Reviewed by C.K. Gan

If you're reading this, you probably already know something about Samurai Shodown 2, so I won't go into length explaining things about SS2. If you don't know much about SS2, please read other reviews or information on this site.

Samurai Shodown 2 was released in arcades and Neo Geo home systems around 1994. And I believe this PC port of SS2 was out in Japan around 1997, then the U.S. version of it was released about 2 or 3 years ago. Yes, that means this game is really old. When Samurai Shodown 2 was released in the arcades, the game looked very nice, one of the best looking games among other 2D arcade games at the time. You probably won't like the look of it when you see it now. But personally, It maybe an old game, but I find there is still certain charms in this game since it is one of the classics.

SS2 is the only SS game that was officially ported to the PC. So, this is like the only SS game we all can enjoy playing without having a Playstation or Neo Geo(yeah, I know there is emulators). The requirement for this game is very minimal. If you have a computer, you probably can run this game. The minimum requirement for it is Pentium 90 computer I believe. Anyways, I tried running this game on my old Pentium II 233mhz, 128megs of Ram, Windows 95(desktop computer), and also tried running it on my Pentium Celeron 600mhz, 64megs of ram, Windows 98(notebook computer), both of them can run the game on full screen mode smoothly without any problems (but I do kind of like the idea of playing SS on my laptop, you know, looking at SS on LCD screens just seem...different).

This is quite a perfect port from the arcade, but there is a little bit of loading before matches since the game runs off the cd. Good thing is the loading is only about 3 seconds with my 24X cd-rom drive(you should have seen the Playstation version of SS2, that takes about 20 seconds of loading each match) However, one strange thing I find about this port is that you can only play it on 16-bit or 256 color mode, but can't play it on 24-bit or 32-bit color...maybe that's just me. Anyway, that isn't a problem since I think the graphics still look very nice.

All in all, there is nothing wrong with this game, and I highly recommended getting it because the retail price for this game is fairy cheap. I got this game about half a year ago for around $15(actually the one I got is a Fatal Fury 3 and Samurai Shodown 2, 2 game cds combo). I think you could probably get this SS2 game alone for a much cheaper price, and I've seen it sold for around $5 on Ebay. Even if you don't like playing it on the computer like me(that's just me, I don't like playing games on computer, only like playing video games on tv screen), you can put the game cd on your cd player and play the music tracks of it. So, getting the game is just like getting the soundtrack of it too. In conclusion, you can't go wrong with a game/music cd that cost about $10.

For those of you who used to love playing this game in the arcade should definatly get this game. Even if you're new to SS or haven't played SS2, give it a try too. Oh, and if you have trouble finding this game at your local computer game stores(I got mine from a computer shop), maybe you should try Ebay.com or any other online game stores that sell pc games.