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.