The Lost Street Fighter characters

I noticed that on the PS4 store you can buy Fighting EX Layer, and that it is 80% off from now until the some time in early September; about a week or so away. From $40 to $8 was a deal too good to pass up (it cost almost that much to add Terry Bogard as a DLC character!) so I bought it this morning (and Terry, because... c'mon, c'mon. It's Terry.) I've played it just a bit, and have some very early commentary.

• I played with Kairi, who's the kinda sorta Ryu clone. My first thought is that he doesn't actually have a lot of moves; two or three "unique" moves, three special moves, and three similar and kind of unimpressive supers. Maybe there's some combos or something that I don't know about that will make him more fun to play, but in general, I thought he was a bit simplistic to play and I got a little tired of him extremely quickly; he just didn't have a lot of tactical diversity to bring to bear. Against the CPU, at least.
• The game seems specifically geared towards online competitive play. Two different versus modes, one for online and one for offline are listed before even arcade mode. I've heard that the netcode is particularly good, and will match you up with players of your same skill level much better than almost all of its competitors, so that you actually have a fun experience playing online games, instead of just getting blown out by freaks who practice all of the time. But I can't comment on this first hand, merely note that the single player experience seems to be a bit lacking.
• Not only that, the arcade mode wasn't particularly interesting to play. Instead of best two out of three, it was best three out of five matches. The CPU blocks a lot, so you throw out a lot of attacks that don't do anything before you finish your matches. I had several matches end because time ran out. Not the funnest way to play either. 
• The characters have potential but Arika do absolutely nothing with them. Very little personality exhibited, and no story to speak of. Just a brief paragraph as an ending, which told me very, very little about the character. This is another indication that the competitive play is the focus for the developer. In my opinion, any game, no matter how much the devs want to focus on a multiplayer experience, that doesn't have a good single player mode is going to be one that eventually people don't play much of. No matter the genre. Look at Star Wars the Old Republic, for instance, and how they added a massive single player experience that they didn't expect to (and that they claim at least 80% of their players are focusing on). Look at Overwatch, which nobody played for more than a few months because it was all running around with bratty little kids and there wasn't anything else to do. There's a handful of exceptions here and there, and a good cooperative or competitive scene is important for a lot of games, but people better be able to just sit down with the machine and play it without relying on someone else, or they'll likely be disappointed pretty quickly. I think the devs made a mistake with their focus here.
• The game looks quite good. In fact, it just highlights how incredibly ugly Street Fighter V is in general, although that's a post for another time, because it's a big topic. The characters look fantastic, if occasionally a little plastic. I didn't see any clipping going on, and the character and stage design was just well done. The strange anime character portraits at the select screen (which also show in the win and lose images, as well as in small form at the top of the HUD) are sometimes hit or miss, but the actual 3D models are great. The stages are really good too. Some of them have a weird deja vu feel to them, like Terry's train ride through the desert southwest of "West Albuquerque", although there's probably a reason for that, because it's Terry. But why does Hokuto (and Shirase, formerly known as "Bloody Hokuto") have a giant snaky background that looks like Mukai's stage in King of Fighters 2003? Anyway, all very well designed from a visual perspective. Nothing at all to complain about here.
• There are hints offline that there is some kind of potentially interesting story here, even if it is derivative, about sealed demons breaking loose, forgotten memories, the main character Kairi turning into an Akuma-like creature, but not realizing it because he's lost his memory, etc. Sure, sure... the story seems to be ripped off from other games that already did it better in the genre; a kind of Orochi Lite, or something... but there's something here that sadly they do nothing with. In fact, you kind of don't know anything at all about it unless you look up stuff on Arika website (or other wikis), because it's not really in the game at all.
• A lot of people probably enjoy this about the game, but I found, quite honestly, the barrage of options that you have to pick before you even start playing to be kind of strange and overwhelming to someone new. What is Classic vs Progressive? No explanation given. What the devil are all these different "Gougi" modes and what to they mean? No explanation given. Again, I have an internet and a browser, so it's not like I can't get some answers out there somewhere, although the game is sufficiently low key that there's less information on it available than you'd probably like to think. 

Anyway, I certainly recommend getting it at that price while you can, if you haven't. At that price, heck, even if you only play it for a few hours total, it's probably still worth it. I doubt it's going to really creep up into superstar status, rivaling King of Fighters or Street Fighter, but it's not a bad game so far, and there are a lot of things that it does do really quite right. It's also the repository of a whole bunch of lost Street Fighter characters, the legacy of the EX spin-off series, and the fact that it has Terry Bogard as a DLC character opens up interesting crossover possibilities that I wish more of these jokers would get on board with. Let's face it, the fighting game genre isn't the top of the heap anymore like it was in the early to mid 90s, and all of the developers need to do more to keep their brands and their profile higher, I think. Or at least keep their existing fanbase excited to keep coming back for more. Big crossover games, and characters that are familiar but in a new setting, like Terry in this game, or Akuma in Tekken 7, or a female Skullomania in the SNK Heroines game is a fun concept, and fans eat that kind of stuff up. Keep doing more of it! In fact, that whole crossover potential is part of what prompted me to start this blog and the Google Sites for Karate Supers that I have. Sure, sure... I could just collect and play these games on my own. I could even record my playthroughs or something and put them on YouTube. But what I really want to do is imagine what it would be like to imagine this whole thing as the "karate supers cinematic universe" which, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would tell stories, somewhat "remixed" or redone with occasionally very different details to them, and mix up characters who otherwise might not be seen together in the same games already.

Terry Bogard appearing with the "lost" Street Fighter characters from the EX games in Fighting EX Layer is just a tiny taste of what I'd like to see more of.

Capcom vs SNK Pro vs Capcom vs SNK 2

It seems like it should be obvious that CvS2 is better than CvS Pro. But, if you have the Japanese import Dreamcast version of the latter, which I now do, then that's not necessarily true. I've had the PS1 version for some time, and it's notably not very pretty or fluid, although it plays quite well and is a perfectly fine game. The improvements that the Dreamcast version adds make the comparison between the two games a bit more unclear, though—it really does make it a much more pleasant if not even occasionally breathtaking experience. Let's talk about various areas where they differ from each other, and I'll talk about which one offers a better experience overall.

