Game feature: Ultra Street Fighter IV

Now that I've had it for about six months--I didn't buy any version of SF4 until the Ultra version came out on Steam--it's past time that I did a game feature for it.  After all, it very quickly rocketed to the top of my preferences in the genre, to the point where I literally hardly play anything else in the genre anymore at all if I can't play this one.  I still mean to get more involved in King of Fighters XIII, but since I have to pick teams of three rather than focusing on one character at a time, as I prefer (and as most other KOF titles have allowed you to do if you chose, although it wasn't ever the default manner of play) it's unlikely to supplant my USF4 love anytime soon.

To me it still feels odd to play this on a non-console platform.  In fact, I don't have a decent laptop to play games on either, so it's loaded on my desktop.  I can't even plug this into my big ole 60" TV and watch the fights happen writ large with my sound bar and sub-woofer on; at least not until I decide to upgrade my older laptop to one with better graphics capability so that I can play Steam games on it.  That's the first thing that, to me at least, is odd.  But putting that aside, what do I think of the game?  Like I said, it's so good, that it basically invalidates the rest of the genre to me.  I almost don't have any interest in playing older games anymore.  It's that good.  It's clearly the best game in the Street Fighter series, and for my money, the best game in the genre overall.  I say this as a person who, for the last several years, had started to prefer King of Fighters games to Street Fighter games overall due to their variety and the quality of their later entries compared to the latest I had from Street Fighter.

Maybe I should take a small step back and reflect.  "Back in the day;" i.e., the mid-90s, I was a Street Fighter fan who played on occasion, but wasn't really into any of the SNK games at all.  It was more fair to say that I was kinda sorta vaguely aware of them rather than anything more intimate.  Of course, back then, we were still talking about plunking quarters into arcade machines.  There weren't even decent home conversions for any console that was available at this time; there were "decent" conversions to the PS1 and occasionally even the SNES for older games, but that was about it.  As my own console ownership improved to a PS1, a Dreamcast, and years later (although still very belatedly) to an Xbox and a PS2, I was finally able to start getting good conversions of more games.  I didn't play SF2 much anymore by this point; my favorite Capcom games were Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  To me, the Alpha series was where the Street Fighter series peaked, and the Street Fighter 3 series didn't do much more me at all.  In fact, I didn't like a number of aspects of it, including some of the gameplay, some of the character selection, and I thought that the music actively annoyed me almost all of the time, and the boss was really stupid.

Because Street Fighter itself as a title started to feel stuck in the late 90s--either they weren't making updates at all for much of the time since then, or they were making updates that I didn't much like, it wasn't until this point that I started migrating more towards SNK games and really belatedly rediscovered the King of Fighters and Fatal Fury series.  For a while; heck; even a year ago--I probably would have told you that my favorite games in the genre were the final PS2 editions of King of Fighters '98 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, while Capcom would come in, probably third and fourth respectively with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  I remember years ago thinking that I'd love to see a game come out that used 3-D graphics to get rid of the need for hand-drawn and animated sprites, but which resurrected a 2-D Street Fighter-esque game-play, and that I'd really want them to be Street Fighter characters, frankly.  Of course, shortly after having that dream or wish; SF4 was announced, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Of course, I didn't get it for a long time, because I lacked the hardware to play it, and maybe that's a good thing.  Other than a small bit of playing around here and there and seeing a few things on youtube, I wasn't really exposed to the game until it was extremely refined; Ultra Street Fighter IV has a broad and deep character selection, finely balanced game-play, a lot of the unique gameplay elements that the IV brings to the greater series have been refined, and in general most of the "kinks", if you will, of the game are fixed.  I probably enjoy it more because I never had to "suffer" through older versions of the game.

Street Fighter IV takes place after Street Fighter II, and prior to Street Fighter III, which it largely ignores completely, other than to take the more popular characters from that ill-fated game and integrate some of them.  SIN is the new villainous organization, which is characterized as a division of Shadaloo (Shadaloo Intimidation Network) focused on developing weapons and other new technology.  It has a feel very similar--in terms of story--to NESTS from King of Fighters of about 15 years or so ago, which isn't a bad thing.  Seth, the boss, is some kind of synthetic human grown as a replacement body for Bison which acquired sentience and autonomy following the fall of Shadaloo in Street Fighter II.

