KOFXIII

Well, it's still not available in the states, as near as I can tell. I guess maybe it's lurking in some arcades somewhere, but arcades are a dying breed, and I don't know where one even is near me that would be likely to have a game like this. And even if I did, I wouldn't have the time or means to visit it frequently, most likely. There still isn't any sign, as near as I can tell, that the game has a home release scheduled, even in Japan much less here in the States. Although there is vague talk about some kind of home release sometimes within 2011. We'll see.

Meanwhile, it is at least out, and if good video and screenshots are rare, there's a fair amount of stuff up on youtube and elsewhere that is hand-held recordings of someone playing, at least. And the resolution of the second Orochi story has been translated and disseminated across the Internet. The nature of "Those from the Past" has also been significantly fleshed out and further elaborated.

And its this last that I want to talk briefly about. Given that I've blogged several times before (including earlier today) about the importance of story to give the fights context as an important element in causing these games to be classics rather than simply fads, it shouldn't be surprising that it's something that I find particularly interesting.

"Those from the past" are revealed to be a time-traveling, non-human, "devilish," European counterpart, in some ways, to the "Hakkesshu" or the original followers of Orochi guys from the '96-'97 titles. But while the Hakkesshu guys were all interested in breaking the Orochi seal to unleash their master on the world, "Those from the Past" are interested in doing so to steal the Orochi power for themselves. Or, more specifically, for the master of the group, who is Saiki. Like Orochi and the Hakkesshu, they are said to be followers of the "will of Gaia" but what exactly that means is not exactly clear. It seems that they are counterparts to Orochi itself, and his followers, rather than counterparts merely to his followers. While Orochi decided that humanity was bad for "Gaia" and needed to be eliminated, it's not clear that "Those from the past" had that aim. Rather, they seem more concerned with their own power, and the magnification of it, and if that means cannibalizing power from their Orochi counterparts, they don't seem to be too concerned with that.

In fact, it seems that they need exactly that--the backstory suggests that they, like Orochi and the Hakkesshu, made war upon humanity, and although their individual power was great, the cumulative effect of all that humanity was that they were gradually losing. This is where the time travel plot came into effect; they were to go to the future, marshal their resources, and then go back further in time after having stolen the power of the Three Sacred Treasures and gone back in time again to defeat their foes when they were still weak and relatively powerless. If this doesn't make tons of sense, remember that this is a beat 'em up fighting game and just go with it.

Ash was their agent who was supposed to run around stealing the power of the sacred treasures and giving it back to Saiki so he could complete this plan. However, Ash decided to turn traitor; he kept the power for himself, defeated and absorbed Saiki himself. Was he trying to merely take his power for his own, or was he trying to save humanity? Not clear. I never was a fan of Ash, and I'm also not a fan of time travel plots. Anyway, Saiki was a strong enough personality, that even absorbed he pretty much took over Ash, and "Dark Ash" ended up being Ash possessed by Saiki. The story kept on going, "Dark Ash" was defeated, and Ash refused to return through the gate. Saiki (and Ash himself) faded away as the time stream was altered--since it turns out that Ash was a descendent of Saiki, and Saiki no longer existed in the past time stream.

Unlikeable protagonists and time travel paradoxes aside, I really like the concept of "Those from the Past." Even without understanding it exactly, I had independently worked up the idea of them that's very similar to what ended up being revealed; they were a shadowy conspiracy group that wanted to steal the Orochi power for its own sake. I had them as more of an Illuminati-like group composed of powerful mortals and immortals alike, riffing off of the Dark Stalkers-like vibe that King of Fighters 2003 and XI had already hinted at.

For very sensible reasons, these various King of Fighters threats are treated separately; it started off with the great but single boss Rugal back in '94, the Hakkesshu and Orochi in '95-'97 (especially '96-'97). The NESTS threat was '99-2001. 2003-XIII was the "Those from the Past" threat. '98, 2002 and XII were "dream matches" that have no canonical implication.

For my glacially slowly budding fanfic effort point of view, I'd want to collapse all those threats into happening simultaneously, though--or at least right on the heels of each other. The Hakkesshu, NESTS, and "Those from the Past" are all out there simultaneously. How do I tie them all together? And how do I include Street Fighter villains to the mix as well?

