Art styles

For Capcom, you can see various "generations" of artistic styling on their fighting games, i.e. mostly Street Fighter.

1. Street Fighter I was made in 1987 on very primitive hardware by the standards of what was to come. The art looked really good for the year that it came out, but it looks primitive by 90s standards, with stiff, non-fluid animation and relatively little detail.
2. Street Fighter II was the same style as the earlier game, but the hardware was improved, and everything looked better. The character animation was both more fluid and more detailed, the backgrounds had a great deal more detail and animation, etc.
3. The Street Fighter Alpha games used the same style as both the Marvel and Darkstalkers game, and looked less like a video game and more like an animated movie, by design. The hardware was improved (CPS1 to CPS2 board). Everything was again improved; the backgrounds look wonderful, the characters look pretty good, although they're still the same size/resolution as the earlier style--but artistically they were very different. I'm not 100% sure that the frame rate or fluidity increased. The F/X stuff looked tons better too. This artistic style actually carried forward for quite some time, and overlapped with the next generation of art.
4. The Street Fighter III games were on improved hardware, the CPS3 boards. There were some graphical improvements associated with this, including a greatly increased framerate. The 2-D backgrounds from this era look really good; some of the best ever made, in fact, to this point. The size and resolution of the characters still look the same, although the art style was revised. It's still animated movie-like, however. The vs games were also on this same hardware, although they usually used Alpha-generation sprites, or newly drawn Marvel/SNK sprites that were the same style, more or less. This is also where some 3-D backgrounds started to pop up in the latest versions of the Marvel vs and the vs SNK games, although they do not, in my opinion, look as good as the 2-D backgrounds of the same era.
5. Although chronologically out of order, I think this belongs here; the high resolution UDON drawn sprites and backgrounds of the Turbo HD Remix and the Switch-released Ultra Street Fighter II game. This stuff looks absolutely FANTASTIC. I actually think I prefer this style of art to any that I've otherwise seen, although some other franchises have very similar style art.
6. Street Fighter IV is the first 3D Street Fighter game (I'm obviously not counting the EX games) although that's just the graphics, not the gameplay, which remains solidly 2D regular "Street Fighter-like." I think this game looks fantastic, mostly, but I admit to preferring the animated 2D style of generation 5. The only thing that makes this better than 2D is the ability to have alternate costumes as 3D modules.
7. Moving from the PS3 (and Xbox 360) to the PS4 allowed for higher quality 3D animation, but the reality is that Street Fighter V doesn't actually (necessarily) look better than Street Fighter IV. The art style is often more caricaturized, there are really bad clipping issues (especially in the story mode cut scenes) and a number of characters have really badly designed new looks. 

In general, I'd say that of the Capcom art style generations, I like the Alpha stuff quite a bit, although I also admit that it looks dated now. I also like the SFIV 3D models, but the UDON high quality 2D animation is my favorite Street Fighter art style. 

Because I've started talking a bit about the beat em up tangent to fighting games, its worth pointing out that beat em ups at Capcom never really advanced out of the SF2 style regardless of what hardware they were on. Maybe Captain Commando has a bit more of an Alpha feel, but I don't think so. That said, a number of beat em up (and other) Capcom characters were remade in different styles because of crossover games, including loads of Final Fight characters that came to Street Fighter or Marvel vs games. The Alpha series, and SF's IV and V have about a fourth to a third each--roughly--of Final Fight characters in them. Street Fighter III even had one.

Capcom's biggest competitor in the fighting games genre was SNK. Even other competitors who made Street Fighter II clones often did so on MVS hardware, like World Heroes by ADK, Breakers by Visco, or the Fighters History games by Data East, so I won't mention them specifically (most of them never advanced beyond Street Fighter II-like anyway.) SNK used the same hardware for the better part of two decades, so they never really increased their technical capability until they finally abandoned it after the turn of the millennium. However, that doesn't mean that every game used the same style of artwork, and different series had more or less attention to detail, realism vs cartoonishness, etc. I'm going to call all of this a single generation, although there are some notable things to point out as brackets within that generation.

