Akuma theme

On a whim, I thought about possibly collecting the Akuma themes--all of the versions I could find--and put them all in a folder, or burn them to a CD, or otherwise have them all collected in one place where I could listen to them ad nauseum.  Luckily for me, after listening to most of them once, I decided that that was not something that was necessary or even necessarily desirable that I do it again anytime soon, so I dropped the effort.  But I did go out to see if I was missing any, and came across this little gem:

I should point out that this includes some Evil Ryu stuff, and also includes a number of games where the theme was not the same actual song, which I was not going to include, but which is interesting for historical comparison.  This also, however, doesn't include any bootleg remixes, like the Over-clocked Remix stuff, which I was.  So, there's that.

Fair warning; it's pretty long. And you probably want to actually go to Youtube to watch it, so you can expand the description and see which game you're listening to as you go.

SFIV vs. SFV

Here's an interesting video:

Some comments of mine:

• I thought my own emphasis on presentation and other aesthetic features was a personal quirk of my own, but apparently I'm not the only one.  Good!
• Putative release date: February-ish 2016.
• I disagree with him about the roster.  Small rosters are no fun when you're used to a series that has a lot of characters.  That was where SFIII went wrong, and where SFA1 was a failure; the games didn't feel "complete" until the rosters were bulked up with later entries.  It's a bit of a moot point, probably; I won't be an early adopter
• I agree with him on the question of the graphics.  Mostly.  While the new game certainly looks a bit more detailed and flashier, while having a slightly more "realistic" Tekken-ish look.  This isn't really a question of an upgrade to the graphics, really, as much as it is a change in style, however.  Personally, I was a fan of the more cartoonish graphics of SFIV.  They seemed to follow naturally from the SFA series, and were similar stylistically--while clearly showing as an order of magnitude improvement.
• That said, I wonder about the flashier elements.  The special and super moves that have "F/X" attached to them, and all that.  That, clearly, isn't "realistic" at all, and in fact moves the game even more (at least in some ways) towards being a superhero fantasy rather than a normal martial arts game.  Which is fine.  In fact, it's always been the case for SF, and therefore, in large part, for the genre itself, since SF was so important in forming the genre.

"Omega Mode"

Although maybe I'm a little late to the party (I didn't even see the update until early this year, although it came out in mid-December), I've been playing around with the 1.04 patch to Ultra Street Fighter 4, which adds the Omega mode move sets to each character.  This is pretty exciting, but I have to say that my first impression is that it's only been half done; it's like a beta for a patch rather than a complete one or something.

Why is Omega limited to only a few modes of game play?  It looks like you can use it in Training, in Vs. and in Endless, but not in Arcade, and not in Ranked Battles.  Since ranked battles and arcade would seem to be the most used; one would think, this is an odd exclusion.  You should be able to pick your move set or character version in any mode, in my opinion.  Personally, I get my "training" in arcade rather than in Training; I use Training just to make sure I can actually pull moves off without the distraction of an opponent: CPU or otherwise.

Speaking of which, it's also not nearly as helpful as it used to be, since the move list included in the game is an Ultra move list, and the new moves and changed moves that belong to Omega aren't actually documented anywhere!

I guess maybe the really technical, competitive players may like this whole journey of discovery; for me, who am admittedly a more casual player, the launch of Omega seems pretty half-cocked rather than fully done.  I want the moves listed, and I want to be able to use them in any mode.  Not having that feels just bizarre; like I'm playing a deliberately incomplete beta or something.

Characters

So... I said in my last post that I hadn't lined up the character rosters; but for the heckuvit, I did just that.  I sorted--or rather, I should say I color-coded--cells in Excel with the origin of the character.  For simplicity's sake, I didn't create every color code that I could have: my color codes were as follows:

• Original World Warrior (one of the original eight possible character selections in SF2)
• Original Bosses (made playable in SF2: Champion Edition and beyond)
• New Challengers (introduced in Super Street Fighter 2; to make things a bit easier, I added Akuma to this list, even though he technically appeared in the Turbo version of the game which came later.)
• Street Fighter 1 characters (many of whom were reintroduced in the Alpha series) but since Ryu, Ken and Sagat all appear prominently in SF2, I consider them SF2 characters, not SF1 characters.  I know, I know, it's a technicality, but it makes sense to me because SF2 established the genre, and only then did Capcom go back and mine the back catalog of SF1 characters.)
• Final Fight characters (many of whom were reintroduced in the Alpha series)
• Alpha original characters; characters who had not previously appeared in any game before showing up in one of the several iterations of SFA.
• Street Fighter III characters (to make things easier, I combined all versions of this game into one single category rather than having characters who were in The New Warriors separate from 2nd Impact or Third Strike, etc.
• Street Fighter IV characters (and I did the same here; it didn't interest me if a character was new to the original Street Fighter IV or didn't come out until the Arcade Edition or even Ultra Street Fighter IV--if they were unique to the IV series, I lumped them all together.)

