Fatal Fury has been a long favourite of fighting fans, never quite beating the lofty status of Street Fighter but always a popular choice. Fatal Fury Battle Archives Volume 1 offers PS2 owners the first 4 Fatal Fury games that came out on the Neo Geo in the early 90’s.

Fatal Fury is the most basic of the games on offer, one punch, one kick, a grab and a few basic special moves thrown in is all you need. There are only 3 characters to choose from, Terry and Andy Bogard and Joe Higashi. Each of them has a reason to take down the main boss Geese Howard, but you have to fight against a few others before getting a chance at the big boss. The graphics on this are as would be expected for a game from 1991, they look OK but a bit blocky and the pace of the fight seems a bit too slow.

Fatal Fury 2 has more familiar controls with a light and strong punch and kick, you also have a planes change to help avoid some of the more brutal characters. There are 8 characters to choose from this time around including newcomers Big Bear and Jubei Yamada. Add to this a Super Special Move and this is a more solid approach to the 2D fighting genre, it still uses the same character designs from the first game but has so much more to offer.

Fatal Fury Special has the return of Geese Howard, looking to take out the Bogard brothers and the mysterious Wolfgang Krauser from Fatal Fury 2. All of the great controls have been tweaked a little and now a few characters have combos. You now also have 16 fighters to choose from including Geese Howard for the first time.

Fatal Fury 3 is the real reason to get this game, there have been solid improvements in each game but this takes all of them and makes one of the best. There are a few less fighters at 13 but each one has been fine tuned to make a perfect fighting game. The speed of the fighting is perfectly balanced and the look has been improved so much that they no longer resemble their older bothers from the early 90’s.

Each game has the ability to choose your difficulty setting, from easy to hard and also included is a MVS mode which is the difficulty setting used in the arcades. A novel little touch is the ability to alter your characters appearance for each game, you can change most of the colour palettes for each fighter, giving them your own personal look.

For a budget price this is well worth your time, especially if, like me, you have wanted to play a good version of the older fighters but could not afford the mad high prices of a Neo Geo.