Character Selection. It's clear that the second game has a better character selection than the earlier version. However, this doesn't matter as much as you'd think unless you're a fan of a more esoteric character. I've actually only quite rarely played any character in 2 that isn't in Pro. My go-to characters, down to the second and third string, a bit deeper on the bench, are almost all characters that are in Pro. However, again—there's no doubt that the second game has more characters, and it also has better bosses. Shin Akuma and Orochi Rugal are simply better than the version of Geese and Bison that Pro has. But on the flipside, Pro has a more even theme and tone. While neither game is anywhere near as gonzo and spastic as the Marvel vs Capcom series had become, especially by the time MvC2 came out, there are still some characters that really don't fit the concept of Capcom vs SNK. Which, lets all face it, was really always meant to be about their iconic fighting game franchises, and specifically kind of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters with maybe a Darkstalkers, Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting character that wasn't in KOF thrown in just for kicks. The inclusion of Samurai Shodown and Last Blade characters just don't feel like they belong in this game. And of course while Morrigan was a perfectly fine fit as an unusual offbeat character but not too much so, her sprite was absolutely terrible, and has been mentioned by every reviewer who's ever talked about either of these games. (I should mention that Nakoruru is in Pro, and she seems to show up as a com player way more often than she should.)

I've got to give a slight edge to 2 over Pro, but much more slight than you'd think; only a tiny sliver of advantage.

Gameplay System. I'm covering three different things here: 1) button layout and moveset, 2) the ratio system, and 3) the groove system. While most people would say that 2 beats Pro handily on all three dimensions, I'm going to make the case that it doesn't; it either is the same, or even arguably worse. For my taste, of course.

1) Pro made the decision to switch to a SNK-like layout, using four buttons instead of the default Street Fighter scenario of six. While this meant that some moves had to be abandoned here and there, curiously, nobody's ever complained about the King of Fighters characters feeling move impoverished because they used four instead of six buttons, and nobody has really complained since the first month or two of release about the four button approach of Marvel vs Capcom 2. In fact, in an era when home ports to consoles were becoming much more important than arcade renditions of the games, you could easily make a case that a four button layout is much less awkward than the six button Capcom default. Unless you went out of your way to buy a specialty control pad, after all, you always only had four buttons on the face of your controller. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the four button layout is better than the six button layout, and I've always been slightly annoyed by trying to figure out the best way to map the six button layout to every four-button (plus triggers) control pad I've ever used to play a Capcom fighting game, from the SNES, the PS1, the PS2, the PS4, the Xbox, the Dreamcast and my USB PC controller. Every single one of them would have benefited from being designed to be a four-button game rather than a six button game. Of course, this isn't an issue for the SNK games, all of which are four button games to begin with... if they aren't even three button games for that matter, which a few of the Fatal Fury titles are.

2) I don't like the ratio system for either game. Luckily, there's actually no reason to play it for either game if you don't like it. Pro has the Pair Mode, where you ignore the ratios and pick two characters of your choice, who are merged into ratio 2, regardless of what they originally had been in the ratio mode. 2 has a slightly better selection; offering a 3x3 mode that is like the pair mode but obviously with three instead of two characters, as well as a regular Street Fighter-like 1x1. Normally, I'd suggest that the 1x1 is essential for the way I like to play, because I don't like having to mentally switch gears between characters. This is one of my bigger complaints with the regular gameplay associated with the King of Fighters games, although most of those titles also offer a well-done 1x1 mode as well. I find, however, that picking two characters instead of three doesn't trigger that reaction in me; I guess switching between two characters I can handle, whereas switching between three is too many to be fun for me and subconsciously stresses me out or something. I can't remember the last time that I played either game using the default ratio system, and I can't imagine why I ever would again. The ratio system simply was a bad idea, and even improving it between Pro and 2 didn't make it worth using, when there are better options right there in both games anyway.

3) I suppose some people like the number of grooves that 2 offers over Pro. I can certainly see that, especially if you're a fan of a particular groove that is unique to 2 rather than Pro. 2 has six grooves; C-A-P-S-N-K. C is almost exactly the same as A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3. A-groove is similar to the V-ism of Street Fighter Alpha 3. P-groove is most often compared to the Street Fighter III games, because of the presence of parry. Although parry was difficult to pull off in III, and it's even more difficult to master in this game. If you're really good at it, it's probably the best groove, but I'm not, so I don't care for it. S-groove has the manually charged super meter, and Desperation moves when you're health bar is red, similar to the earliest KOF games. N-groove is similar to the advanced mode that later KOF games started to develop, including 97 and 98 (and maybe 96? I'm drawing a blank now on that one.) K-groove is an interesting mashup of Samurai Shodown features and Mark of the Wolves features, making it a unique groove. This choice is great if you like one of the new grooves, or like playing around with optional things in the system and having lots of choices. There's even a groove edit mode where you can create your own grooves. However, after trying all of them out for a bit, I now only play C-groove on 2. I have no interest anymore in any other groove, although if for some reason I had to pick another one, I'd go for N. Pro only has two grooves, and although they don't have the same names, they are identical to C-groove for Capcom and S-groove for SNK. Since I can't imagine that I'd ever pick another groove again other than Capcom/C-groove, and it's present in both games and works exactly the same in both, the additional choices of 2 offer me nothing that I actually want.

I'd say that the button layout is a very slight advantage to Pro over 2 and a similarly slight advantage goes to 2 over Pro for offering the 1x1 and 3x3 over the 2x2 of Pro. Neither has an advantage in groove selection, because both offer me the only groove that I'm still interested in playing ever again. On this dimension the two games, therefore break even.

Presentation. In terms of the sprites, they are basically the same for both games, and there are, honestly, issues with them. The handful of redrawn Street Fighter sprites (just Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and M. Bison, I believe) and the obviously newly drawn SNK sprites all look pretty good. Ironically, by the time even the first of these came out, many of the SNK characters had migrated to improved looks; Kyo's NESTS saga look was a big improvement over his Orochi saga look, for instance, but it's the latter that got drawn in the Capcom style. Regardless, that's all nearly top of the line for the era, and can't really be complained about. The rest of the Capcom sprites, however, don't look nearly as good. Everyone always points out how terrible Morrigan looks, and while it's true that she has the worst looking sprite in the game, many of the older Alpha vintage sprites really aren't that much better. Not only that, they really aren't drawn in the slightly more serious style that the SNK characters and redrawn Street Fighter characters are. A few new characters (and by new I mean drawn from much older games) from the Capcom side got ported to 2 that weren't in Pro, like Maki, Kyosuke or Eagle, and they also had to be redrawn in the newer style. The Alpha sprites look fine in their own game, but they are somewhat more cartoonish than the style that the SNK and redrawn Capcom sprites are in, which causes further graphical confusion; they just don't all look like they belong in the same game at all. (To be fair, this is also true even for some 3-D models that are in the same game. SFV has characters that look ridiculous next to characters that look really good. The newly released Akira in particular simply looks like she shouldn't be in the same game at all as the totally whiffed up Ken model.) However, while this is an issue, it's equally an issue for both games, so I can't give either game a leg up in this regard. Other parts of the presentation are different however.

