Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1

I'm a bit less enthused about my old-school crawl than I used to be. I spent some time last night with the Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1 collection last night, and it wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. Part of that was the slap-dash nature of the collection. SNK gave us a color edit mode, but there's not even a training or practice mode? There's no in-game skill list when I hit pause? This is basically just the arcade ROMs and an emulator slapped together on one DVD.

Not only that, although I anticipated this, after not having played these games in quite a long time, I didn't think that they would feel as clunky and primitive as they did. Even such "classic" titles as Fatal Fury Special really felt... well, primitive. And in some cases, poorly designed. I blasted through the bosses fairly easily, but struggled to get past a handful of the regular characters at the front of my run, who had a surprisingly difficult AI.

I did notice that the localization was even worse than I thought. The grammer, pronunciation, spelling, and English usage in general is just embarrassingly bad. In the original Fatal Fury game, for instance, Billy Kane's last name is pronounced to rhyme with 'con', Raiden is mis-pronounced (and once, even mispelled!) as Riden, and at the end of Fatal Fury Special, the credits say that the game was "Prodused by SNK". And that's just the tip of the iceberg; nearly every winquote is ridiculous. What in the world is "Wubba wubba, I'm in the pink today!" even supposed to mean?)

Anyway... I had a good enough time with my little jaunt through nostalgia, but really, the gameplay for many of these older games just doesn't hold up anymore. It's too primitive, too imprecise, and riddled with problems.

Two new series...

Although I don't have time to start this today, I'm giving as a heads-up; I've got two new blog post series that I want to initiate sometime this week.

For the first series, I want to go back and play my copies of all of the older games that I have... in chronological order. So, I'll take my old Xbox and my Capcom Classics Collection 2 and spend an entire evening with the original Street Fighter, for instance, before moving on to the various Street Fighter IIs, the Fatal Furies, the King of Fighters, etc. I'm not going to religiously research the exact release dates, but I am going to make an effort to get them more or less chronologically correct. Should be fun to see the evolution of the genre unfold before my eyes.

The second series will be one devoted to the myriad, and today mostly anonymous, Street Fighter II rip-offs. The games that attempted to cash in on the craze by being similar. As it happens, an inordinate amount of these games were released on the Neo*Geo hardware, even when they weren't necessarily SNK developed. That means, among other things, that they are easy to emulate, and therefore screenshots and even youtube videos of them are easy to find. I don't have much direct experience with most of these games (except for the SNK ones like Fatal Fury) so I won't be talking from direct experience, but I can describe them in some detail based on what other people have said about them, and I can post video, and I can talk about their place in the grand scheme of things, such as it is.

Like I said, it is bizarre that the Neo*Geo hardware hosted so many of these rip-offs, but it's got the Fatal Fury series, the Art of Fighting series and the King of Fighters series by SNK, the World Heroes and Aggressors of Dark Kombat by ADK, the Breakers series by Visco, the Fighter's History series (or at least Fighters History Dynamite) by Data East, the last of the Power Instinct game (Matrimelee) by Atlus/Noise Factory, Double Dragon by Techmos and the unofficial sequal Rage of the Dragons by Noise Factory and Evoga... the list goes on. And those are just the obvious ones.

Anyway, I hope that I have fun writing both series, and I hope that you also have fun reading the.

Depth

One way to judge the quality of a fighting game is its depth. I tend to mean, by this, how much you can enjoy coming back to the game over and over again, and how much you can continue to learn and grow in the game, without having to be a fanatic about it. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper offers this in spades. One of the main ways in which a good fighting game does this, of course, is by offering a diverse and plentiful character selection.

The last two evenings, it's been the only game I've played, and I've been re-acquainting myself with characters that I haven't played in a long time. Years, even. In fact, for several of these characters, I haven't really played around with them since I only had Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES to work with.

I don't mean by this that I like a game to be overly technical and difficult to learn. In fact, I think that's a mark of bad game design, and for the characters that are overly technical, I think that's a bad design as well. The "deadly rave" type combos that SNK seems so fond of? Bad design. It's a barrier to entry to other players, and only appeals to an increasingly smaller subset of hardcore players. Same thing with characters who have to chain combos together in order to get any thing done. Angel? Great idea, but terrible execution, sadly. Even SNK's poster child, Kyo Kusanagi, suffers from this a bit in the more "recent" games.

But Street Fighter Alpha 3 manages to offer depth without offering over technicality. You don't have to be a pro on the competitive circuit to appreciate the character selection. The last two nights, I've played around a bit with Fei-Long especially, but also Guy and Gen, and I even re-acquainted myself with Sakura a bit. Despite all the years I've had this game, I've got a long way to go to let some of these other character breath and become comfortable to me. And yet, I find that I'm excited to let that happen, for years to come.

And that is the hallmark of good game design.

Added a hit counter

Just for fun. It started a 0, so it's like a trip odometer, not like your "regular" odometer. But as this is a pretty new blog, I think it's close enough.