There are a few nods to SFIII in terms of game-play, most notably in the fact that you must select your Ultra move rather than simply being able to do them all.  Ultra Street Fighter IV allows you to do either of the two Ultra moves if you select Ultra Combo Double, but the cost for this flexibility is that they do less damage.  Each character also has only one Super Combo (with a few odd exceptions).  Curiously, this makes the game feel more old school, however--King of Fighters could learn a lesson or two in terms of stripping down and focusing on core gameplay rather than on highly technical gameplay with lots of moves, many of which will be difficult to pull off.  Not that some SFIV moves aren't difficult to pull off; charge-characters and grapplers are notoriously difficult with a regular USB control pad, for instance, but there's still a feel that this almost ignored the Alpha games and SFIII entirely and is really a sequel to SFII instead.  This isn't a bad thing, really.

Super Combos are done much as they always have been; you gain energy on a super combo bar by landing hits or being hit.  Ultra Combos on the other hand, only get charged up when you take damage.  If you play too well, you won't actually ever get the opportunity to use an Ultra combo.

There's a few other neat additions, like Focus Attacks which make you vulnerable for a short time, and might actually end up taking energy from your own bar if you don't play it right, but which in return are armor breakers that knock your opponent down and give you an opportunity, if you're quick, to get in a super or ultra combo without any chance of it being blocked.  Playing on Steam also means that you have access to online matches that run pretty smoothly; you can upload your matches directly to youtube from your game, and more.  But really; the appeal of SFIV, in any iteration but especially this one, is the ability to play very classic (yet updated and modern feeling) Street Fighter gameplay with beautiful presentation in terms of the characters, the rest of the graphics, the stages, etc.  It even has decent voice-acting, with both Japanese and American/English voice actors (you can toggle in the settings which you prefer to have and you can even toggle per character, just in case you want your Japanese characters to speak Japanese instead of English in game.)  And it also advances the mythology significantly.

By this I mean that certain things in the Street Fighter mythos are actually changed.  Whereas before we were told that M. Bison was killed when Akuma did a Shun Goku Satsu on him at the end of SFII, well---clearly he wasn't, because he appears in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Ryu and Ken's master was murdered by Akuma at about the same time-frame as SF1, well---clearly he wasn't either, because Gouken makes his first appearance in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Akuma was holding back and Shin Akuma; the same character with a slightly different set of moves, was him fighting at his potential, we now get a totally new version of the character with new graphics, new moves and even a new name: Oni, who is the true potential of Akuma.  There's even some confusing talk in some sources about Oni being a "dream" character (as Evil Ryu is); what would happen if Oni completely foreswore his humanity and became--basically--a demon, warped by the "dark Hado" or, the Dark Side of the Force... er, his Martial Art power source.  This, of course, is kind of silly, since Akuma is already representative of someone who foreswore his humanity in pursuit of power.  Whatever.  Because I like the shotokan characters (I guess that makes me a bit of a scrub) I don't mind having another option, and one that's significantly different, for that matter, from the others, and I don't mind the update to the mythos.  And I like the look of Oni quite a bit.

Another fun aspect of digitally rendered models (rather than hand-drawn sprites) is that you can alter the appearance of the characters quite dramatically by downloading costumes.  My purchase of Ultra Street Fighter IV came with all of the previously released costumes enabled and deployed, and then I also paid some money for the Vacation package of additional costumes.  I didn't buy the more recently released animal cosplay ones because I think the notion of spending money on costumes is lame, unless they're phenomenal and I'm really excited, plus I thought the idea of animal cosplay costumes was really dumb anyway.  Anyone who reads my blog knows that I get inordinately picky about the color palettes and whatnot in past games; here, I tend to find a costume and color combination that I really like, and I like that I have a lot of options available.  Some characters that I don't even necessarily much like the look of in their original costumes are really cool looking in alternate costumes, although of course, many alternate costumes are extraordinarily dumb.  I'm in particular not fond of some of the "really Japanese" costumes that fail their localization efforts; gigantic bows tied on the back of characters with gigantic ropes, and weird, billowy, semi-samurai-ish robes.  Eh; that's the price of variety.  For (almost) every character, there's at least one costume that I like.  For some, it's even the original.

The character selection is also really great.  Every single SF2 character is here, almost all of the SFA characters (I haven't lined up the rosters to systematically compare, but I think Sodom, Birdie, Juni and Juli are the only ones missing.  I think...) and about half of the SF3 characters (Dudley, Elena, Yun, Yang, Ibuki, and Makoto); certainly all of the ones that you'd care to see again.  There are also a number of all-new SF4 characters: Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Oni, Hakan, and Yuri.  There are, as always, too many shotokan characters: Ryu, Evil Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Oni, Dan, and even Gouken now, but they also all feel much more different from each other than they have in the past, so they don't feel too much like retreads of the same moves.

Target acquired...