While I don't think either game has really very memorable music, Pro's music is substantially better than the really generic Eurodancy soundtrack of 2. In general, I'd say Capcom was really whiffing on their music selection in this era too; this is the era of Marvel vs Capcom 2; the worst music ever featured in a major fighting game, and Street Fighter III. (To be fair, I'm really only familiar with the Third Strike music. But I didn't like most of that either.) Neither game is anywhere nearly as ridiculous as MvC2 (and yes, I realize that the music has grown on many fans. I'm not one of them. If anything, I find it even more obnoxious the more time passes. But I have other reasons for not really loving that game too.) I think 2's music is comparable in its weird badness to Third Strike, whereas Pro's music is comparable in its pretty generic run-togetherness to Alpha 3. Ironically, I once really liked the music to Alpha 3, but after hearing the really well-done remakes of the classic Street Fighter themes, plus the equally cool stage scenes that Overclocked Remix did (both for the HD Remix of SF2, and on their own before even) and the OST for Street Fighter IV, that Alpha 3 has not aged well in comparison. I still think that both Alpha 3 and Pro are fine for the era in which they came out, and they at least don't distract from the game, like MvC2 does, but they really aren't all that good either.

Otherwise, the look and feel of the stages is also very much better in Pro than in 2. Now, I didn't appreciate this as much for many years, because I only had the PS1 version of Pro, but with the Dreamcast version, it's obvious that many of the stages in this game are literally the absolute best 2-D stages ever produced, while the 3-D stages from 2 (and MvC2 for that matter) are probably the worst stages produced in general. Now, I don't necessarily hate 3-D stages in their own right. I think later 3-D stages, like those in KOF 2002 UM or KOF 1998 UM, for instance, look great, and there's some other really cool console port stages of what were originally 2-D stages in the arcade versions for some games that I also quite like. But I certainly don't think doing stages in 3-D just because you can is an improvement, and the stages in 2 are just awful, with only a couple of exceptions (the two boss stages, as it happens.) Really well-done 2-D stages have aged quite well, and have a kind of timeless beauty to them now that the early 00s 3-D video game design simply doesn't have. That era really kind of is a wasteland of very ugly, blocky polygon graphical design that looks terrible almost across the board, no matter the type of game. Curiously, though—it's less the technical limitations of the era that make the stages so unlovely as it is simply the design of them. I've got to give the edge, and it's a more substantial edge than we've seen before in these comparisons, to Pro over 2.

Total. Now, exactly which of those dimensions are most important to you may vary from what are most important to me. And some of my preferences there are obviously fairly subjective. Although I'll note that with the music in particular, I hear people make repeated mention of the "this is true love we're making" track of the London stage, and I've got to think that they've just developed a nostalgic fondness for an ugly track, the same way many have for "I'm gonna take you for a ride" from Marvel vs Capcom 2 rather than because it's an objectively good song or anything. But for my money, I'd have to say that it adds up to me being more likely now to play Pro than 2. Now don't get me wrong. I played a lot of 2 over the years, and I played probably a bit less of Pro when I had it only on the PS1. But now that I have the Dreamcast version, even with the Japanese, which I can't read a lick of, I just think that I prefer playing that one and probably will for the foreseeable future. All of the "improvements" made to 2 over Pro ended up being improvements that I don't really value that much, meaning that in most respects I can consider it an improvement from an academic perspective, but my own personal experience is actually a downgrade.

SFA3 and CvS2

I recently watched some Top Hat Gaming Man YouTube documentaries. I've actually seen these before months ago, but I'd kind of forgotten about a handful of specific conclusions he reached. Now, he's got his finger more on the pulse of what fighting game fans think than I do, presumably, although of course there might be selection bias in terms of the data input he receives. He also (as well as some other fighting game YouTubers) make reference, particularly in regards to the Street Fighter fandom, to a distinction between the "FGC" or fighting game community, and casual fans. I'm not 100% sure that I fit very well into either of those buckets; I don't feel like my fandom is necessarily all that casual, and yet I certainly don't compete online or do much with any "community" other than watch YouTube videos and stuff like that. I'd say I'm a casual fan who's casualness is suspect because I'm a bit of an obsessive collector sometimes, and because I do a lot of stuff when not actually playing related to my fandom, but who's behavior is otherwise quite similar to a casual fan in many respects.

Anyway, either way, THGM made a few conclusions; two major and two minor, that I 100% agree with yet I thought that the fandom in general did not agree with. What's more, he implied that these same conclusions were fairly general. Not everyone, of course, agrees with them, but a significant plurality if not majority does. This is both surprising and also somewhat gratifying if true. The "if true" being a big limiting factor, because I don't know that it is. But if it seems to be true to him, I'll trust that he's in a much better position than I am to see that, and trust in turn that it's much more likely to be true than I had previously suspected.

Anyway, what are these shocking conclusions? First the two major conclusions that he discusses.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 is considered the best SF game of the entire greater series by many fans. I don't actually think this anymore, because after I got Ultra Street Fighter IV back in 2014 or 2015 or whenever I got it on Steam, I came to believe that one was the best one. V is still growing on me, and it's TBD what I feel about it long term. But I seriously can't ever imagine that it would pass up IV in my esteem, and after IV, is definitely SFA3. I don't hesitate to recommend it to anyone as a timeless example of the pinnacle of karate supers development, or even fighting games development as a whole. 

It's important to remember the context in which this game came out too, though. The revolution caused by SF2 felt like a long time ago to us (although it wasn't really; less then ten years.) SF2 clones that were a dime a dozen were out there. Street Fighter itself had had a lot of development. The Marvel vs. series was in full swing by this time, and in fact, the alleged pinnacle of that series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, was not far away from being released at this point (about 18 months or so.) The 3D fighting game revolution was also in full swing; Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Soul Edge had been in arcades for years already. In another direction entirely, so had Mortal Kombat by this point.

