Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive arrived on the Saturn as a home port of the arcade hit that made waves at a time when the 3D fighting game genre was dominated mainly by Virtua Fighter and the overseas Tekken. Tecmo came to the table with its own recipe: fast-paced fights, a distinctive system of strikes and counter-strikes (holds) that let you turn around even a seemingly lost exchange with a single precisely timed press, and above all, multi-tiered arenas, where knocking an opponent off the edge didn't end the round but continued the fight a floor below — sometimes even with a fall through a glass roof into the next level down.

On the Saturn, the game showed that the console could bring the arcade original across with surprisingly few compromises — the characters had smooth animation, the backgrounds were full of detail, and the gameplay remained just as aggressive as in the arcade. The character roster was narrower than the competition's, but each fighter had a distinctive style and personality, from ninjas to wrestlers to elegant Chinese boxing, so even a brief introduction to the controls was enough for memorable fights. The game also wasn't afraid of a certain sense of humor and exaggerated stylization, which the series would go on to cultivate even further later on.

Dead or Alive on the Saturn remained primarily a Japanese affair, and today it's mostly a curiosity for collectors, since the series' subsequent entries continued mainly on the PlayStation and later made the name famous even outside fighting games through spin-offs. Still, it's a solid demonstration of how well the Saturn, despite its reputation as a machine worse suited for 3D, handled fast arcade brawlers when developers knew how to make use of its hardware.

Why play it: It offers fast, arcade-pure fights with a counter-strike system and multi-tiered arenas that gave the series a reputation as one of the most dynamic fighting genres of the nineties.