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.