This may seem a little odd, in that it gives primacy to divisions within SF2 that it does not to other sub-series, but given the primacy of SF2 in establishing the series overall (and heck; the genre overall) I think that's OK.  Only after the success of SF2 did Capcom go back to older games to mine them as a back catalog for character concepts, namely SF1 and Final Fight.  A few observations:

• Eight World warriors; four bosses and four (five, counting Akuma) New Challengers make for a total of only 17 characters at the peak of SF2.  And all seventeen of these characters are repeated in SFA3 (the version of the Alpha series that peaked with regards to character selection) and USF4 (the version of IV that peaked with regards to character selection.)  Although the original intent was that SF3 would eschew these characters entirely, it turns out that four of these 17 made their way in before all was said and done.
• If you count the portable releases (that had a few additional characters, mostly grabbed from Capcom vs. SNK 2 and one other source) the Alpha series peaked at 38 characters.
• Four SF1 characters (not counting Ryu and Ken, of course) ended up coming back in Alpha, but none of them were in III and only two of them made the cut in IV--Adon and Gen.
• Five Final Fight characters (if you count Maki in the portable version) made it to Alpha, none of which were in III and three of which were in IV.  Sodom and Maki are the ones who got cut.  Poison was never in Alpha or III, but is a Final Fight character that gets added to IV.  Hugo is an odd case, but I'm considering him a III original rather than conflating Hugo and Andore as the same character and calling him a Final Fight character.
• Out of ten original Alpha characters, less than half came to IV: Rose, Dan, Sakura, and Evil Ryu.  You could maybe make a case that Shin Akuma evolved into Oni, but I'm considering them as separate characters.  It may be slightly debatable whether or not Shin Akuma should be considered a separate character in Alpha, but I went with it.  I didn't count Final Bison as a separate character, because among other things, he's not playable.
• The portable version of Alpha 3 had a few hangers-on; Yun is in it, which makes no logical sense given the time frame that Alpha is supposed to take place in vs. III, and Ingrid comes in from Capcom Fighting Evolution--although clearly she was just thrown in there because she could be, not because she belonged.
• Alpa had a big selection, but the peak roster for III was only 20 characters, so in scope, it's more like SF2.
• USF4 has the biggest roster of any SF title ever: 44.  10 of them are unique to the IV sub-series.  Curiously, more SF3 unique characters came over to IV than Alpha unique characters, but then again, Alpha already recycled a lot of characters from a lot of sources anyway, so that's not necessarily saying anything significant.  You could, for instance, fairly make the case that the Final Fight and SF1 characters owe much more to their Alpha appearances than they do to any appearances in any other game.  If you do that, then there are more Alpha characters than III characters.
• I've actually done very little with the IV unique characters, and have expressed little interest in most of them.  They're not quite as bad as some of the worst of the III unique characters (like Q, Twelve or Necro) but they clearly don't have the "staying power" of the originals or some of the popular Alpha or III characters, like Yun or Sakura, for instance.
• In thinking about which characters are likely to be added to V whenever it comes, I'm conflicted.  There seem to be hints that Charlie will return, but he seems to be the only "dead" SF character who actually has remained dead, and Guile has had to represent for him (occasionally with "cosplay" costume alternatives, as in IV).  I predict that only four or so of the IV unique characters make the cut: my votes go to Abel, Crimson Viper, Gouken, Juri and Oni.
• Mike Haggar is a character in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 who could therefore have relatively easily been added to SF4.  I'm surprised, honestly, that he hasn't already been as part of the 1.04 patch that added the Omega mode, if not as part of the Ultra update in the first place.  Very curious and surprising.
• It's been said before, but I'll say it again; one of the big reasons III flopped on its face was the lack of recognizable and relatable characters.  It didn't have any of the ones we already knew and loved, and the new ones that it had weren't as interesting as the originals.  That said, in doing this analysis, I was surprised to find that as many III unique characters came over to IV as did.  I didn't really think that until I laid them out, color coded them, and counted them.  Of course, to me they are just filler characters,  I've rarely, if ever, played most of them.  That said—I do like Dudley.  And the Chinese twins aren't that bad.

