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.