King of the Monsters

King of the Monsters is a fighting/wrestling game. It was released by SNK on July 1, 1991 in Japan (later released on the Virtual Console), with later ports for the Super NES and Sega Genesis by Takara. The game uses giant monsters that are reminiscent of kaiju and tokusatsu characters. King of the Monsters was included as part of SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 which was released for the Wii, PlayStation 2 and PSP in 2008.

Gameplay

Players choose one of six monsters (four in the 16-bit ports) for battle, and two players can join forces to fight the monsters together. Battles end when one of the monsters is pinned for a three count or if time expires (in which case the player loses).

The game consists of 12 total levels (8 in the 16-bit ports) which takes place in 6 cities in a futuristic 1996 Japan . Each city is featured twice with the game beginning and ending in Tokyo. Other cities include Kyoto, Okayama, Osaka , Kobe and Hiroshima (the latter two are omitted from the SNES port. The Sega Genesis port only features Tokyo with the other cities being "Mega Port", "Dragon City", and "Castle City"). The player first must defeat all six monsters, with the last monster being oneself, but in a different palette. Then the player must defeat the six monsters again, in the same order, but this time in different cities.

Characters

• Geon: A Godzilla-like dinosaur.
• Woo: A King Kong-like giant gorilla (not available on the ports).
• Poison Ghost: A creature covered in toxic waste, inspired by Hedorah (not available on the ports).
• Rocky: A giant Moai-like golem made of boulders, very likely to be an allusion to Daimajin
• Beetle Mania: A large beetle-like creature, possibly inspired by Megalon.
• Astro Guy: An Ultraman-like superhero with the name reference from Astro Boy.

Other appearances

The King of the Monsters series was mostly forgotten following the second game. However, it briefly received some recognition in 2005, when SNK Playmore released NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, a fighting game featuring many of the company's popular characters. Cyber Woo is featured as one of the playable characters, although in a much smaller form and controlled by a human. Also, Yuki and Ai, two other characters in the game, have a combined attack where they can change into Atomic Guy for a brief period of time. The game also features 2 King of the Monsters stages (one day, one night) where you can see the skeleton of super Geon and a rusted old Cyber Woo locked in combat.

Atomic Guy, Super Geon, and Cyber Woo appear as character cards in the DS game SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters DS. Both Atomic Guy and Super Geon have their names transliterated directly from Japanese, so their names are spelled as, respectively, "Atomic Gai" and "Super Zion".

In addition, King of the Monsters inclusion on SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 led to many rare pieces of King of the Monsters production art being featured on the disc. In 2018, the game was ported to the Nintendo Switch Shop by Hamster^[1]. The port features two extra features in a High Score Mode and Caravan Mode.^[2]

Other media

King of the Monsters was a regular on the popular Nickelodeon game show Nick Arcade. It was almost always picked, leaving other games like ActRaiser, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and El Viento out, this was the same on earlier broadcasts of Sky1 show Games World.

Reception

Mega criticised the game, awarding it a score of 10%, with Andy Dyer making the comment "unforgivably bad. There should be laws to protect us from crud like this".^[3]

References

External links

• King of the Monsters at MobyGames

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