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.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Lately, I've been interested in the Capcom superhero games made under license from Marvel Comics. These games include X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The new one looks to be based around Street Fighter IV graphics and (presumably) engine, so it stands quite a bit apart from the other games in the series. X-Men was the first Marvel game done by Capcom. Coming out in 1994, it had to have been in development concurrently with the first Darkstalkers game, and like that, it uses upgraded "line art" style animation. This animation style was to last at Capcom for years; some of the exact same sprites originally drawn for 1994 releases were still being used in new games as late as 2005---until the release of the Street Fighter IV game, really.

Anyway, barring the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3, about which we only know limited information anyway, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the crown jewel in the Marvel vs. series. Probably the most popular and well known in the series as well. And while it did make a number of improvements to the series... in many ways, I've always been very unhappy with this game at the same time. Here's my complaints, one at a time:

• The presentation. Good heavens, the music is terrible! Simply embarrassing. For that matter, the backgrounds aren't very good either. A few of them pass muster as "OK" but pretty much all of the prior games in the series had better ones. The acid trip carnival background is particularly bad.

• The gameplay has been simplified, and that's mostly welcomed, but at the same time, the ramping up of the tag-team battle from two to three opponents really makes matches drag out unnecessarily. Two was kinda fun... three is not so much. Frankly, I'd still rather just play one on one anyway. You'd think as a King of Fighters fan it wouldn't bother me so much, but I never liked that in the King of Fighters games either, and luckily I can easily play most of those in single character mode.

• While this is a factor of all of the Marvel Capcom games, it seems worse in this one: the game is simply too hyper. It moves too fast and does too much. It rewards button-mashing nearly as much as careful strategic play, which is really difficult to do because of the speed anyway. I think the advent of Turbo modes in Street Fighter was a good thing, but there comes a point where faster is not better, and this game is way on the wrong side of that line. Slower moving games like Fatal Fury's Mark of the Wolves are still tactically very rich and deep without needing to be on a Ritalin.

• The unlocking phase is painfully slow. I've had this game for years and I still have a few alternate character colors to unlock. Part of that is that because of the other problems I have with the game, I don't really play it that often, but part of it is that it's just terribly, terribly slow. The newer re-releases of this game don't feature any unlocking, by the way. It comes with everything pre-unlocked. I don't mind some unlocking; it can even be fun for a while. But this is way beyond fun and into abnormally frustrating and tedious.

• There are way too many silly characters, most of them on the Capcom side, that don't seem to fit with the others. Not only that, some of the silliest characters seem to be on high rotation as CPU opponents, so I see them all the time. The game would be significantly improved without the presence of the four Megaman characters, Amingo the Cactus man and SonSon the monkey girl. For that matter, I have to be feeling pretty generous to be happy to see Anakaris, B. B. Hood, Jill Valentine or Ruby Heart show up either.

What I'd have rather seen, frankly, was a Marvel Super Heroes 2 with all of the Marvel characters that this game has (28 of them, although that counts Wolverine and Wolverine (Bone Claws) as two separate characters). They could possibly add full sprites for the "helper" attackers from Marvel vs. Capcom as well (which, if I remember correctly, would add Thor, Jubilee and US Agent to the roster.) Maybe a few other characters could help pad the roster; after all, many of the characters we do have are quite obscure (Blackheart, Shuma-Gorath and Silver Samurai in particular, but Spiral and Marrow are hardly less so. Even more bizarre is that supervillains associated with Daredevil (Blackheart and Silver Samurai) show up but Daredevil does not.) Give us old-fashioned cool backgrounds and music, and that'd be one of my favorite games in the genre. Sadly, it'll never happen. Maybe I could recreate it in MUGEN if I want it that badly. If I ever decide to get into MUGEN. As it is, I'm left feeling that the Capcom adventure with Marvel is a great big mighta-been; what we got was cool enough, but only a fraction of how cool it could have been.

The team-up has also captured my attention, because of course Capcom teamed up with Marvel and with SNK, but never mixed the two; the Capcom characters (specifically the Street Fighter characters, and Morrigan) are the only common denominators. While on vacation recently, I was struck by the concept of a massive fanfiction that combined the Fatal Fury and King of Fighters characters with the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters and the Marvel characters... but frankly, I'm already doing that as it is except without the Marvel characters being added to the mix, and it's an intimidating enough concept on its own.