1. MVS generation. A lot of different graphical "tricks" were tried, even fairly early on, like Art of Fighting's zoom feature. Fatal Fury itself has the most primitive graphics of the series, although it's not really much less primitive than Street Fighter II. However, after the release of Street Fighter II, the art style was done more in open imitation of SF2's style, and games like Fatal Fury 2/Special, for instance, look like SF2 clones in terms of style. While always somewhat stylized and comic book like, or animation-like in style, it's fair to say that most of the games of this era approached a semi-realistic look within the animation gamut. A notable exception here is the direction that the Real Bout games went for Special and 2, where they had a much more stylized, cartoon-like appearance that (I believe) was probably done in deliberate imitation of the Alpha style of Street Fighter games. Unlike Capcom, SNK didn't just reuse aging sprites, but constantly updated them and often made them better-looking over time without really changing the style over much itself. If you look at an early King of Fighters game, like 94 or 95, for instance, and compare it to a late MVS (or even Atomiswave) titles like King of Fighters 2002, 2003 or XI, or Mark of the Wolves, you'll probably notice that from a technical standpoint and a stylistic standpoint, they all look quite similar, but you'll also (I believe) quite easily note that the later titles look "better"; the artists just got better over more time and practice with the system, and were able to put out better looking works. That said, the home ports did employ some additional graphical "improvements" including 3D backgrounds (not always better than the 2D ones, but sometimes they were) and pixelation smoothing of the sprites. There was also very notable and noteworthy improvement of the character portraits after matches, during menu selection, etc. as a more comic bookish or anime approach was adopted. Anime is more than one style, however--the anime style that SNK adopted is one that is closest in appearance to western art and animation, while still having an eastern "anime" edge to it. It's less Sailor Moon and more Jim Lee, if you will. This is maybe a little hard to describe as western comic book art and animation and Japanese manga and anime art have cross-pollinated each other to such a degree that its often not easy to say what western animation looks like anymore, other than it certainly excludes the more cartoonish giant-eyes anime and bizarre emotional overreaction cues. But hopefully you can follow what I mean here.
2. After SNK's bankruptcy, all of their titles except King of Fighters basically shut down. XII and XIII were the last 2D fighters, but they feature greatly improved graphics in much higher resolution. I'd say that in most respects, they are comparable to the UDON graphics of Ultra Street Fighter II, but a bit more anime and caricaturish on occasion in style.
3. They didn't stick with that style for very long, for whatever reason (probably because somebody figured out that 3D was cheaper and faster and more flexible.) For XIV and the upcoming XV, they've switched to 3D models. These models are much better than anything Capcom have used, in my opinion; although they are still more "realistic" "western" anime in style.

Given what I thought about Capcom's styles, you'd think that generation 2 would be my favorite, and you'd probably be right. However, I think that SNK did their 3D animation (after they got the Maximum Impact series out of their hair) better than Capcom did in general, and it's hard to fault their 3D animation. With one exception. SNK has always been known as being "stylish" compared to Capcom. Stylish in this regard is a very Japanese thing, though, taking a lot of inspiration from "Japanese Street Fashion". I suppose there's nothing to call that other than "stylish" compared to Capcom, but whereas stylish would seem like a compliment, here it isn't. Japanese street fashion, to western eyes, looks like what a horde of flaming gay people would wear if they all decided that they were really nerdy and wanted to go to Comicon via some kind of goth/steampunk niche. These character and costume designs that SNK comes up with are not cool. They're not good. They're bizarre. SNK has always had that reputation, but it's gotten orders of magnitude worse in the last few titles compared to what it used to be during the "glory days" of mainline King of Fighters titles. 

Luckily, enough characters have enough history that they can't deviate too much from their look without upsetting the fans, so this mostly applies to the new characters that they keep adding rather than the older ones that they're still picking up because they're perennial favorites. This limits the amount of damage this bizarre aesthetic can wreak on the series, but as time goes on, it's probably going to get worse.

As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the King of Fighters XIII cast was one of the most conservative, traditional ones done in many years, which also limited the ability of the "SNK aesthetic" from being very prominent in that game. Yet another reason to like generation 2.

For beat em ups, Sega's Streets of Rage was obviously the main competitor to Final Fight. Those two are usually considered the epitome of the beat em up genre. Normally, I wouldn't think a comparison here would be necessary. Streets of Rage was sub-generation 1 in comparison to Capcom, while 2 and 3 were comparable to Final Fantasy and therefore to Street Fighter II in graphics.

