While I discussed last time, six weeks or so ago, that SFA3 is my "go-to" Street Fighter title; the one that I'm much more likely to play than any other title in the series when I'm in the mood for some Street Fighter action, it's a bit more difficult for me to say that about any of the games in the Fatal Fury series. I still regularly return to the original Fatal Fury fer cryin' out loud, and I sometimes have a hard time deciding if Real Bout Special is better than Real Bout 2 or vice versa. Mark of the Wolves is, of course, an excellent game too, and Fatal Fury 3 even gets some love. I don't often play Fatal Fury 2 or Special, and I don't have much use for the original Real Bout game, but still--unlike with Street Fighter where I've homed in on a single title as my favorite and play it most of the time to the exclusion of all other titles (except when I want to indulge some nostalgia) I bounce around a fair bit in the Fatal Fury series, trying to decide what I'm really in the mood to play.
Yesterday, for example, I played through Fatal Fury 3 (with Terry; yeah, it's kinda cheesy, but a few characters are really hard in this game!) I have to admit, I think one of the reasons I like this game so much is the little attention to detail; the backgrounds and stuff are really cool and fun to watch. Yamazaki's trainyard background in particular is one of my favorite scenes in any fighting game ever (train-themed stages are very popular in both Street Fighter, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters stages in general. There must be some railfans in Japan. Also; what's with the steam engines? They're cool, that's what. There's no other reason to have them except that they look awesome.)
The character sprites don't look quite as good; they were greatly improved (although also "cartooned up" a bit) after Real Bout, so going back to these sprites feels clunky and primitive. Granted, FF3 improved the sprites significantly from FF2 and FFS (which in turn did so to the FF1 sprites--those that represented characters who recurred, that is) so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them. The FF characters in the early KoF games also looked quite a bit better, although KoF was usually a slightly more attractive game visually anyway than the FF games.
I had better luck this time playing through it than I sometimes do. Some characters are just harder for me than others; Franco Bash is harder than he should be (especially for for a "Tier 1" character) and Terry is surprisingly hard to get past without having to use a continue or two (or more.) Geese Howard is, of course, a maniac that consumes several continues every time I play, but I only used two or three on him this time, I think. Surprisingly, after defeating Geese, the next two characters are relatively easy.
Anyway, I included a youtube link to the second half of a playthrough of FF3. In Spanish.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Monday, December 20, 2010
SFA2 Gold vs. SFA3 Upper
Last night on a whim, I got out my Street Fighter Alpha Anthology but instead of just playing SFA3 Upper, like normal, I played through that with Akuma (I know, kinda cheesy, but I was out of practice) and then played SFA2 Gold with Akuma too, to compare the two titles and see how different they really are. Although I'd played tons of both games on various systems (mostly SFA2--not Gold, on SNES and SFA3U on the old Playstation) I'd never spent any real time playing the two of them back to back to see how they compare together.
Although there were a handful of things I liked better about the older title, in general, SFA3 was quite a bit improved from SFA2. The presentation of SFA2G was dated; the music sounded primitive and, frankly, kinda silly. The inter-match graphics are also more primitive (although less stylized and strange than in SFA2G.)
Notably, the controls were less fluid and responsive. I was surprised to find that out, because I expected that it would be more or less the same. They must have made some gameplay tweaks and corrections to make the characters feel a bit more responsive. In particular, after doing the Shun Goku Satsu (Instant Hell Murder) Maxed out super move on SFA3 several times, I was surprised at how difficult it was to pull off in SFA2; the timing is really much more precise, and I was used to the SFA3 timing anyway.
So... any faithful readers (ha! As if anyone besides me reads this blog anyway) know how much I like lists, so let me list out things that I liked and didn't like from each version. At least as I saw them from a simple, single playthrough with one character for purposes of comparison.
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
1) I had forgotten that SFA2 still retained the old Street Fighter 2 convention of doing throws by simply hard punching or kicking at a certain range. I always liked that better than entering a special command to throw. Although SFA3 replaced this feature with a special two-button command (which makes throws something that happens extremely rarely in my games), as do the SFIII titles, Capcom later returned to this mode for the Capcom vs. SNK series.
