PS2 woes are over

I'm happy to be the "proud" owner of another PS2 that works now, so... yeah! The new one is silver, which actually surprised me when I pulled it out of the box.

I wonder if I can do anything with the black one? Maybe I'll mess around with it and see if I can get the discs to read.

In any case, in celebration, I broke out several of my PS2 games and played with them a bit: Street Fighter Alpha 3 (the "Upper" version with more characters and a few other improvements), King of Fighters XI and King of Fighers '98 (the Ultimate Match version.) I found myself a little overwhelmed again when I first got it back again, actually. So many games to play, that I found it hard to focus on one. Even while I was playing, I was thinking about other games that I wanted to play too, so it was a little bit of a schizophrenic night, and that's without me even touching my Fatal Fury titles!

Once I settle down a bit, I can get a little more serious about actually playing some of the games and getting back into the groove with them.

Anyway, for part of the time, I was in Training Mode in KoF98, re-teaching myself some of the character moves. I picked Orochi Yashiro as my foe so I could listen to this song while training:

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

Lurching to life a little bit...

I never did follow through on my three post series, did I? There's two reasons for that, 1) my interest in these games has always been a cyclical pattern of waxing and waning; sometimes I'm extremely interested in them for weeks (or more) at a time, and other times I literally don't think of them at all for weeks or months at a time. I went through a "fallow" period there were they were off my radar, and I was doing other things. And 2) my hardware issues left me bereft of a large number of my titles, unable to play them.

1) has cyclically turned, and now I'm interested again, and 2) should be resolved today or tomorrow as I go and buy another PS2 to replace my old one (I also tossed my PS1 when I got the PS2, so I really had a lot of games unavailable...)

Last night, however, I did break out my Xbox and a few of the titles that I have for that system. I played a bit of Capcom vs. SNK 2 using Ken just to warm myself up again to the rhythm of these games and use a familiar character to get back into the groove.

In any case, I hope to start up the three series again... two of which I never actually started. As a refresher, for myself as much as for any readers (of which I'm skeptical that I have any anyway):

• Game feature
• Old School Crawl
• Street Fighter clones

Two of those could have been done without having a working system anyway, so they're long overdue.

PS2 woes, cont.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I went into a PS2 repair shop and asked how much a disc re-alignment would cost. $50. $50.

When I asked how much to buy a replacement used PS2: $65. I could probably knock that down a bit, even, if I bought one on eBay or somewhere.

So, my karate supers actions is, to put it mildly, severaly constrained for the time being, by hardware issues.

My 6-year old finally fessed up to having dropped the PS2 while trying to set up the Xbox. sigh. I wish he'd get over the idea that he can just go get whatever he wants to use it.

Anyway, hopefully at some point this summer I'll get a replacement, and then we'll be back in business.

PS2 woes

Well, I find that my PS2 isn't working this weekend. I think one of my kids dropped it while trying to get it down (without permission, I might add.) He's not fessing up, but I already know that he got into it. It's a moot point anyway.

Hopefully it's just a case of the laser becoming mis-aligned, and that it can be fixed easily. We'll see. If not, I'll have to somehow acquire another one before I can play again.

Which is a real shame, because after a fallow period, I was actually coming around to having interest in playing more of my games again.