Art styles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street Fighter vs King of Fighters

The year is 1998. Capcom has released, this year, its arguably most polished—and still considered one of its best entries in the entire Street Fighter series even now, years later—Street Fighter Alpha 3. It's in between the releases of Street Fighter III: Second Impact (1997) and Third Strike (1999). Its vs series has just barely graduated from Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (1997) to Marvel vs Capcom (1998) which expanded the roster from just Street Fighter characters to include characters from other Capcom franchises like Megaman, etc. That would be greatly expanded in the next game in the series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, but this was the first game that started the real trend of gonzo, spastic, novelty value of having such a tonal dissonance of characters all appearing in a crazy crossover game. Prior to that, the Marvel crossovers had been marginally more serious, and the Street Fighter games themselves obviously so, with a consistent tone and feel throughout. In many ways, 1998 was "peak Street Fighter" for a whole decade, while the franchise lingered under lazy, uninspired efforts, before being revived with Street Fighter IV in 2008.

Meanwhile, SNK also released King of Fighters '98 in 1998, obviously. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 also came out that year, which although a tremendous game, had already had the spotlight taken from it to migrate to King of Fighters. While here in America, this was never really the case, in many markets in Asia and in South America in particular however, SNK was as popular as Capcom at the 2-D fighters, and the supposed rivalry between the two companies was catnip to games journalists, especially seeing as what even many years later many fans see as two of the best entries in both Street Fighter and King of Fighters came out in 1998. This fact was not lost on people at the time, of course, and both games were covered in the press, often in fact, in the exact same issue. At least one publication, Arcadia, plastered the title Street Fighter vs King of Fighters on its cover, and at least some fans, tantalized by that title, thought that that meant that some kind of actual crossover game was coming, as opposed to the magazine merely reviewing two of the best competing entries from each company in the same issue.

Whether this is literally true or not, this fan and journalist fervor is supposedly what prompted Capcom and SNK people to talk to each other and hammer out the license for what was to become the various Capcom vs SNK (and SNK vs Capcom) series of games. From the get-go, however, this concept was tainted by what was going on in the crazy, spastic Marvel vs Capcom stuff; the idea that we needed to add characters who had no tonal resonance with the others, just because the whole point was throwing everybody in a giant bag of a game and shaking it up until it broke. The Capcom vs SNK games were more serious in most respects than the Marvel vs Capcom game of the same era (2000-2002 or so) when they did finally come out in response to that stimulus in 1998, but for my money, they never quite lived up to the premise and promise of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters described in the headlines.

There are some other titles that qualify as similar in tone, of course, although most of them have already had some kind of crossover of sorts with the two flagship franchises. On Capcom's side, Rival Schools and Final Fight have always been associated with Street Fighter; Sakura appearing in Rival Schools and more recently, Akira appearing in Street Fighter V's final season. Final Fight characters were all over the place in the Alpha series already, and more of them have been more and more integrated into the Street Fighter franchise since. Although going back to 1989 already it was clear that they were going to be the same canon; the crush the car game from Street Fighter II was borrowed from Final Fight, and Final Fight's original title was going to be Street Fighter '89! Darkstalkers is a little more difficult; while the Darkstalkers titles have more or less the same vintage as the Marvel and Alpha games, and are obviously very similar to them in many, many regards, they do have an occasionally more gonzo tone than the Street Fighter games, at least. Although other Darkstalkers characters would fit in more closely with the Street Fighter cast. Curiously, as far as I'm aware, no Darkstalkers or Street Fighter character have actually ever appeared in the same game unless it was explicitly a crossover game (or puzzle fighter or something), however, and there hasn't ever been a Street Fighter vs Darkstalkers type property except for a comic book series published by UDON. I find this observation oddly compelling to noodle on. Some of the Street Fighter characters, especially Akuma, but also maybe Gill and Urien and Rose (and Menat) and more recently G (and Q) have the kind of vibe that would fit quite well in a Darkstalkers game. And with the successful relaunch of Street Fighter again, there's certainly been a call to do something with the Darkstalker characters besides an occasional cameo or cosplay alternate costume from many fans, which so far seem to have been unanswered and unaddressed. Curious and curiouser.