Krizalid

I know I just made another BGM related post, but the Arranged version of the soundtrack for King of Fighters '99 is one of the best video game music CDs that I have (which is good; it took quite a bit of tracking down to find.) And amongst the best music on that soundtrack are the two Krizalid themes. Although the two tracks on the CD are tracked so that they flow seamlessly from one to the other, I haven't been able to find that anyone on youtube has actually merged the two files. I might yet do it myself. In the meantime, here's the two parts of the Krizalid theme. If you listen to them back to back, you'll see what I mean. The first part is "Mechanical Bless", and the second is "My Dear Falling Angel".

Then, for fun, I've included the King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match remake of the song, which is retitled "Cutting Edge."

K'

One of my favorite songs from the King of Fighters series. This is the Original Soundtrack version of the K' team, in the game where they first appear.

Unusually, I actually like this OST version better than the Arranged soundtrack version. Not a huge fan of that artwork, though.

Color select

So... according to videos I've seen on youtube, in King of Fighters XIII, after you select your character, you can select your color from menu that shows you all the available options. You move with the joystick up and down through the selections, and it actually updates your sprite to show you what the color looks like.

Why in the world did it take so long for someone in this genre to think of that?

SF2 clones: Breakers series

Following my generic discussion about SNK, I want to hit on the Breakers series by Visco Games. Although a prototype in a few locations was released to Beta markets called Crystal Legacy in 1994, the real start to the series was in 1996 when Breakers was released. Two years later, in 1998, a slightly tweaked version of the game called Breakers Revenge was released. All on the Neo-Geo platform. Because Breakers Revenge just tweaked some balance issues, added one new character, and made the boss playable, I don't really consider it a "new" game in the series, but rather a polishing off of the same game. The differences between the two are no greater than between Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.


The video I've included is probably made available because as a Neo-Geo title, this is easily (and probably frequently) emulated. This is probably the only way the game gets played much, other than the occasional MVS cartridge. Apparently, it never even got an AES release.

While the video will show that this is very much in the vein of Street Fighter 2 in terms of graphics, even to the point of having almost embarrasingly similar character designs, the gameplay has some more nods to an Alpha like gameplay, with super combos being important in the game, and each character having at least two to choose from. What makes the game stand out from others that came out at the same time is the fact that it was painstakingly and very carefully balanced. In fact, to this day, there are still championships held for it in Japan (reportedly) because it has just held up that well. Also because the combo and breakers system is kinda original and fun; not too unlike the concept of the Alpha counters, just implemented a bit better.


In any case, I think it's a little bit unfortunate that this game didn't get a little bit more attention, although it's not at all hard to see why it didn't. Maybe someone could show the title a little TLC on the internet, and make it ping on the radar of genre fans yet.

Although... good luck scoring a copy.

As an aside, there is some embarrasingly bad Engrish in this title, including the character Pierre (who is mispelled Pielle---yes, it is supposed to be Pierre. That's how he appeared in the prototype.) There's still an official site lurking around on the internet, and it's got even more spelling errors; Condor becomes Condol, for instance, and Dao-Long becomes Dao-Rong. Presentation-wise, this lags behind the better efforts of Capcom and SNK, which no doubt contributes to its obscurity. As you can imagine, a game that looks like SF2, except even less visually striking, coming out in 1996 or 1998 (depending on which version you're looking at) couldn't have been very visually exciting either.

Old School Crawl: Street Fighter II

A few nights ago I spent a couple of hours or so with Street Fighter II. The original.

Of course, Street Fighter is the real original, but it didn't make waves like Street Fighter 2 did. Street Fighter 2 is the game that single-handedly created the genre as we know it, and almost everything that followed afterwards did so in its footsteps.



When I was cruising through potential labels for the entire genre, before settling on Karate Supers, I kept coming back to street fighting video games. I didn't use it, because it did sound too much like it just meant the games in this series, but at the same time, that's the long shadow that Street Fighter casts over the genre, and Street Fighter 2 is where it all really happened.