Here's my thought. The Hakkesshu and Those from the Past are already at odds. Good guys don't want either of them to win. Shadowloo and NESTS are very similar organizations, with very similar aims--cloning, AI, criminal syndicates, take over the world plans, etc. Combine them and Bison and his organization--basically the main Street Fighter villains, are fully integrated into at least one KoF stream. What if the psychic energy that powers the psychodrive and that that Hakkesshu and Those from the Past is trying to use to unseal Orochi is the same power? Suddenly Bison/NESTS have a very important reason to be at odds with the other two supervillainic organizations. And, of course, the good guys still have every reason to stop all of the groups.

In fact, the whole set-up reminds me in vague terms of the Galactic Storm storyline from The Avengers, not that I'm a huge comic book guy, but still. The good guys step in to keep earth from becoming collateral damage in a vast war between the Kree and the Shi'ar, which was engineered by the Skrulls. And, once again, I relate karate supers to modern, post-silver age superhero comic books and the derivative media based on them. I can't help it.

Bosses

So... last night, I discovered that my Xbox titles are plagued with problems. The life expectancy of Xbox controllers seems to be downright abyssmal. I still have fifteen year old original controllers with my SNES (ironically, the machine itself stopped working recently, and I haven't had time to try and figure out what's wrong with it) but I've gone through nearly a dozen Xbox controllers in much less time. I do have some third party controllers, but I find that the d-pad and buttons on those often has a very different feel, making pulling off the kinds of moves that karate supers games require often quite difficult.

In addition to that, my favorite Xbox game of this genre, Capcom vs. SNK 2, has long struggled with some kind of condition where it often "hangs" between matches on the yellow cross-hatch screen. Even though I got the disc resurfaced, this problem has gotten worse, to the point where the game is almost completely unplayable. I'll probably have to buy it for the PS2, unlock some of the extra characters and extra modes and whatnot all over again, and migrate it entirely. I may have to do the same for my other Xbox titles when I can, including King of Fighters 2002/2003, and I may have to write off completely SNK vs. Capcom: Chaos and King of Fighters Neowave, although I won't miss either of those too much, honestly. That's certainly a frustrating development.

But I didn't post just to gripe about my hardware woes. What I'd really rather talk about is bosses. There are a few iconic bosses that stay with entire series for iteration after iteration, and remain classic and... well, iconic time after time. And then there are bosses that are forgettable. And thirdly, there are bosses that are perfectly fine and serviceable, but which somehow remain less iconic and their appearances are limited. Finally, to create a last category, there are bosses that are meant to be somewhat disposible--they belong to "boss families" and as the series progresses, you're not meant to fight literally the same boss over and over again, but rather related or similar bosses.

From the first category, I'd say certainly that Bison and Rugal are the standouts (from the Street Fighter and King of Fighters series, respectively) with Geese Howard from Fatal Fury right behind them. Their personality, their look, their moves, their whole "schtick"--they're iconic, popular, and they repeat over and over again because, let's face it, the designers can't top 'em. Rugal has been the boss in no fewer than four KoF titles (even if two of those were non-canonical "dream matches" and he's actually supposed to be dead) and may well make an appearance again in a putative KoFIV dream match. One hopes, anyway. Bison is the boss in the Street Fighter II series and the Alpha series, and he makes plenty of appearances in the vs. Marvel series, he was redesigned for the vs. SNK series, and yet again for the Street Fighter IV titles, although not as the boss. Those two have an enduring legacy as nightmare bosses that is probably never going to be matched. But let's not leave Geese out of the discussion. While Fatal Fury might be a "lesser" title compared to KoF or even SF, he is definitely the definitive boss from that series. When SNK replaced him with Krauser, it just wasn't the same at all, and Geese had to come back in subsequent games. Geese also has made very notable appearances in other games, including King of Fighters, Art of Fighting, the vs. SNK games, and more.

Sadly, there have also been fairly forgettable bosses--even if they make repeat performances, players don't much care, because they have little personality and little legacy. Wolfgang Krauser, unfortunately, seems to fit this profile. In his case, it's not exactly his fault; he just couldn't live up to the standards set by Geese. Street Fighter's Gill and Seth also seem pretty forgettable, and even silly in many respects, compared to Bison. Some of the King of Fighters bosses could also qualify, but I'm going to put them in the families section instead--their association with other related bosses makes them more than just what you get in that particular game.