The King of Fighters games were always meant to be crossover games, of course, but they were primarily based around the concept of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting and other similar characters; even characters like the US Sports team, the Psycho Soldiers team or the Ikari Warriors team were remade into a Street Fighter-like character representation. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters, of course, were already in that mold. From time to time, characters who were a little more outré have popped up, like Nakoruru being a significant part of the plot of King of Fighters XIV, or some of the weird sub-bosses that showed up in King of Fighters XI, or especially all of the strikers that showed up in King of Fighters 2000. And curiously, a number of their actual bosses have always had a Darkstalkers like vibe too; I mean, what is Mukai and Magaki and Saiki and even Orochi for that matter, if not Darkstalkers in a Street Fighter-like game? The NESTS saga was less supernatural, but that only meant that it much more closely resembled the Street Fighter Alpha games, and later the G-project Street Fighter III stuff.

A few other games merit some mention. The Street Fighter EX games were, of course, Street Fighter games, but they were developed by Arika, and had a reasonably diverse cast of characters that have not appeared in mainline Street Fighter. The reason for this, it appears, is that the rights to those characters remained with Arika all this time, so that even if Capcom wanted to use them (which isn't at all clear that they ever did) they couldn't have without making some kind of new deal with Arika to do so. Arika have not that long ago finally released a new Street Fighter-like fighting game of their own, featuring these characters. Curiously, they made a deal of some kind with SNK so that Terry Bogard appeared in their game, and Skullomania appeared in a strange King of Fighters spin-off. This raises the tantalizing question of including these Arika Street Fighter EX characters in with the Street Fighter and/or SNK characters as certainly plausible. 

There are a few more even more obscure but also tantalizing connections. Data East released a Street Fighter II-like game called Fighters History and Fighters History Dynamite, its sequel or upgraded version. This was released on the Neo Geo and just based on the look and gameplay of it, it's mostly a late Street Fighter II vintage copycat. These characters would fit very well. In fact, Capcom thought that they would fit so well, that they sued Data East for copyright infringement. They lost because of the scenes a faire doctrine, which in fact suggests that Capcom was right in believing that the FHD characters are basically Street Fighter wannabes. Curiously, the rights to use these old Data East characters are currently with SNK, and although they've done precious little with them, they have on occasion had crossovers and cameo appearances, including a FHD character appearing in one of the Maximum Impact King of Fighters 3-D games, and a crossover cellphone game using Fatal Fury and Fighters History characters. I'm not quite sure why they haven't introduced a few of them into their mainline King of Fighters series since they have the rights; maybe it's because they don't know that they'll retain the rights forever and don't want to be stuck unable to sell a title that they've produced. But it'd be pretty fun to see a Fighters History team or two, even if they're DLC "non-canon" characters make an appearance in a King of Fighters game.

A final one I'll note is another Neo Geo game, but one developed by another studio, Visco. This is Breakers and its update Breakers Revenge. For my money, this one is even more overtly Street Fighter II-like (with a handful of Darkstalker nods; I actually think Alsion III is a better manifestation of the mummy concept than Anakaris, for instance) yet it was Data East that got sued.

Both Fighters History and Breakers have cult followings for various reasons; the super solid gameplay of Breakers Revenge, for example, and some of the odd character designs for Fighters History Dynamite. While they are largely forgotten (if they were ever known to begin with) by the mainstream as merely Street Fighter 2 copycats, the fact that they were such clear Street Fighter II copycats, not to mention the occasional cameo of some of the characters in other games of the same type, raises the question of whether or not there's any value in adding a Street Fighter vs Breakers Revenge or vs Fighters History Dynamite angle to this crossover. Probably not, because hardly anyone is asking for it, the characters don't have as much depth or interest for the most part, and frankly just with Street Fighter vs King of Fighters alone you've got too many characters to choose from anyway. But... it remains a tantalizing feature; how do (or at least how can, the Darkstalkers characters, EX characters, Fighters History Dynamite and Breakers Revenge characters somehow get worked in to this massive crossover game that yet somehow still manages to have a consistent feel with characters that all feel like they belong there for the most part, without having bizarre characters that don't belong, like Megaman or Amingo or Phoenix Wright, or other characters that actually have appeared in crossover games? Probably mostly just to provide novelty value for the silliness of the concept of adding them, honestly.

Whew. So, where am I going with this? I don't know yet. I'd like to think that eventually I'll write a big fan fic that crosses over the Street Fighter and King of Fighters characters, with some nods towards Darkstalkers and maybe some of the other titles, but honestly, I'm not really doing anything there and not likely to in the immediate future. I am, however, putting together a more complete list of character on my Google Drive. I already had a list of mainline Street Fighter characters. I needed to add the recently announced Luke to the list, and decided, why not create more tabs and go all out? I've now done the EX characters tab, using all of the EX games, including the various iterations of Street Fighter EX and the two games that Arika published that are not Street Fighter. Next will be Darkstalkers, and then I can turn to the SNK titles. I'm doing that one last because it's by far the biggest and most difficult of them all to do.