Very belatedly, at least compared to the rest of the world, I just acquired some new titles.  Specifically, with the announcement of Ultra Street Fighter IV and its release on Steam, I realized that I 1) already have a Steam account, and 2) quite handily meet the system specs, now that I put my new graphics card in last year, and 3) could get King of Fighters XIII on Steam too.

So, with mere hours left until the pre-order expired (so I could get the extra 2014 Challengers costume pack--the rest of the DLC packs were already included) I got Ultra Street Fighter IV on Steam.  I got to play it for a few hours before promptly going out of town for nearly two weeks and just got back late last night.  So really... just today I've been playing it.  It cost $30.  I also, for $30 got King of Fighters XIII, although my first impression is that I can't figure out how to play any kind of decent Single character play, which is a major disappointment, since I pretty much always play all of the KOF games that way.  And I talked myself into buying the Summer Vacation complete costume pack for USF4, which will probably be the very last DLC that I'll be tempted to buy (unless they come up with one that actually adds characters to the game.)  By coincidence, while out of town, I got to also spend several hours playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with my brother-in-law for a while too.  Given the short time that I've had to play all of these titles, I'm giving only very early first impressions at this point.

Given that the game has been out in various slightly less evolved forms for a few years now, these first impressions are probably way too late to be of any interest to anyone but me.  But hey, it's my blog, and I'll talk about old news if I want to.

My initial impressions of the KOF title, the one I've played the least, is that it looks and feels pretty darn smooth.  If I can find a single player mode, it'll almost certainly be my favorite in the franchise, but if I can't, I'm not sure.  I do also appreciate the "back to basics" approach that the game sports.  The franchise is sometimes notorious for going off the rails into odd, overly technical gameplay that isn't likely to appeal to more casual fans like me (casual in the sense that I'm not really a very good technical player, that is.)

UMvC3, of course, also doesn't offer a single player mode (one of the several reasons that I've only been casual about this franchise... even relative to others in the genre.)  That said, the number of characters has been pared down, and most of the really silly ones have been eliminated (a few exceptions remain.)  I find myself especially happy to play the Marvel characters, whereas in its predecessor, I played a fair mix of Marvel and Capcom characters.  I also find that that makes the game feel just a tad more serious, when you're much less likely to see an awful lot of a "fighting attorney" or weird Megaman characters.  Some of the new additions, such as Thor, Hawkeye and others are a delightful addition to the game, and most of the costume colors end up being interesting Easter eggs, for those interested in exploring them.  I largely found that I was good with many of the same characters I had been good at in MvC2, although it wasn't as simple as picking up right where I left off.

One odd note: Mike Haggar makes his triumphant return to a Capcom game (and his first that I know of in a fighting game) here as well.  Although he'd be a better fit for a Street Fighter title, and because the character models already obviously exist, I'm a little bit surprised and disappointed that he wasn't added to the Ultra expansion to SF4.  Maybe the developers thought he treaded too much on Zangief's toes?

I've spent most of my time, however, with Ultra Street Fighter IV, and probably will continue to do so.  This game almost certainly will have a place at the very top of my list of best games in the genre.  Not only does it look and sound absolutely great, but it's got great back to basics gameplay, great balance, smooth play, great character selection, and basically has everything I could ever possibly want in a SF game.  SFA3 was my favorite in the series previously to this, as it had the best gameplay and the best presentation and the best character selection, but there were a few things that CvS2 did better.  USF4 beats them both in all possible metrics.

One interesting side effect of the presentation is that, while the characters do have their classic themes remixed for a modern sounding soundtrack (as well as new themes for the new characters) you don't actually hear them very often.  The BGM that normally plays is the one associated with the stage that you're on instead, which means that you don't get to hear much of the classic SF2 sounds updated for the 2010s.

I'm trying to think if there's anyone missing from the roster that I think should be on it, and I'm coming up blank.  Other than Mike Hagger, which I already mentioned, but that's more of a theoretical desire--I don't actually like playing grapplers all that much anyway.  All of the SF2 roster is here.  Most of the SFA3 roster.  Frankly, most of the SF3: Third Strike roster makes the cut by the time we get to the Ultra update.  There's a handful of new characters that are unique to SF4.  Most of them aren't that wonderful, in my opinion.  Perhaps the most interesting are, sadly, yet again shotokan variants; Gouken: Ryu and Ken's old master (who's supposed to be dead, but clearly isn't after all) and Oni, which is a new variant on the Shin Akuma idea; a more pumped up version of Akuma with a more variant movelist.  Decapre is a Cammy variant (so therefore, I suppose, steps on the toes of the Juli and Juni space).  I haven't really experimented much with El Fuerte, Rufus, Abel, Crimson Viper, Hakan, Seth, Poison or Juri--the other characters who are unique to the SF4 franchise.  I suspect only a few of them will stand the test to find themselves even half a memorable as the basic 12 characters of the original SF2 game (8 playable and 4 bosses.)

