Fatal Fury Special

Now the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 is hardware from 1987 and its not quite as powerful as the Genesis or SNES. It has less RAM, a slower processer, and the HuCards (Cartridge) has less maximum storage space. However, the PC-Engine CD add-on allowed games to have several hundred times more storage space on an individual CD. This game in particular also required a 2 MB RAM expansion called the Arcade Card. These accessories made storage and RAM no longer an issue and the other hardware such as the video and processor could work at its full potential. In this review I'll mostly touch on how it compared to other 16-Bit ports and the Arcade.
For those of you not familiar Fatal Fury Special is a 2D fighter released by SNK for the Arcade and home consoles. It bears similarities to Street Fighter 2 and also brings some unique game mechanics to the table. It featured a great cast of characters, had a great presentation, and was very popular in the arcades. It was also the basis for the King of Fighters series.
Now booting the game up it has the Arcade intro but this console can not do scaling so Rugal doesn't move towards the screen like the original. The menus have a classic Neo-Geo look and the artwork in the menus better resemble the Arcade compared to the Genesis and SNES ports.
Visually the character sprites are very well detailed and almost match the Arcade in quality. The Sega-CD's port has characters sprites that more closely resemble the Arcade, but only that and color seem to be the only advantages over the PC-Engine CD visually. On the Arcade when characters would move to the back lane they would scale down in size. Since the console can't do scaling they instead quickly change into a slightly smaller version of their sprites. This is the only console port that did this and it's a nice touch of detail given limitations.
Compared to the other 16-Bit ports the backgrounds much more closely resemble the Arcade. It seems like the other ports changed them, scaled them down, and even, removed sprites. These are much closer but lack the layering capabilities of the original and there were a few things removed. Over all I was content with the effort made to capture the original levels.
A lot of people seem to say that the PC-Engine has better color than the Genesis but I personally think the color palette of the PC-Engine in many cases is too bland. In fact both the SNES and Genesis more closely resemble the Arcade color palette.
Over all we have much cleaner visuals on the PC-Engine CD version thanks to the vast amount of storage and RAM.
Getting into the audio, the music uses both CD Audio tracks during fights and the old PC-Engine hardware for menus. The CD Audio tracks are great, Arcade quality if not better. The music and sound effects using the old hardware are low quality even for this console. Some sound effects are even inappropriate for what happens. For example crashing into a barrel makes a beeping sound.
All in all the PC-Engine CD offers a much more gratifying experience than the Genesis, Sega CD, and SNES. The best fighter on the PC-Engine period is Street Fighter II Championship Edition in my opinion, but this one offers a lot of entertainment as well.