2) I love some of the stages. Dhalsim, Adon, Gen, Ryu, Sagat and a few others just have very lovely or interesting stages, and the "hidden" stages of the Venezuelan waterfall and the Australian grasslands thunderstorm are really nice. SFA3 has nice stages too; but I really missed a few of these that I had always quite liked. I wish that the Hyper Street Fighter Alpha allowed to you mix and match stages from all three titles, but it was not to be.
Unless I've got that wrong. Since I don't frequently have someone I can play against that enjoys playing it very much, I haven't actually done much with HSFA. Maybe it does allow that and I've forgotten! I don't think so, though...
3) As an improvement on SFA2 non-Gold, you can now select from six colors by simply selecting with one of the six basic attack buttons. Much easier.
4) Alpha counters were always pretty dumb. I remember back when I was first playing SFA2, I'd do them accidentally sometimes. That doesn't happen now, but I still don't really like them, or see the point in them. I can see how they'd be useful strategically, but it doesn't seem worth it in the cost from your super meter.
5) I really don't like how you do supers, where to get the maximum strength one you have to hit all three buttons. Especially on a PS2 controller, that's really a PITA. So, I rarely do supers higher than second level in this game, and frankly, make a lot more use of my 1st level supers, whereas in SFA3, I always use the highest level super that I can.
6) I find that I actually don't miss a lot of the characters from SFA3 Upper after all, since a lot of the added characters were ones that I was less likely to want to use anyway. So, if I really want to play those characters, I obviously can't play them in this game, but eh... for the most part the characters I'm most likely to want to play are here.
7) Hate the music. Granted, this is about the same era as the Dark Stalkers and Marvel Superheroes, or at best, the first of the Marvel vs. series, and the music sounds similar in many respects to those. But I've gotten used to better over the years. Even the SNK releases of old titles have "remixed" soundtracks with really good versions of the themes. Wish they could have done that too. Since many of the themes used in SFA2 are the same ones used all the way back to SF2 itself, they've also made appearances on the HD remix game and SF4 soundtracks, so I've got high expectations of what they could sound like.
8) Kinda liked the concept that each character had their own individual boss depending on what their story was. Granted, it made the boss feel a bit less like a boss, but still... it was a fun idea.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
1) Really like the expanded character roster, although sadly many of the more "esoteric" characters show up very infrequently in regular arcade play, so unless you play against friends who like to use a varied stable of characters, you may not see them much, or see their stages or listen to their themes. Unless you pick them in versus or practice mode, of course, but that's not the same thing at all.
2) Final Bison is a really cool boss. Of course, he makes playing with "regular" Bison a bit of a letdown, but meh. For some reason, the PS2 version doesn't seem to want to allow me to continue if I lose to Bison, although in the old PS1 version I know that I could.
3) Smoother gameplay, air blocking, air recovery, dashing, etc. probably make up for throws being crocked.
4) Great stages and great themes. I know that there are few (if any) tributes to the original soundtrack, and that's occasionally missed (SF4 and SSF2THDR all showed that the original themes could be spruced up to be cool again) but instead, we get quite a few really nice ones. Of course, a lot of them tend to run together and sound too similar to each other after a while, but I'm OK with that because when the themes here are good, they're really good. I'm especially fond of Rose, Chun-Li and Karin's themes, but Blanka, T. Hawk and Cammy also have quite nice ones.
5) The story is intriguing, but impossible to make out from the game itself. Without online plot guides, I'd be lost.
6) Some of the newer characters are redundant to say the least. We've already got Ken, Ryu and Akuma (and Dan) all of whom are very similar to each other. Do we really need to add new versions of both Ryu and Akuma to the mix? Cammy and Juli and Juni are also to a certain extent very much like each other too; Juli and Juni in particular playing like move-impoverished versions of Cammy.
7) This is true of all the Capcom fighters (and the SNK ones too); the PS2 controller is a poor subsitute for a good arcade stick. While in many ways I like the PS2 controllers a lot, it does a poor job for certain moves, and makes some characters nearly unplayable because their specials and supers are so difficult to pull off. This also contributes to making all that character diversity a bit of a false promise. The big grapplers in particular suffer from this--double 360 motions on a d-pad are a nightmare.
I'm convinced after playing this that revisiting SFA2 Gold will be a relatively rare occurance for me, and will mostly just gratify my sense of nostalgia, while SFA3U will still be the go-to game for SF action for me, as it already was. But it was fun to revisit SFA2 again, and remember some of the things that I liked better about that game after all.