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 3

http://sfkofff.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-history-of-karate-supers-part.html

Part 1, and

http://sfkofff.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-history-of-karate-supers-part_03.html

Part 2. Ignore the URLs. They're automatically generated by blogger and clearly don't make sense. This post is post #3, not the last one.

Anyway, last time I blogged about this, I got through the 90s and the first coupla years of the 2000s, which found me enjoying the genre vicariously over the internet more than I did in actuality. When I left grad school, with a small family in tow, I no longer had easy access to even a poor arcade, so I could only play what I could get at home, and if you recall, that meant I was playing on an SNES at a time when the Xbox and PS2 were launching. I did, however, have access to more money and more free time, so after a little while of this, I finally was able to come into a PSOne (the smaller revised design) and wasted no time in picking up a few games, mostly pre-owned, and exclusively of the "bright and polite" karate supers variety. This is when I bought Marvel Superheroes, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Darkstalkers 3, a couple of King of Fighters titles ('95 and '99--the only two to get PSOne North American releases) and then a little bit later Capcom vs. SNK Pro. These purchases brought me into the semi-modern playing field for the first time. While the Playstation had to make a few sacrifices to get sprite-based animated games to run on its hardware, they were relatively minor sacrifices, and all of these games played relatively well and were tons of fun. Those of them that I had played in arcades previously, like Marvel Superheroes, for example, felt near enough to the arcade version that I was certainly happy with them.

By now, the internet was old hat for me; I'd been online for close to ten years, and I knew easily how to find in depth game FAQs, reviews, and more. So I was able to maximize my enjoyment out of these games, and for quite a while, that was the genre to me. It was all I had, but luckily much of what I had was the best there was to get: the Street Fighter Alpha 3 port on the PS, and the Darkstalkers 3 port in particular being notably good games that still hold up well even now ten years or so after they were first released. I also felt at this point like I had just enough games of the karate supers variety that I could start to call myself a junior level connoisseur and collector… a label that more serious gamers would probably laugh at, but having a large variety of games and playing them and comparing them, and thinking about them outside of just the moments in which I was playing became a major hobby (one among about half a dozen serious hobbies I indulge) that I enjoy to this day. Of course, I've since far outstripped my efforts back in the days when I had first acquirred those earliest PSOne games, but still… I felt a sense of belonging to the genre, of being a true fan, not just a fly by night faddish fellow who stopped by when it was popular and then flitted away to the next big thing afterwards.

Shortly after buying the PSOne, I also bought a Dreamcast. These systems had been out of production for a little while by this point, so it was easy to get one really cheaply. Almost immediately on the heels of that (actually, I had a couple of the games before I had the system) I picked up Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, King of Fighters 1999: Dream Match and Street Fighter III: Third Strike.

As you might expect, my opinion on a few things was starting to change and evolve as I was exposed to more games. I had said earlier that I saw SNK as merely the most prominent among many Street Fighter copycats, and therefore not really worth a lot of attention. The two King of Fighters titles I had for the Playstation started to change that. While they suffer from hardware limitations, as do all 2-D fighters on that system, they didn't do so more than the Capcom games I had, and it became pretty obvious that these two games were as good as Capcom games in most respects. As a bit of an old-school kinda guy, I preferred the one on one battle type, as typified by Street Fighter; the team modes of King of Fighters didn't appeal to me as much. Of course, both games had single player modes, so I played these games most often as if they were just alternate Street Fighter titles. And as such, they were as good as any Street Fighter title except Alpha 3.

If my Playstation games started to change my opinion of SNK and Capcom, my Dreamcast titles cemented it. Both of the Capcom titles disappointed me in many respects: Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was just too silly, too hyper, too prone to button mashing; I rather quickly burned myself out on it and haven't really enjoyed it the same ever since. Street Fighter III: Third Strike was supposed to be the Street Fighter III version that redeemed the title. I remembered playing the first one in arcades back in Texas, but like many, I was disappointed in the characters and several minor aspects of the gameplay and presentation. Third Strike did improve the series, but ultimately not enough to make it even nearly as much fun as Alpha 3, much less some of the competition that was now sitting there on my shelf for the same game system.

The two SNK games I got for the Dreamcast are widely considered to be two of the best karate supers games in existance, and as I delved into them, I found that to be entirely true. Mark of the Wolves at first fell a little flat with me. It seemed like just any other fighting game, and the character selection was a bit thin. In time, though, especially contrasting it with the spastic gameplay of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, I came to really appreciate the depth it offered. Not to mention the fact that the characters were almost univerally great. A small selection isn't nearly as much of a liability if everyone's a winner, right? King of Fighters 1999: Dream Match, which is really King of Fighters '98 with a handful of minor upgrades to port it to the console, suffered a bit from clunkiness and ugliness before and between matches, but when you're playing that game, man, it's hard to beat it. The character selection is top notch, the gameplay is nearly perfect; even the Dreamcast controller worked relatively well for King of Fighters titles, since at least it had the exact right number and layout of buttons.