However, in recent years, an indie publisher convinced Sega to let them publish Streets of Rage 4 out of France of all places, and they've done a fabulous job with it. I highly recommend watching a youtube video of a playthrough of it. While the art style is sometimes quite anime, at other times, it's more reminiscent of western comic book or Disney style art. In any case, at all points, it looks absolutely fantastic, at least as good as Capcom's generation 5 or SNK's generation 2, and similar in many respects to both... but probably actually better. Capcom's generation 5 still tried to just upgrade technically while copying faithfully their generation 2 designs, and SNK's generation 2 was a little too out there with caricaturish anime stylings. Streets of Rage 4 does everything that those do, except without the weaknesses. 

If I could see fighting games done the way I'd most like to see them done, then the lizardcube style from Streets of Rage 4 would be it. The ONLY thing that I can complain about with Streets of Rage 4, and I'm not 100% sure that I'm willing to complain about it until it gets even worse, is its bizarre Diversity, Inc. cast with way too many women acting like men and way too many bizarre ethnic groups. Why is the one guy a Maori? Do you know how many Maoris I've seen in America in nearly fifty years of living here? Other than a handful of students at BYU Hawaii, absolutely ZERO. Anyway, I think it's on the cusp of being a problem without quite managing to become one yet at its current state.

Anyway, I've posted this before, but here's a mockup that the lizardcube guys did of a Mark of the Wolves 2 done in their Streets of Rage 4 style. I'd love to see some fighting games get this treatment. Absolutely.

Beat em ups

Although I haven't really talked much about beat em ups except as a kind of aside, since so many Final Fight characters made their way over the years into Street Fighter, that's probably not really fair. Beat em ups came out about the same time as fighting games; maybe just a bit earlier, and their origins and development are inextricably entangled with that of fighting games too. If fighting games have a number of "fallow" years in the early 00s, the beat em up genre experienced a much longer fallow years blight; from the mid-90s until just a few years ago, honestly. Right now there's a fairly good scene for beat em ups, although to be fair, many of the titles are kind of indie and you may not have heard of them, but the revival of Streets of Rage in its belated fourth entry, brought the revival into the mainstream; it's available on pretty much every major platform right now, and has sold over two and a half million copies (that number is as of six months ago, and before the release of its DLC. It's probably significantly higher now.)

Because beat em ups were popular prior to the arrival of fighting games as we really know them, I was a huge fan of them prior to playing fighting games. While the narrative is that beat em ups suffered in popularity following the release of Street Fighter II, the reality is that probably the most popular and often considered the best one was released after Street Fighter II, and took deliberate inspiration from it. Beat em ups and fighting games followed a lot of parallel development in terms of how they should play, which admittedly could only go so far because of the fact that one is focused on 1x1 martial arts fist fighting in a duel-like environment, while the other is focused on beating up wave after wave of much weaker enemies (except the bosses) on a belt-scrolling stage. I think people stopped playing them because they weren't available anymore in arcades rather than because people didn't want them. I mean, when semi tongue in cheek fan project Beats of Rage gets a million downloads with only word of mouth, that strongly suggests that there was a market for good games of this type all along.

I already mentioned how the environment and enemies is a major difference between fighting games. The belt-scrolling stages where you fight wave after wave of arguably weaker opponents to end the stage against a boss that's comparable to you, if not stronger is the major distinction, but other things are significant too. The potential for cooperative play between more than one player is another key element, as is the use of disposable weapons like the knives, metal pipes and other things that you pick up and use for a little while before they disappear. The most iconic titles are fist-fighting martial arts games, like the most iconic fighting games, but the moves are much simpler, usually focusing on only two or three buttons. Over time, this has changed somewhat in cross-pollination with fighting games; more complex combos and special--even super moves--have entered the lexicon of beat em ups. But the originals didn't really have too many of them. Despite the fact that there were only a few buttons, there were combinations of things that you could do with them that led to more moves being available than merely two or three, of course--but the classic beat em up is a simpler game to play than the classic fighting game, at least in terms of player character moves.

From a story and setting perspective, there have been lots of different types, but the classic involves fighting street gangs in a setting of urban decay and chaos, often to go rescue one of the characters girlfriends. The first game that is usually called a beat em up in the traditional sense, although it still lacked the cooperative play feature, is "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio" which was translated into the West as Renegade. It wasn't just translated, though--it was graphically remade, and the whole rescue the girlfriend story was added. Rather than being a Japanese high school delinquent protecting his nerdy friend from being picked on by gangs from school, it was loosely based on the cult film The Warriors, released in 1979, which I don't think much of anyone saw at the time, but which has been referenced by creative types in multiple genres over and over and over again. (The music video for Shake It by Metrostation, for instance, is also based on it. K-Traxx and other EDM artists have sampled vocals from it in many places, and Renegade, among other video games, lifted the look and concepts straight from that movie too.) Renegade is an insanely influential game, but the beat em up as we all know it really was created the next year (1987) with the same creators building on both the Japanese and Western versions of the game to create Double Dragon. Curiously, the same year as the initial release of Street Fighter, which although a different kind of game, was obviously influenced by the success of Renegade in its title and concept.

