Someone crafted their own controller to try out SNK's hardest fighting game to properly play and locate
Buriki One is a forgotten gem that can still only be experienced on the Hyper Neo Geo 64
The control layout for most fighting games hasn't really changed at all over the past 3 decades, but once in a blue moon, developers will attempt to experiment with something new and different.
Buriki One was one such title as the final game released for SNK's ill-fated Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade system, and GuileWinQuote recently tracked down the original boards for the 1999 fighting game — plus he even crafted his own controller to get the full Buriki experience.
Unlike just about every other game in the genre, Buriki One used 2 buttons to control whether your character moved left or right while the lever was actually used to input attacks.
It sounds pretty counter intuitive at first, but SNK really seems to have tried their hardest to innovate the space in such a way to provide a different yet still fluid experience.
Instead of a Super meter, Buriki also used what was essentially a balance meter, which changed your characters attacks or even the strength of those attacks depending on their center of gravity.
This implementation is actually a truly clever way to try and push fighting games in a different direction, which could also serve a bunch of potential functions, but of course that plus pretty much everything else from the game just kinda fell to the history books.
With a distinct lack of projectiles and inter-dimensional beings, Buriki's focus on close-quarters grapples and strikes works well with the lever attack system too, considering some special attacks require a player to input multiple directions to pull off.
These systems also make the rare specimen seem almost more like a precursor to modern MMA games than traditional fighters.
Unfortunately, Buriki One was never officially ported to any other consoles in the past 23 years and Hyper Neo Geo 64 emulation still isn't great.
So GuileWinQuote had to track down the official arcade and game boards to even have a decent way of playing Buriki, and that's without making his own controllers too.
He doesn't seem to say how much all of that cost him to put together, but it probably easily ran the guy at least $500–600 USD if not much more to pull off.
And we're thankful that he did go through all that trouble so we can see and learn more about this fascinating piece of fighting game history.
We highly recommend checking out GuileWinQuote's full video on Buriki One below where he breaks down everything about how the game works and what makes it one-of-a-kind.
