shields can be broken by strong attacks. Once you lose a shield, it's gone forever. Lose all five, and you're entirely defenseless. You can no longer block. It creates a great bit of strategy in deciding when and where to block. So you're left with Sonic slapping the crap out of Tails or Knuckles beating down Bean. Bean is from an early AM2 arcade game called Dynamite Dux for those of you who don't know. It was actually brought over here as a SEGA Master System game. It's great seeing cute cartoon animals slap the crap out of each other in a rather vicious fighting engine. The graphics in the game are classic Model 2, which means the polygonal makeup of the characters are entirely visible. You can sort of see the wireframe base beneath. You can see how they were constructed. The polygons are flat shaded. No real texture mapping. Despite being of ancient Model 2 standards, the game looks rather well nine years on. The controls are responsive, but do take learning the Fighting Vipers engine's timing. The learning curve is steep. The sounds are cartoon smacks and slaps. The music deserves special notice. It's awesome stuff. Easily one of my favorite soundtracks ever, and arguably the best fighting game soundtrack ever made. It's between this and Fighting Vipers 2. I have thoroughly enjoyed Sonic the Fighters. It was a long time coming. Sonic the Fighters was one of the great lost games in gaming history. One of those games that gets pulled out from under you at the last second. It was ported to the Saturn, but then never made it out. Canceled at the last moment for both the US and Japan. A game SEGA fans had given up for dead. Good to finally see it all these years later. Better still that it was worth the wait.

Next time we'll be seeing how Sonic R holds up.