By this, I'm largely referring to the bosses of the ongoing miniseries within the King of Fighters series. While Krizalid himself, for example, is certainly a "lesser" and perhaps forgettable boss on his own, his association with the greater NESTS saga elevates him somewhat in estimation. Rather, it's fair to say that NESTS as a whole is an iconic and memorable foe, even if the individual bosses within it--Krizalid, Clone Zero, Zero and Igniz--are individually not much to write home about. This phenomena is particularly notable with the original Orochi storyline of King of Fighters, which featured mostly in King of Fighters '95-'97. In '95 itself, the storyline was merely hinted at and the sensible decision to recycle Rugal as the boss from the mostly unrelated King of Fighters '94 was made. In '96 the storyline really started coming together for the first time, though. Goenitz was given a token relationship with Rugal or sorts, and the concept of this big conspiracy stretching back generations was unveiled. Goenitz was himself a pretty cool boss, and he's made a number of appearances for no other reason than because he's kinda cool--officially he's supposed to be dead. This was all brought to a head in '97 with the Orochi New Faces team as sub-bosses, evolving into Orochi himself as the final boss. But... '97 kinda had lame bosses. The Orochi storyline is a classic in the genre, but Orochi as a boss is shockingly underwhelming. His association with a greater threat that spans several games gives him a gravitas of sorts that his actual appearance doesn't support.

This is also true to some extent of the "new" Orochi storyline; the so-called European counterparts to the Heavenly Kings, the "Those from the Past" group. Mukai, Magaki and Saiki (these are supposed to be the European counterparts? Oh, well.) In fact, it's leader, Saiki, isn't even the final boss of the series... kinda. Ash Crimson, that totally lame and unlikeable "protagonist" character for this subseries, steals his power, can't control it, ends up being possessed, and at the end "Dark Ash" is the final boss. But the team as a whole; the NESTS bosses, "Those from the Past" etc., benefit from their association. They're cooler and more threatening than they would be just on their own.

There's a few other bosses that have made appearances here and there and done a serviceable job without turning into classics. Kane R. Heinlein, for example. Mr. Big. Maybe Krauser really belongs here, instead of in the "forgettable" bosses. A lot of the "alternate" and sub bosses, like Adelheid, for example.

All in all, good bosses make a good game. While for most, the actual tactics of playing are the most important part of the game, in other cases, the presentation and the context is hugely important in making it all come together. The tactics sometimes aren't enough by themselves--the story, the human drama--that's what makes the best of these games really come alive, and of course, the nature of any human drama is conflict. And conflict requires great antagonists. Quite honestly, games with underwhelming bosses tend to be underwhelming games that don't become the classics.

Game feature: King of Fighters XI

This seems like an opportune time to indulge in another game feature post. My son, while playing with this the other day, accidentally deleted the savegame file (he inserted the memory card after it was already running, which caused the autosave to rewrite the file with no data to speak of) so I've had to spend a little bit of time going back through and attempting to unlock all the hidden characters again. As of the time of this writing, I've got everyone except Mai and Geese done, and I should be able to have them complete the next time I'm able to sit down with the game... which hopefully, but not necessarily, will be tonight.

This is the first game from the King of Fighters series that I'm featuring, and it's in most respects an unusual entry in that series. A little background: the King of Fighters series used to come out with a new entry every year. From 1994 through 2003 that was the case, even when SNK went belly-up, a new title came out every year, but increasingly, they barely squeeked in under the date, and the games were (almost certainly) rushed in at least some respects. King of Fighters XI is the first in-sequence game to abandon this schedule; the year was dropped from the title, and it was released when it was ready to go. The poorly recieved King of Fighters Neowave was also released prior to this one; really it was a lightly tweaked adaptation of King of Fighters 2002 on the new hardware. This game, then, was the first real new game, on new hardware, with a new titling scheme.

That said, it was a continuation in every other sense of King of Fighters 2003. Not only is it part of the same "saga"--miniseries within the greater King of Fighters series, but it also continues to build on the tag-team mechanics of that game. In XI, there are new tweaks to the tagging--you can get out of combos with a timely tag team, or jump in and complete combos. Like 2003, you pick a leader for your team, and the leader is the only character who can get the so-called Leader Desperation Move, your big supercombo. This is unfortunate, but there are ways around it.

For example, although you can play it in arcade mode with the tag teaming, you can also play it in a mode that more closely resembles "classic" King of Fighters gameplay, and you can also play in a mode that more closely resembles classic Street Fighter play; i.e., instead of a team, you pick a single fighter and play best two out of three (or three out of five, if you set it up that way.) Needless to say, based on my already well-established preferences, that's usually how I play. In 2003 that mode was rather poorly executed; instead of having rounds, the battle was collapsed into a single round and each character has three health bars. Lame. Here, it works exactly as you'd expect.