Anyway, no doubt I'll be posting a bit more about these games (especially USF4) over the next several weeks.  Needless to say, my somewhat slumbering love of the genre has lurched back to life now that I've acquired some new toys to play with...

Game feature: Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers

It's been a long time since I posted a game feature post.  And heck--I've only done three of them so far anyway--so it's time for another.

SNK released most of the Fatal Fury series on two discs called Fatal Fury Battle Archives.  The first disc had Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Fatal Fury 3.  The second disc had the three Real Bout subseries titles, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2.  Missing from the collection are Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition, and Real Bout Fatal Fury Special: Dominated Mind.  The last was a special variant Playstation port of Real Bout Fatal Fury Special (actually, kind of obviously) while the other two missing titles can be seen as spin-offs that are not related to the "main" series--the latter being a 3D retelling of the first Fatal Fury story, and the former being a "ten years later" sequel of sorts with an almost completely redone cast and dramatically redone gameplay engine.  Curiously, MotW is only called Fatal Fury in the Dreamcast version; it's otherwise called Garou: Mark of the Wolves, giving at least some credence to the idea that it's not really a Fatal Fury game at all, but really a tangent, spin-off, or simply a related title that SNK hoped to stake a new series on.  Either way, it's not on the Battle Archives disc, but I do have the Dreamcast version.  It's also available as an Xbox Live arcade game in the Classics section.

In any case, removing it from consideration makes picking the "best" game in the Fatal Fury series much easier.  While I do occasionally hear of folks who give a slight edge to RBS--and I can kinda see their point--I give my edge to RB2.  It's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and the best game in the series, in my opinion.  It's got the best character selection, including most of the characters who have graced the series over the years (minus a few mostly forgettable ones like Michael Max or Axel Hawk.  It's also missing Hwa Jai who has made his triumphant come-back in King of Fighters XIII, though--which proves that some of these older characters certainly can be rehabilitated and modernized.)  The animation is bright, detailed, and reasonably well done, if a bit cartoon-like compared to more modern King of Fighters animation.  In fact, in many ways, it has a similar "feel" graphically to Street Fighter Alpha 2 or 3, which was no doubt the point.

However, in terms of gameplay, it feels very specifically like a Fatal Fury game.  By this I mean that it has a pronounced two-plane arena, which has been tweaked at this point to where it's a nice tactical addition rather than a novelty, or a frustrating "chase each other back and forth from one plane to another" routine.  It has three regular attack buttons instead of four (which in the PS2 controller takes a little getting used to, especially if you're coming off playing a more traditional layout game.  When I played this last night it was right after toying around with King of Fighters XI for a while, for instance.)  Super move charging is also very FF instead of KoF or SF-like; every character has one super move that you can do when your meter is charged.  When your meter is fully charged, it will slowly drain away.  Once it does (or once you activate the super move) you can't do it anymore.  You can also use your supermove at will once your life is lower than 50%.  If you have a charge and less than 50% life, you can actually do a super super move (technically called a P. Power move--the "regular" version is called an S. Power move).  For some characters, this is a more powerful version of their super move, for others, it's actually an all new Super-super move.

With games modes in Capcom like A-ism or C-groove--similar to how super charging works in some King of Fighters games too, for that matter--you have to pay attention to how many charges you have, but in this game, you have to pay a bit more attention to it, because of the fact that the meter drains away fairly quickly, making your supers a use it or lose it proposition.  I don't know that I necessarily like this better (actually, if I could choose, I no doubt would choose something more A-ism like) but it certainly does feel different and very unique--except to other Fatal Fury games, of course.  Heck, if anything, this is a good argument for the inclusion of Mark of the Wolves within the series, because super meters in that game work very similarly to this one.

Presentation-wise, the game is also a little bit hit or miss.  Certainly it looks really nice, and has beautiful backgrounds (although each gets only two slight variations, so it feels like there a little bit of discount usage somehow) but the lack of any kind of meaningful ending, inter-battle demos, or anything like that feels a little bit spartan compared to other games that I'm used to playing.  Especially Street Fighter Alpha 3, the game that most logically this would be compared to.  The music is mostly recycled from RBS, but it's still pretty good stuff, so I don't feel too bad about that.  SNK music in general was always a bit more adventurous; willing to try wildly different genres than what you'd expect, sometimes.  This leads to a hit or miss situation in some ways; stuff that I really really like, and stuff that I think is too bizarre for words, but I do admire their willingness to experiment.