UPDATE: I really buckled down and finished the lists after a couple of free hours. The King of Fighters rosters were—as anticipated—the most difficult to do. It also reminded me, actually, that there are a lot of really dumb King of Fighters characters. The developers, going back to the very beginning, really, have a strange fondness for introducing characters with bizarre "Japanese street fashion" outfits, although that's admittedly gotten much worse since Falcoon started working for the company. They also have a really bizarre tendency to like to enter little kids in the game, and there are tons of high schoolers and even younger kids padding out the roster. 

Whatever I do with these characters (including simply playing the games) I will very studiously ignore the worst of these.

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. 

New Season V characters

I haven't done anything here in forever, but... now that I've got my new desktop, and my own office to use it in that used to be my son's room before he grew up and left home, I've reinstalled Steam, I've put Street Fighter V Champion Edition on my PS4 (technically that belongs to my youngest two boys too; but like I said, one of them is out of the house for at least another year and half, and then he'll leave again after that for college out of state. And the younger one is kinda over video games and doens't care anymore. I'm the only one left that's regularly using it, which is weird, because I didn't touch it for a long time when we got it; not until one of my sons bought Red Dead Redemption II, actually.) So, I'm back in the saddle after a lengthy hiatus where I rarely if ever played one of these types of games, because I didn't have access to SFIV for a time, and I never liked SFV until I got it recently in its more fixed and updated form with enough content to not be embarrassing.

Anyway, although SFV was considered a fairly dead or done game, the Champion Edition was sufficiently well received that Capcom decided to issue a final and fifth (Vth?) season and announced that there would be five (V) new characters added to the game still. While it's certainly possible that a new character will be among them, I think it's much more likely that we'll see the return of some characters that've already part of the Capcom roster. If we get anyone "new" it'll be one of the dolls; maybe one that hasn't ever been playable before. (We do know that most of them are in the game as opponents already, since we fight a number of them in story mode. That would be a quick and easy way to bring a character to the game without having to do too much work on it; you've already got a model and moves, they just need to be made playable. Which I don't want to underestimate the workload involved in doing that, but still--a fair chunk of the work has been done.)

Anyway, the purpose of this post isn't to talk about who I think is likely to be brought in, but who I'd wish to see, and who I'd pick if I was in charge. Before I do, let me at least spell out who some of the potentially obvious adds are, just because. Then I can contrast (and a bit of compare, but it'll mostly be contrast) those obvious adds with my own wishlist. Street Fighter V is the first game since Super Street Fighter II that doesn't feature all of the characters from Super Street Fighter, at least in its final, fully fleshed out form. So, some obvious adds would be the three missing New Challengers: T. Hawk, Fei Long and Dee Jay. Yeah, yeah... those are the least popular of the New Challengers, I'm sure, but still, it's odd that they're missing. But I also doubt that they'd make three of the five be those characters. Probably at least one of them, though. Some of the more popular Street Fighter III characters also seem like shoe-ins. We have less Street Fighter III characters in V than in IV. Dudley, Yang and/or Yun and possibly Makoto. I hear a lot of calls from the fanbase for the latter, in particular, although I've never liked her as a character at all. Of the Alpha characters, I doubt that Rose or Guy will come back as we have Menat and Zeku to kind of represent them. It's the first game not to have Dan, though, so he'd be a kind of obvious addition too. Even if the joke is long past played out by this point. Of the IV characters, I was surprised that C. Viper wasn't already included; she does make a cameo in the story, at least. The same is kind of true for Abel, although he was a much less memorable addition to IV than Juri and Viper. So, that list of "obvious" candidates is obviously twice as long as it needs to be, but I wouldn't be surprised to see at least four of the five pulled from that list, if not all five.

Who would I most want to see return? My list might be a little esoteric, but what the hey?

