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. 

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.

Essay No. 1: On the Nature of Setting

What does it take to adapt the actual, modern, real world to make room for games like Street Fighter, Fatal Fury or King of Fighters to actually exist? This essay attempts to analyze some of the things that are necessary for them to all fit together.

The first goal is to mostly minimize the changes. There's no reason to make very big, sweeping changes to the "real world" setting if I'm not forced to. At the same time, though, some changes, some of them actually fairly broad and sweeping, do certainly facilitate the genre. But I'm going to try to be as conservative as possible. I'm also going to point to actual in-game situations or scenarios to justify changes. Overall, though, the changes aren't too big a deal; no more than is necessary to incorporate superheroes into the modern world, as Marvel and DC Comics have done, for instance. Anyway, here's a list, with discussion:

• Very few of the characters look Asian, despite the fact that many of them are. Large, round eyes, fairly light brown hair, and relatively white skin are all very common. A lot of this can be attributed to art style, but not all of it; characters like Karin Kanzuki or Benimaru Nikaido are clearly born and raised Japanese, yet have curly blond hair, blue eyes, and other hallmarks that point to a classic Caucasian; even Nordic, physical type. Iori Yagami is similar; with his bright red hair, for instance. The best explanation for this is simple: the fictional world of superhero martial arts games (and many anime too, for that matter) is a much more racially cosmopolitan and mixed society than we currently have. If so, it's totally possible for a Japanese born and bred girl like Karin to be blond, blue-eyed and Caucasian in features, and not attract too much undue notice. Many of the other Asian characters are also at least partially Caucasian in their features too, I'd think, if the high frequency of Caucasian coloration and physical features seen in character artwork is any guide.

• Along those same lines, there are also physical types that we currently don't have. Of course, it's always possible that a girl with blue or purple hair or eyes is wearing a wig, dye, contacts, etc., but I think it's pretty implicit in the characterizations that that's not really what's going on. Some variations that are rare in the world at large, but not too uncommon in games include purple/lavender hair, green or greenish hair, blue hair, and a type of towhead coloration that is literally white or silver, but on young people. If the default colors for the characters isn't enough to convince you, check out some of the alternate colors for some real wildness. Or just look at characters like Blanka. It's possible that the chi that powers these metahumans also kinda evolves or mutates them sometimes, causing new physical times to spontaneously arise, but I don't know that it's strictly necessary to say anything like that.

• Governments around the world seem to be more lax and hands-off than in the real world, for the most part. Characters don't think twice about traveling around the world, often penniless, to participate in martial arts tournaments. Not only are borders not that open in the real world, but martial arts tournaments of the type being held in these games are generally illegal in almost any country in the world today. These tournaments aren't usually taking place in controlled environments either if the stages are any guide; in front of famous landmarks, in the middle of the street, in restaurants and bars, or in the more conventionial boxing ring type of environment all seem to feature, and apparently governments are not cracking down on these activities--some of them are even very official and formal and broadcast around the world like the Olympics, i.e. King of Fighters of the Orochi time-period. Apparently, the governments are also unperturbed by the fact that minors participate in these tournaments from time to time; there are plenty of teenage characters, and even a few like Bao seem to be pre-teens. Another example of laid-back governance is the fact that Southtown can be literally taken over by a criminal syndicate, and seriously talk of seceding from whatever nation it belongs to (presumably the U.S.?) which in the real world are both quite impossible. Criminal organizations aren't just like the Mafia; they can actually set up small rogue nation-states, and do so relatively unopposed by the rest of the world, i.e ., Shadaloo in the Golden Triangle and Brazil.

• Along with the rather hands-off government, a lot of the real-world conflict that makes travel to many areas of the world dangerous for some people seems to be completely glossed over. My preference to resolve this conflict with the real world is that almost all of the world's governments are small, and relatively centralized. If you imagine all of the world running more or less like the American West of the later 1800's; territorial governors manning vast stretches of land with a skeleton crew bureaucracy, then it works. Have all of the world's nations hand over a fair amount of their sovereignty to a world governing body helps too; imagine if all the world belonged to an organization somewhat similar to the E.U., for instance, and you've got the right idea. For a story, I don't think this needs to really be dwelt on, though--government interference can simply fade into the background, i.e., the government doesn't really actually ever make an appearance except as a plot device.

• The final point that needs some addressing is the question of--if we have all these superhuman warriors running around, what changes does that have on society and history? And this one, more than any other, I want to gloss over without changing the real world any more than necessary. So, first of all, they have had an impact on history; but it's the same impact other famous warriors and whatnot have had. In other words, historical figures like Alexander the Great, Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, etc. most probably were metahumans. Legendary figures like Hercules, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, etc. are almost certainly all based on metahuman prototypes as well. But, they've always been very rare; one that really has the ability to change world history doesn't even come along once every few hundred years.

• However, given the cast of characters in even one company's roster (say, SNK) to say nothing of combining them (adding in Capcom, for instance) makes you wonder about that; there are over 100 characters in the King of Fighters series alone, about fifty or so in the Street Fighter games, and many more if you start adding in other series that have popped up over the years and are clearly related, such as Rival Schools, Final Fight, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, etc., then we've got a lot of characters, and there's no indication that these characters are so unique that there aren't many more in the setting that simply haven't been in the games yet. One way around this is that the proliferation of some modern technology has accelerated the growth of these techniques. With fast, safe and easy global travel, finding a martial arts master to teach you has never been easier. With the sharing of techniques and knowledge over the Internet, or by global post, even, the spread has been even faster. Many characters, such as Shadaloo's Dolls, or the Ikari Warriors, or the N.E.S.T.S. agents, literally have had their powers scientifically and/or genetically engineered for them. Populations themselves are much higher around the globe; why not just assume there's been a sharp rise in the numbers of metahumans over the last generation or two? Is this sharp rise explained by all the factors I just listed? I don't know, but I actually think it's intriguing to say that no, it's not. Something else is going on too, but what could it be exactly? Is Mother Destiny stepping in and preparing the world for something big that's coming; spinning out more potential heroes than normal? Hmmm...