But in spite of a few quibbles where it did things in a way where I'd slightly prefer a different way of doing things, in reality, the game wins me over easily with its colorful character selection, fine control, sufficient yet not too much tactical complexity, and general personality.  It also helps that--although in SNK games I always tend to first gravitate to Terry--that there are plenty of other characters I enjoy playing in this one.  It's one that I find in my player pretty frequently.  It's a lot of fun, it's a good looking game, it's got lots of replayability value, and it's just really quite polished.  Like I said earlier, I really believe it's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and certainly it is if you count Mark of the Wolves as a spin-off rather than a series entrant proper.

There is a secret boss or alternate character named Alfred in the game.  I guess he's more of a secret character than a boss per se.  He's insanely hard to play against; you can't lose a single round, and even at low difficulty, that's a challenging proposition  That last picture is him and his stage, though.  His stage is somewhere in the American southwest from the looks of it.  So are Terry's and Rick Strowd's (they actually look like the same stage, but at different times of day, and in Terry's there's a big-rig truck that's gone in Rick's.)  This game is technically a "dream match" rather than a canonical game, so I'm not sure if it even matters, but unlike most Fatal Fury games (minus 2/Special) it does look like it takes place in locations other than Southtown and instead has an international flair of sorts to it.  Franco Bash and Joe Higashi also seem to be on a ring or stage in Thailand.  The rest of them could be in Southtown, if you really needed them to be, but there's not necessarily a strong reason for believing that they should.

SF2 clones: Breakers series

Following my generic discussion about SNK, I want to hit on the Breakers series by Visco Games. Although a prototype in a few locations was released to Beta markets called Crystal Legacy in 1994, the real start to the series was in 1996 when Breakers was released. Two years later, in 1998, a slightly tweaked version of the game called Breakers Revenge was released. All on the Neo-Geo platform. Because Breakers Revenge just tweaked some balance issues, added one new character, and made the boss playable, I don't really consider it a "new" game in the series, but rather a polishing off of the same game. The differences between the two are no greater than between Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.


The video I've included is probably made available because as a Neo-Geo title, this is easily (and probably frequently) emulated. This is probably the only way the game gets played much, other than the occasional MVS cartridge. Apparently, it never even got an AES release.

While the video will show that this is very much in the vein of Street Fighter 2 in terms of graphics, even to the point of having almost embarrasingly similar character designs, the gameplay has some more nods to an Alpha like gameplay, with super combos being important in the game, and each character having at least two to choose from. What makes the game stand out from others that came out at the same time is the fact that it was painstakingly and very carefully balanced. In fact, to this day, there are still championships held for it in Japan (reportedly) because it has just held up that well. Also because the combo and breakers system is kinda original and fun; not too unlike the concept of the Alpha counters, just implemented a bit better.


In any case, I think it's a little bit unfortunate that this game didn't get a little bit more attention, although it's not at all hard to see why it didn't. Maybe someone could show the title a little TLC on the internet, and make it ping on the radar of genre fans yet.

Although... good luck scoring a copy.

As an aside, there is some embarrasingly bad Engrish in this title, including the character Pierre (who is mispelled Pielle---yes, it is supposed to be Pierre. That's how he appeared in the prototype.) There's still an official site lurking around on the internet, and it's got even more spelling errors; Condor becomes Condol, for instance, and Dao-Long becomes Dao-Rong. Presentation-wise, this lags behind the better efforts of Capcom and SNK, which no doubt contributes to its obscurity. As you can imagine, a game that looks like SF2, except even less visually striking, coming out in 1996 or 1998 (depending on which version you're looking at) couldn't have been very visually exciting either.

Old school crawl plan

I had previously said that I wouldn't rigorously research release dates to make sure all my orders are correct. However, I kinda did. I mean, it wasn't rigorous, but I pulled some release dates off Wikipedia and GameFAQs, and put the titles in order. Here's what we've got. Thirty nine titles, all in (more or less) chronological order.