• Geki. Of all of the non-playable characters from the first Street Fighter game, he's the one who seems to have picked up the most mystique. I'd argue that he's probably more popular than SFI characters that we have had added to subsequent games like Birdie, Gen and Adon. Of course, I don't have much to back up that assertion other than his use in stuff like the Udon comics and whatnot, but I'd really like to see him updated. I know, I know, there are a number of ninja-esque characters in the game already, like Ibuki and Guy and Zeku. But they don't really fit the classic trope of the Shinobi that was super popular in the late 80s and early 90s when these games came out, and the little that we do know about Geki's potential moves is already very different than either of them, with throwing stars and teleportation, etc.
• Edi. E. (I don't know why he has a period in his name after Edi, but that's correct.) The only Final Fight boss (other than Belger himself, and a character in a wheelchair probably isn't feasible) to not make an appearance makes him a good candidate in my opinion. Not only would his rivalry with Cody make for a better story reason to include him than say, Abigail or Hugo, both of which have made appearances, but he'd be a significantly different type of character than any we've seen before, given that he always uses a pistol and a night stick. He'd probably be Zangief-sized too, which would be interesting, as we could always use another bigger character while we're at it. Maybe this time he's the one in a convict uniform, since after he framed Cody and sent him to prison, now that Cody is mayor, maybe he's been drummed out for corruption finally. Yet another reason to have an even more bitter rivalry!
• Mike Haggar. I know, I know. I'm probably leaning too much into the older games, but I'm an older guy, and I like my nostalgia. To be honest, I'd rather have seen Mike make an appearance with his Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 model in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and leave him off the roster for V, but since he didn't ever make it to IV, putting him in V is a must. He's the iconic character from Final Fight, and he's had a bit of a comeback since his appearance in the MvC series. He's primed for a re-appearance.
• Oro. A Street Fighter III character that never seems to get any love, although maybe that's because he's kinda dumb like Twelve or Necro, I dunno. At least he has more character, in my opinion, and he does make a number of cameos in Street Fighter V already, where it's shown that he's pretty good friends with Dhalsim. I think he could turn out pretty cool and interesting, especially if he gets some decent alternative costumes. It can also start to point towards his appearance in Street Fighter III; the inclusion of a bunch of Illuminati characters already starts that, as well as Sean's cameo since his sister is a playable character. 
• C. Viper. Just because she's an obvious one doesn't mean that it's not one that I wouldn't like to see! I kind of like C. Viper, although I think she's a little bit underpowered in IV, and could stand a bit of minor updating. She's obviously kicking around, having made a number of small cameos in the Story mode, but as kinda the new protagonist specifically for the IV game, leaving her out is a little bit insulting. She's also a kind of rival to Juri, and picking up Juri but leaving C. Viper out seems incomplete. It'd be like having Ken in the game but not Ryu. Well, not quite, as those are the protagonist and deuteragonist for the entire franchise, but still, you get the picture. 
• Honorable Mention. Oni should come back, not as a new character, but as a skin for Akuma. Akuma looks so terrible in this game, and only his "nostalgia" skin actually looks any good. Giving him an Oni skin would be perfect. I think it would actually be interesting to bring Gouken back too, although again, maybe as a skin or "cosplay" for either Akuma or Ryu is better than bringing him back as a complete character. For that matter, maybe that's a better way to bring Dan back than as a character; have someone dress as him in cosplay. Although, to be fair, he already dresses an awful lot like classic Ryu and Ken anyway, and just has a different head. I would have thought the same thing about it being fun to bring some Darkstalkers characters into the game, but given that most of the ones I'd want to see are already skins for someone or other in the game as is, it's probably fine as is.

Charge characters

I suppose I've forgotten how much time I spent practicing the fireball and dragon punch motions on a control pad when I first got Street Fighter 2 for the SNES.  It can't have been intuitive or automatic that I was able to transfer intellectual knowledge of the motion into actual implementation without some practice on an unfamiliar controller.

However, I have forgotten.  I have a vague memory of finding the motion difficult and doing it in Training Mode and elsewhere for quite a while before I got it down.  And then, once I had it down, I greatly preferred playing characters with Command style moves--as opposed to the other major alternative; charging characters, a la Guile.

Now, I liked Guile well enough in SF2.  Charge motions weren't that bad when it was merely Sonic Boom and Flash Kick.  Once super combos were added, however, charging characters became much more frustrating to me, if they had weird charging style super combo motions.  Realistically, of course, what I'd prefer is that the sonic boom were performed like a fireball, and the flash kick like a dragon punch with the kick instead of punch button.  The super and ultra combos could similarly be harmonized with a command style motion.  Or at least I'd be able to toggle to such a system.  Since Capcom is unlikely to offer customizeable commands for any characters, I've decided that I should probably try to learn the odd charge/delta motion of the Double Flash kick and Flash Explosion, and make Guile a part of my personal roster again.  This would also enable me to use other charge characters (like Chun-Li, for instance--or Vega, Honda, Blanka, etc.) instead of avoiding them, although the Sonic Hurricane is still an annoying motion to do on a control pad, and I'll probably most ignore it.