That said, the PS1 release of SFA3 (which is the one that I played the heck out of for years, by the way) was considered a great release by most, and was immensely popular. I guess I didn't realize that the Alpha series was considered so good by fans, though. I hear all kinds of noise about the classicness of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, or the finely honed tactical, technical, competitive gameplay of Street Fighter III: Third Strike. I consider both of them significantly less fun to play than SFA3, however, and that they apply to a niche market within SF fandom. I guess I'm not as alone as I thought in that opinion.

To be fair, plenty of people don't think it's the best of the SF series. Heck, there are people who don't think it's the best of the Alpha subseries, and who prefer SFA2 still. But, although I don't change my mind because of this kind of thing, it is still somewhat gratifying to know that there's a significant plurality that agrees with me on this one.

Capcom vs SNK 2 is considered the best 2-D fighting game of the entire genre by many fans. Although kind of a quiet "sleeper" hit compared to the Marvel vs Capcom 2 game which came out the same year, it's more serious, Street Fighter-like gameplay, great roster of characters, and general vibe appeals to fans of the genre in many ways more than the hyperactive Marvel vs. games do. I think it's worth pointing out that to the majority of Street Fighter's audience, SNK was not really a rival, but rather a distant second who made some games that they were vaguely familiar with. Not saying that this is fair, but I think it's still true. The SNK fandom is concentrated in 1) certain parts of Asia, 2) South America. In Europe and North America, the only ones who knew SNK well were 3) people who are a bit less casual about their 2-D fighting game fandom and went out of their way to become familiar with series like King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, etc. During the 90s, I'd offer up the observation that most arcades had a few Neo Geo cabinets, probably because they were a good deal for arcade owners. I rarely saw large crowds around these cabinets, though, like I did when a new Capcom, Namco or Midway game was out. (Samurai Shodown's release being a notable exception.)

So I suspect that the portion of the fandom who thinks this is a bit less casual than the Joe Blow who buys a Street Fighter title for his Playstation, plays it a bunch, but then kind of puts it aside and forgets about it when new stuff comes out. It's more for the kind of fan who returns to this type of gameplay time and time again over long periods of time, because he really likes this kind of game more than just about any other kind of video game. Guys like me, in other words.

I also suspect that the people who think SFA3 is the pinnacle of Street Fighter development overlap a lot with the people who really esteem this title. In spite of a few characters who don't really fit the vibe of the game because they come from different enough types of games that they don't really fit (this problem was orders of magnitude worse in the Marvel vs games), it's really Street Fighter vs King of Fighters, and both were really very similar types of games with a very similar vibe to them. The gameplay is heavily based on the SFA3 style of gameplay, and while there are other options you can mess with with the groove system, I still think it's fair to say that the default is very much like playing a SFA3 game except with a bunch of SNK characters thrown in too. It's no wonder that I consider both of these games the very best of the pre-hiatus titles by Capcom if not by anyone (which I might think too, but I do have to acknowledge King of Fighters '98 in particular as a contender there) given in many ways how similar they are, and how both seem to be tailored specifically to my own taste. But again, it's nice to think that my taste maybe isn't such an outlier out there after all. 

Anyway, let's move on to the two minor conclusions which, again, I didn't think very many people agreed with, but which were certainly true for me.

The 2.5D style of 2D sprites fighting over a 3D background isn't very attractive, and looks very dated. The well-done 2D backgrounds of earlier games actually look quite a bit better and more timeless. This is, in particular, a feature related to Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Capcom vs SNK 2. Most of the titles up to that point had still used 2D backgrounds. It doesn't help, of course, that the actual stages weren't really all that attractive to begin with. They were simply poor designs. Of course, there are plenty of 2D backgrounds that are also poor designs and which I don't much like over the history of the genre. However, none of the stages from Marvel vs Capcom 2 stand out to me as even vaguely interesting, except possibly the boss stage, and none of the stages from Capcom vs SNK 2 stand out to me as attractive at all except, again, the two boss stages (the rainy castle roof and the fiery destruction stage.)

Of course, I don't really think that this is necessarily a problem with 3D stages, just that at the time these 3D stages were made, the technology and context for the artists wasn't there to make 3D stages that actually looked good. They certainly look good in Street Fighter IV and V. In fact, in V they made a deliberate effort to recreate, in 3D, a number of the classic 2D stages from the past. This includes loads of the Street Fighter II stages and a few Street Fighter Alpha 2 stages.

In fact, in general, I think my copy of Capcom vs SNK Pro has much better looking stages than Capcom vs SNK 2, even though those are 2D stages, and they're on the PS1 (the Dreamcast versions look even better.) Granted, I don't love the design of all of these stages either, but the ones that are good are really good. To be honest, I've often kind of liked some of the SNK stages better than Capcom. I think they have a slight edge in making really attractive stages compared to Capcom. Although it's not really super dramatic or anything, I still absolutely love the stage progression of this little neighborhood park from King of Fighters 99. I think stage design doesn't get much better than that, and since you usually play this game in teams of three, the stage will advance through all three "morphs" before you move on. This is the kind of thing 2D stages could be, and it is a kind of timeless look. These animations aren't actually all of the animations that playing the game would show you, but you get the idea:

That said, I think the stages is one of the presentation areas that Capcom vs SNK 2 really botched, and it does tend to depress my enjoyment of playing the game. The other minor conclusion is also a presentation issue, and it does the same thing as the stages; make me wish for a way to fan-sub it out for something else. That is:

The music from the late 90s games, specifically Capcom vs. SNK 2 is really bland, uninteresting and "Dreamcasty" and really dates the game; also not timeless like the earlier Street Fighter II themes. To be fair, this may be mostly THGM's opinion rather than one that's shared overall. Even in the comments to his video that he posted saying this, he got a lot of flack from the "This is true love we're making" fans. Blegh. The worst track from the game. That said, I suspect that the fans who like that like it in a kind of ironic way rather than a legit fashion, just like they like "Gonna take you for a ride" theme of Marvel vs Capcom 2. Nobody actually likes that song, but they do laugh at it and can become fond of it because of association. I don't; I dislike the music from most of this entire era. Marvel vs Capcom 2 has the worst music of any fighting game that I know of. Street Fighter III Third Strike also has pretty terrible music with only a few standout tracks that I don't mind, like the Yun/Yang "Chinese James Bond" music being a good example of one that I do like. Sadly, when ported into SFIV to accompany the characters that came from Third Strike, their music wasn't rearranged enough to dilute the terribleness of it. Dudley, Ibuki, Makoto, Elena, etc. I'm looking at you. Of this era, I'd actually probably suggest that the Capcom vs SNK music was generally the least offensive and dated sounding, but that isn't to imply that it isn't pretty bad. 

