Well, after speaking my mind a bit with that post yesterday about WOTW being a potential dissapointment (a thread which as usual has digressed a bit by now...), I picked up WOTW today for myself and me and my friend played for a few hours. I had read some of the posts earlier and wasn't expecting too much.
I was actually quite pleasantly pleased with the game. The animation is a bit choppy, but the graphics and music are fantastic (the voices need some work , IMO). The control is pretty decent, and I think the control would be very good with a fighter joystick (hopefully we'll all have one soon). The gameplay is definitely different from SFII and MKII and SamSho (I'm a big fan of SFII and SamSho; don't really like MKII all that much), but it's been a really refreshing experience so far playing a game with a unique playing engine -- I feel like I actually am playing a NEW game! Whoever said the computer is overlly cheap on the normal skill levels was exagerating a bit.. if you use the right combination of offense and defense, you can prevent them from throwing you. I think I can honestly say for sure that the computer is no more cheap than the MKII computer fighters as far as throwing goes...
Although the music is great, I play with the music volume lowered a bit ( a nice feature) just so I can hear what the voices are saying. I like to hear the ref's voice indicate when I've done an actual combo, etc... The voices do need work however. I remember when that 3do sampler came out and how we all complained like hell about how the ref's voice sucked. David Liu said that they would get proffesional voice actors and it would get a lot better. It sounds like the ref's voice is the same voice except that it's been "filtered" out a bit.. Well , guess we can't have everything... I also am a little irritated by the high jumps - more irritated actually because David had posted that this had been corrected - it hasn't. What happened here David? (Don't take this personally, I just want to know why it wasn't fixed)
So who's going to be the FAQ guy for this game. I'm a grad student and am pretty busy so I can't spend too much time on stuff like this... I'm sure we'd all appreciate the efforts of whoever that does though...:)
Well, my final opinion on this game is that it's definitely a good game to have at home on our 3do's, but it's not a game that can be released on the arcades and do well. I would strongly reccomend against an arcade release simply because arcade players won't spend enough time (and more importantly, the quarters!) to give this game a chance. SFII and ShamSho are probably better pure fighting games but WOTW does beat both of those games in terms of shear variety. That's what makes this game.
michel.buffa@cmu.edu