Part of the reason I continue to like this genre of games, long after foregoing most other video games, is the fact that I don't have to put much work into it, though.  I can sit down and play for an hour or so after months of not touching it, and have a reasonably good time.  So, the idea of learning a complicated and difficult move to expand my character roster may seem to be anathema, but I'm willing to give it a try and practice it for a while, largely because it will open up several new characters to me.  Plus, SF4 Guile, with some of his alternate "swat team" costumes, is just too cool to continue to ignore.

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.

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.

Fatal Fury

While I discussed last time, six weeks or so ago, that SFA3 is my "go-to" Street Fighter title; the one that I'm much more likely to play than any other title in the series when I'm in the mood for some Street Fighter action, it's a bit more difficult for me to say that about any of the games in the Fatal Fury series. I still regularly return to the original Fatal Fury fer cryin' out loud, and I sometimes have a hard time deciding if Real Bout Special is better than Real Bout 2 or vice versa. Mark of the Wolves is, of course, an excellent game too, and Fatal Fury 3 even gets some love. I don't often play Fatal Fury 2 or Special, and I don't have much use for the original Real Bout game, but still--unlike with Street Fighter where I've homed in on a single title as my favorite and play it most of the time to the exclusion of all other titles (except when I want to indulge some nostalgia) I bounce around a fair bit in the Fatal Fury series, trying to decide what I'm really in the mood to play.

Yesterday, for example, I played through Fatal Fury 3 (with Terry; yeah, it's kinda cheesy, but a few characters are really hard in this game!) I have to admit, I think one of the reasons I like this game so much is the little attention to detail; the backgrounds and stuff are really cool and fun to watch. Yamazaki's trainyard background in particular is one of my favorite scenes in any fighting game ever (train-themed stages are very popular in both Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters stages in general. There must be some railfans in Japan. Also; what's with the steam engines? They're cool, that's what. There's no other reason to have them except that they look awesome.)

The character sprites don't look quite as good; they were greatly improved (although also "cartooned up" a bit) after Real Bout, so going back to these sprites feels clunky and primitive. Granted, FF3 improved the sprites significantly from FF2 and FFS (which in turn did so to the FF1 sprites--those that represented characters who recurred, that is) so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them. The FF characters in the early KoF games also looked quite a bit better, although KoF was usually a slightly more attractive game visually anyway than the FF games.

I had better luck this time playing through it than I sometimes do. Some characters are just harder for me than others; Franco Bash is harder than he should be (especially for for a "Tier 1" character) and Terry is surprisingly hard to get past without having to use a continue or two (or more.) Geese Howard is, of course, a maniac that consumes several continues every time I play, but I only used two or three on him this time, I think. Surprisingly, after defeating Geese, the next two characters are relatively easy.

Anyway, I included a youtube link to the second half of a playthrough of FF3. In Spanish.

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.

Thou shalt not covet...

You'd think that since I just got a ton of games that are newish (to me, anyway) and that I still have a long ways to go before I've even become comfortable with those, much less tired of them, I wouldn't be on the lookout for new games for a while.

However, that's not the case. I really want a copy of the King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match. Much like the KoF '98 remake, this really cleans the game up, adds back in all the "missing" characters, rebalances and tweaks most of the characters, does the backgrounds all over again in 3-D, releases a bunch of new backgrounds, releases a bunch of new modes... all in all a great package. SNK had said that they wanted King of Fighters XII to be the ultimate 2-D fighting game, a goal which it appears to have spectacularly failed to achieve, while ironically this 2002 remake, released at about the same time, could make a claim for that title. Word on the street is that this is the best King of Fighters game yet, even better than the '98 remake.

Sadly, it doesn't look like I'm going to be getting it any time real soon. It was released about a year ago for the PS2 in Japan, but does not have any PS2 release in the US scheduled at all. Instead, it's supposed to get an Xbox Live Arcade download release "sometime this year." That means that the game is sadly destined for almost certain obscurity here. I'm left with the rather poor choices of getting an Xbox 360 and a live account, or importing the game, and picking up Swap Magic or some other way of running import games on my PS2. I don't really like either choice.