Double Dragon was originally going to be the actual sequel to Kunio/Renegade, but the decision was made to give it a different cast, setting and make it its own thing, which was probably a good move. This is where the genre really finally came into its own; Double Dragon introduced the cooperative play, the continuous side-scrolling, the disposable weapons, etc. It also utilized the Western Renegade type setting and plot, including some cut scenes, and it went even further. Rather than simple urban decay as in The Warriors, Double Dragon takes place in an almost post-apocalyptic urban setting, heavily influenced by the Mad Max movies and Fist of the North Star. Much of these tropes would be copied by most of the other subsequent beat em ups. Heck, even such esoteric details as an enemy female character who dresses like a stripper and uses a whip were carried over at least into both Final Fight and Streets of Rage from Double Dragon.

Double Dragon was wildly successful; in America it was the highest selling arcade game for two years in a row, 1988 and 1989 after its initial release. By 1989, two rival franchises became probably the most successful in the genre, Sega's Golden Axe, which took the concept of the Double Dragon beat em up, wedded it to the developers love of the Arnie Conan movies, and the concept of special moves that Capcom had introduced in Street Fighter I. This game was hugely successful and spawned several sequels and spin-offs. I personally probably played more of it than I did Double Dragon, although I played a fair bit of Double Dragon in arcades in 87-88 or so. This type of game was even better served, I think, when Capcom got a hold of the Dungeons & Dragons license and created Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara in the mid-90s, using big, Final Fight-like sprites. 

Capcom, in fact, had a large run of beat em ups. Not only the D&D games, which are fantastic, by the way, but the weird post apocalyptic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Alien vs Predator, and futuristic superhero Captain Commando. The D&D games themselves probably came about because of Capcom's own King of Dragons and Knights of the Round. But probably the most famous, and later a contender for the top series of the genre was Final Fight. Originally conceived as Street Fighter II, albeit a totally different kind of game more closely based on Renegade and Double Dragon, Final Fight brought much better graphics, smoother gameplay and much more character than any game in the genre had heretofore delivered. The arcade version is a great game, but unfortunately, it got a SNES exclusive conversion that was hacked in many ways, and pretty disappointing. It's readily available now in modern systems; you can buy the arcade version on the Capcom Classics Collection (PS2 era) or the Capcom Beat em Up Bundle on Steam, PS4 Nintendo Switch, etc. (It's interesting, isn't it, to see this classic era of video gaming make a resurgence as gamers are discovering that the direction the market went was not actually in the direction of games that were necessarily more fun. Stuff that's now twenty or even thirty years old is being rediscovered and it turns out that it's considered good design even still.)

Final Fight was enormously successful; it was the most successful video game in arcades in 1990 (it's release date is late 1989--around Thanksgiving) and the second most successful arcade game in 1991, behind Street Fighter II. It also was one of Capcom's best-selling games on the SNES, in spite of the poor conversion. It epitomized the genre in almost every respect; the urban decay, the go beat up gangsters to rescue a girlfriend, the roster of characters which includes (admittedly somewhat generic) Cody, the boyfriend, but also the girl's father, Mike Haggar, who was also mayor, and Cody's best friend Guy, a Japanese ninja who was hanging around town for whatever reason.

Final Fight characters had so much character, in fact, that they've had a somewhat startling level of longevity. Even relatively "faceless" mooks have gone on to become Street Fighter characters (Hugo and Poison, in particular) while many of the bosses have as well (Rolento, Abigail, Sodom) and both Cody and Guy have appeared in multiple Street Fighter roles. Even some characters from the sequels (Maki, Lucia) eventually made their way into Street Fighter. Also extremely curiously, Mike Haggar has never made an appearance as a playable character, even though he did so in Marvel vs Capcom 3 Ultimate. Why they didn't port him to Street Fighter IV's later updates is still a frustrating mystery to me.

