Holian Family: Retro Gaming on the Switch

Back in the 90’s as a teenager I was into 2D fighting games. From the well-known Street Fighter & Mortal Kombats to the more obscure like Capcom’s Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure and SNK’s World Heroes Perfect. Unfortunately I had to jump through some hoops to play some of the games. SNK’s Neo Geo console was not available to buy in the UK, but luckily I was able to get my hands on a Japanese Import copy of World Heroes Perfect for the Sega Saturn and a NTSC console to go with it.

Fast forward to today and you don’t need to good though the hassle that I did to play these classic SNK titles. Some of these gems have recently landed on the Nintendo Switch eshop, my daughters and I put a couple of them to the test.

World Heroes Perfect

Both my children have had some experience with fighting games, namely Pokken Tournament and Smash Bros. on Wii U.  But apart from watching me play them they had never tried any 2D beat-em-up’s , much less anything as hard-core as World Heroes perfect.

Having said that they seemed to really enjoy their time with the game, whilst the more complicated combos were out of their reach they did still managed to pull off some specials against each other and were both very pleased with themselves when they did.

We played mostly with the switch on the kickstand and even with both the kids using the small screen, they managed to have a great time and never got cross or upset playing together. This bodes well for having future tournaments in a tent or on the train when we go on holiday.

Shock Troopers

This is a great little arcade shooter, like many older arcade games the difficulty level is quite high so expect to die a lot. But this never deterred us from having a great time. The colourful graphics and action packed gameplay kept both my kids interested even though they struggled getting too far without my help.

Kids these days learn fast though, and they soon found themselves getting more familiar with the controls and began winning boss battles and beating levels much quicker than I would have been able to at their age.

Perseverance and muscle memory are the name of the game here, and before we knew if almost 2 hours had gone by, both my kids and I had found ourselves immersed in the world of a 90’s arcade, the only things missing was the sticky carpet and noise of all the slot machines.

Both these games were brilliant fun and good value for money, if you are looking for a couple more titles to add to your shiny new switch console, World Fighters Perfect and Shock Troopers are highly recommended.