This is another arena in which I think SNK might have had a leg up on Capcom. Granted, SNK were prone to do a lot of experimentation with lots of different styles, and the smooth jazz soundtrack of Blue Mary, for instance, might have been a poor fit for a fighting game, but I do kind of appreciate the willingness to take risks and really put out there some intriguing types of music. Again, from King of Fighters 99, check out this boss theme. It's about the same vintage as Capcom vs SNK 2, but nothing on Capcom vs, SNK 2 sounds as good as this.

To be fair, maybe my own personal fondness for certain types of EDM make me prefer some games' BGM to others, but I think that really classic tracks from the SFII era done in the SFIV EDM style sounds kind timeless too. The late 90s early 00s style of music is just a very dated sound, with its weird Eurodisco rap and hip-hop influences. But again, dated or not, I hated it when it was new. It's just not my style at all.

And comparing it to King of Fighters 99 might not be entirely fair. While the vintage of the games is about the same, King of Fighters 99 was probably the most atmospheric of all of the KOF games, which makes is more atmospheric than any other fighting game. Nobody else has managed to compete in that particular front. The dark, secret society cyberpunk edge lurking just under the surface of what appears to be the normal world that we were familiar with is just brilliant. I do think that 99 is a criminally under-rated entry in the KOF series, unfortunately. The problem with the KOF titles, if I can be allowed a small digression at the end of my post (and of course I can, because it's my blog; I can write whatever I want) is that they tend to overwrite themselves. There was a clear progression from 94 to 98 where once the newer one came out, there was little reason to look backwards at the earlier entries, and 98 in particular was meant to capture the best of the entire 94-97 run in a single game. This is especially true of the Ultimate Match re-release. The next phase is kinda sorta treated this same way by KoF02, especially the Unlimited Match re-release. But what gets missed if you do it this way is the atmosphere and story of each individual game in the series. Sure, if what you mostly want—and I'd wager most fans, even me, do want this—is all of the characters and gameplay in a single game, then Ultimate Match 98 and Unlimited Match 2002 are all you really need to have for the entire run of King of Fighters between 94 and 2002. But that's a little bit of a shame, because you miss out on some cool little details here and there that way. 

Characters

So... I said in my last post that I hadn't lined up the character rosters; but for the heckuvit, I did just that.  I sorted--or rather, I should say I color-coded--cells in Excel with the origin of the character.  For simplicity's sake, I didn't create every color code that I could have: my color codes were as follows:

• Original World Warrior (one of the original eight possible character selections in SF2)
• Original Bosses (made playable in SF2: Champion Edition and beyond)
• New Challengers (introduced in Super Street Fighter 2; to make things a bit easier, I added Akuma to this list, even though he technically appeared in the Turbo version of the game which came later.)
• Street Fighter 1 characters (many of whom were reintroduced in the Alpha series) but since Ryu, Ken and Sagat all appear prominently in SF2, I consider them SF2 characters, not SF1 characters.  I know, I know, it's a technicality, but it makes sense to me because SF2 established the genre, and only then did Capcom go back and mine the back catalog of SF1 characters.)
• Final Fight characters (many of whom were reintroduced in the Alpha series)
• Alpha original characters; characters who had not previously appeared in any game before showing up in one of the several iterations of SFA.
• Street Fighter III characters (to make things easier, I combined all versions of this game into one single category rather than having characters who were in The New Warriors separate from 2nd Impact or Third Strike, etc.
• Street Fighter IV characters (and I did the same here; it didn't interest me if a character was new to the original Street Fighter IV or didn't come out until the Arcade Edition or even Ultra Street Fighter IV--if they were unique to the IV series, I lumped them all together.)

This may seem a little odd, in that it gives primacy to divisions within SF2 that it does not to other sub-series, but given the primacy of SF2 in establishing the series overall (and heck; the genre overall) I think that's OK.  Only after the success of SF2 did Capcom go back to older games to mine them as a back catalog for character concepts, namely SF1 and Final Fight.  A few observations:

• Eight World warriors; four bosses and four (five, counting Akuma) New Challengers make for a total of only 17 characters at the peak of SF2.  And all seventeen of these characters are repeated in SFA3 (the version of the Alpha series that peaked with regards to character selection) and USF4 (the version of IV that peaked with regards to character selection.)  Although the original intent was that SF3 would eschew these characters entirely, it turns out that four of these 17 made their way in before all was said and done.
• If you count the portable releases (that had a few additional characters, mostly grabbed from Capcom vs. SNK 2 and one other source) the Alpha series peaked at 38 characters.
• Four SF1 characters (not counting Ryu and Ken, of course) ended up coming back in Alpha, but none of them were in III and only two of them made the cut in IV--Adon and Gen.
• Five Final Fight characters (if you count Maki in the portable version) made it to Alpha, none of which were in III and three of which were in IV.  Sodom and Maki are the ones who got cut.  Poison was never in Alpha or III, but is a Final Fight character that gets added to IV.  Hugo is an odd case, but I'm considering him a III original rather than conflating Hugo and Andore as the same character and calling him a Final Fight character.
• Out of ten original Alpha characters, less than half came to IV: Rose, Dan, Sakura, and Evil Ryu.  You could maybe make a case that Shin Akuma evolved into Oni, but I'm considering them as separate characters.  It may be slightly debatable whether or not Shin Akuma should be considered a separate character in Alpha, but I went with it.  I didn't count Final Bison as a separate character, because among other things, he's not playable.
• The portable version of Alpha 3 had a few hangers-on; Yun is in it, which makes no logical sense given the time frame that Alpha is supposed to take place in vs. III, and Ingrid comes in from Capcom Fighting Evolution--although clearly she was just thrown in there because she could be, not because she belonged.
• Alpa had a big selection, but the peak roster for III was only 20 characters, so in scope, it's more like SF2.
• USF4 has the biggest roster of any SF title ever: 44.  10 of them are unique to the IV sub-series.  Curiously, more SF3 unique characters came over to IV than Alpha unique characters, but then again, Alpha already recycled a lot of characters from a lot of sources anyway, so that's not necessarily saying anything significant.  You could, for instance, fairly make the case that the Final Fight and SF1 characters owe much more to their Alpha appearances than they do to any appearances in any other game.  If you do that, then there are more Alpha characters than III characters.
• I've actually done very little with the IV unique characters, and have expressed little interest in most of them.  They're not quite as bad as some of the worst of the III unique characters (like Q, Twelve or Necro) but they clearly don't have the "staying power" of the originals or some of the popular Alpha or III characters, like Yun or Sakura, for instance.
• In thinking about which characters are likely to be added to V whenever it comes, I'm conflicted.  There seem to be hints that Charlie will return, but he seems to be the only "dead" SF character who actually has remained dead, and Guile has had to represent for him (occasionally with "cosplay" costume alternatives, as in IV).  I predict that only four or so of the IV unique characters make the cut: my votes go to Abel, Crimson Viper, Gouken, Juri and Oni.
• Mike Haggar is a character in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 who could therefore have relatively easily been added to SF4.  I'm surprised, honestly, that he hasn't already been as part of the 1.04 patch that added the Omega mode, if not as part of the Ultra update in the first place.  Very curious and surprising.
• It's been said before, but I'll say it again; one of the big reasons III flopped on its face was the lack of recognizable and relatable characters.  It didn't have any of the ones we already knew and loved, and the new ones that it had weren't as interesting as the originals.  That said, in doing this analysis, I was surprised to find that as many III unique characters came over to IV as did.  I didn't really think that until I laid them out, color coded them, and counted them.  Of course, to me they are just filler characters,  I've rarely, if ever, played most of them.  That said—I do like Dudley.  And the Chinese twins aren't that bad.

