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.