The 360 would at least open the door for Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, Street Fighter IV, Super Street Fighter IV (assuming that's not just a rumor), and King of Fighters XII; but let's not kid ourselves. I was OK waiting on those indefinately. It's King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match that really gets to me. Mostly because I believe it should get a US PS2 release. In fact, I sent an email off to the old email account I had for SNK telling them as much. I know, I know, they're not going to change their strategy simply on my account. But man, that would sure be convenient for me! I'd like to think that not only for me, though. Any King of Fighters fan worth his salt is going to have a PS2 anyway. It's how you get your '98 remake. It's how you get your XI. It's how you get all your Fatal Fury games, and really all of the rest of the King of Fighters titles except Neowave and XII. King of Fighters fans have PS2s. Releasing it for that system sells it to your current, installed, fanbase. Releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade? Not necessarily so much. Granted, you do save on pressing, printing and distribution costs, but you're also leaving some long-time fans out in the cold.

Anyway, I've included a HSDM exhibition from youtube. That's the game I want, folks. Right there. And I won't be able to get it, easily. Ironic; I've got the "regular" Xbox port of 2002, and Neowave, which is a remake of this game as well. This, version, though, is the truly definitive one.

Presentation counts

Presentation counts in these types of video games. I think part of the secret of the original success of the Street Fighter franchise, now over twenty years ago when the first one came out, was the presentation. The fighters were interesting characters, their stages and BGMs were engaging, and the little story endings really gave folks a reason to keep plunking quarters into the machine to keep moving up the brackets.

I think ultimately that was part of the reason SNK's games struggled to find a market in the US a bit too... their presentation was pretty, but otherwise laughable. In fact, SNK's presentation has become a bit of a joke in some respects. They have interesting characters, they have engaging stages and music... but their endings on their earlier games were a major let-down, and the atrocious use of English was laughable. Even the ambitious storylines and endings that they started developing a bit later, say, the Orochi storyline in King of Fighters '95-'97 was hampered by the fact that the presentation didn't make it very clear what in the world was going on. It didn't make much sense. And the dialogue was nearly nonsensical.

Of course, I also have to admit that some of the most successful games in the genre eschewed some aspects of presentation, and that doesn't seem to have brought them down. That's because presentation is only one aspect of a game's success, not the sole one. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had no endings, and insulting BGMs, yet is hugely successful. The same is true somewhat for King of Fighters '98.

All other things being equal, though, taking a little bit of time on presentation doesn't add much to the development cycle of the game, but it does add quite a bit to the appeal of the game.

Teams vs. Singles

I really like the King of Fighters series, and anyone who knows anything at all about this genre knows, of course, that it's one of the main, most important series we've got. It started as an excuse to pair characters from the Fatal Fury series, the Art of Fighting series, a bunch of other non-fighting video games, plus a handful of original characters that are unique to the series.

Of course, it very quickly eclipsed all those other titles in popularity; today, King of Fighters is, along with Metal Slug, just about the only thing SNK Playmore still puts out.

The other main conceit of King of Fighters, relative to other games in the genre, was the team approach. Frankly, though, I could do without the teams. On all my console ports, I almost exclusively prefer to play Single mode, which is more "Street Fighter" like; best two out of three rounds, and all that. In fact, my copies of King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match and King of Fighters XI have only been played that way (by me) so far. Granted, I haven't had them all that long yet, but also, that's just how I like to play. The team approach turns me off somewhat; I don't like having to change gears mentally and adapt to another character mid-stream. The tag-team approach of King of Fighters 2003 and King of Fighters XI (not to mention Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and the rest of the Marvel vs. series) doesn't appeal to me nearly as much.

With the King of Fighters titles, that means that I'm missing out on some of the strategic implications, but that's OK. Frankly, I was almost exclusively a Capcom guy for years, and so I like that play style because it feels more like Street Fighter. Although I've since come to appreciate SNK a lot more, at the same time I'm kinda a creature of habit.

Of course, that means that I'm a bit screwed in some respects, too. My King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga has the arcade ROMs, but not the MVS ROMs, which means that there isn't any option for single play. Boo! Bad choice, SNK! Also, King of Fighters 2003 has a poor Single play mode; you only do one round and you have three health bars. It feels like the tag team, except that there's no one to tag.

Anyway, I think that's clearly a personal affectation. The team play has been a hugely popular feature with most fans, and the fact that I'd rather just have a Street Fighter-ish single player experience is probably an unusual quirk of my own.