1. Street Fighter
2. Street Fighter 2
3. Fatal Fury
4. Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition
5. Fatal Fury 2
6. Street Fighter 2: Hyper-fighting
7. Fatal Fury Special
8. Super Street Fighter 2
9. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
10. King of Fighters '94
11. Fatal Fury 3
12. Street Fighter Alpha
13. King of Fighters '95
14. Marvel Superheroes
15. Real Bout Fatal Fury
16. Street Fighter Alpha 2
17. King of Fighters '96
18. Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
19. Real Bout Fatal Fury Special
20. King of Fighters '97
21. Darkstalkers 3
22. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2
23. Street Fighter Alpha 3
24. King of Fighters '98
25. Street Fighter III: Third Strike
26. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
27. King of Fighters '99
28. Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves
29. Marvel vs. Capcom 2
30. Capcom vs. SNK Pro
31. King of Fighters 2000
32. Capcom vs. SNK 2
33. King of Fighters 2001
34. King of Fighters 2002
35. SNK vs. Capcom: Chaos
36. King of Fighters 2003
37. King of Fighters Neowave
38. King of Fighters XI
39. King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match

Of course, I'm not yet certain that I'll play every single title. Is it really necessary for me to play five versions of Street Fighter 2, two version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and two versions of Street Fighter Alpha 3? I don't think so.

But that's the order, anyway. Interesting. It was also fascinating to see them lined up. Of course, my collection isn't complete, and having (for example) Darkstalkers 3 without having 1 or 2, or Street Fighter III: Third Strike without having New Generation or Second Impact could confuse rather than elucidate. And yet, I struggled with exactly how the Fatal Fury and Street Fighter subseries matched up to each other, because Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury seem to form a small subseries (despite the titles indicating otherwise) with similar gameplay and sprites that was "extra" compared to the various Street Fighter subseries. That's still true, but seeing that Fatal Fury 3 was out before Street Fighter Alpha kinda confirms to me who was the lead in that development, and who was the follower. (Real Bout Special and Real Bout 2 were much more "Alpha" like.)

SF2 Clones: SNK

I had earlier said that I was going to give SNK a pass on being SF2 clones, for a variety of reasons. I've changed my mind on that... sorta. Let me begin by listing the reasons that I was initially going to give them a pass, then I'll give a list of reasons why I think that they could be counted after all. Then, I'm going to discuss them in more general terms rather than specifically calling out their series. There are three series that apply here: Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and King of Fighters. I do like my lists.

• First of all, the first Fatal Fury was already under development before Street Fighter 2 was released. Sadly (for SNK) it wasn't released until some months after SF2 was already sweeping arcade owners by storm, so it appears to be a SF2 clone attempt. However, a careful examination of many of the properties of the first Fatal Fury show it to be an improvement (although very similar, still) on the first Street Fighter title, and one that went a different direction than SF2 in many ways. Fatal Fury concentrated instead on some presentation issues, including adding a bit more of an integrated story to the game.
• SNK was not a flash in the pan SF2 imitator. Although some of their titles certainly pass muster as SF2 clones, they managed to stick with it, develop some real leverage with their titles, and frankly, some of them continued long after the Street Fighter series had faded away (discounting the rebirth of that series with Street Fighter IV.) These weren't quickie copies that faded away into obscurity shortly afterwards, which was really kind of the point of the series. Fatal Fury had no less than eight mainline titles and two spinoffs. King of Fighters has twelve mainline titles (with a thirteenth under development) and several spinoff titles. Art of Fighting only had three titles, but even that's quite a bit for a "copy."
• SNK was never content to simply copy anyway; even some of the very earlier "SF2 imitators" had innovative content, much of which later became standard for the genre, including the first true "super combos" (called Desperation moves in Art of Fighting, and later also in Fatal Fury and some King of Fighters titles), spirit meters (useful for using super combos), hidden characters that you needed to unlock, and more.
• Of all the developers who made these ripoff titles (Atlus, Visco, Data East, Noise Factory, etc.) SNK is the only one who's still in the game. Heck, a couple of years ago, SNK was still in the game while Capcom itself wasn't.
• The developers for many of these titles were the original developers of the original Street Fighter title: "Piston" Takashi and "Finish" Hiroshi. Well, that doesn't exactly make them not ripoffs, but it still means something.
• SNK used to also make a bunch of other fighters that were much less similar to Street Fighter in many ways, including the Samurai Shodown series, the Savage Reign/Kizuna Encounter series, and the Last Blade series.

Of course, on the other hand...