In any case, my opinion on Capcom and SNK didn't exactly flip-flop, but I really came to appreciate SNK for their efforts, while seeing Capcom's as tired and burned out. Today, some of my favorite fighters are still Capcom games: Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper and Capcom vs. SNK 2 being the notable ones there, but I have at least as many favorite games by SNK now. The PSOne and Dreamcast titles I got can be credited with turning around that perspective.

I continued to move on into new hardware and games without fundamentally changing that perspective; all the Xbox and PS2 titles I've picked up since, which have at least doubled my collection, had affirmed that the SNK and Capcom parity in the ability to produce quality karate supers games remains in force. If anything, I think SNK might have a slight edge, but that could also just be because they've done more titles now. Take more shots, and you're more likely to score goals, as they say. Of course, as of this moment, I'm still talking without the benefit of an Xbox 360 or PS3, so I haven't yet sampled Street Fighter IV. Word on the street is that it's an incredible game (and it certainly looks like one from the many youtube matches I've watched) whereas King of Fighters XII is a very lackluster effort that scores points for looking kinda pretty, but not really managing to do anything else. So maybe the balance has shifted again, but I can only speak from my own experience.

Beyond the playing of the games, I was reminded of how much fun I had putting together that clunky old Street Fighter fanfic that I did in the mid-'90s. Of course, today I'd want to do more than Street Fighter; I'd want to incorporate King of Fighters, Darkstalkers and Fatal Fury characters, all mixed up in the same continuity, and as if they were all in one game, and tell stories about them. I think one thing that really inspired me to do this were comic books.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, but I've been a fan of superheroes as long as I can remember. I watched most of the superhero cartoons as a kid, and that probably informed my perception of superheroes more than the comic books themselves, but I dabble in comics too. Just as with karate supers I was solely a Capcom guy for years, I've been pretty thoroughly steeped in the Marvel side of comics, and have only occasionally ventured into DC or Image or other companies territory. There are two things that've happened to comic books in the last decade. The first one was the release of a whole slew of new movies. These new movies redesigned the look of most of the characters, updated and retold their origin stories, and basically just took the themes and important points of the original comic book continuity and worked them up into something new.

Marvel did something similar with their most popular lines in the Ultimate titles. For a while there, I followed Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate X-men and of course, The Ultimates themselves, who could loosely be called the Ultimate universe version of the Avengers. Here again; the look of the some of the characters was updated, the origin stories were significantly updated, and the stories were retold. The basic gist of the stories was the same, but many, if not most, of the details were different. Although I'm too old to have caught them really, various animated comic book cartoon series have done the same thing, and as my kids have gotten old enough to watch the Spiderman cartoon of the 90s and the new, current Spectacular Spiderman, I've seen that they've also done the same thing. So, the basic gist of, say, the Spiderman story, has been told at least five times, with significantly different details each time: 1) the original comic book run and the late 60s animated show which followed that run really closely, 2) the '90s cartoon run, 3) the live action movies, 4) Ultimate Spiderman, and 5) The Spectactular Spiderman cartoon show. This is when it clicked for me: the secret of a successful fan fiction isn't to religiously follow the "canon" established in the various games; the secret is to take those characters, remake them slightly if needed, but keep the gist of them the same, and mix them all up together.

And why not be inspired by comic books, anyway? Another thing that occured to me is that the characters of Street Fighter or Fatal Fury or any of these other titles are basically just superheroes. Rather than being invented by Americans steeped in the pulp literature and science fiction tradition, they were invented by Japanese steeped in the martial arts cinema and science fiction tradition, but the difference between the two genres was only superficial, while the similarities are deep-rooted and thorough.

This actually clicked with me a couple of years ago, but I've done more fiddling with outlines and backgrounds than I have actual writing. But soon, I hope, I'll have enough material to "go live" with a fan fiction. Hopefully one that works well. I've seen at least one combination Street Fighter and King of Fighters fanfiction over the years, the "Nightmare Symbiosis" project (which sadly, seems to have completely disappeared from the Internet, except possibly in Internet archiving services) which was actually quite well done. It was perhaps a bit too ambitious and ended abruptly after a lot of set-up, but the concept has a lot of merit. Taking the lessons learned from the different iterations of the Spiderman tale, I've tweaked, borrowed, adapted and blended the backgrounds of the entire Street Fighter and King of Fighters runs, added in some Darkstalkers and Fatal Fury characters, and in general focused just on the characters I like, and I think the results will, hopefully, speak for themselves.

