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King of the Monsters 1 & 2


fun2novel

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King of the Monsters

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Japanese monsters beating the hell out of each other in a fight to the death has been projected in the Japanese theaters all the way back in the early half of the 20th century. Being the 90’s kings of the arcade SNK decided to take their hand at the monster brawl formula and made King of the Monsters.

King of the Monsters is a 2D fighting game but it’s not a true fighting game either, it’s more like a wrestling game with giant monsters punching and kicking each other to the death. There are three gameplay modes to choose from, a Player vs. the CPU, 2Players vs the CPU and Player vs. Player each is self explanatory and don’t need to be explained what they mean or how they play. As far as the monsters go there are 6 sci-fi movie monsters to choose from but except for one or two the rest are really unimaginative and uninteresting to play as. They are just too generic with no defined characteristic to define or make them unique.

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The player moves through 3 or 4 Japanese cities one by one and defeating a monster in that city before moving to the next city and fighting another monster. What makes the game fun is perhaps the destructible urban environments full of buildings of all shapes sizes and heights and some unique buildings as well like a football stadium and a destructible bridge. Destroying small buildings takes no effort at all, the monster can just stomp on it and It will explode but the bigger building require more effort and need to be punched several times before they are destroyed. SNK made exactly what an environment in a game like this should be and completely fills in your expectations. Eventually even military tanks, helicopters, jets, and even some advanced laser weaponry is mobilized by the army but of course their efforts are useless against the enormous devastating monsters.

Once again the details SNK puts in their games also define this game as well with the monsters able to grab flying planes from the sky and thrown them at their opponent. It’s even possible to pick up a passing train right from the rails, an entire train with what can only imagined is full of people and throw that at the enemy. By the time the battle is over you could leave the entire city in a complete state of devastation, panic, fire, and utter destruction. Strangely there aren’t any people walking around the city although there are some, very few, cars driving around.

King of the Monsters is just a glorified wrestling game and it really feels like nothing more and nothing less than what you’d expect from a wrestling game. You don’t have a lot of freedom of movement and the environments are blocked on both sides with some kind of electric field, probably because the military set these fields up to contain the damage but how then can the monster move from one city ot the next if it can’t get through the field. It’s not enough to drain the enemy monster’s life, nope. You have to attack it so it will fall on the ground but even then it’s not enough, now you have to jump on him and pin him down while waiting for the countdown to finish, once again, just like wrestling, and just like in wrestling the defeated monster can escape being pinned down and the fight will continue until you repeat the process. But there is also a time limit  which if it down you lose the fight no matter if you have more life than the enemy.

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Some holds and throws will make the other monster drop power icons you can pick up. If you collect enough of those you’ll level up and become stronger. It’s a nice addition but ultimately doesn’t change much or makes things any more fun and you got to collect a lot of those power ups before you can level up.

The graphics have some pretty nicely detailed environments but most of the game is drawn as if it’s an early 16-bit game and not something you’d expect from an SNK arcade game in the 90’s. The colors are just too bland and too overblown with brightness and have an ugly contrast values and it just doesn’t look pleasing to the eye at all. The monsters suffer from this the most and that’s too bad because that’s what you’ll be looking at most of the time anyway. The game has some good visuals but it also, in a way, just looks ugly to look at.

The game has great ideas and utilizes everything pretty well however the sum parts of the execution leaves a lot to be desires. The game gets tiring very quickly, every environment is almost the same and looks indistigueshible from every other environement. The controls feel stiff and very slow at times which sometimes leaves the player wonder what he did wrong or what he did right. The lack of variety even the developers even force you to fight all the same monsters again once you already defeated them, retrace the same steps visiting the same cities and fighting the same monsters twice. It gets awquard to play eventually and stops being fun.