Essay No. 3: On Continuity and Canon

(What happened to Essay No. 2 you may ask?  Nothing.  It was just kind of obsolete, so rather than port it from my old website, I just dropped it.  I might add it back in with new formatting... maybe.  But probably not.)

Because I think these types of games, their characters and their settings represent a foreign (namely, Japanese) interpretation of the modern superhero story line, I often make comparisons to superhero comic books. If you think of Ryu, Terry or Kyo as analogs to the X-men, or Spiderman, then they kinda work, and if you think of Rugal or Bison as Magneto or Dr. Doom, you can see striking and obvious parallels. If you think of the plot to take over the world by NESTS from King of Fighters '99 through King of Fighters 2001 by holding a martial arts tournament, gathering data from how the champions fight, and channeling that data into a clone army, you can easily see what I'm talking about in terms of "comic book" plots too. Heck, Heidern serves for the King of Fighters games (and Chun Li and Charlie/Guile's bosses for the Street Fighter games) almost like S.H.I.E.L.D.

However, I specifically want to talk about one issue and discuss it a little bit in relation to my story, and that is continuity and canon. Comic book fans the world over were excited when Sam Raimi filmed the first Spiderman movie with Toby MacGuire and Co., yet nobody expected it to be a faithful reproduction of the origin of Spiderman as originally written by Stan Lee in the early 1960s. For one thing, the media was completely different. For another, the audience was considerably more sophisticated. And for another, there've been too many changes in the world over the last forty years for that to still be even a little bit credible.

So what did Raimi do? He retold the story. The spider that bit Peter Parker wasn't radioactive, it was the result of genetic manipulation by Norm Osborn. Parker's look and powers changes slightly; Osborn changed even more significantly (the Halloweenish original Green Goblin wouldn't look anything other than extremely cheesy in a big budget action movie meant for a general audience, after all) and many of the details of the origin of Spiderman story, as well as the relationship between Spiderman and the Green Goblin were changed fairly significantly.

This of course, wasn't the first time this happened. Marvel Comics a few years back kicked off an extremely popular line of comics called the Ultimate comics where popular characters and series were "rebooted" and restarted, the stories retold and the character redesigned, with a more modern and sophisticated audience in mind, and without all the baggage of forty years of accumulated back story. There are some very significant differences between "regular" Spiderman and "ultimate" Spiderman, which in turn are quite different from "movie" Spiderman. If you keep in mind that there are at least five animated series of Spiderman, each also with their own separate "canon" of continuity and details of how the stories were told and the characters developed, you can see that some major changes were made to accommodate different media and different audiences.

What does that have to do with me and this story? Well, frankly, I'm doing the same thing. I'm referencing the "original" canon when it works for me, I'm even giving a nod here and there to the UDON comic books, because they had some great ideas, but I'm retelling these stories my way to make it work for me. I have a few more significant challenges than most others who've tried to write fan fictions about these games; I'm combining incompatible plot lines from several different games with well over a hundred potential characters, and setting a goal of meeting as many of those characters as reasonably possible without it feeling forced or fake. This means, of course, that I'm going to have to make a fair number of changes to plot points as well as character description and development.

One way in which this will happen is in the arena of romantic entanglements. Maybe I'm just a bit of a softie, but a good romantic relationship makes any story better. Sadly, most of the interesting prospects from SNK at least are already tied up with other characters. This is problematic; for many reasons, cross-source material pairings are more interesting than in-game pairings. I've also decided to make some rather major consolidations and changes to, again, further facilitate the mingling of various story lines. With three story lines from King of Fighters to contend with, one from Fatal Fury, a few from Street Fighter and even some nods towards Darkstalkers, anything else would be a confused mess. If you don't like to see established video game canon changed like this, I can only suggest that you avoid this story, then, and read the paragraphs above; my changes aren't any more significant than having Spiderman date Shadowcat from the X-men, for example. To make the story tell-able, I had to make changes, and I'm creating this note specifically to justify them to the fans.

On a slightly less serious note, exactly what stories am I retelling, and which stories are being relegated to the background? That's a good question.

I'm going to assume for the time being that the plots of the original Street Fighter and Fatal Fury video games happened more or less exactly as described, in the "distant" (i.e., at least a year or two ago) past, while the events of the Street Fighter Alpha series and the original Rugal headed King of Fighters games ('94 and '95) happened in the very recent past (i.e., just a month or two tops before the stories start.) Geese Howard is missing and presumed dead (cf. the Fatal Fury ending), as is M. Bison after the explosion of his Shadowloo headquarters in Thailand (cf. Cammy, Chun Li, Charlie, Ken, Sagat, Ryu and Sakura's endings from Street Fighter Alpha 3) and even Rugal is presumed dead after the crash of the Black Noah (cf. Kyo's team ending for King of Fighters '95.)