The character selection for this game is unusual. While many classic characters that have been in almost every chapter of the series so far are conspicuously missing, at the same time, the game is packed with a number of unusual characters that have made only sporadic appearances before, and even characters who have never been in any King of Fighters title before. So frankly, even though it seems maybe a little weird to not have Joe Higashi or Andy Bogard show up (and the exclusion of Mai from the standard version of the game--she's a PS2 exclusive who has to be unlocked--was very controversial amongst fans) I've got them already on every other King of Fighters title I've got; it's kind of nice to see instead more esoteric characters like Duck King, Eiji Kisaragi, Mr. Big, or Silver, Gai Tendo, Jazu and Tung Fu Rue make appearances. One odd thing of note; once you get beyond the basic character color and start exploring the other three, there are some really weird ones out there. Of course, there's also a color edit so you can create two custom colors. These are also interesting; as in the PS2 Ultimate Match version of KOF98, you can also edit the colors of the character's "special effects" so that if, for example, you wanted the flame effects around Terry's Buster Wolf to be white and blue instead of yellow and orange, to give them a colder feel, well, you could. It seems a lot of work, but it's doable. Although I still haven't finished unlocking everyone again after losing my original savegame file on the memory card, I did go in and create an edit of Athena that looks more like her KoFXII version--just for fun. I actually quite like Athena in this game, after not liking her much in several recent ones. Her "deadly rave" style supercombos are replaced with a simplified and graphically quite astonishing move that makes me wonder if the designers are familiar with the classic X-men "Dark Phoenix" saga.

The presentation of the game is otherwise also very good; menu is perhaps a bit too small to easily see the character portraits when you're looking for your favorite, and the hidden characters are all off screen. The backgrounds are very nice, and higher resolution than the old Neo-Geo hardware was able to provide (although the more recent ports of Neo-Geo titles still had upgraded backgrounds anyway. 2002 simply redid the backgrounds in higher res, while 2003 did that to a few stages, and then created a whole bunch of new stages that were only loosely similar to their Neo-Geo counterparts.) Notably, there are fewer changes to these backgrounds as you advance--not much of the going from daytime to sunset to night time, for example. Given that the game is meant to be played in a single round format, with tag-teaming fighters, this is certainly an excuseable lapse.

All in all, I don't know that King of Fighters XI will go down in history as a real classic title in the series especially given the unusual character selection and a few other oddities about its game sstem, but it's certainly one of the better ones, as well as one of the most attractive ones. Frankly, its one of the ones I come back to the most, along with King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match, so I consider it amongst the very best in the series.

Gaming again

After struggling with an extremely stressful many-week run at work, I needed something that required perhaps a bit less thought than reading, and which was less likely to cause me to fall asleep on the couch than watching movies, especially ones I already own and have seen before. The obvious answer, of course, was to plug in my old consoles and breaking out my karate supers games again, which I had played very sporadically and mostly not very much at all the last several months. The last week or so I've given it a much more concerted go at playing more frequently and getting back into practice with the games and characters that I like. I haven't done much with my Xbox titles, and I haven't yet turned on my Dreamcast at all, so it's so far all been Playstation titles. King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match, King of Fighters XI, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel Superheroes, King of Fighters '99, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 are so far the titles I've explored, which is really quite a lot.

I know it seems unlikely that at the rate I'm going I'm ever going to finish my fanfic in my lifetime (or get an Xbox 360 so I can play Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, Super Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match or King of Fighters XII) I'd like to think that that prognostication is overly pessimistic. I've made a few minor tweaks to the fanfic actually already, and have started outlining some future chapters.

Anyway, I'm still a bit braindead from being so busy all the time with my real life, which means that my hobbies are suffering tremendously, but I do still need to occasionally get my thoughts out of my head and on screen, at least. Hopefully I'll get to blogging more frequently on all my blogs soon.

Fatal Fury

While I discussed last time, six weeks or so ago, that SFA3 is my "go-to" Street Fighter title; the one that I'm much more likely to play than any other title in the series when I'm in the mood for some Street Fighter action, it's a bit more difficult for me to say that about any of the games in the Fatal Fury series. I still regularly return to the original Fatal Fury fer cryin' out loud, and I sometimes have a hard time deciding if Real Bout Special is better than Real Bout 2 or vice versa. Mark of the Wolves is, of course, an excellent game too, and Fatal Fury 3 even gets some love. I don't often play Fatal Fury 2 or Special, and I don't have much use for the original Real Bout game, but still--unlike with Street Fighter where I've homed in on a single title as my favorite and play it most of the time to the exclusion of all other titles (except when I want to indulge some nostalgia) I bounce around a fair bit in the Fatal Fury series, trying to decide what I'm really in the mood to play.