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King of the Monsters had great ideas and it utilizes everything it has pretty well, however the sum parts of the execution leaves a lot to be disered. The game gets tiring very quickly and gets boring pretty fast. Every environment is almost the same without much variety to make them different from any other environment and the lack of freedom of movement keeps you locked in without any shed of ability to explore and cause more destructive damage on the already panicking city. The controls feel very stiff and slow with every punch or kick takes a short delay before the results are shown on the screen. It’s understandable, these are giant monsters and it should take them a longer time to swing their punches or kicks or tails but this is a game and a game should also be fun to play. The lack of variety pervades into the even to the entire adventure as the developers had nothing else to offer, the game recycles the same 3 or 4 cities with different but same looking environments and when all the opponents are defeated the play has to defeat them again for no reason than just extending the game time. It stops being fun by the 3rd battle and just gets awkward to play.

The ending is very somber which leaves things open but it’s pretty obvious that that there is nobody else to resists the winning monster it’s free to rampage the world leaving nothing but bloody destructions in its wake.

The game does have a very somber ending which leaves things a bit open but it’s pretty obvious what happens next. Now that all the other monsters are defeated the surviving monster starts terrorizing the entire planet, or at least only Japan, leaving a trail of bloody destruction in its wake.

King of the Monsters had a lot of potential but and in some way it delivers but it also lacks something that would make it memorable.

 

King of the Monsters 2

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It is the year 1999, 3 years after the events of the first game, only 3 monsters survived their brutal war. Geon, now called Super Geon, the dragon Godzilla style monster of the roster. Atomic Guy, the amphibian and the most human looking of the monsters possessing great speed. And Cyber Woo, a giant mechanical Triceratops, essentially a giant robot. The citizens of earth believes these monsters will rule the earth and there’s just no escaping their raw strength, the military is obviously no match for them, in the movies the military could never stop a single Godzilla but this time there are 3 scary monsters. However… Earth is invaded by aliens and send their own monsters around the world and now original monsters must defeat the invaders because if there’s anybody’s going to destroy the earth it’s going to be them and no one else. Welcome to King of the Monsters 2.

First thing you notice are the graphics and what an improvement. They are lush and colorful with a much more detailed selection of color palate. There are fewer selectable monsters, only three, but each one is really detailed, has a great design, and has an overall a really good look to them. The alien monsters are all well designs and have their own fitting styles.

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The environments this time have a lot more details and even the really small buildings have their own personality, something that really lacked in the first game. You can still just walk over the small buildings and they will explode like in the first game but unlike that game this time you can actually pick up the big and tall buildings and throw them right at the enemy’s face. As the monster this time goes all over the world the environments have a lot more variety this time around as well and there are plenty of very cool and special structures you can destroy in the game like the shuttle, a football stadium, the golden bridge and so on. The levels include an American City. A French City. Grand Canyon with destructible mountain ridges and plenty of aliens to kill and a bridge and a train to destroy. A Desert with a lot of big quick sands and sand swimming “sharks”, soon into the level a tornado comes and swallows the monster only to spit it out very far into the air as the monster eventually lands in what seems to be Egypt. A Sea Bed level, literally an underwater level. There are even some bonus levels.

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Like in the previous game in King of the Monsters 2 there are plenty of other distractions, like flying military jest which can be grabbed and thrown, submarines, helicopters, even civilian airplanes. The insane destruction the monsters leave behind is even more powerful this time because of all the explosive and burning buildings, bridges, and vehicles possible to destroy.

The environments are also a lot more open this time around and the player is free to move around, within the limits of the level or until he’s allowed to progress further, but at least there is no constriction inside this limited ring where it’s impossible to go beyond the electric force field. The player vs. monster mode is a lot more like an action adventure brawler in the style of Streets of Rage or Final Fight but each level has one main monster that needs to be defeated and the rest is just mindless fun to see how much destruction you can cause to the innocent city.

You can also collect different icons that restore life or level up your monster. It’s similar how it was in the first game but this time you only need to get one power to level up. Leveling up is limited to 2 times at most so you cannot get beyond level 3. Each level up adds one more health bar, adds a new special attack, and changes the monster’s color. But players got to be careful because there is an icon that will lover a monster’s level back by one.

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With redesigned and polished graphics, retooled gameplay, plenty of variety even for a short game, SNK managed to take a mundane boring and forgettable game and turn it into the awesome arcade action brawler full of action and a lot of fun little details and creativity the company is known for. King of the Monsters 2 is every giant monster fan’s dream come true.

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