Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection Launches This July On Nintendo Switch

FINALLY!

Oh baby baby I had all but given up hope on this one. Day one for me, let's go! Crossing fingers for that good netcode and crossplay, although probably wishful thinking.

Yes, but I’ll be holding out for the physical version.

I already got these on the ACA collection, well besides Perfect but I can live without that.

I smell... Limited Run Games.

Cool. Guess I'm glad I didn't get any of these when they first launched on the eshop!

I was wondering if this collection will ever come, glad they finally got the collection ready. I'm also glad they finally include the full story uncensored version of SSV Special in the game. To me that is way better than the no story censored version of SS6. Still missing Samurai Shodown RPG though, the only NeoGeo Samurai Shodown game forgotten by history.

"We have rollba-"
SOLD!

Probably just get the new Samurai Showdown instead, based on the price of this collection.

@Supadav03 Or if you hadn't bought that game yet just wait for a sale and until all the DLCs are released.

Cool so Can we get the SNK Arcade Collection next? And they never gave us that Vol. 2 either. 😊

Yup, multi collections is the only way I'll buy Neo Geo games on Switch.

Will be all over this!

@JJtheTexan @tofarawaytimes Yeah I would have much rather had the RPG and N64 versions included, maybe even a release of VI or the NGPC games as well. From what I have heard V Perfect is just a rebalanced version of V Special so it doesn't seem like it will be that big of a deal. Neat for hardcore fans I guess but I would have rather this had more going for it.

Should've been a $30 package, not $40.

The online play has me sold. I’m in.

I already have the Samurai Shodown Anthology on the Wii, so I have no interest in this.

Worth the double dip (from the ACA NEOGEO releases) for the museum and rollback. So glad SNK is starting to come around to value better netcode options for the masses.

@retro_player_77 smart thinking. That’s probably the best way to go.

@JJtheTexan The NeoGeo Pocket Color versions of Samurai Shodown! 1 & 2 were basically portable versions of Samurai Shodown 64: 1 & 2. They had the same roster and story as the Hyper Arcade games but better gameplay over the janky 3D gameplay of those games.

@BulbasaurusRex Yeah but with this you got the unreleased SSV Perfect as well as the six NeoGeo MVS versions of these games along with online play and portability. The only attraction of the Wii version is SS6 which wasn't even that good and is missing SSV Special.

@BulbasaurusRex That version is 420p resolution, low-res Wii graphics; it’s ugly and dated. This new collection will be in HD with crisp graphics for modern TVs. If you’re a fan of the series it’s noticeably worth the upgrade.

They already sold it to me, but now it's final. Anyway... Why all the games I'm interested in this year launch in July? I won't be able to buy them all day one!

Streets of Rage 4, The Wonderful 101, Paper Mario and now this one...

@JayJ There was no Samurai Shodown game on N64. Samurai Shodown 64 was made for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade system. The closest thing you could get to Samurai Shodown on N64 was probably Mace: The Dark Age.

@DrDaisy Interesting, I thought there was a N64 game I didn't remember lol.

Yeah, Perfect is a cool addition, but I’d still rather they included #6 or some of the ancillary games.

I’ve been eying up the Wii Anthology (which is missing 5 Special, but that’s £6 as a standalone download). Think I’ll stick with that plan.

man and I thought I got ripped off buying the Anthology for PS2 at $25, yeesh.
samsho 5 special/perfect is not worth the extra $15, considering i only do local and arcade + the state of switch fightpads (outside of the recent horii announcement)

This is cool... I was hoping SNK would do something like this.

Golly this has taken a long time.

July’s looking even better.

I was reading a pretty interesting thread by Brandon Sheffield, who worked on this, who shed some light on how SSVP came about. Basically, SSVP was being worked on by a skeleton crew, led by the director of V, under request from Yuki Enterprise (presumably contacting the director directly), while VI was in development. They fixed some known bugs, added new story scenes and endings for the characters, etc. The weird thing was that SNKPlaymore had no idea it was being worked on until the day that one cabinet made it's way to a location test. It was only there for a couple hours until SNKP came to shut down the test. Fast forward a bit to when two guys from Digital Eclipse, Brandon and Adam, were visiting SNK for research for this collection when they learned of the legendary final NEOGEO ROM from that same director of SS V. They asked if the ROM was still around and, after some digging, it just so happens that it was...an employee had taken it home! (the original test cart was lost, but the ROM survived by sleeping in an old and dingy hard drive) The ROM was already complete, rough translations were made for the story due to time constraints, and here we are.

the full thread is here:
http://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1265472772928462849

@BulbasaurusRex @gaga64 I remember exchanging the Wii version of the SS Anthology for the PS2 version back in the day because Nintendo's anti-seizure methods on the Wii messed with the frame pacing and dropped certain animation frames, and also introduced a little input lag. The PS2 version was pretty much perfect, gameplay-wise. Graphics, eh, I'm not gonna hook up my analog PS2 to my capture setup when a nice, crisp, HD version is on the horizon...um, again. It served me well back in the day, so it's earned a rest.