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 2

http://sfkofff.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-history-of-karate-supers-part.html

The link above takes you to Part I. For this part, we talk about my personal history with the genre after the release of Street Fighter II. This is, of course, everyone's Golden Age of karate supers, because this is when they were huge. Not only were Street Fighter II cabs literally everywhere, but all kinds of would-be imitators were also popping up all over the place. Some of those games weren't actually bad… it was just obvious that they were imitators, so they didn't get the attention they may have otherwise enjoyed. In America, at least, the same seemed to be true of the SNK games. While I did play around with the original Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special, Art of Fighting, and the earliest King of Fighters titles, it was just playing around, really. For that matter, I also played around with World Heroes, which was terrible, and Data East's Fighter's History, which is probably most notorious today for being the subject of a lawsuit by Capcom U.S.A of Data East U.S.A. for copyright infringement. The lawsuit was eventually scrapped, as the courts ruled that the similarities were "scènes à faire" and therefore not subject to copyright protection. (Also, the sequel to that game which used licensed Neo*Geo hardware called Karnov's Revenge, wasn't a bad alternative to Street Fighter II, really. Certainly a lot better than World Heroes, if not quite up to par with the Fatal Fury games. Of course, by the time it came out, we were on Super Street Fighter II Turbo was already out, and Street Figher II had kinda run its course. Capcom was gearing up to release the first Alpha title. So, Karnov's Revenge was too little too late. Too bad when Data East went out of business their property rights didn't revert to SNK like ADK's did. I'd much rather see these guys get modernized than the World Heroes characters we got in Neo Geo Battle Coliseum. Oh, well. The bosses sucked, though. Truly terrible concepts. Gah.)

I played around with any title that looked vaguely Street Fighter esque, for that matter, and I'm sure that there are tons of games that I've played that I no longer have any reliable memory of whatsoever. By this time, I was in college, so most of my gaming money was spent at the arcade in the basement of the MSC; the student center at Texas A&M University. I also got a SNES system around this time, and of course, Street Fighter II. In fact, this was to be my main outlet for non-arcade action for quite some time, and I even went so far as to pick up Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES because it looked unlikely I'd get a Playstation for years (which is, in fact, what happened---I didn't get one for years.)

In addition to the Street Fighter and Street Fighter like games, I played a lot of Mortal Kombat during this era, and Mortal Kombat II. Mortal Kombat III was a disappointment to me, and at the end of the day, I ended up thinking that the whole concept around Mortal Kombat was just the novelty value of the other-the-top violence. My interest in the series waned and never really peaked again. I also became a big fan of the 3-D fighters when they first came out: Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Soul Edge, etc. all got a lot of play in my arcade. Maybe part of the reason those didn't become quite as popular to me personally was because I didn't have a system that could really play them for a long time. I own a fair number of 3-D fighters now… but I tend not to care about them as much as I do my 2-d karate supers games. I think, also, that part of the reason for that love is that it's where I started.

Another part of it, though, is that this was about the time that the Internet was becoming mainstream, and I got involved in Street Fighter discussion on Usenet, I discovered Street Fighter fanfic (this was in the early, heady days of fanfic, where the concept still seemed exciting. Later over-exposure would sour me a bit on the idea… but as I'll mention later, it's still something that I see the potential in. Even if the reality is so often banal); in short, my exposure to Street Fighter stuff was all over the place, which I think further cemented my love for it, and my unwillingness to really "move on" even when the rest of the video gaming world mostly did.

In those days, I was all about Capcom. I saw SNK's efforts as merely the most notable of the many Street Fighter clones. I had a hard time with the finicky and difficult controls that some of the earliest SNK games had. Also, their localization efforts were laughable; their translations into English were nonsensical and ridiculous. Be that as it may, I did always see Fatal Fury Special as the nearest thing to a competitor that Street Fighter II ever really faced. Only later did I come to realize that in Japanese arcades, that was quite literally true, and that Fatal Fury Special was the most popular game in 1993 over there. I did notice that a lot of the same people who liked Street Fighter seemed to like SNK games, though. So I kept playing them off an on as I saw them. I played more Samurai Shodown than Fatal Fury, or King of Fighters, but I continued to find the concepts behind these SNK games intriguing, I continued to hear about their characters, and I even saw crossover fanfics that featured characters from both companies duking it out together.

About this time, I stumbled across Bethany Cox's fanfics. I mentioned them before; they are, still, amongst the best fanfics of any kind I've ever read, and in the mid 90s, I read a lot of them. I ended up becoming online pals with a guy named Ken Meredith, who was also writing a fanfic; a retelling, really, of the Street Fighter Animated Movie. I thought to myself, "hey, I could do this!" and so I did. I put together a massive fanfic, hosted on Geocites up until Geocities went belly-up recently. I archived it by copying and pasting the text off of the webpages into a Microsoft Word and saving it as an rft. It ended up being 105 pages long, so not a novel by any means, but still pretty ambitious for a fanfic. Probably too ambitious; rereading it many years after writing it, I think parts of it still work quite well, but it's hampered by lack of focus (too many point of view characters coming and going) and the strange desire I developed to cameo as many people as I could, even the Street Fighter EX specific characters and Darkstalkers characters, who I didn't actually really know very well because I only played those games a handful of times.