I played three characters all the way through and watched their endings (Ken, Chun-Li and Blanka, for those interested) and played around with a few others, especially Dhalsim, as part of my Old School Crawl review. My first thought when firing up the game was remembering how primitive it all looks in comparison to what followed. The graphics and sound aren't really too much better than the original Street Fighter in many ways. Althought it seemed like a big deal in 1991, the choices of characters (eight) seems really depauperate compared to what we're used to now. The gameplay was slow, and until I got my groove on, it felt floaty and difficult.

Of course, after a round or two, I fell seamlessly back into my groove, and it felt natural again to be playing. I had the timing right to pull off the moves and strategies that I was used to. Moreso than other games that followed later, the original Street Fighter 2 was not nearly as reliant on combos, super or otherwise, nor was it necessarily reliant on special moves. Special moves existed, of course, and were important to playing the game, but regular, basic moves were just as important, and strategies often relied more on predicting AI patterns, at least in single player mode.

Despite the primitiveness, I found that I quite enjoyed revisiting this game. It's still got it. The tweaks that followed in the series and spinoffs that came later didn't necessarily improve it, and in many instances, Capcom tried to recapture the magic that was the original Street Fighter 2.

Nightmare Symbiosis

After thinking that it had completely disappeared from the 'net, I managed to stumble across a web archive version of Nightmare Symbiosis, the best claim I know of for a truly good fanfic based on karate supers. In this case, it's a Street Fighter vs. King of Fighters themed fanfiction.

It does suffer from spending a lot of time on set-up, and then almost slapdashedly finishing the story off, but... it's fanfic. It's still fun to read, and miles above the embarrassingly bad stuff one normally finds.

http://web.archive.org/web/20031203155746/sfvskof.highervoltage.net/intro.php

Old school crawl plan

I had previously said that I wouldn't rigorously research release dates to make sure all my orders are correct. However, I kinda did. I mean, it wasn't rigorous, but I pulled some release dates off Wikipedia and GameFAQs, and put the titles in order. Here's what we've got. Thirty nine titles, all in (more or less) chronological order.

1. Street Fighter
2. Street Fighter 2
3. Fatal Fury
4. Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition
5. Fatal Fury 2
6. Street Fighter 2: Hyper-fighting
7. Fatal Fury Special
8. Super Street Fighter 2
9. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
10. King of Fighters '94
11. Fatal Fury 3
12. Street Fighter Alpha
13. King of Fighters '95
14. Marvel Superheroes
15. Real Bout Fatal Fury
16. Street Fighter Alpha 2
17. King of Fighters '96
18. Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
19. Real Bout Fatal Fury Special
20. King of Fighters '97
21. Darkstalkers 3
22. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2
23. Street Fighter Alpha 3
24. King of Fighters '98
25. Street Fighter III: Third Strike
26. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
27. King of Fighters '99
28. Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves
29. Marvel vs. Capcom 2
30. Capcom vs. SNK Pro
31. King of Fighters 2000
32. Capcom vs. SNK 2
33. King of Fighters 2001
34. King of Fighters 2002
35. SNK vs. Capcom: Chaos
36. King of Fighters 2003
37. King of Fighters Neowave
38. King of Fighters XI
39. King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match

Of course, I'm not yet certain that I'll play every single title. Is it really necessary for me to play five versions of Street Fighter 2, two version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and two versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3? I don't think so.

But that's the order, anyway. Interesting. It was also fascinating to see them lined up. Of course, my collection isn't complete, and having (for example) Darkstalkers 3 without having 1 or 2, or Street Fighter III: Third Strike without having New Generation or Second Impact could confuse rather than elucidate. And yet, I struggled with exactly how the Fatal Fury and Street Fighter subseries matched up to each other, because Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury seem to form a small subseries (despite the titles indicating otherwise) with similar gameplay and sprites that was "extra" compared to the various Street Fighter subseries. That's still true, but seeing that Fatal Fury 3 was out before Street Fighter Alpha kinda confirms to me who was the lead in that development, and who was the follower. (Real Bout Special and Real Bout 2 were much more "Alpha" like.)