Although there were a handful of things I liked better about the older title, in general, SFA3 was quite a bit improved from SFA2. The presentation of SFA2G was dated; the music sounded primitive and, frankly, kinda silly. The inter-match graphics are also more primitive (although less stylized and strange than in SFA2G.)
Notably, the controls were less fluid and responsive. I was surprised to find that out, because I expected that it would be more or less the same. They must have made some gameplay tweaks and corrections to make the characters feel a bit more responsive. In particular, after doing the Shun Goku Satsu (Instant Hell Murder) Maxed out super move on SFA3 several times, I was surprised at how difficult it was to pull off in SFA2; the timing is really much more precise, and I was used to the SFA3 timing anyway.
So... any faithful readers (ha! As if anyone besides me reads this blog anyway) know how much I like lists, so let me list out things that I liked and didn't like from each version. At least as I saw them from a simple, single playthrough with one character for purposes of comparison.
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
1) I had forgotten that SFA2 still retained the old Street Fighter 2 convention of doing throws by simply hard punching or kicking at a certain range. I always liked that better than entering a special command to throw. Although SFA3 replaced this feature with a special two-button command (which makes throws something that happens extremely rarely in my games), as do the SFIII titles, Capcom later returned to this mode for the Capcom vs. SNK series.
2) I love some of the stages. Dhalsim, Adon, Gen, Ryu, Sagat and a few others just have very lovely or interesting stages, and the "hidden" stages of the Venezuelan waterfall and the Australian grasslands thunderstorm are really nice. SFA3 has nice stages too; but I really missed a few of these that I had always quite liked. I wish that the Hyper Street Fighter Alpha allowed to you mix and match stages from all three titles, but it was not to be.
Unless I've got that wrong. Since I don't frequently have someone I can play against that enjoys playing it very much, I haven't actually done much with HSFA. Maybe it does allow that and I've forgotten! I don't think so, though...
3) As an improvement on SFA2 non-Gold, you can now select from six colors by simply selecting with one of the six basic attack buttons. Much easier.
4) Alpha counters were always pretty dumb. I remember back when I was first playing SFA2, I'd do them accidentally sometimes. That doesn't happen now, but I still don't really like them, or see the point in them. I can see how they'd be useful strategically, but it doesn't seem worth it in the cost from your super meter.
5) I really don't like how you do supers, where to get the maximum strength one you have to hit all three buttons. Especially on a PS2 controller, that's really a PITA. So, I rarely do supers higher than second level in this game, and frankly, make a lot more use of my 1st level supers, whereas in SFA3, I always use the highest level super that I can.
6) I find that I actually don't miss a lot of the characters from SFA3 Upper after all, since a lot of the added characters were ones that I was less likely to want to use anyway. So, if I really want to play those characters, I obviously can't play them in this game, but eh... for the most part the characters I'm most likely to want to play are here.
7) Hate the music. Granted, this is about the same era as the Dark Stalkers and Marvel Superheroes, or at best, the first of the Marvel vs. series, and the music sounds similar in many respects to those. But I've gotten used to better over the years. Even the SNK releases of old titles have "remixed" soundtracks with really good versions of the themes. Wish they could have done that too. Since many of the themes used in SFA2 are the same ones used all the way back to SF2 itself, they've also made appearances on the HD remix game and SF4 soundtracks, so I've got high expectations of what they could sound like.
8) Kinda liked the concept that each character had their own individual boss depending on what their story was. Granted, it made the boss feel a bit less like a boss, but still... it was a fun idea.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
1) Really like the expanded character roster, although sadly many of the more "esoteric" characters show up very infrequently in regular arcade play, so unless you play against friends who like to use a varied stable of characters, you may not see them much, or see their stages or listen to their themes. Unless you pick them in versus or practice mode, of course, but that's not the same thing at all.
2) Final Bison is a really cool boss. Of course, he makes playing with "regular" Bison a bit of a letdown, but meh. For some reason, the PS2 version doesn't seem to want to allow me to continue if I lose to Bison, although in the old PS1 version I know that I could.
3) Smoother gameplay, air blocking, air recovery, dashing, etc. probably make up for throws being crocked.