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.

Old School Crawl: Street Fighter II

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

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



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

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

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

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

Old School Crawl: Street Fighter

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

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

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

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

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

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

SF2 ripoff list

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

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

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

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

Breakers series (by Visco)

• Breakers
• Breakers Revenge

Fighters History series (by Data East)

• Fighters History
• Fighters History Dynamite

Agressors of Dark Kombat (by ADK)

World Heroes Series (by ADK)

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

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

• Double Dragon
• Rage of the Dragons

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer (by Technos)

Power Instinct series (by Atlus)

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

Two new series...

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

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

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

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

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 3

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

Part 1, and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal History of Karate Supers, part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karate supers?

Whaddya think? As a label for the genre overall?

It's not as specific as I'd like, but that's been the bane of me coming up with a genre tag, frankly. I want to be too specific, and I end up with something really clunky. "2-D anime-like superheroic martial arts fighting game" is specific enough (although it might leave room for stuff like Guilty Gear or Blazblue, which I'd rather not, actually) but it's too long and doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. Karate infers the martial arts tradition that's important to the genre, it infers the Japanese nature of the games (karate being a specifically Japanese martial art) and it infers the weaponless nature, excluding games like Samurai Shodown or Last Blade. Supers infers the superpowers that the characters routinely exhibit, which sets these games apart from more realistic martial arts games, most of which tend to be three dimensional, like Virtua Fighter, Tekken or Dead or Alive.

It doesn't really exclude games like Mortal Kombat very well, except by fiat. Mortal Kombat wasn't made by a Japanese company, after all. It also doesn't exclude a fair number of other games, which I won't really ever address just because I don't have any interest in them. For example, the fighting game (as opposed to the side-scrolling beat-'em-ups of the same name) Double Dragon and Rage of the Dragons. Nor does it exclude stuff like the Power Instinct series, or Waku Waku 7, or Rumble Fish or Arcana Heart, or plenty of other examples. That's OK; I don't need to exclude them, and frankly they seem like they fit into the genre as well as, say, the Art of Fighting series. But like I said; just because the definition includes them doesn't mean I'll talk about them here.

Karate supers. The more I think about it, the more I think I'm unlikely to come up with anything better. Although not meant to be completely inclusive, I figure the games (and game series) that are the iconic ones that belong to the genre are the Street Fighter games, the Fatal Fury games, the King of Fighters games, the Darkstalkers games, the Marvel and Marvel vs. games, and the Capcom vs. SNK games.

The Genre vs. the Real World

What kind of changes would have to happen in the real world to accomodate the kind of action that a game like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, or Fatal Fury seems to implicate? My goal here isn't to make broad, sweeping changes, but rather to minimize them as much as possible, yet still have a setting that makes some sense and has some consistency. Here's what I've got:

• The world has to be a much more cosmopolitan place than it is today. Southtown, the setting for the Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury games, and much of the King of Fighters games too, for that matter, is supposed to be a west coast American city. It's got street signs in Japanese in some instances, though. Plus, you've got characters with obviously caucasian features bearing Japanese names who are clearly supposed to be Japanese. Karin Kanzuki is one of the most overt examples, because not only is she clearly extremely white-skinned, but she has curly blond ringlets and blue eyes! She looks a bit like a teenaged martial arts loving Shirley Temple. I've seen explanations here and there about wigs, dye jobs, colored contact lenses, etc. That seems like special pleading. Let's just assume a more cosmopolitan world where what you look like and what culture you grow up in are not nearly so tightly linked as they are in the real world.

• Along those same lines, there are some people who don't look like they could belong to any ethnic group today. Who has naturally occuring blue or purple hair, for example? Or red eyes? What kind of young people routinely have white or silver hair? What the heck is Blanka supposed to be? If you don't think the default colors are crazy enough, check out some of the alternate colors. I don't mean ones that players have made with color edit modes, I mean stuff that just appears in the game itself.

I actually like this bizarre, almost alien diversity. In a cosmopolitan world where Japanese people can have blond hair and blue eyes, why not where some other Japanese girl can have lavender hair and be a J-pop singing sensation?

• The government sure doesn't seem to be very important. Why is nobody stepping in when fights break out between folks with crazy superpowers right there in public places, in front of national monuments and everything? Why doesn't anyone do anything about all the minors that compete in violent martial arts tournaments? How is it that these apparently penniless martial artists can travel around the world barefoot without any concern for things like national borders, passports, or anything like that? How does a city like Southtown conceptually come up with the idea of seceding from the United States? How does Bison establish what is essentially a rogue nation in the Golden Triangle? Well, all of that is a heck of a lot easier if you figure that governments play a much more limited role than they do in real life.

• Despite that, agents from Interpol, the Ikari Warriors (who are... what exactly? Mercenaries?) and who knows what other law enforcement agencies seem to have an awful lot of clout when they want to. They can travel internationally to arrest people. And by "arrest" them, I mean beat them up in a public place without so much as a warrant or court order or anything. I think the way to do this is to have national governments be extremely low key, laissez-faire, but they've ceded some of their authority to international law enforcement agencies. They're way too small and undermanned to do the job properly, so they go about as practically and expediently as possible, even if that means the occasional sacrifice of due process.