The story lines that I intend to weave together, with a fair amount of changes to fit them all together, are:

1. The later Fatal Fury games (although these stories tend to repeat themselves over and over again; Geese falls from his tower no less than three times before finally being declared "officially" dead, so the Fatal Fury story lines are an amalgam of Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury. The other two Real Bout titles are "dream matches."
2. The "NESTS" story line from mid-era King of Fighters games.
3. The "Sacred Treasures" story line from current King of Fighters games (although granted; since the resolution isn't yet out, this story line is a bit confused at the moment. When King of Fighters XII is released, hopefully it will make more sense. Of course, by then, it'll no doubt invalidate what I've written. NOTE: Since this is an Orochi based story line, I'm dropping the original Orochi story line and telling this one instead. It could feature characters from the Original Orochi story line re-imagined here (i.e., Leopold Goenitz and possibly others. But not the New Faces team; I think those guys are incredibly cheesy.)
4. The Street Fighter 2 story line.
5. Possibly a few ideas from the Street Fighter III, Final Fight or Darkstalkers story lines as well.

As you can hopefully see, this is a bewildering tangle to try and unwind and remake into anything that's coherent or interesting, so a little patience and forbearance if you see changes that are obviously "wrong" from the canon is requested here.

Shuddering back to life...

Well, it's been a ridiculously long time since I have had a post on this blog.  Nearly a year.  As it happens, it's been a ridiculously long time since I played one of these games (although not quite that long.)  The last two evenings, I've managed to spend half an hour or so each with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2--two of the best games in the genre, and classics from the mid to late 90s era Golden Age of karate supers.

In addition; a few other developments.  My old Xbox died.  This means that I no longer have access to some of my titles that were exclusive to that console, or for which I never bought PS2 equivalents.  I'm finding, however, that I don't really care all that much.  My attitude, which was more like a completionist collector, in many respects, is now one of "I'd rather own a few games that I actually will want to play" rather than a bunch of titles that I only get out once in a blue moon to remind myself why I don't like them as much as their brethren.  Of the titles I have, that means that really only KoF2002 will be missed on the Xbox, and if I really wanted to, I could get that for the PS2 anyway (and I'd have liked to get the upgraded Unlimited Match version of that anyway--which isn't readily available in my market.  Grrr.)

I also still haven't gotten an Xbox 360 or a PS3... although both are now "aged" technology with replacements that have been in the market for a little while.  The price hasn't really dropped, though, and SF4 continues to get revisions (the supposed last one due to come out this summer sometime) and I've spent money that I could have used to feed this hobby on a slew of new backpacking gear instead.  Frankly, this hobby waned in my attention, and I haven't given it much thought.  But it didn't go away completely (like my interest in tabletop miniatures wargames has), it merely slumbered.  I'd like to revisit just a few things in the next little bit, and I'd like to play some of my old games a bit again too.  I'd like to get a new system, and I'm now leaning a bit towards the PS3 rather than the 360, since it will have the latest SF4 title, KoFXIII and the upgraded MvC3 titles--really all that I probably even want, at this point.  Maybe I should haunt garage sales and whatnot looking for one?  I still remain pretty cheap, and with a son going off to college in the near future, that's not likely to change soon either.

However, I'd like to archive a few of my websites; converted and upgraded, perhaps, into blog posts.  I'm more confident that blogger will be here than freewebs in five to ten years, frankly, and I've already been burned with content that I lost when Geocities died.  Better to keep stuff handy.

I'll start by converting my Southtown geography pages into blog posts.  Ironically, it looks like the last time I blogged--nearly 11 months ago--I addressed that topic lightly.  It will perhaps seem as if I'm fixated on the subject.  Ah, well.  I don't really blog all that much anyway.

Technical vs casual

I've been thinking about a lot of the games in these series lately (mostly because I've gotten my PS2 down and played a bunch of them recently.  I haven't played much if any of the games I have for other systems.)  My wife doesn't really understand why I want so many titles when to her, the games all look pretty much the same.  And even my kids, who get that the games are very different, often wonder why I care about the older titles when--to them, at least--the newer ones mostly clearly make many of the older ones obsolete.  This is especially true with the King of Fighters series, where there are a number of possible obsolesence points within the series.  You could reasonably argue that the recent KOFXIII with its migration to a much more powerful hardware and greatly improved graphics makes all the previous iterations feel obsolete.  You could argue that the dream match capstone games at the end of the various subseries make all of the games in the subseries obsolete too--and you'd be a little hard-pressed to even get me to not kinda shrug and say, "yeah, you're right."  Because honestly, I almost never play KOF 94-97 anymore, especially since I can use KOF98:UM to "replicate" earlier versions of the characters through the EX characters, and it has all of the characters that ever appeared in any game in the subseries.  This isn't quite true for KOF02:UM because it's not a striker-based game like 99-01 were, but honestly I was never a huge fan of the strikers anyway.  It turns out that the only reasons I have for turning to some of those older games are to get a closer look at some of the stages again, or some other nostalgic or "research" purpose.  You could make the claim that with KOF98:UM, KOF02:UM, KOFXI and KOFXIII you are completely covered in terms of KOF titles.  There are practically no important characters or game-play options that you are really missing that way.

You could probably make similar (although not quite as clear-cut) cases for the Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Marvel vs Capcom and Fatal Fury series too; in fact, I pretty much have made exactly that case for Darkstalkers and MvC (although I was also driven by lack of availability of ports on systems that I own to some extent too)--and I rarely play any FF game other than RBFF2 anymore too.

Part of the reason for this is that I'm a rather casual player.  I'm honestly not that good, nor am I much interested in getting significantly better at playing these games.  I don't even care to play competitively at all, really.  I'm interested in game that I can, when I'm in the mood, sit down and play for a while against an interesting but not too frustrating or challenging CPU opponent.  I don't know what the rest of the market is like, but I imagine with the mainstream success of games like SFIV or MvC3, that there's a lot of newer and casual players out there.  So I think that a developer has got to be careful to not cater to the niche of harder-core players.  Those who like really technical play that's too fast, or with complicated air juggles, or deadly-rave type supermoves that are unlikely to be learnable by casual players.  This is even true with unintentional technical issues--grapplers, for instance, that have 360° motions that are doable on an arcade cabinet with a joystick, but which are a complete pain in the butt with a standard hand-held controller of a console game.  If developers aren't careful about this, then what they've managed to do is create a game that appeals to a hardcore niche audience that values system mastery but have created massively impenetrable barriers to entry to newer and more casual gamers.