KOFXIII Backgrounds rips

I found four King of Fighters XIII background rips on the 'net. Check them out. The India one is my favorite.

Japan
India
Great Britain
Rose Stadium

PS2 woes are over

I'm happy to be the "proud" owner of another PS2 that works now, so... yeah! The new one is silver, which actually surprised me when I pulled it out of the box.

I wonder if I can do anything with the black one? Maybe I'll mess around with it and see if I can get the discs to read.

In any case, in celebration, I broke out several of my PS2 games and played with them a bit: Street Fighter Alpha 3 (the "Upper" version with more characters and a few other improvements), King of Fighters XI and King of Fighers '98 (the Ultimate Match version.) I found myself a little overwhelmed again when I first got it back again, actually. So many games to play, that I found it hard to focus on one. Even while I was playing, I was thinking about other games that I wanted to play too, so it was a little bit of a schizophrenic night, and that's without me even touching my Fatal Fury titles!

Once I settle down a bit, I can get a little more serious about actually playing some of the games and getting back into the groove with them.

Anyway, for part of the time, I was in Training Mode in KoF98, re-teaching myself some of the character moves. I picked Orochi Yashiro as my foe so I could listen to this song while training:

SF2 Clones: SNK

I had earlier said that I was going to give SNK a pass on being SF2 clones, for a variety of reasons. I've changed my mind on that... sorta. Let me begin by listing the reasons that I was initially going to give them a pass, then I'll give a list of reasons why I think that they could be counted after all. Then, I'm going to discuss them in more general terms rather than specifically calling out their series. There are three series that apply here: Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and King of Fighters. I do like my lists.

• First of all, the first Fatal Fury was already under development before Street Fighter 2 was released. Sadly (for SNK) it wasn't released until some months after SF2 was already sweeping arcade owners by storm, so it appears to be a SF2 clone attempt. However, a careful examination of many of the properties of the first Fatal Fury show it to be an improvement (although very similar, still) on the first Street Fighter title, and one that went a different direction than SF2 in many ways. Fatal Fury concentrated instead on some presentation issues, including adding a bit more of an integrated story to the game.
• SNK was not a flash in the pan SF2 imitator. Although some of their titles certainly pass muster as SF2 clones, they managed to stick with it, develop some real leverage with their titles, and frankly, some of them continued long after the Street Fighter series had faded away (discounting the rebirth of that series with Street Fighter IV.) These weren't quickie copies that faded away into obscurity shortly afterwards, which was really kind of the point of the series. Fatal Fury had no less than eight mainline titles and two spinoffs. King of Fighters has twelve mainline titles (with a thirteenth under development) and several spinoff titles. Art of Fighting only had three titles, but even that's quite a bit for a "copy."
• SNK was never content to simply copy anyway; even some of the very earlier "SF2 imitators" had innovative content, much of which later became standard for the genre, including the first true "super combos" (called Desperation moves in Art of Fighting, and later also in Fatal Fury and some King of Fighters titles), spirit meters (useful for using super combos), hidden characters that you needed to unlock, and more.
• Of all the developers who made these ripoff titles (Atlus, Visco, Data East, Noise Factory, etc.) SNK is the only one who's still in the game. Heck, a couple of years ago, SNK was still in the game while Capcom itself wasn't.
• The developers for many of these titles were the original developers of the original Street Fighter title: "Piston" Takashi and "Finish" Hiroshi. Well, that doesn't exactly make them not ripoffs, but it still means something.
• SNK used to also make a bunch of other fighters that were much less similar to Street Fighter in many ways, including the Samurai Shodown series, the Savage Reign/Kizuna Encounter series, and the Last Blade series.

Of course, on the other hand...