4) Great stages and great themes. I know that there are few (if any) tributes to the original soundtrack, and that's occasionally missed (SF4 and SSF2THDR all showed that the original themes could be spruced up to be cool again) but instead, we get quite a few really nice ones. Of course, a lot of them tend to run together and sound too similar to each other after a while, but I'm OK with that because when the themes here are good, they're really good. I'm especially fond of Rose, Chun-Li and Karin's themes, but Blanka, T. Hawk and Cammy also have quite nice ones.
5) The story is intriguing, but impossible to make out from the game itself. Without online plot guides, I'd be lost.
6) Some of the newer characters are redundant to say the least. We've already got Ken, Ryu and Akuma (and Dan) all of whom are very similar to each other. Do we really need to add new versions of both Ryu and Akuma to the mix? Cammy and Juli and Juni are also to a certain extent very much like each other too; Juli and Juni in particular playing like move-impoverished versions of Cammy.
7) This is true of all the Capcom fighters (and the SNK ones too); the PS2 controller is a poor subsitute for a good arcade stick. While in many ways I like the PS2 controllers a lot, it does a poor job for certain moves, and makes some characters nearly unplayable because their specials and supers are so difficult to pull off. This also contributes to making all that character diversity a bit of a false promise. The big grapplers in particular suffer from this--double 360 motions on a d-pad are a nightmare.
I'm convinced after playing this that revisiting SFA2 Gold will be a relatively rare occurance for me, and will mostly just gratify my sense of nostalgia, while SFA3U will still be the go-to game for SF action for me, as it already was. But it was fun to revisit SFA2 again, and remember some of the things that I liked better about that game after all.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Blood on the Asphalt
You've gotta give Capcom some credit; when a bunch of amateur remixers decided they wanted to remix the classic Street Fighter II BGMs as part of a community project, mostly just for their own fun, it was a big success. And when Capcom was ready to release the "Hi-def" version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, they came to these amateur remixers and asked them to contribute their tracks, reworked to be less stand-alone music samples and more something that could work in the context of a game (i.e., don't get too creative with changing the mood or tone of the piece, since it works with the character and background art to create a single, unified "feel", make sure that none of the pieces stand out as too outre and that they all fit coherently together, while still maintaining the diversity that was part of their charm all along, and make sure that the tracks can loop properly and speed up for the dramatic "someone's almost KOed" sound effect.)
Involving a fan project so prominently like that was a cool and classy move. Go, Capcom! Just for that, I fired up my Street Fighter Alpha Anthology last night a bit and played around with it. I had a lot on my mind, so I didn't play for too long, but I've had this growing sense of wanting to reconnect with this hobby again after getting distracted by an absolutely crazy fall schedule.
Involving a fan project so prominently like that was a cool and classy move. Go, Capcom! Just for that, I fired up my Street Fighter Alpha Anthology last night a bit and played around with it. I had a lot on my mind, so I didn't play for too long, but I've had this growing sense of wanting to reconnect with this hobby again after getting distracted by an absolutely crazy fall schedule.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Marvel vs. Capcom 2
Lately, I've been interested in the Capcom superhero games made under license from Marvel Comics. These games include X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The new one looks to be based around Street Fighter IV graphics and (presumably) engine, so it stands quite a bit apart from the other games in the series. X-Men was the first Marvel game done by Capcom. Coming out in 1994, it had to have been in development concurrently with the first Darkstalkers game, and like that, it uses upgraded "line art" style animation. This animation style was to last at Capcom for years; some of the exact same sprites originally drawn for 1994 releases were still being used in new games as late as 2005---until the release of the Street Fighter IV game, really.
Anyway, barring the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3, about which we only know limited information anyway, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the crown jewel in the Marvel vs. series. Probably the most popular and well known in the series as well. And while it did make a number of improvements to the series... in many ways, I've always been very unhappy with this game at the same time. Here's my complaints, one at a time:
• The presentation. Good heavens, the music is terrible! Simply embarrassing. For that matter, the backgrounds aren't very good either. A few of them pass muster as "OK" but pretty much all of the prior games in the series had better ones. The acid trip carnival background is particularly bad.
• The gameplay has been simplified, and that's mostly welcomed, but at the same time, the ramping up of the tag-team battle from two to three opponents really makes matches drag out unnecessarily. Two was kinda fun... three is not so much. Frankly, I'd still rather just play one on one anyway. You'd think as a King of Fighters fan it wouldn't bother me so much, but I never liked that in the King of Fighters games either, and luckily I can easily play most of those in single character mode.