And that gets us to about 2002 or so. I was still playing Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha 2 and occasionally Fatal Fury Special on the SNES, and otherwise only vaguely aware of the rest of the genre through the Internet. I'd briefly had a flare-up of interest in fanfiction, but too many author insertion and other bizarre fantasy fictions (not to mention the prevalance of so many, many terrible, terrible writers) soured me on the effort. While I still acknowledged the potential for fanfics to be cool, so few of them were. This state of only semi-awareness continued until I finally was able to get a Playstation. Ironically I didn't even buy it; some friends of ours who were moving were selling it in a garage sale. When my wife mentioned that I was interested in buying it, they just gave it to us. They were only asking $5 I think anyway. By this time the PS2 was already out. Yes, have I mentioned before that I'm really, really cheap most of the time, and that I also am a very late adopter of new technology?

Anyway, for part 3 I'll get us to the "modern era" of my personal history of karate supers.

Psycho Soldier

For some reason, I've woken up several mornings this week with this song stuck in my head. "Psycho Soldier" is kinda important, I guess, in that it's the first in-game vocal soundtrack in a video game. When the psycho-soldiers were ported to King of Fighters as a team, they used a version of this song in several iterations of it (other times, they used the song "Tremble! Dora Shudders" which also seems to go by the name of "Shuddering Gong" on some soundtracks. By the time we got to the NESTS saga, the classic KOF songs were largely being replaced; in '99 we got "Psycho Sonic Trip (Dance at the Paddy Field)", in 2000 it was "Will" and in 2001, which probably had the most divergent soundtrack of any of the games in the series to date, we got "Psycho Guys." "Psycho Soldier" returns for 2002. The entire Psycho Soldier team gets a bye in 2003, although Athena still appears as part of the High School Girls team, with an all new song, naturally. When the team returns with a slightly revamped line-up in XI, they've got yet another song. Then again, everyone does. Athena also has a "special" vocal track in the PS2 version, if you have Athena appear on either of the concert stages.

Anyway... Athena's themesong, yeah. That's probably more than you cared to know about it over the years. The point is that the "Psycho Soldier" song has been in my head the last few mornings. So, I'm sharing the pain. Here's the Arranged soundtrack from King of Fighters '96 which brings the vocals back.

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 1

Fighting games and me go way back. I'm old enough to have been part of the "arcade generation;" those kids who were the right age to remember the golden age of video game arcades before home consoles "caught up" with arcade hardware and made the arcade obsolete.

I don't know how many hours I spent, mostly during the '80s, hanging around in darkened rooms with the bleeps, bloops, and flashing lights of arcade cabinets all around me, dropping quarter after quarter into the machines. For that matter, I don't know how many hours (and dollars) I spent in the early to mid '90s as a college student doing the same thing, as fighting games really came into their own and artificially prolonged the life of video game arcades as a viable business. But through it all, fighting games have always been amongst my very favorite.

One of the earliest such games I remember was Data East's Karate Champ, from 1984. This game was absurdly primitive compared to fighting games today, but it was also 1) martial arts focused (as opposed to boxing or wrestling, like many of the others that I played back in the day), and 2) semi-realistic. You fought for points, so any good hit was a half point or a full point. The first guy to get two points won. This did, however, really set the stage for what was to come. The backgrounds that you fought against were a clever innovation that became super important in the presentation of fighting games in the future, and the minigames in between rounds were something that carried forward to most of the early fighting games. Not to mention the fact that "white" and "red" karate guys, the two characters in Karate Champ can be seen as direct ancestors of Ryu and Ken.

One of the next leaps forward in the evolution of fighting games was Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu, a Hong Kong cinema-based game in which you had a character who had all kinds of different moves he could make by making joystick and button combinations. He went through a parade of colorful antagonist characters that you had to fight to beat the boss at the end and… do whatever you did at the end of the game. I confess that I don't remember now what happened when you got to the end. The parade of colorful characters leading up to a boss, as well as the variety of moves you could pull off as a fighter were dramatically improved from earlier games in this arena, though, and was certainly a watershed moment in the evolution of what would come to be known the original fighting games. I had a copy of this arcade cabinet at a grocery store about a block or two away from my house, so within easy walking distance. It had a big effect on my evolving tastes as a video gamer and is generally created with being incredibly important to the development of the embryonic fighting game genre. Yie Ar Kung Fu came out in 1985, and it's impressive to see the evolution from Karate Champ to this game in just a single year.