Although they are significant in Street Fighter as playable characters, they also don't really contribute in any way to Street Fighter's story, however. In fact, in the General Story mode of Street Fighter IV, I'm pretty sure that not a single Final Fight character makes so much as an appearance, even. They're part of the same continuity, but somehow part of a completely parallel existence.

Final Fight was also caught up in the console wars between Nintendo and Sega of the 16-bit generation. As I said above, Final Fight got a SNES exclusive port, although it had to make significant sacrifices from the arcade version to be ported to the SNES. While it was successful as a seller on the platform, I suspect most gamers were disappointed in it. Sega, seeing an opportunity here, took their Golden Axe engine and made an urban Final Fight copycat game which was exclusive to their console, the Sega Genesis, called Streets of Rage. While graphically it doesn't really compare to Final Fight, in most other respects, it is a better game than the SNES port, if not the arcade version, of Final Fight.

You'll notice that many fighting games from the early years followed exactly the same tropes as Final Fight and other beat em ups. Art of Fighting has the exact same plot. Fatal Fury has Geese knocked off of a skyscraper, just like Belger, the boss from Final Fight. Street Fighter Alpha 2 foregoes the fighting championship, and has characters moving around not unlike a beat em up in nature. 

Final Fight 2 and 3 were SNES exclusives, not arcade games, and "fixed" a number of issues that the SNES Final Fight game had had, but Sega was not resting on their laurels either, and Streets of Rage 2 and 3 are considered by many fans to be the absolute best games in the beat em up genre; Streets of Rage 2 in particular. (3 is often seen as good, but offering little than 2 didn't already offer.) In fact, the game is often considered one of the best video games of all time period, which is really saying something. It continues more of the cross pollination that was happening with fighting games by introducing more moves and more variety for playable characters, something directly inspired by Street Fighter II and its success. One designer even said that having the same kind of combo rhythm as Street Fighter II was a key design attribute that they wanted to corner. Streets of Rage 2 also had greatly improved graphics over its predecessor, comparable to Street Fighter II's in most respects. In addition to this, Streets of Rage had what was considered at the time--and maybe even still--one of the greatest original soundtracks ever bundled with a video game. (Personally I still greatly prefer Star Wars the Old Republic's.)

It's curious to me that Capcom's big rival in the beat em up was Sega, while their big rival in the fighting game was SNK. SNK also had a Final Fight-esque beat em up called Burning Fight, which is capable enough, but which lacks a lot of the character that made Final Fight or Streets of Rage so memorable. Still, it was relatively successful in Japanese arcades, at least, when launched in 1991. I'm a little surprised that a King of Fighters '94 team wasn't made of the three selectable characters, to stand next to the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters. Not that the USA Sports Team doesn't have its fans, but I think this would have been a better use of that team's slot.

Burning Fight has two American policemen from NYC come to Japan in pursuit of a Yakuza criminal gang that was causing trouble at home. They meet up with a Japanese detective and the three of them are the selectable characters. Among other things, if they had used these characters, King of Fighters would have it's own character named Ryu, although he would have looked and probably moved much more like Guy.

Game Feature: King of Fighters '98

I haven't done a game feature post in quite a while, and the obvious one to do that I haven't yet is King of Fighters '98. For many, many years, the KOF was done on the same MVS hardware, and even when it briefly migrated to the Atomiswave hardware, it was still done with the same graphics. Only when we get to King of Fighters XII and XIII do we actually get improved graphics and only when when we move to KOF XIV and XV (out February) do we get fully 3-D graphics (although still with traditional 2-D play.) All of the Orochi Saga games can be "summed up" if you will in King of Fighters '98, and all of the NESTS saga games can be summed up with King of Fighters 2002. If you're not actually interested in playing the "story" of the games, you can get all of the action you want from the entire saga in the "summary" games; King of Fighters '98 has everything you can get in any Orochi Saga game, and then some. This is especially true for the "Ultimate Match" version, which added all of the (very few) characters who had appeared in an Orochi Saga game but hadn't yet appeared in '98, like the remaining bosses, Eiji Kisaragi, and a handful of others.

I have a handful of versions of this game, although to be fair, only the Ultimate Match is one that I'd ever feel compelled to come back to at this point. The first version I got was when I got my old Dreamcast, and it had the odd title of King of Fighters Dream Match 1999. I suppose SNK were a little self-conscious at feeling out of date with the title, which I suppose is a fair problem. For the PS2, I have the Ultimate Match version of the game, which also includes the original Neo Geo version of the game. And finally, I have the Neo Geo version of the game also on the Orochi Saga compilation for the PS2. There is one more final update, called Final Version, or something like that, which is what was available on Steam or now Good Old Games. It's relatively cheap, but it doesn't add anything new to Ultimate Match, just a few subtle tweaks to gameplay.