Definitely getting this, and also downloading the PC version for free from the Epic Store.

I’m getting this for Switch and PS4. Not really impressed with another version of V in there since V is still my least favorite in the series.

i hope online multiplayer will be well populated but i doubt it...

what do you all think about online multiplayer?

Wowsers!

Awaiting Metal Slug collection.
Also, it would be nice to have a new one in the same style as Street of Rage 4.
One can dream!

@JJtheTexan I had never heard of SS64, and I’m shocked because I was living in Japan (and going to a lot of arcades) when it came out. You’re right that adding the two 3D games would’ve really made this collection special.

Already own it on the wii, but will probably pick it up again, i like the inclusion of bezel graphics.

The Code Mystics port of SamSho V Special is exceptional (the same team behind the excellent ports of The Last Blade 2 and Garou: Mark of the Wolves). If they get near that standard across all games, this will definitely have my interest

@masterLEON really, wow, had no idea the Wii version was so gimped. That, and the convenience of the Switch is making me rethink my plan. But without a PS2/3/4, I just wish a version of 6 was available on a Nintendo machine outside of Anthology. The completionist in me is dying...

@lovesushi I think it's great they're adding rollback to all these old games. It's so strange they haven't updated their modern games though. It would be great if the new Sam Sho, King of Fighters XIII and XIV got the same love

Holding out for the physical.

All the talk of 'HD' versions of old pixel art games makes me chuckle. Yes, a modern console may have a better quality video output than an old console, meaning the games may appear better on your TV, but the games themselves were drawn at the original resolution and all an HD output is doing is rendering each of the square pixels as a large cluster of pixels forming an equally square shape. The games aren't suddenly drawn in HD.

Digital Eclipse?

Still waiting for the volume to be fixed on the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection!

The price tag is too high and it would be better to have a complete collection with SSVI, the NeoGeo Pocket and HyperNeoGeo 64 Games.

I wish they would do a Fatal Fury and World Heroes Collection as well.

Gonna get this one

@BionicDodo You obviously haven’t played the Wii versions and compared them to the recent versions from the likes of Hamster. The difference is immediately noticeable.

@SuperWeird I haven't played the Wii versions, so made no mention of them in my comment. I merely stated that calling 240p type games 'HD' because they've been upscaled for an HD video output does not an HD game make. Putting a decent video out on an old console through something like an OSSC can yield very similar results.

@SuperWeird Honest question, I still have the Wii collection but hardly ever played it, how different are the versions in that collection vs the newer Hamster ones or this collection for someone that only plays offline?

@DrDaisy The strange part is that the machine is called the Hyper NeoGeo 64 but the hardware is more on standard with the PS1 which is less powerful than an N64. They're basically just adding up numbers to get to 64 rather than used an actual 64-Bit processor to make the game. This is true as Samurai Shodown: Warrior's Rage 2, the third Hyper NeoGeo 64 SS game was ported to the PS1 as Samurai Shodown: Warrior's Rage instead of the N64.

As with all my fighting games I'll be downloading this. I wish VI was in there but oh well. I would love to see the SamSho 64 games show up ANYWHERE at some point.

No Metal Slug collection?

Nice, i really didn't like V, but i keep hearing V Special is great, and V Perfect might be... perfect?

@nab1 The versions in this new collection will have potentially (good) online play (with proper rollback netcode), which all other versions, including HAMSTER's ACA NEOGEO doesn't have. Though, the standalone V Special release on PS4 was the only one to feature that previously. Then there's the new museum mode in the new collection which promises to be massive with lots of never-before revealed production notes and such, if you're into that sort of thing. (I am)

The Anthology Collections for the Wii and PS2 have Samurai Shodown VI. But the Anthology doesn't have V Special (one V Perfect, of course), a more balanced version of V but with the blood turned up to 12 and excessively bloody command input fatalities.

