Geese Howard - Reception

Reception

Geese has been well received by gamers, ranking high in several popularity polls. In Gamest's 1997 Heroes Collection, Geese was voted as the staff's ninth favorite character. In the character popularity poll on Neo Geo Freak's website, he was voted as the thirteenth favorite character with a total of 903 votes. While interviewing Shane Bettenhausen, Ignition Entertainment's Director of Business Development, Alex Lucard from Diehardgamefan.com mentioned that one of the characters he wanted to be playable in The King of Fighters XII was Geese.

Video games publications have added praise and criticism on Geese's character. GameSpot reviewer Frank Provo comments that Geese's introduction in Fatal Fury is one of the biggest accomplishments from the game as he notes how Geese continues appearing in other games. Avi Krebs from Gamingexcellence.com noted that Geese was the hardest character of the series to defeat and jokingly commented that even though he fights "while wearing a wristwatch, he pulls out all the tricks possible". IGN writer Ryan Clements agreed with Avi Krebs saying that Geese is "almost physically impossible to beat". He also mentioned that due to how difficult Geese is, almost twelve different IGN people had to help Clements to win, being only able to defeat him "resorting to the cheapest, most absurd tactics possible". ScrewAttack likewise said he was ridiculously difficult to beat. Eric Bratcher from GameRadar commented that Geese is "the big hook" from the series along with Terry Bogard, labelling Geese as "nearly un-killable". While reviewing The King of Fighters Neowave Gamer 2.0's Patrick Mifflin found that Geese is the "first SNK true villain", and commented that his young appearance featured in such game "can surely be chalked up to being one of the perks of a fighting game that has no story at all". The Nightmare Geese version from The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match was compared with Street Fighter's Shin Akuma in terms of difficulties by Eurogamer writer Matt Edwards who described him as one of the strongest opponents in the game. Geese was also in GameSpot's "All Time Greatest Villains" losing to Mother Brain from the Metroid. Greg Kasavin from the same site listed his "Knockdown Throw" special move as the third best move in fighting games commenting that it was one of the first reversal moves ever made in video games way before they became popular. For this reason, Kasavin stated that Geese became "one of the greatest fighting game characters of all time."