The whole point of '98 was to be a "Dream Match", i.e., there's no story to it, but it brings back all of the "greatest hits" of the Orochi Saga in one game, including teams that only made an appearance in the first game, like the USA Sports Team, or the Boss team of 96, or creating new teams out of "retired" master characters like Heidern or Saisyu Kusanagi and Takuma Sakazaki, etc. Although from a story perspective, Rugal was only the boss of the first two games, and was therefore just the taste of things to come, the developers also wisely realized that in most respects he was the most iconic King of Fighters boss, and brought him back as the boss of this game as well. Of course, for Ultimate Match, all of the bosses of the Orochi Saga made reappearances, even the mid-bosses like Riot of the Blood Leona, etc. Of course, the reality is that most of those bosses were kind of underwhelming anyway. Rugal was so good that they even brought him back for the next dream match in 2002, ignoring all of the NESTS saga bosses. In both cases, he was the supered out "Omega Rugal", complete with stripper shirt and everything.

A good case can be made that especially once 2002 got "remade" as Unlimited Match, a kind of upgrade very similar to the Ultimate Match upgrade to this game, that there was no longer any reason to play any King of Fighters game that had preceded it, unless you wanted to see the specific story cut scenes associated with one game, or something like that. I don't think that that's completely true; there are a number of things in particular that are unique to the Orochi Saga. Sometimes these are little things, like Terry Bogard's moveset, for instance, which is a bit different in the NESTS games, and other times its more in the vibe, presentation and "feel" of the game, and harder to put your finger on. 

While I can certainly see and actually probably agree with that perspective to some degree, I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to '98 over 2002 and in many ways still prefer it, especially in its Ultimate Match version. The game presents to you the two basic different "systems" that the prior King of Fighters games used; EX, which is similar to '94 and '95's manual charging of super movies, dashes, etc. and "Advanced" which was similar to '96 and '97s super stocks, rolls and other items. The Ultimate Match version also allows you to play an Ultimate Mode, where you can pick and choose elements from EX or Advanced, although honestly, I just prefer to use Advanced. Not surprisingly, it's the most like A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3, or the C-groove from the Capcom vs SNK games of the options presented, which is my favorite system.

You can play in teams, or you can play single player, which is more "Street Fighter" like in terms of how it plays. I usually prefer the latter, of course. The fact that there aren't any story endings means that team composition doesn't matter; the only endings are a bunch of joke animations from the characters during the credits.

The player select menus are, in my opinion, extraordinarily ugly, as are the character portraits. They are improved somewhat for the Ultimate Match, but the character portraits and end-match art/quotes are the same in every version. Shinkiro is the artist, who's normally quite a talented fella, but this is not his best work. That said, once you get playing, this matters very little. The Dreamcast version has the same menus as the Neo Geo or arcade, with the exception of course, of a very bare bones "text only" menu of console specific modes and options, which are all pretty basic. 

I've talked before about the shift to 3-D backgrounds that was happening right about at the turn of the millennium in these kinds of games, and it came for KOF'98 too. The Dreamcast version has the backgrounds redone in 3-D, although it's relatively low-res 3-D, and mostly just looks almost exactly the same as the 2-D backgrounds for most of them. (Oddly, the Osaka street scene outside of the SNK headquarters is an exception here; there are variants in the 2-D version that are not done in 3-D.) The Ultimate Match version gives us redone 3-D backgrounds, including more variants. In particular, it seems that the developers were very enamored this year of adding a bluish, washed out haze to make the backgrounds look like they take place early in the morning in the minutes right before the sun comes up but the light is still relatively strong. Almost every stage has a variant that looks like this. It also adds a bunch of new stages to the mix that hadn't yet ever been seen.

In fact, most of the stages are new to this game, even in the old Neo Geo version. A handful are from other games in the Orochi Saga series, like the '96 boss stage, or the Orochi boss stages, but most are not. In my personal opinion, this is a bit of a missed opportunity; the Ultimate Match didn't need new stages added when it could have brought forward the older stages from the games that had come before, redrawn if necessary. I think that there were some really beautiful stages that I miss not having in a game that I'm actually likely to still play anymore. The Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting team stages from '96 are in particular to be highlighted here. Sigh. In this game, stages are no longer associated with specific teams, except for the boss stages, and tend to come up randomly.

