World Heroes 2 (PC Engine) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
142A playthrough of Hudson's 1994 versus-fighting Arcade CD-ROM² game for the PC Engine, World Heroes 2.
This video shows two different playthroughs of the game: the first is of the "Normal Mode" with Johnny Maximum (or, as I like to think of him, Demonic Joe Montana). The second, beginning at 26:23, is of the "Death Match" mode with Fuuma.
I played this a ton on my PC Engine docked with the CDROM2 expansion and the Arcade Card Pro system card, and it's a pretty amazing spectacle. The Turbo hardware is powerful, no doubt, but to think that it would play host to some of the best Neo Geo ports of its era seems a bit ridiculous. Hudson was good at doing magic on their own console, and this port of World Heroes 2 was one of the most amazing feats that they pulled off. Granted, the arcade card provided a absolutely *massive* boost in system RAM (on the order of 2048k in addition to the memory added by the 3.0 system card), but still - the base system that's driving everything is an 8-bit console from 1987, yet it's version of WH2 utterly shames the SNES port of the game.
While a couple obvious concessions were made - the resolution is lower, there are load times (though they really do an amazing job of keeping them as short as possible - it's running off of a 1x CD drive!), and the graphics have been simplified somewhat, the PC Engine version looks insanely close when it's compared side-by-side with the Neo Geo original. All of the characters are here, they're huge, and they're all well animated. The backgrounds have lost their parallax scrolling and some animations, but that's a small sacrifice when you consider how much they've crammed into this port.
It also features excellent new CD remixes of most of the tracks, and even though the voices all sound a bit compressed, they're all present and clear.
Finally, the gameplay is surprisingly faithful to the original. Almost too much so at times, with special thanks to the ridiculously high difficulty level that survived the port completely intact. The controls are a good match for the Turbo pad since the original game relied on long-presses of keys to use hard attacks, and they're responsive and feel accurate.
But man, that difficulty level! If you found the Neo Geo version too difficult to have fun with, the PC Engine version will leave you feeling the same. If you enjoy the difficulty, though, or if you have a friend to battle it out with, I can't recommend this one highly enough. The SNES port was well done, but it just can't compare.
Hudson's was easily the finest port of the game to be put on a non-Neo Geo system until arcade hardware emulation became viable in the PS2 era.
It requires a fairly exotic collection of hardware to play, but if you have access to it, Worlds Heroes 2 is an unbelievably strong showing for the PC Engine hardware.
-Did anyone else notice that one of the death match arenas has an LED light board reading, ""SKINHEAD DEATH MATCH"? That was an interesting choice of words... :0
-In case you saw my original video of the game, this is a new, more thorough playthrough of it, and the video quality is much higher than in the video it's replacing.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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