Yesterday, for example, I played through Fatal Fury 3 (with Terry; yeah, it's kinda cheesy, but a few characters are really hard in this game!) I have to admit, I think one of the reasons I like this game so much is the little attention to detail; the backgrounds and stuff are really cool and fun to watch. Yamazaki's trainyard background in particular is one of my favorite scenes in any fighting game ever (train-themed stages are very popular in both Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters stages in general. There must be some railfans in Japan. Also; what's with the steam engines? They're cool, that's what. There's no other reason to have them except that they look awesome.)

The character sprites don't look quite as good; they were greatly improved (although also "cartooned up" a bit) after Real Bout, so going back to these sprites feels clunky and primitive. Granted, FF3 improved the sprites significantly from FF2 and FFS (which in turn did so to the FF1 sprites--those that represented characters who recurred, that is) so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them. The FF characters in the early KoF games also looked quite a bit better, although KoF was usually a slightly more attractive game visually anyway than the FF games.

I had better luck this time playing through it than I sometimes do. Some characters are just harder for me than others; Franco Bash is harder than he should be (especially for for a "Tier 1" character) and Terry is surprisingly hard to get past without having to use a continue or two (or more.) Geese Howard is, of course, a maniac that consumes several continues every time I play, but I only used two or three on him this time, I think. Surprisingly, after defeating Geese, the next two characters are relatively easy.

Anyway, I included a youtube link to the second half of a playthrough of FF3. In Spanish.

SFA2 Gold vs. SFA3 Upper

Last night on a whim, I got out my Street Fighter Alpha Anthology but instead of just playing SFA3 Upper, like normal, I played through that with Akuma (I know, kinda cheesy, but I was out of practice) and then played SFA2 Gold with Akuma too, to compare the two titles and see how different they really are. Although I'd played tons of both games on various systems (mostly SFA2--not Gold, on SNES and SFA3U on the old Playstation) I'd never spent any real time playing the two of them back to back to see how they compare together.



Although there were a handful of things I liked better about the older title, in general, SFA3 was quite a bit improved from SFA2. The presentation of SFA2G was dated; the music sounded primitive and, frankly, kinda silly. The inter-match graphics are also more primitive (although less stylized and strange than in SFA2G.)

Notably, the controls were less fluid and responsive. I was surprised to find that out, because I expected that it would be more or less the same. They must have made some gameplay tweaks and corrections to make the characters feel a bit more responsive. In particular, after doing the Shun Goku Satsu (Instant Hell Murder) Maxed out super move on SFA3 several times, I was surprised at how difficult it was to pull off in SFA2; the timing is really much more precise, and I was used to the SFA3 timing anyway.




So... any faithful readers (ha! As if anyone besides me reads this blog anyway) know how much I like lists, so let me list out things that I liked and didn't like from each version. At least as I saw them from a simple, single playthrough with one character for purposes of comparison.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold

1) I had forgotten that SFA2 still retained the old Street Fighter 2 convention of doing throws by simply hard punching or kicking at a certain range. I always liked that better than entering a special command to throw. Although SFA3 replaced this feature with a special two-button command (which makes throws something that happens extremely rarely in my games), as do the SFIII titles, Capcom later returned to this mode for the Capcom vs. SNK series.

2) I love some of the stages. Dhalsim, Adon, Gen, Ryu, Sagat and a few others just have very lovely or interesting stages, and the "hidden" stages of the Venezuelan waterfall and the Australian grasslands thunderstorm are really nice. SFA3 has nice stages too; but I really missed a few of these that I had always quite liked. I wish that the Hyper Street Fighter Alpha allowed to you mix and match stages from all three titles, but it was not to be.

Unless I've got that wrong. Since I don't frequently have someone I can play against that enjoys playing it very much, I haven't actually done much with HSFA. Maybe it does allow that and I've forgotten! I don't think so, though...

3) As an improvement on SFA2 non-Gold, you can now select from six colors by simply selecting with one of the six basic attack buttons. Much easier.

4) Alpha counters were always pretty dumb. I remember back when I was first playing SFA2, I'd do them accidentally sometimes. That doesn't happen now, but I still don't really like them, or see the point in them. I can see how they'd be useful strategically, but it doesn't seem worth it in the cost from your super meter.