Game feature: Ultra Street Fighter IV

Now that I've had it for about six months--I didn't buy any version of SF4 until the Ultra version came out on Steam--it's past time that I did a game feature for it.  After all, it very quickly rocketed to the top of my preferences in the genre, to the point where I literally hardly play anything else in the genre anymore at all if I can't play this one.  I still mean to get more involved in King of Fighters XIII, but since I have to pick teams of three rather than focusing on one character at a time, as I prefer (and as most other KOF titles have allowed you to do if you chose, although it wasn't ever the default manner of play) it's unlikely to supplant my USF4 love anytime soon.

To me it still feels odd to play this on a non-console platform.  In fact, I don't have a decent laptop to play games on either, so it's loaded on my desktop.  I can't even plug this into my big ole 60" TV and watch the fights happen writ large with my sound bar and sub-woofer on; at least not until I decide to upgrade my older laptop to one with better graphics capability so that I can play Steam games on it.  That's the first thing that, to me at least, is odd.  But putting that aside, what do I think of the game?  Like I said, it's so good, that it basically invalidates the rest of the genre to me.  I almost don't have any interest in playing older games anymore.  It's that good.  It's clearly the best game in the Street Fighter series, and for my money, the best game in the genre overall.  I say this as a person who, for the last several years, had started to prefer King of Fighters games to Street Fighter games overall due to their variety and the quality of their later entries compared to the latest I had from Street Fighter.

Maybe I should take a small step back and reflect.  "Back in the day;" i.e., the mid-90s, I was a Street Fighter fan who played on occasion, but wasn't really into any of the SNK games at all.  It was more fair to say that I was kinda sorta vaguely aware of them rather than anything more intimate.  Of course, back then, we were still talking about plunking quarters into arcade machines.  There weren't even decent home conversions for any console that was available at this time; there were "decent" conversions to the PS1 and occasionally even the SNES for older games, but that was about it.  As my own console ownership improved to a PS1, a Dreamcast, and years later (although still very belatedly) to an Xbox and a PS2, I was finally able to start getting good conversions of more games.  I didn't play SF2 much anymore by this point; my favorite Capcom games were Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  To me, the Alpha series was where the Street Fighter series peaked, and the Street Fighter 3 series didn't do much more me at all.  In fact, I didn't like a number of aspects of it, including some of the gameplay, some of the character selection, and I thought that the music actively annoyed me almost all of the time, and the boss was really stupid.

Because Street Fighter itself as a title started to feel stuck in the late 90s--either they weren't making updates at all for much of the time since then, or they were making updates that I didn't much like, it wasn't until this point that I started migrating more towards SNK games and really belatedly rediscovered the King of Fighters and Fatal Fury series.  For a while; heck; even a year ago--I probably would have told you that my favorite games in the genre were the final PS2 editions of King of Fighters '98 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, while Capcom would come in, probably third and fourth respectively with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  I remember years ago thinking that I'd love to see a game come out that used 3-D graphics to get rid of the need for hand-drawn and animated sprites, but which resurrected a 2-D Street Fighter-esque game-play, and that I'd really want them to be Street Fighter characters, frankly.  Of course, shortly after having that dream or wish; SF4 was announced, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Of course, I didn't get it for a long time, because I lacked the hardware to play it, and maybe that's a good thing.  Other than a small bit of playing around here and there and seeing a few things on youtube, I wasn't really exposed to the game until it was extremely refined; Ultra Street Fighter IV has a broad and deep character selection, finely balanced game-play, a lot of the unique gameplay elements that the IV brings to the greater series have been refined, and in general most of the "kinks", if you will, of the game are fixed.  I probably enjoy it more because I never had to "suffer" through older versions of the game.

Street Fighter IV takes place after Street Fighter II, and prior to Street Fighter III, which it largely ignores completely, other than to take the more popular characters from that ill-fated game and integrate some of them.  SIN is the new villainous organization, which is characterized as a division of Shadaloo (Shadaloo Intimidation Network) focused on developing weapons and other new technology.  It has a feel very similar--in terms of story--to NESTS from King of Fighters of about 15 years or so ago, which isn't a bad thing.  Seth, the boss, is some kind of synthetic human grown as a replacement body for Bison which acquired sentience and autonomy following the fall of Shadaloo in Street Fighter II.