• While this is a factor of all of the Marvel Capcom games, it seems worse in this one: the game is simply too hyper. It moves too fast and does too much. It rewards button-mashing nearly as much as careful strategic play, which is really difficult to do because of the speed anyway. I think the advent of Turbo modes in Street Fighter was a good thing, but there comes a point where faster is not better, and this game is way on the wrong side of that line. Slower moving games like Fatal Fury's Mark of the Wolves are still tactically very rich and deep without needing to be on a Ritalin.
• The unlocking phase is painfully slow. I've had this game for years and I still have a few alternate character colors to unlock. Part of that is that because of the other problems I have with the game, I don't really play it that often, but part of it is that it's just terribly, terribly slow. The newer re-releases of this game don't feature any unlocking, by the way. It comes with everything pre-unlocked. I don't mind some unlocking; it can even be fun for a while. But this is way beyond fun and into abnormally frustrating and tedious.
• There are way too many silly characters, most of them on the Capcom side, that don't seem to fit with the others. Not only that, some of the silliest characters seem to be on high rotation as CPU opponents, so I see them all the time. The game would be significantly improved without the presence of the four Megaman characters, Amingo the Cactus man and SonSon the monkey girl. For that matter, I have to be feeling pretty generous to be happy to see Anakaris, B. B. Hood, Jill Valentine or Ruby Heart show up either.
What I'd have rather seen, frankly, was a Marvel Super Heroes 2 with all of the Marvel characters that this game has (28 of them, although that counts Wolverine and Wolverine (Bone Claws) as two separate characters). They could possibly add full sprites for the "helper" attackers from Marvel vs. Capcom as well (which, if I remember correctly, would add Thor, Jubilee and US Agent to the roster.) Maybe a few other characters could help pad the roster; after all, many of the characters we do have are quite obscure (Blackheart, Shuma-Gorath and Silver Samurai in particular, but Spiral and Marrow are hardly less so. Even more bizarre is that supervillains associated with Daredevil (Blackheart and Silver Samurai) show up but Daredevil does not.) Give us old-fashioned cool backgrounds and music, and that'd be one of my favorite games in the genre. Sadly, it'll never happen. Maybe I could recreate it in MUGEN if I want it that badly. If I ever decide to get into MUGEN. As it is, I'm left feeling that the Capcom adventure with Marvel is a great big mighta-been; what we got was cool enough, but only a fraction of how cool it could have been.
The team-up has also captured my attention, because of course Capcom teamed up with Marvel and with SNK, but never mixed the two; the Capcom characters (specifically the Street Fighter characters, and Morrigan) are the only common denominators. While on vacation recently, I was struck by the concept of a massive fanfiction that combined the Fatal Fury and King of Fighters characters with the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters and the Marvel characters... but frankly, I'm already doing that as it is except without the Marvel characters being added to the mix, and it's an intimidating enough concept on its own.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Krizalid
I know I just made another BGM related post, but the Arranged version of the soundtrack for King of Fighters '99 is one of the best video game music CDs that I have (which is good; it took quite a bit of tracking down to find.) And amongst the best music on that soundtrack are the two Krizalid themes. Although the two tracks on the CD are tracked so that they flow seamlessly from one to the other, I haven't been able to find that anyone on youtube has actually merged the two files. I might yet do it myself. In the meantime, here's the two parts of the Krizalid theme. If you listen to them back to back, you'll see what I mean. The first part is "Mechanical Bless", and the second is "My Dear Falling Angel".
Then, for fun, I've included the King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match remake of the song, which is retitled "Cutting Edge."
Monday, August 16, 2010
K'
One of my favorite songs from the King of Fighters series. This is the Original Soundtrack version of the K' team, in the game where they first appear.
Unusually, I actually like this OST version better than the Arranged soundtrack version. Not a huge fan of that artwork, though.
Unusually, I actually like this OST version better than the Arranged soundtrack version. Not a huge fan of that artwork, though.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Color select
So... according to videos I've seen on youtube, in King of Fighters XIII, after you select your character, you can select your color from menu that shows you all the available options. You move with the joystick up and down through the selections, and it actually updates your sprite to show you what the color looks like.
Why in the world did it take so long for someone in this genre to think of that?
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