Reviewed by C.K. Gan

This so called 'Samurai Spirits Kenkyaku Shinan Pack' consist of Samurai Shodown 1 and Samurai Shodown 2. Two of the SNK Classics in one CD, sounds like it worth your money to buy it. Well, personally I think it does worth it.

Samurai Shodown 2 also play and look just like the arcade version. SNK is getting better at porting their 2D games to the PS. It does have some cut of animation from characters, I would say about 20% of the animation is cut out. The game plays very smooth, no slowdown at all. And all the background looks as nice as the arcade version.

Since the sounds are in CD quality, most of the BGMs does sound better on the PS than on the NG cartridge. But too bad you could not put the CD to your CD player and listen to the tracks. But there are a BGM gallery that you can access some of the characters' voices and BGMs.

One other good feature is there is a training mode and a survival mode. In the training mode, they even show you 5 combos for every character.

As for SNK trademark loading time, SS2 seems to have one of the worst loading time compare to all the SNK 2D CD games. Even if you turn on the demo-cut option, each fight still takes about 25 seconds to load. Another bad thing is that it does not have an English option. So, all of the text are in Japanese only.

It is a very nice PS port. If you don't intend to get a Neo Geo Cartridge, then the SS1&2 pack is your only choice. I'm giving SS2 for the PSX an 8.0 out of 10.