• SNK very obviously did ripoff SF2 once they saw that SF2 was more popular than its own offerings. Fatal Fury 2 and Fatal Fury Special are exactly to Fatal Fury as Street Fighter 2 and Super Street Fighter 2 is to Street Fighter. Mai was an obvious Chun-Li clone, and the boss progression (both the idea of fighting four bosses, and the specifics of the bosses themselves) strongly resemble the SF2 bosses, including having a boxer, a Spanish fighter, the boss from the first game (Geese vs. Sagat) and a big boss who wears big shoulder pads. The resemblance between Fatal Fury Special and one of the later iterations of Street Fighter 2 are almost uncanny at times (although the same will be true for some of the other titles we'll review in this series.) While it's fair to say that SF as it developed took some ideas from SNK, I think it's also very fair to say that much moreso, it went the other way around. This actually became more pronounced over time, particularly if you compare the Fatal Fury series with the Street Fighter series. The later Real Bout Fatal Fury games have a strong resemblance in many ways to the Street Fighter Alpha subseries, and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves has a strong resemblance to Street Fighter III. Then again, as King of Fighters turned into the flagship title for SNK, it underwent its own evolution independently more often than not (although the change from EX to Advanced super meter scheme was very reminiscent of how Street Fighter Alpha handled the issue,) and of course, Art of Fighting didn't really last very long anyway.
• Art of Fighting in particular looks to be a series that was developed to cash in on the SF2 craze, and since it wasn't in development at the same time as SF2 (at least as far as I know) that's probably exactly what did happen.

All in all, SNK gets a lot of credit for being, of all the producers of Street Fighter wannabes, the most consistent, the most innovative, the longest lasting, probably the highest quality (this is certainly true for the later titles, where the competition is long gone), the most serious, and the most successful. Over time, I've come to appreciate SNK as much as Capcom, and some of their titles are certainly more than a match for the best Capcom titles. Some of their characters are just as intriguing as the best Capcom characters. While I won't go as far as to say that they've ever bested the best Capcom titles, they were certainly toe-to-toe peers, a claim that no other karate supers producer can match.

Old School Crawl: Street Fighter

Since I arbitrarily defined by label of 'Karate Supers' as starting with the first Street Fighter title in 1987, that's where I started the crawl. Plus... I don't have access to games like Karate Champ or Yie Ar Kung Fu anymore anyway, even if I wanted to expand the definition of the label to include some of the stuff that was clearly prototypical to the subgenre. Needless to say, I don't want to do that anyway; I think the first Street Fighter title is the first game where the label really fits.

I played around with this a bit last night. Played it all the way through as Ryu and even plugged in a second controller so I could be Ken for a little while (although I didn't bother playing it through again as Ken just to see it... to be really complete, maybe I should have, but... meh.

It's easy to forget on occasion that graphics and sound have come a long way since 1987, but nevertheless, the original Street Fighter game still looks pretty good. I mean, the frame rate is really low, so the movement isn't all that fluid and the vocals are nearly unintelligeable, and not just because of the accent (although that certainly doesn't help) but there was an obvious attention to detail in the character designs, backgrounds, and even the BGM.

Where the game really spectacularly fails compared to its successors is in control. The control is not tight at all, and in fact that makes any kind of tactical play nearly impossible to execute. When playing, I tend to try and pull off special moves as much as possible because the movement is so difficult to control otherwise, and because they do a buttload of damage when they connect. This, then, becomes nothing more than a somewhat spastic button masher in play, which isn't very fun for very long.

Despite the flawed execution, all of the elements are in place. Heck, we've got Ken and Ryu (although they don't really look the same, especially Ryu) with their three famous special moves already, the fireball, the dragon punch and the hurricane kick.

The next game chronologically is, actually, Street Fighter 2 itself, but the creative team behind the first Street Fighter left Capcom and later worked on SNK fighters. SNK gets some credit for jumping off at this point in the development of the genre; although unfortunate timing and other things make the original Fatal Fury look like a poor (in some ways) SF2 clone, it actually isn't, and would have been a viable next iteration of the genre from this title instead of being based off of SF2, like most of the rest of the subsequent games were. However... they took too long, Capcom beat them to the punch with SF2, and SNK was stuck playing catch-up for a little while, at least. But we'll get there later. Next up on the old school crawl is Street Fighter 2, followed by Fatal Fury.

SF2 ripoff list

I like making lists. Since I specifically said I'd like to do a series about games that were obvious attempts to cash in on the Street Fighter II arcade craze while it was hot, I decided to make a list of the specific games (or series) that I'm talking about here.

