Reviews
Game
The fighting game genre had become really big in the early 1990's thanks to the success of the Street Fighter series. The PC market didn't have much in the way of fighters other than ported versions of Street Fighter and later with Mortal Kombat. However, a small company in Taiwan produced Sango Fighter in 1993. Because the game's publisher was so small, only a few people ever saw this game in its prime. It was often seen only in shareware bundles and rarely seen by itself--although it was more popular in China.
The game looks great with graphics comparable to the arcade games of the time (the title screen font very closely resembles Street Fighter II, which I'm sure was purely coincidence). Unfortunately, the controls aren't very comfortable. They use a full eight button directional making multiplayer on the keyboard rather difficult. They also only feature two types of attack--kick and punch--while at the time four or six were the standard. However, the game does feature 12 playable characters and each character has a few unique special moves.
Unlike arcade fighters, Sango Fighter featured a story mode based on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. In this mode, you would fight several battles against generic soldiers and bosses to take control of the country side. This gave the game some depth that the fighting engine lacked.
Music
The game's music isn't phenomenal, but it at least the developers were nice enough to allow for Roland MT-32 output, thus allowing the few who had the privilege of owning one to hear the music with high fidelity. Although, they don't send and system exclusive data to the MT-32, so you have to make sure you've reset the instruments manually if you just played a game that did use sysex. The Vorbis version here was recorded with an MT-32. No game credits exist, so the music composer is unknown. Also, no music titles exist, so the given titles are just descriptions of when you hear the music, and we're guessing on the ending music. Nobody here had the patience to play the game long enough to find out.
Ripping
The file in the installed folder "Music.mid" contains the game's music. It has eight type 0 MIDI files concatenated together, and once broken out they are already formatted with the proper headers.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sango_Fighter
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