Still no genre title...

As much as I've tried (well, I honestly haven't tried that hard, but I have given it some thought) I don't have a good label for the genre that's not overly long and clunky and descriptive. I still keep gravitating towards street fighting, perhaps in homage to the first game of the genre, and its sequal which single-handedly launched the genre into superstardom status. But, it seems too exclusive, so I keep backing away.

One thing that has occured to me in the past about it, and typing up the last post kinda cemented it some more. The genre, whatever we decide to call it, has a lot of correspondances with the American superhero comic book genre too. In fact, the characters are a lot like superheroes, and they clearly (most of them, anyway) have superpowers.

And I don't just say that because Capcom took the Street Fighter engine and used it to make fighting games with Marvel superhero characters in them. Although that's certainly a valid bit of supporting evidence.

Think about the plots of the Street Fighter Alpha or the NESTS Saga games, though. You can't tell me that those don't sound like they're straight out of a comic book. The only big difference is that street fighting characters don't tend to wear spandex and a mask, and don't have secret identities.

The Genre vs. the Real World

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

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

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

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

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

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

BGM

One often overlooked aspect of fighting games is the BGM---background music. Because I'm a bit crazy about this genre, I've actually gone and tracked down imports of most of the soundtracks to most of the games I really like, including the various Street Fighters, the various Marvel and Marvel vs. games by Capcom, and the King of Fighters and Fatal Fury soundtracks by SNK.

It's probably pushing it to say that the music tracks are really good to listen to in their own right from a music appreciation angle, but I still frequently like having them on anyway. Some of the soundtracks are pretty good, or at least have good tracks, but mostly it's good in a sense that it evokes the games and can serve as interesting background music while you're doing something else. In particular, whenever I'm reading my UDON Street Fighter collections, I like to listen to this kind of stuff. Although I also throw it on while writing, or while puttering about the house doing something else.

Anyway, I've attached one of my favorite tracks, "Dust Man" which is Mr. Big's themesong. This version is the "Arranged" soundtrack version from King of Fighters '96... and it's quite long, but worth listening to all the way through, because it does actually do more than just repeat itself. It's a pretty decent piece of ambient electronica in its own right, too.

King of Fighters 00/01

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

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

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

Game Feature: Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper

I'd like to start a regular feature on this colum where I "feature" a specific title, and talk about why I like (or don't, if I don't particularly) that title. Because I've got a lot of titles, this is something that could go on for months. Should be fun.

Let me start with a game that's very near and dear to my heart; a strong contender for my favorite game in the entire genre, and certainly my favorite game in the entire Street Fighter series, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper. The best version of this is on the Playstation 2 compilation Street Fighter Alpha Anthology; what you have to do first is beat the "regular" Street Fighter Alpha 3 and then this is unlocked. It's basically a home port of an arcade game which in turn was an arcade port of a console version of the original Street Fighter Alpha 3 title... which was ported from the arcade. A bit confusing, I know. The biggest difference is that, unlike the regular SFA3 game, this one has all the characters that were added back in, including everyone who was ever in any version of SF2, plus all of the revised Street Fighter 1 and Final Fight and Alpha sub-series original characters. This makes a total of 34 characters, although granted, two of them are variants of existing characters. Either way, the roster is certainly respectable. A big roster is no substitute for a good one, though... the nice thing about SFA3 is that so many of the characters are actually going to be very fun to play.

Four characters, notably, are not included, even though they were in the portable version of the game: Ingrid, Eagle, Maki and Yun. Eagle and Maki would have been great additions, because as SF1 and Final Fight characters respectively, they would have fit in nicely with the other Alpha characters. Be that as it may, I've got them nicely done for already in Capcom vs. SNK 2, so I don't feel like I'm missing out too much. Ingrid and Yun's addition is a bit more questionable, but hey, the more the merrier, for the most part.

Aside from the character selection, this game also is helped by superior presentation. Each character has a unique stage, and a unique (and new! and pretty cool, for the most part, although some of them start to run together after a while) BGM track. In fact, the soundtrack was good enough that I tracked down an import CD from Japan so I could listen to it while I tinker with Street Fighter related thoughts, or read my Street Fighter comic books by UDON. Actually, I'm nerdy enough about this genre, that I've done that for a lot of related titles, but this one was literally the first that I ran down.

Each time you play against the computer, you fight ten (or occasionally 11) matches. The final match is the boss, and in almost all cases, the boss is called FINAL BISON; he's a roided up version of Bison that you can't play because he's too cheap for actual players to get their hands on. Fine boss, though. Difficult, but not too cheesy. He certainly does the job, plus he's iconic for the Street Fighter series. Before you fight Final Bison, you have a sub-boss, which will be one of the other characters in the game, and which will vary depending on who you are. And the fifth match, halfway through, will also be a "mid-boss", a character with a unique rivalry, or other reason to want to face off against you.

Despite the fact that all of these elements are excellent, it's really in the gameplay that Street Fighter Alpha 3 shines the most. It brought some variety back to the game by introducing "isms" that control the game engine that your character will respond to. A-ism is a tweaked (and in my opinion, very nearly perfected) version of the Alpha gameplay engine, X-ism does the same thing to the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo gameplay engine, and V-ism is the odd Custom Combo system that debuted in Street Fighter Alpha 2. Each of these modes has been pretty heftily tweaked from their earlier incarnations, and work really well. SFA3 is a relatively fast-paced and superheroic game compared to some others in the series, although compared to, say, the Marvel vs. games maybe not quite so much.

There are also some other options you can layer onto the game; you can pick Saikyo, Maki or Classic filters, which change damage output, defense ability and super combos ability. Saikyo is basically a major handicap mode, Maki is "don't get hit, but your own hits will be scary powerful in return" and classic is Street Fighter 2 with no super combos at all. I clearly prefer A-ism with the "normal" filter, which gives me the ultimate in Alpha gaming experience. I also turn the number of victories needed to advance up to three, to give me longer to savor the experience. I really like the A-ism gameplay engine. Not only do I almost exclusively use A-ism in this game, but I also almost exclusively use the C-groove in Capcom vs. SNK 2... which is A-ism all over again, pretty much. That said, it's still nice to have these other options available. The game is fun.

The only minor quibbles I'd have about the game are 1) that some of the BGM tracks start to sound too much alike after a while (although others are among my favorite BGM tracks in a fighting game ever), and 2) the World Tour mode isn't present in the PS2 compilation. Then again, I haven't played my PS1 World Tour mode much at all after winning through it the first time, so maybe that's not such a handicap after all.

Anyway, I've also attached a few screenshots, snagged off of Moby Games, which is a great source for Capcom and SNK screenshots, by the way. Just to complete my own post and make it prettier.

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.