The original Street Fighter (1987) was probably the next major iteration in the evolution of fighting games. The graphics had been substantially improved. Moves were systematized; there were three types of punches and three types of kicks. Early cabinets actually had pressure pads that reacted to how hard they were pressed; this, naturally, led to many broken buttons. Capcom, the developer, fixed this by releasing a six button layout that wasn't pressure sensitive, and the modern control scheme was born. Of course, the original Street Fighter didn't have very tight controls yet, but it was clearly a harbinger of what was to come. The graphics were lush and highly detailed (by mid-80s standards, anyway) providing a backdrop for the fights that was unprecedented up to that point. The sprites were as well; large, detailed and colorful compared to what had come before. Also, an innovation that was to have a striking impact on the development of the genre, was the use of "magical" special moves. You could only play as one of two characters (who played identically to each other to boot), Ryu and Ken. And although how to pull these off wasn't well known, and was tricky to do anyway, the three main "special" moves that Ryu and Ken were later to become incredibly famous for, were already present in this game; the fireball, the dragon punch, and the hurricane kick. If you could land a blow with one of these moves, it was devastating in these early games, doing anywhere from 30-50% damage against the opponent's lifebar.

And although Street Fighter is, of course, a household name nowadays, it wasn't 1987's game that made that a reality. In fact, the genre continued to develop in a lot of ways in parallel to the standards that Street Fighter would later crystalize as crucial to the evolving fighting game genre. Perhaps inspired by the popularity of side-scrolling "beat-'em-ups" like Double Dragon or Final Fight, one game that in particular rings a bell with me is Taito's Violence Fight from 1989. I can't claim that it was a significant moment in the evolution of the genre, but it was certainly a popular stop for me. This game had even bigger and more detailed sprites than Street Fighter, it had the semblance of a story as you advanced from venue to venue and opponent to opponent. Most of the stages weren't truly two dimensional in the sense that we think of them today; you could move up or down across a somewhat isometric arena, and to jump you pressed a jump button. Combining the jump button with the punch or the kick button give you variations on your basic attacks, again, probably a nod to Double Dragon or Final Fight which operated the same way.

It was 1991 when the genre, which had been struggling to develop, was finally and truly born with the wild and completely unexpected success of Street Fighter II. Coincidentally, rival company SNK had been developing something that could also be seen as the next iteration in the development of the genre which was also released in 1991, but it was eclipsed and overshadowed by Street Fighter II. That's a little bit unfortunate, because SNK's effort, the original Fatal Fury game, had a lot of really cool ideas, as does their subsequent release, Art of Fighting, which followed less than a year on the heels of Fatal Fury, and almost certainly had started development before Fatal Fury was released. Several of the innovations in those two SNK games pervaded the genre: super combos and the super combo meter, taunts, and more had their origin here. But Street Fighter II was really the game that single-handedly created the fighting game genre from the early efforts that pointed the way and previewed the conventions that were to come. Not only did it create the fighting game genre, but it also is a fine example of the karate supers subgenre, to use my own term yet again (I'm going to keep talking that up until at least one other person starts to use it too. And then I'll talk it up some more!) meaning that the karate supers subgenre is actually the original mode of fighting games, and subsequent developments away from it were, in part, characterized by how they differed from that subgenre first. Later, as those other subgenres developed some traction of their own, they could stand on their own two legs as well.

Anyway, let's stop there for now. This is part one of my personal fighting game history, and it really only gets us to the beginnings of the genre. I'll have at least two more entries talking about my own personal experiences with karate supers and fighting games in general, maybe three, before I'm done.

Fanfiction

Fan fiction has a bad name. Deservedly so, in most cases. There's so much terrible fan fiction on the internet that it's impossible to adequately convey the huge, sprawling, horrible mass of it.

However, not all fanfic is horrible. Some of it doesn't deserve the bad name it's got. When I first discovered the world of fan fiction, in the mid-90s, so quite some time ago now, it was while I was searching the Internet for stuff related to Street Fighter, with which I was pretty much in love at the time. And by far the best stuff I found were these quick vignettes by Bethany Cox.

I've added a link at the bottom of the post here. All of her stories are there, that I know of. Some of the links are bad; some of the text files end in a .txt extension, and some end in a .cox extension, but the links are not all accurate. You'll have to manually update the URL on the links that don't work.

Bethany's stories really helped bring the characters to life for me, in a way beyond that of the game. She had a real talent for characterization. Which is really what these stories are about; they're not action-packed, plot driven expositions, they're character studies, and as such, they're absolutely brilliant.

Check 'em out. I promise, despite the fact that they're tainted with the bad name of fanfiction, these are the exceptions that prove the rule. They're good.

www.thekeep.org/~rpm/streetfighter/

Thou shalt not covet...

You'd think that since I just got a ton of games that are newish (to me, anyway) and that I still have a long ways to go before I've even become comfortable with those, much less tired of them, I wouldn't be on the lookout for new games for a while.