• SNK very obviously did ripoff SF2 once they saw that SF2 was more popular than its own offerings. Fatal Fury 2 and Fatal Fury Special are exactly to Fatal Fury as Street Fighter 2 and Super Street Fighter 2 is to Street Fighter. Mai was an obvious Chun-Li clone, and the boss progression (both the idea of fighting four bosses, and the specifics of the bosses themselves) strongly resemble the SF2 bosses, including having a boxer, a Spanish fighter, the boss from the first game (Geese vs. Sagat) and a big boss who wears big shoulder pads. The resemblance between Fatal Fury Special and one of the later iterations of Street Fighter 2 are almost uncanny at times (although the same will be true for some of the other titles we'll review in this series.) While it's fair to say that SF as it developed took some ideas from SNK, I think it's also very fair to say that much moreso, it went the other way around. This actually became more pronounced over time, particularly if you compare the Fatal Fury series with the Street Fighter series. The later Real Bout Fatal Fury games have a strong resemblance in many ways to the Street Fighter Alpha subseries, and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves has a strong resemblance to Street Fighter III. Then again, as King of Fighters turned into the flagship title for SNK, it underwent its own evolution independently more often than not (although the change from EX to Advanced super meter scheme was very reminiscent of how Street Fighter Alpha handled the issue,) and of course, Art of Fighting didn't really last very long anyway.
• Art of Fighting in particular looks to be a series that was developed to cash in on the SF2 craze, and since it wasn't in development at the same time as SF2 (at least as far as I know) that's probably exactly what did happen.

All in all, SNK gets a lot of credit for being, of all the producers of Street Fighter wannabes, the most consistent, the most innovative, the longest lasting, probably the highest quality (this is certainly true for the later titles, where the competition is long gone), the most serious, and the most successful. Over time, I've come to appreciate SNK as much as Capcom, and some of their titles are certainly more than a match for the best Capcom titles. Some of their characters are just as intriguing as the best Capcom characters. While I won't go as far as to say that they've ever bested the best Capcom titles, they were certainly toe-to-toe peers, a claim that no other karate supers producer can match.

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

Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1

I'm a bit less enthused about my old-school crawl than I used to be. I spent some time last night with the Fatal Fury Battle Archives 1 collection last night, and it wasn't as fun as I'd hoped. Part of that was the slap-dash nature of the collection. SNK gave us a color edit mode, but there's not even a training or practice mode? There's no in-game skill list when I hit pause? This is basically just the arcade ROMs and an emulator slapped together on one DVD.

Not only that, although I anticipated this, after not having played these games in quite a long time, I didn't think that they would feel as clunky and primitive as they did. Even such "classic" titles as Fatal Fury Special really felt... well, primitive. And in some cases, poorly designed. I blasted through the bosses fairly easily, but struggled to get past a handful of the regular characters at the front of my run, who had a surprisingly difficult AI.

I did notice that the localization was even worse than I thought. The grammer, pronunciation, spelling, and English usage in general is just embarrassingly bad. In the original Fatal Fury game, for instance, Billy Kane's last name is pronounced to rhyme with 'con', Raiden is mis-pronounced (and once, even mispelled!) as Riden, and at the end of Fatal Fury Special, the credits say that the game was "Prodused by SNK". And that's just the tip of the iceberg; nearly every winquote is ridiculous. What in the world is "Wubba wubba, I'm in the pink today!" even supposed to mean?)

Anyway... I had a good enough time with my little jaunt through nostalgia, but really, the gameplay for many of these older games just doesn't hold up anymore. It's too primitive, too imprecise, and riddled with problems.

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.

Game Feature: Capcom vs. SNK 2

One game that continues to get a lot of voice for "best game in the genre" is Capcom vs. SNK 2. I have this game on the Xbox, so technically it's Capcom vs. SNK 2: EO with the EO (for either Easy Operation or Extreme Offense) added to the end of it. I don't really have much use for the EO mode, but for my kids, who haven't really mastered the art of the joystick motion required for, say, a basic Hadoken, it's one of their favorites to play because they can sit down and have a go at it without knowing what they're doing.

Really, though, the draw for this game is the fact that it combines all kinds of Capcom and SNK fighters together. Otherwise, how could you ever see what happens when you pit Ryu against Kyo or Terry? Sagat against Geese? Bison against Rugal? Or whatever other combination you wish. Of course, you can't do every combination, you're limited to the characters that they provide, but with 49 characters available (counting Chang and Choi separately) there's only a few that you'll miss.

Sadly, that gets right to the heart of one of my handful of small gripes about the game, but I'll just mention it and move on. There are a number of characters that don't really fit in the genre. They come from games that aren't really comparable, and in comparison, they feel out of place. In particular I'm thinking of Haohmaru and Nakoruru from the Samurai Shodown games and Hibiki from Last Blade. They've also continued the tradition of over-representation by some very similar Capcom characters; do we really need Ryu, Ken and Akuma? Well, probably yes, but if so, then do we really need Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma too? Probably not. If they'd removed these extraneous and out of place characters, we could have had room for a handful of other ones instead that better fit and are more sorely missed, that would have improved the experience.