5) I really don't like how you do supers, where to get the maximum strength one you have to hit all three buttons. Especially on a PS2 controller, that's really a PITA. So, I rarely do supers higher than second level in this game, and frankly, make a lot more use of my 1st level supers, whereas in SFA3, I always use the highest level super that I can.

6) I find that I actually don't miss a lot of the characters from SFA3 Upper after all, since a lot of the added characters were ones that I was less likely to want to use anyway. So, if I really want to play those characters, I obviously can't play them in this game, but eh... for the most part the characters I'm most likely to want to play are here.

7) Hate the music. Granted, this is about the same era as the Dark Stalkers and Marvel Superheroes, or at best, the first of the Marvel vs. series, and the music sounds similar in many respects to those. But I've gotten used to better over the years. Even the SNK releases of old titles have "remixed" soundtracks with really good versions of the themes. Wish they could have done that too. Since many of the themes used in SFA2 are the same ones used all the way back to SF2 itself, they've also made appearances on the HD remix game and SF4 soundtracks, so I've got high expectations of what they could sound like.

8) Kinda liked the concept that each character had their own individual boss depending on what their story was. Granted, it made the boss feel a bit less like a boss, but still... it was a fun idea.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper

1) Really like the expanded character roster, although sadly many of the more "esoteric" characters show up very infrequently in regular arcade play, so unless you play against friends who like to use a varied stable of characters, you may not see them much, or see their stages or listen to their themes. Unless you pick them in versus or practice mode, of course, but that's not the same thing at all.

2) Final Bison is a really cool boss. Of course, he makes playing with "regular" Bison a bit of a letdown, but meh. For some reason, the PS2 version doesn't seem to want to allow me to continue if I lose to Bison, although in the old PS1 version I know that I could.

3) Smoother gameplay, air blocking, air recovery, dashing, etc. probably make up for throws being crocked.

4) Great stages and great themes. I know that there are few (if any) tributes to the original soundtrack, and that's occasionally missed (SF4 and SSF2THDR all showed that the original themes could be spruced up to be cool again) but instead, we get quite a few really nice ones. Of course, a lot of them tend to run together and sound too similar to each other after a while, but I'm OK with that because when the themes here are good, they're really good. I'm especially fond of Rose, Chun-Li and Karin's themes, but Blanka, T. Hawk and Cammy also have quite nice ones.

5) The story is intriguing, but impossible to make out from the game itself. Without online plot guides, I'd be lost.

6) Some of the newer characters are redundant to say the least. We've already got Ken, Ryu and Akuma (and Dan) all of whom are very similar to each other. Do we really need to add new versions of both Ryu and Akuma to the mix? Cammy and Juli and Juni are also to a certain extent very much like each other too; Juli and Juni in particular playing like move-impoverished versions of Cammy.

7) This is true of all the Capcom fighters (and the SNK ones too); the PS2 controller is a poor subsitute for a good arcade stick. While in many ways I like the PS2 controllers a lot, it does a poor job for certain moves, and makes some characters nearly unplayable because their specials and supers are so difficult to pull off. This also contributes to making all that character diversity a bit of a false promise. The big grapplers in particular suffer from this--double 360 motions on a d-pad are a nightmare.

I'm convinced after playing this that revisiting SFA2 Gold will be a relatively rare occurance for me, and will mostly just gratify my sense of nostalgia, while SFA3U will still be the go-to game for SF action for me, as it already was. But it was fun to revisit SFA2 again, and remember some of the things that I liked better about that game after all.

Blood on the Asphalt

You've gotta give Capcom some credit; when a bunch of amateur remixers decided they wanted to remix the classic Street Fighter II BGMs as part of a community project, mostly just for their own fun, it was a big success. And when Capcom was ready to release the "Hi-def" version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, they came to these amateur remixers and asked them to contribute their tracks, reworked to be less stand-alone music samples and more something that could work in the context of a game (i.e., don't get too creative with changing the mood or tone of the piece, since it works with the character and background art to create a single, unified "feel", make sure that none of the pieces stand out as too outre and that they all fit coherently together, while still maintaining the diversity that was part of their charm all along, and make sure that the tracks can loop properly and speed up for the dramatic "someone's almost KOed" sound effect.)

Involving a fan project so prominently like that was a cool and classy move. Go, Capcom! Just for that, I fired up my Street Fighter Alpha Anthology last night a bit and played around with it. I had a lot on my mind, so I didn't play for too long, but I've had this growing sense of wanting to reconnect with this hobby again after getting distracted by an absolutely crazy fall schedule.