However, that's not the case. I really want a copy of the King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match. Much like the KoF '98 remake, this really cleans the game up, adds back in all the "missing" characters, rebalances and tweaks most of the characters, does the backgrounds all over again in 3-D, releases a bunch of new backgrounds, releases a bunch of new modes... all in all a great package. SNK had said that they wanted King of Fighters XII to be the ultimate 2-D fighting game, a goal which it appears to have spectacularly failed to achieve, while ironically this 2002 remake, released at about the same time, could make a claim for that title. Word on the street is that this is the best King of Fighters game yet, even better than the '98 remake.

Sadly, it doesn't look like I'm going to be getting it any time real soon. It was released about a year ago for the PS2 in Japan, but does not have any PS2 release in the US scheduled at all. Instead, it's supposed to get an Xbox Live Arcade download release "sometime this year." That means that the game is sadly destined for almost certain obscurity here. I'm left with the rather poor choices of getting an Xbox 360 and a live account, or importing the game, and picking up Swap Magic or some other way of running import games on my PS2. I don't really like either choice.

The 360 would at least open the door for Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, Street Fighter IV, Super Street Fighter IV (assuming that's not just a rumor), and King of Fighters XII; but let's not kid ourselves. I was OK waiting on those indefinately. It's King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match that really gets to me. Mostly because I believe it should get a US PS2 release. In fact, I sent an email off to the old email account I had for SNK telling them as much. I know, I know, they're not going to change their strategy simply on my account. But man, that would sure be convenient for me! I'd like to think that not only for me, though. Any King of Fighters fan worth his salt is going to have a PS2 anyway. It's how you get your '98 remake. It's how you get your XI. It's how you get all your Fatal Fury games, and really all of the rest of the King of Fighters titles except Neowave and XII. King of Fighters fans have PS2s. Releasing it for that system sells it to your current, installed, fanbase. Releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade? Not necessarily so much. Granted, you do save on pressing, printing and distribution costs, but you're also leaving some long-time fans out in the cold.

Anyway, I've included a HSDM exhibition from youtube. That's the game I want, folks. Right there. And I won't be able to get it, easily. Ironic; I've got the "regular" Xbox port of 2002, and Neowave, which is a remake of this game as well. This, version, though, is the truly definitive one.

Game Feature: Capcom vs. SNK 2

One game that continues to get a lot of voice for "best game in the genre" is Capcom vs. SNK 2. I have this game on the Xbox, so technically it's Capcom vs. SNK 2: EO with the EO (for either Easy Operation or Extreme Offense) added to the end of it. I don't really have much use for the EO mode, but for my kids, who haven't really mastered the art of the joystick motion required for, say, a basic Hadoken, it's one of their favorites to play because they can sit down and have a go at it without knowing what they're doing.

Really, though, the draw for this game is the fact that it combines all kinds of Capcom and SNK fighters together. Otherwise, how could you ever see what happens when you pit Ryu against Kyo or Terry? Sagat against Geese? Bison against Rugal? Or whatever other combination you wish. Of course, you can't do every combination, you're limited to the characters that they provide, but with 49 characters available (counting Chang and Choi separately) there's only a few that you'll miss.

Sadly, that gets right to the heart of one of my handful of small gripes about the game, but I'll just mention it and move on. There are a number of characters that don't really fit in the genre. They come from games that aren't really comparable, and in comparison, they feel out of place. In particular I'm thinking of Haohmaru and Nakoruru from the Samurai Shodown games and Hibiki from Last Blade. They've also continued the tradition of over-representation by some very similar Capcom characters; do we really need Ryu, Ken and Akuma? Well, probably yes, but if so, then do we really need Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma too? Probably not. If they'd removed these extraneous and out of place characters, we could have had room for a handful of other ones instead that better fit and are more sorely missed, that would have improved the experience.

But that's a minor pet peeve.

Rather, what did this game do right? There are a handful of other games that also mix Capcom and SNK characters, but this is regarded by nearly everyone as the definitive one. Partly that's because all of the other games out there that give us that same experience have significant flaws that they struggle to overcome, but partly it's also because this one is really just that good.

Sorta like Capcom did with Street Fighter Alpha 3, you can choose a game engine to apply to your character. There are more choices here. Twice as many, in fact. C-groove plays very much like SFA3's A-ism, while A-groove plays very much like SFA3s V-ism. P-groove creates an environment that is much more similar to SFIII's system, including parrying. The use of super combos is simplified from SFIII (you don't have to just pick one, for example) but its roots are very clear. There are also three grooves that are based on SNK games: S-groove which is like the earlier "EX" mode from King of Fighters, N-groove which is like the "Advanced" mode from slightly later King of Fighters games, and K-groove which is most similar to Samurai Shodown, except with "Just Defend" from Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves thrown in for extra effect. This insanely high number of possible combinations of characters and grooves makes for a game that you could potentially be mastering for years. I certainly don't claim to have done so: I stick with C-groove and about a dozen characters as my "go-to guys" most frequently. The level of choice is amazing, though.