Curiously, the 3D stages, especially in the Dreamcast version, but even in the Ultimate Match version, are not necessarily better than the older 2D stages. Although in the case of most of them, it doesn't actually make much noticeable difference. The Japan Street set of stages are better in 2D. The Korea ones are noticeably different, but neither is better than the other, in my opinion. A few stages have slightly different lighting details between the 3D and 2D versions, which I think is very unusual. The characters themselves offer a smoothness indicator that can be modified, to give them a less pixelated appearance, so that they match the backgrounds a little better and don't look so old-school and clunky.

All in all, King of Fighters '98 is the best King of Fighters game, or at least it was when it came out, and remains so probably at least until 2002, although even then that's a question of opinion, not objectivity. In 1998 when it came out, it was side by side with Street Fighter Alpha 3, and that was probably the best game in the Street Fighter series up to that point. This was part of the genesis of the Capcom vs SNK series in the first place; with two of the best titles from the two most important series by each company out at the same time, it begged the question of what it would be like to have them really duking it out head to head. Although the Capcom vs SNK games are pretty good, I think that there's still definitely a kind of desire and demand to see this question answered more definitively still. And no, MUGEN doesn't really count.

But of the grade of games that precede the major graphical upgrades of the very late 00s and 10s years, King of Fighters '98 has to stand out as one of the best representatives, and one of the better games in the entire genre overall no matter how you slice it.

Alts

So, when I fired up Steam a month or so ago for the first time in several months and started playing around with USFIV again, one of the things that I finally broke down and did was figure out how to swap out some of the alternative character costumes with fan-made ones. EVERY character has at least one, if not multiple, alternate costumes that are super whack. Some of my favorite characters only had one or two costume that I even liked at all. So it was fun to rehabilitate the "style" of some of them by swapping out something else. Ken's bathrobe and cowboy outfits were probably the very first to go, for instance, but I've got lots of alternatives on lots of characters, with more waiting in the queue for me to get around to. Maybe. (I've already gone pretty deep on the bench with characters that I'm likely to play, for instance.) I also found another app that allows you to "turn off" certain elements of character costume models. So, for instance, Akuma's first alternative costume, which is pretty cool except for one thing; a gigantic bow made of super thick rope on his back, which looks insanely ridiculous. I took that off. Now that costume is... well, it's not necessarily great, but it doesn't offend me with its silliness anymore either.

So now I've started on a project of playing through all of the costumes. I'm doing vs CPU, and going through every color of every costume for a character, vs a random com character on a random stage, and then when I'm done, I'll play through the arcade mode with that character, and then move on to the next. This will take some time, and I'm not doing this for every character, just for "my" characters. I've done Ryu and Ken so far, and I've started Akuma. Evil Ryu and Oni are next, followed by Sagat and Sakura. We'll see if I still have mental stamina left to pursue this project after that, or if I need to walk away from it, but I do have lower tier characters that I still sometimes play beyond that. Probably nearly a dozen more. And then maybe another dozen after that that I don't really consider my characters, but which I sometimes play. And then at least another dozen after that of characters that I've never really dived into in USFIV, but which I have in other games like the Alpha series, or something, so I've always kinda wanted to.

I've talked before about it being important to think that the character you're playing is cool in some way. The alternate costume idea was a great one in that regard, because it could turn a mediocre or even poor design into a good one. Being able to mod them even further helped with this, because honestly, the designers costumes were sometimes really, really bad.

Even before we had 3D models where alternate costumes were easy to implement, a lot of home console ports did have color palette editors which did a little bit of the same thing, although not as well. Sometimes characters just changed their look and evolved from game to game to game. On the SNK side, Athena is famous for having a different outfit in every single King of Fighters game, and Kyo has a different outfit every single major series--so he's on his fourth now.

Anyways, it's just one more reminder that whomever that complete and total tool who tried to tell us that people didn't care about Magneto being in Marvel vs Capcom Infinity, because Magneto wasn't actually a character, he was just a mechanical function, is a complete moron. He's not a normal person. He's some kind of spergy, lizard simulacrum of a human, like Mark Zuckerberg. People like their characters because they're characters, and they identify with some aspect of them, and they want to see them represented in a way that they can identify with.