In fact, I suspect that to some extent SNK has suffered due to this syndrome.  I think much of what they have developed rewards system mastery, and excludes casual players.  And I think that's at least part of their story of struggling to find a big US market comparable to that which Street Fighter and Capcom were able to find.  Only part, as I think console availability, localization and presentation issues and more were at least as big if not bigger issues for them.

I do have to say that MvC2's popularity in the US kinda sorta refutes this, but my response to that is that while its possible to play that game very technically, you can also play it reasonably successfully as little more than a button masher too.  Not competitively against a really good player, of course, but against the CPU, or against other casual players, sure.  It's not hard to actually pull the moves off, at least.  Plus, the presence of all the Marvel characters was a big draw in its own right.

Capcom vs. SNK again

Well, it turns out that I did erase all the color edits, at least for the characters that I was looking into. But I did have all the characters and EX characters unlocked. Strange. Anyway, I ended up spending some time while I was waiting for a repairman to arrive playing around with making two new Akuma color edits on the old Capcom vs. SNK Pro game that I have, and then playing through it just for fun. I had thought that with Capcom vs. SNK 2 in hand, the older game wouldn't have much charm for me. I guess with a few characters, there's actually not a lot of differences between them one to another. Since I prefer playing C-groove in CVS2, which is identical to Capcom Groove in the earlier game, and since I can pick the same character twice in pairs mode, just with a different color scheme to remind me if I'm on my first or second "life", for certain characters there really isn't much difference after all. And I do remember now how much I really liked a few of the stages, especially the train-ride on the fictional Orion Pacific railroad through the butte and mesa country of the American southwest, the car wreck and flame at night in a crowded Japanese street, and the craggy cliff-like coastline of somewhere in rural Japan with the big statues looking out of the surf. And I love Capcom's take on some traditional SNK arenas, like the top of Geese tower, or the Pao Pao Cafe.

I also picked up on a few little details; like the Orion Pacific railroad, for instance, or the News Combo 7 anchor, which carries forward to the sequel game as well. And I've always liked that soundtrack better than its sequel's too--even though much of it is blend together generic electronica.

One thing I don't like about both of them is that the SNK characters feel really dated. Although the movelists are not necessarily, the look of the characters comes from earlier games that were already going out of circulation when these games were released, and which have become even more dated looking since. Athena is wearing her '94 or '95 outfit, for example. Kyo is wearing his Orochi style school uniform. It's inevitable, no doubt, but as time marches on, they feel more and more outdated, making the experience of playing this game feel more and more like a relict. Too bad, really.

Again, I'm left asking myself if maybe mugen isn't something I wouldn't be interested in trying out. I'm not interested in some of the really crazy mugen matches that I've seen on youtube and elsewhere; what I'm really interested in is creating a game that has my favorite stages, my favorite system, and my favorite characters from Fatal Fury games, King of Fighters games, Street Fighter games, Darkstalkers games and maybe a handful of characters from the Marvel line-up as well, and have that be my gold standard in fighting games. Can mugen even do that? I don't know. Probably not without a lot of work. And probably not completely to my satisfaction even then.

Capcom vs. SNK 2 for PS2

Well, for whatever reason, it's not too difficult to find PS2 copies of this game. Since my Xbox version has pretty much died, and since my PS2 has become my main console for all these games (I only have a handful of games only for the Xbox now, and of them, only KoF2002 and KoF2003 are worth getting into very often) this seemed like a good move. On a whim, I went by Gamestop and picked up a copy yesterday.

Of course, my Xbox savefile had Ultimate Rugal and Shin Akuma unlocked already, as well as a number of custom color edits. I whipped up one of Ken (although it's not perfect; I'll need to tinker with it) that is the "ivory" Ken color from SFIII:TS, or something close to it, and played through with the difficulty turned down.

One noticeable thing about this: with the difficulty turned down, the game is really easy, even though I'm a bit rusty with this particular game. So it wasn't hard to qualify for fighting Ultimate Rugal. However, even with the difficulty way down, Ultimate Rugal is still terribly hard to play. Ugh. I couldn't beat him before I ran out of time last night. I probably won't have time tonight either. I'll have to see what I can do with that this weekend.

Also noticed that in Training mode, the two boss stages weren't available. Maybe I have to unlock them first? I didn't remember that.

Bosses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaming again

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

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

King of Fighters 00/01

As a quick aside, I ordered this title from Amazon the other day. It should show up by... tomorrow, I think, since I'm an Amazon Premium member.

That pretty much completes my collection of titles, at least until I get a next gen system other than the Wii so I can play Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XII and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix.

I'm kinda sorta tempted to pick up SwapMagic, or some other app that allows my PS2 to play import games, and then run down a copy of King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match, but honestly, that's probably more than I really need. It'll be a very low priority.

Welcome to my new blog!

I'm a big fan of Japanese two-dimensional, superhero-like martial arts fighting games. That means, basically, games like Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, King of Fighters and Fatal Fury. A handful of other titles could pass muster, but that's the core series of games that I'm talking about.

I'll spend some time talking about my personal gaming history, my views on these types of games, and more as time goes on, but primarily, what I wanted to do was take them out of my more "mainstream" blog; I found I was talking often enough about these kinds of games that I wanted to keep that discussion separate. I have little reason to believe that the readers of my regular blog have any interest in this type of game, so why not put it somewhere where it doesn't distract them, and it can get the attention it truly deserves, I thought?

Why not indeed? That's why I created this new blog.

For starters, let's talk about the blog title. SFKOFFF. This is actually a code I put on a DVD storage box where I keep most of my games of this genre. My kids asked me what it meant, but my eight year old looked at it for about three seconds and puzzled it out: Street Fighter - King of Fighters - Fatal Fury. Since I consider those the core titles of the genre and I don't have a good label for the genre as a whole, I whipped up that rather dumb little acronym. Most likely, I'll change it when I can think of a better label, but in the meantime... turns out that's not such a hot priority, so I've kept with it. Certainly it's better than some of the other hybrid titles I've thought of. I mean, Dark Fatal King of Furious Street Stalking Fighters doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. I've thought of street fighters (lower case, to distinguish from the Street Fighter series) but it doesn't sound generic enough. I'll keep working on that.