As an improvement from the earlier Capcom vs. SNK, each character has been tweaked and improved. The earlier title had regular and EX versions of many characters, both of which felt movelist impoverished. This game, on the other hand, has merged those, creating more "full" characters that feel complete on their own. The older game also had a four button layout, which made it feel more King of Fighters like. In particular, this made the Capcom characters feel impoverished in terms of regular moves. They've reinstated the six button layout, and added new animations to allow every character to take advantage of them. These character and basic command improvements really propel this game to the top of the genre, and the phenomenal character roster to choose from cements its place. The fact that it combines SNK and Capcom characters together in a format that's not MUGEN or fanfiction is just icing on the cake.

That said, I can't let my description of the game pass by without making a handful of negative quibbles with elements of the game. I've already mentioned that a handful of the characters don't really fit and are poor choices. Most of the rest of my dislikes about the game are presentation issues.

One that's got a lot of attention on almost every discussion of the game I've seen so far are that the sprites are of mixed vintage and it really shows. The SNK characters were obviously all drawn recently, because Capcom didn't otherwise have them in their library of sprites. OK, well that's fair enough. Some of the Street Fighter characters, notably Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Bison, Chun-Li, and maybe one or two more that I'm forgetting at the moment, were also redrawn to look more similar to their SFII or SFIII appearances. A handful of other Capcom characters needed new sprites because they'd otherwise never appeared in a modern fighting game, like Eagle and Maki. Most of the rest of the Capcom characters use their recycled Alpha series sprites. These really don't look nearly as good as the newer ones. And most egregious of all is Morrigan, using her old Darkstalkers sprite, which in turn looks notably worse than any of the Alpha sprites. She's really a blight on the screen when she appears, which thankfully is rarely.

There's also only a handful of stages, and most of them aren't particularly attractive. This is disappointing, as the improved hardware could have given us some great ones. The older game, Capcom vs. SNK, actually had better stages (although it also had worse ones---stage design there was about 50/50. Real hit and miss.) None of them really actively offend, but they're extremely bland. There's nothing anywhere near as cool as the huge flaming car wreck stage in the earlier game, for instance. The exceptions to this are the two boss stages; the roof in the rain on the Japanese castle, and the rooftop after a massive explosion, with flaming debris everywhere if you get one of the the "true" bosses.

The same complaint could be made of the music. By the time I got this, I already had Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III: Third Strike for the Dreamcast, so I knew what really bad fighting game music could be like. This game doesn't have particularly bad music. Sadly, it doesn't have very many tracks that are very good either. Most of them are kinda bland and uninspiring.

An even more minor issue; I'm not a huge fan of how they choose to render the special effects of super and special moves. I prefer the hand-drawn effects of prior efforts. It's not nearly so bad as the blobby mass of colored pixels that you got in the first game, although that could also be an artifact of the hardware that I'm running my ports on. But they're not very good, either. Considering how good some of those special effects have gotten in other games, like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or King of Fighters XI (to use two particularly good-looking alternatives) having them appear lackluster here is a bit of a disappointment.

That said, all of those presentation issues are, when everything's considered, fairly minor quibbles. I really like this game, and it's certainly one of my "go-to" games when I feel like a little bit of karate supers action.

Karate supers?

Whaddya think? As a label for the genre overall?

It's not as specific as I'd like, but that's been the bane of me coming up with a genre tag, frankly. I want to be too specific, and I end up with something really clunky. "2-D anime-like superheroic martial arts fighting game" is specific enough (although it might leave room for stuff like Guilty Gear or Blazblue, which I'd rather not, actually) but it's too long and doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Karate infers the martial arts tradition that's important to the genre, it infers the Japanese nature of the games (karate being a specifically Japanese martial art) and it infers the weaponless nature, excluding games like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade. Supers infers the superpowers that the characters routinely exhibit, which sets these games apart from more realistic martial arts games, most of which tend to be three dimensional, like Virtua Fighter, Tekken or Dead or Alive.

It doesn't really exclude games like Mortal Kombat very well, except by fiat. Mortal Kombat wasn't made by a Japanese company, after all. It also doesn't exclude a fair number of other games, which I won't really ever address just because I don't have any interest in them. For example, the fighting game (as opposed to the side-scrolling beat-'em-ups of the same name) Double Dragon and Rage of the Dragons. Nor does it exclude stuff like the Power Instinct series, or Waku Waku 7, or Rumble Fish or Arcana Heart, or plenty of other examples. That's OK; I don't need to exclude them, and frankly they seem like they fit into the genre as well as, say, the Art of Fighting series. But like I said; just because the definition includes them doesn't mean I'll talk about them here.

Karate supers. The more I think about it, the more I think I'm unlikely to come up with anything better. Although not meant to be completely inclusive, I figure the games (and game series) that are the iconic ones that belong to the genre are the Street Fighter games, the Fatal Fury games, the King of Fighters games, the Darkstalkers games, the Marvel and Marvel vs. games, and the Capcom vs. SNK games.