The Wii version of the Anthology Colleciton has some slight visual drawbacks as a result of Nintendo's anti-seizure measures back in the day. I touched on this a bit earlier in the thread, but basically on older games that have a lot of strobe effects or single frame flashes, the Wii version would extend certain screen frames to reduce the strobe effect or cut the screen flash entirely. The Anthology wasn't as bad as the Virtual Console NEOGEO games, which went as far as disabling the flashing life bar when someone is at critical health and reducing or removing the flashing effect on everyone's weapons. What still got cut are the full screen flashes of red whenever a weapon damages a character, the white screen flashing when delivering a killing blow in Samurai Shodown 2, Mizuki's (also from SS2) grab and slap still look choppy due to dropped animation frames (probably because it was animated on the ones, a new animation frame every frame), and and there is some slight hitching that'll happen every now and then due to dropped frames. Some people won't even notice, to be honest. Some people can feel it right away. I only know from experience since I've spent enough time in the older titles to know when somethings off or missing.

@gaga64 If the price is right, by all means get it for VI as there's really no other way. And the anti-seizure stuff I mentioned is more for the first 5 games.

@retro_player_77 It's too bad cartridges were so expensive in those days. A few SS games probably would have made their way to N64 otherwise.

@nab1 I used to own the Wii collection and thought it was going to be my definitive collection, and would never need to buy it again. Until I tried the Hamster versions, then I immediately realized how bad they were by comparison. I sold the Wii collection soon after. It’s worth the upgrade.

@SuperWeird Wow, you are unnecessarily rude. Which games are you referring to that I haven't played? I own many Hamster Switch releases and various other retro collections, as well as almost all 80s and 90s game consoles and an Open Source Scan Converter. The point I made was that everything shown on an HDTV is being displayed in HD (or it wouldn't fill the height of the screen). All content that wasn't captured or created in HD is being upscaled. Is it possible to mess up the displaying, upscaling or formatting of this material? Yes. There are many retro collection releases that do this, and the Wii Samsho games may well be among them. But the fact remains that a game made at a 330x224 resolution being sclaed to output at an HD resolution does not an HD game make. It may look great with nice sharp 'pixels', but it still isn't truly HD content. Again this doesn't mean there aren't ways to make these games look bad, as this obviously happens a lot, but these games also look great on an HDTV via a good RGB output and an OSSC. I know, as I've played the original Neo Geo hardware that way.

@BionicDodo The Wii versions of Samurai Showdown look like crap. They are stuck in 480p, the pixels are fuzzy. The Hamster games by comparison look sharp and crisp. There’s no denying the image quality is vastly superior on the Switch versions. That’s just a fact.

@SuperWeird I'm not sure why you are targeting this fact at me though. I have not played the Wii versions or commented on them at any point here. I just stated that great as the Hamster releases are, they don't suddenly make the games high definition, they just look good on an HDTV as they are properly displayed and upscaled.

@BionicDodo Fair enough. Apologies for coming off as rude.

@retro_player_77 @SuperWeird The home releases of the various Neo Geo games were pretty much arcade perfect already, so having the original arcade versions included isn't much of a perk.

Getting one extra (somewhat improved yet still derivative) game, upgraded graphics, and online play is nowhere near worth enough to spend so much money to double dip. I really don't care much about HD graphics when the original SD graphics already look as great as they do, anyway. Also, the pixels are not fuzzy if you still play your Wii games on a CRT like I do (specifically, I have my Wii U hooked up to both a modern HD TV and a CRT).

@BulbasaurusRex Makes sense. I'm playing everything on a 4k TV, so the better image quality makes a big difference for me. The online play is actually the biggest selling point too, otherwise I wouldn't bother rebuying these games. The Hamster games should have come with online play in the first place.

@masterLEON isn’t V Special on their Wii Anthology version ? It’s what I’ve been reading in multiple product listings.

I think I may have to get the Anthology if that’s the case. I feel shortchanged that they would not include the VI game. And if V Special is in the PS2 Anthology version, I’m good. I remember hearing back then how bad the Wii version was.

@Magrane It's just regular V in both cases, sadly. Here's a clip from the Wii version where the menu is included (timestamp 3:01)

The same person also did one for the PS2 version but no menu. (SSV is at 5:55 on that clip)

@masterLEON oyyyy...

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll just avoid them all. Lol