There are a few nods to SFIII in terms of game-play, most notably in the fact that you must select your Ultra move rather than simply being able to do them all.  Ultra Street Fighter IV allows you to do either of the two Ultra moves if you select Ultra Combo Double, but the cost for this flexibility is that they do less damage.  Each character also has only one Super Combo (with a few odd exceptions).  Curiously, this makes the game feel more old school, however--King of Fighters could learn a lesson or two in terms of stripping down and focusing on core gameplay rather than on highly technical gameplay with lots of moves, many of which will be difficult to pull off.  Not that some SFIV moves aren't difficult to pull off; charge-characters and grapplers are notoriously difficult with a regular USB control pad, for instance, but there's still a feel that this almost ignored the Alpha games and SFIII entirely and is really a sequel to SFII instead.  This isn't a bad thing, really.

Super Combos are done much as they always have been; you gain energy on a super combo bar by landing hits or being hit.  Ultra Combos on the other hand, only get charged up when you take damage.  If you play too well, you won't actually ever get the opportunity to use an Ultra combo.

There's a few other neat additions, like Focus Attacks which make you vulnerable for a short time, and might actually end up taking energy from your own bar if you don't play it right, but which in return are armor breakers that knock your opponent down and give you an opportunity, if you're quick, to get in a super or ultra combo without any chance of it being blocked.  Playing on Steam also means that you have access to online matches that run pretty smoothly; you can upload your matches directly to youtube from your game, and more.  But really; the appeal of SFIV, in any iteration but especially this one, is the ability to play very classic (yet updated and modern feeling) Street Fighter gameplay with beautiful presentation in terms of the characters, the rest of the graphics, the stages, etc.  It even has decent voice-acting, with both Japanese and American/English voice actors (you can toggle in the settings which you prefer to have and you can even toggle per character, just in case you want your Japanese characters to speak Japanese instead of English in game.)  And it also advances the mythology significantly.

By this I mean that certain things in the Street Fighter mythos are actually changed.  Whereas before we were told that M. Bison was killed when Akuma did a Shun Goku Satsu on him at the end of SFII, well---clearly he wasn't, because he appears in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Ryu and Ken's master was murdered by Akuma at about the same time-frame as SF1, well---clearly he wasn't either, because Gouken makes his first appearance in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Akuma was holding back and Shin Akuma; the same character with a slightly different set of moves, was him fighting at his potential, we now get a totally new version of the character with new graphics, new moves and even a new name: Oni, who is the true potential of Akuma.  There's even some confusing talk in some sources about Oni being a "dream" character (as Evil Ryu is); what would happen if Oni completely foreswore his humanity and became--basically--a demon, warped by the "dark Hado" or, the Dark Side of the Force... er, his Martial Art power source.  This, of course, is kind of silly, since Akuma is already representative of someone who foreswore his humanity in pursuit of power.  Whatever.  Because I like the shotokan characters (I guess that makes me a bit of a scrub) I don't mind having another option, and one that's significantly different, for that matter, from the others, and I don't mind the update to the mythos.  And I like the look of Oni quite a bit.

Another fun aspect of digitally rendered models (rather than hand-drawn sprites) is that you can alter the appearance of the characters quite dramatically by downloading costumes.  My purchase of Ultra Street Fighter IV came with all of the previously released costumes enabled and deployed, and then I also paid some money for the Vacation package of additional costumes.  I didn't buy the more recently released animal cosplay ones because I think the notion of spending money on costumes is lame, unless they're phenomenal and I'm really excited, plus I thought the idea of animal cosplay costumes was really dumb anyway.  Anyone who reads my blog knows that I get inordinately picky about the color palettes and whatnot in past games; here, I tend to find a costume and color combination that I really like, and I like that I have a lot of options available.  Some characters that I don't even necessarily much like the look of in their original costumes are really cool looking in alternate costumes, although of course, many alternate costumes are extraordinarily dumb.  I'm in particular not fond of some of the "really Japanese" costumes that fail their localization efforts; gigantic bows tied on the back of characters with gigantic ropes, and weird, billowy, semi-samurai-ish robes.  Eh; that's the price of variety.  For (almost) every character, there's at least one costume that I like.  For some, it's even the original.

The character selection is also really great.  Every single SF2 character is here, almost all of the SFA characters (I haven't lined up the rosters to systematically compare, but I think Sodom, Birdie, Juni and Juli are the only ones missing.  I think...) and about half of the SF3 characters (Dudley, Elena, Yun, Yang, Ibuki, and Makoto); certainly all of the ones that you'd care to see again.  There are also a number of all-new SF4 characters: Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Oni, Hakan, and Yuri.  There are, as always, too many shotokan characters: Ryu, Evil Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Oni, Dan, and even Gouken now, but they also all feel much more different from each other than they have in the past, so they don't feel too much like retreads of the same moves.

Street Fighter V

Holy crap, y'all!

http://www.streetfighter.com/us/sfv