But that's a minor pet peeve.

Rather, what did this game do right? There are a handful of other games that also mix Capcom and SNK characters, but this is regarded by nearly everyone as the definitive one. Partly that's because all of the other games out there that give us that same experience have significant flaws that they struggle to overcome, but partly it's also because this one is really just that good.

Sorta like Capcom did with Street Fighter Alpha 3, you can choose a game engine to apply to your character. There are more choices here. Twice as many, in fact. C-groove plays very much like SFA3's A-ism, while A-groove plays very much like SFA3s V-ism. P-groove creates an environment that is much more similar to SFIII's system, including parrying. The use of super combos is simplified from SFIII (you don't have to just pick one, for example) but its roots are very clear. There are also three grooves that are based on SNK games: S-groove which is like the earlier "EX" mode from King of Fighters, N-groove which is like the "Advanced" mode from slightly later King of Fighters games, and K-groove which is most similar to Samurai Shodown, except with "Just Defend" from Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves thrown in for extra effect. This insanely high number of possible combinations of characters and grooves makes for a game that you could potentially be mastering for years. I certainly don't claim to have done so: I stick with C-groove and about a dozen characters as my "go-to guys" most frequently. The level of choice is amazing, though.

As an improvement from the earlier Capcom vs. SNK, each character has been tweaked and improved. The earlier title had regular and EX versions of many characters, both of which felt movelist impoverished. This game, on the other hand, has merged those, creating more "full" characters that feel complete on their own. The older game also had a four button layout, which made it feel more King of Fighters like. In particular, this made the Capcom characters feel impoverished in terms of regular moves. They've reinstated the six button layout, and added new animations to allow every character to take advantage of them. These character and basic command improvements really propel this game to the top of the genre, and the phenomenal character roster to choose from cements its place. The fact that it combines SNK and Capcom characters together in a format that's not MUGEN or fanfiction is just icing on the cake.

That said, I can't let my description of the game pass by without making a handful of negative quibbles with elements of the game. I've already mentioned that a handful of the characters don't really fit and are poor choices. Most of the rest of my dislikes about the game are presentation issues.

One that's got a lot of attention on almost every discussion of the game I've seen so far are that the sprites are of mixed vintage and it really shows. The SNK characters were obviously all drawn recently, because Capcom didn't otherwise have them in their library of sprites. OK, well that's fair enough. Some of the Street Fighter characters, notably Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Bison, Chun-Li, and maybe one or two more that I'm forgetting at the moment, were also redrawn to look more similar to their SFII or SFIII appearances. A handful of other Capcom characters needed new sprites because they'd otherwise never appeared in a modern fighting game, like Eagle and Maki. Most of the rest of the Capcom characters use their recycled Alpha series sprites. These really don't look nearly as good as the newer ones. And most egregious of all is Morrigan, using her old Darkstalkers sprite, which in turn looks notably worse than any of the Alpha sprites. She's really a blight on the screen when she appears, which thankfully is rarely.

There's also only a handful of stages, and most of them aren't particularly attractive. This is disappointing, as the improved hardware could have given us some great ones. The older game, Capcom vs. SNK, actually had better stages (although it also had worse ones---stage design there was about 50/50. Real hit and miss.) None of them really actively offend, but they're extremely bland. There's nothing anywhere near as cool as the huge flaming car wreck stage in the earlier game, for instance. The exceptions to this are the two boss stages; the roof in the rain on the Japanese castle, and the rooftop after a massive explosion, with flaming debris everywhere if you get one of the the "true" bosses.

The same complaint could be made of the music. By the time I got this, I already had Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III: Third Strike for the Dreamcast, so I knew what really bad fighting game music could be like. This game doesn't have particularly bad music. Sadly, it doesn't have very many tracks that are very good either. Most of them are kinda bland and uninspiring.

An even more minor issue; I'm not a huge fan of how they choose to render the special effects of super and special moves. I prefer the hand-drawn effects of prior efforts. It's not nearly so bad as the blobby mass of colored pixels that you got in the first game, although that could also be an artifact of the hardware that I'm running my ports on. But they're not very good, either. Considering how good some of those special effects have gotten in other games, like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or King of Fighters XI (to use two particularly good-looking alternatives) having them appear lackluster here is a bit of a disappointment.

That said, all of those presentation issues are, when everything's considered, fairly minor quibbles. I really like this game, and it's certainly one of my "go-to" games when I feel like a little bit of karate supers action.