I excluded the games developed by SNK, although I did so kinda by fiat. Fatal Fury was in development before Street Fighter II's release (or so I've heard) so it gets by on a technicality, although otherwise it quacks exactly like a SF2 rip-off. That is an even more difficult sell to exclude SNK's Art of Fighting series, or the King of Fighters series that followed afterwards. However, I'm going to arbitarily excuse them because they were all long-lasting and influential enough to have developed beyond being merely a throwaway SF2 clone. Most of the rest of the titles on this list are much more obscure, if they had sequels, they were really just minor upgrades or freshenings of the original, or otherwise fail at some kind of handwavey notoriety test, as judged solely by me.

Despite giving SNK a buy here, their hardware system, the Neo*Geo platform, as it turns out, was host to a lot of the other clones that'll pop up on this list, due to the fact that SNK licensed the hardware to other development houses. But that's neither here nor there, really.

Here's the list of games I anticipate talking about in this series once I get it off the ground.

Breakers series (by Visco)

• Breakers
• Breakers Revenge

Fighters History series (by Data East)

• Fighters History
• Fighters History Dynamite

Agressors of Dark Kombat (by ADK)

World Heroes Series (by ADK)

• World Heroes
• World Heroes 2
• World Heroes 2 Jet
• World Heroes Perfect

Double Dragon series (by Technos and Evoga and Noise Machine)

• Double Dragon
• Rage of the Dragons

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer (by Technos)

Power Instinct series (by Atlus)

• Power Instinct
• Power Instinct 2
• Gogetsuji Legends
• Groove on Fight
• Matrimelee

Lurching to life a little bit...

I never did follow through on my three post series, did I? There's two reasons for that, 1) my interest in these games has always been a cyclical pattern of waxing and waning; sometimes I'm extremely interested in them for weeks (or more) at a time, and other times I literally don't think of them at all for weeks or months at a time. I went through a "fallow" period there were they were off my radar, and I was doing other things. And 2) my hardware issues left me bereft of a large number of my titles, unable to play them.

1) has cyclically turned, and now I'm interested again, and 2) should be resolved today or tomorrow as I go and buy another PS2 to replace my old one (I also tossed my PS1 when I got the PS2, so I really had a lot of games unavailable...)

Last night, however, I did break out my Xbox and a few of the titles that I have for that system. I played a bit of Capcom vs. SNK 2 using Ken just to warm myself up again to the rhythm of these games and use a familiar character to get back into the groove.

In any case, I hope to start up the three series again... two of which I never actually started. As a refresher, for myself as much as for any readers (of which I'm skeptical that I have any anyway):

• Game feature
• Old School Crawl
• Street Fighter clones

Two of those could have been done without having a working system anyway, so they're long overdue.

PS2 woes, cont.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I went into a PS2 repair shop and asked how much a disc re-alignment would cost. $50. $50.

When I asked how much to buy a replacement used PS2: $65. I could probably knock that down a bit, even, if I bought one on eBay or somewhere.

So, my karate supers actions is, to put it mildly, severaly constrained for the time being, by hardware issues.

My 6-year old finally fessed up to having dropped the PS2 while trying to set up the Xbox. sigh. I wish he'd get over the idea that he can just go get whatever he wants to use it.

Anyway, hopefully at some point this summer I'll get a replacement, and then we'll be back in business.

PS2 woes

Well, I find that my PS2 isn't working this weekend. I think one of my kids dropped it while trying to get it down (without permission, I might add.) He's not fessing up, but I already know that he got into it. It's a moot point anyway.

Hopefully it's just a case of the laser becoming mis-aligned, and that it can be fixed easily. We'll see. If not, I'll have to somehow acquire another one before I can play again.

Which is a real shame, because after a fallow period, I was actually coming around to having interest in playing more of my games again.

Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1

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

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

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

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

Two new series...

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

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

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

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

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

Depth

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

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

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

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

And that is the hallmark of good game design.

Added a hit counter

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 3

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

Part 1, and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psycho Soldier

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

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanfiction

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

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

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

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

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

www.thekeep.org/~rpm/streetfighter/

Thou shalt not covet...

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

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

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

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

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

Game Feature: Capcom vs. SNK 2

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

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

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

But that's a minor pet peeve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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