Tag Archives: All 3 Punches All 3 Kicks

All 3 Punches, All 3 Kicks – Darkstalkers IV

11 Jan

There are some ideas I can’t get out of my head.  Ideas that I can’t do anything about.  These are the ideas that keep me up at night, that make me take 20-minute showers, that make it supremely difficult to focus my mind on projects I can reasonably hope to accomplish.  Most of these impossible-to-exorcize-ideas have to do with video games.  I like games a lot, and I always think of new games I’d like to play.  I don’t have the technical skills or the artistic skills to even come close to half-realizing any of my ideas.  Let’s add the problem of intellectual property rights, and it becomes increasingly clear that my maniacally imagined sequels and spin-offs are doomed to bounce around the inside of my skull forever.

A new Darkstalkers game has occupied this skull-space for a while.  I never much played the series when it was alive in arcades, but I was fascinated by the concept of Capcom tackling a fighting game where all the playable characters were monsters.  Many of the game’s innovations have essentially been co-opted by the Vs. Capcom series – so when Capcom started talking about reviving the series, I started to wonder what fundamentally successful elements of the series they would stay true to.  After all, that’s how you revive an old series: remember what works, and make it better.  By my count Darksalkers had exactly three things going for it at the time:

1. Fighting game built on the solid Street Fighter 2 foundation.

2. Unique, compelling character concepts and world

3. Rich, vibrant art style

Hopefully, I’ve been able to maintain all those aspects in my design while offering up some concepts that could begin to brand the franchise anew.  It’s not just about bringing the series back – it’s bringing the series back in a way that matters.

Art Style – Rip Off Sin City

Step number one is going to be addressing the style in which everything in the game is visually expressed.  The cartoon-esque sprites that were used for the original releases were absolutely wonderful, but that style has been used in all of Capcom’s big fighters for the last couple years – most noticeably in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (which contains three Darkstalkers characters).  The last thing I’d want is for the Morrigan, Felicia and Hsienko models from MvC3 recycled for this release.  It’s got to be bold.  I want to look at a screen shot and say “holy shit, that’s neat.”

Capcom has been aping from manga and American comic books forever.  Maybe it’s time they lift a more striking style – may I suggest Frank Miller’s Sin City?

From the Sin City short story "Silent Night"

I’m talking incredibly high contrast: black and white.  Imagine a stage like the scene pictured above, the snow obscuring the movements of the characters but their bold simple images popping against the solid black background.  Of course some characters could have accent colors, like the Yellow Bastard or Blue Eyes do in Sin City:

Blue Eyes and The Yellow Bastard - try to guess which is which.Another benefit of this art style is that it would change the way the characters are depicted based on their environment.  I mentioned the snowy field, but what about a completely white background with the character’s silhouetted in black?  Or a bar scene where the light source comes from a casually swinging overhead light, casting long shadows?  Maybe a colorful stained glass window that our silhouetted characters fight in front of.  Not all the levels need to be so dynamic, some  can be nicely drawn black and white (no gray) environments for our nicely drawn black and white characters to beat eachother up in.  And there could even be levels that take place in some kind of opium nightmare and are depicted as strange and colorful, like Wallace’s drug induced hallucinations in “Hell and Back.”

The Darkstalkers characters have always been a interesting mix of quirky and terrifying and giving them (and their world) the Sin City treatment would create an awesome synthesisof art and thematic material.  Also, it would be the only fighter to look like this on the market – and visually distinct from all the other drek that’s out there.  Except maybe LIMBO… but everyone loved LIMBO, right?

Roster – A Dozen Distinct Characters

The most recent Mortal Kombat game maxes out with 32 characters (with Kratos in the PS3 version and 4 DLC characters).  Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition has 39.  Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has 50.  This is more characters that you can ever hope to master.  For most players, it’s more than you’ll ever even play.  And I know there are real playable differences between Ken, Ryu, Akuma, Evil Ryu, Dan, and Sakura, but these guys have a lot of the same tricks.  Let’s trim the fat a here – we’ve already got some redundancies in the Dalkstalkers line-up.

The one of the left is named Lilith. The one of the right is named "My eyes are up here."

So, let’s just bring back the 8 most compelling characters from the series and then invent 4 more.  There should be no problem dipping into the deep well of folk-monsters to come up with fun, interesting characters to play.  Obviously, we have to choose between one of the two succubi above.  Morrigan seems like the right choice, because she shows up wearing the cameo badge in every single crossover title.  But maybe we want to mix things up and make the younger, less hilariously sexual Lilith the face of the franchise.  Going with Lilith would be a bold statement about taking the series in new directions while staying true to it’s spirit.  Quickly, my other character picks:

Okay, there are 8 here in addition to the Lilith/Morrigan pick.  The whole bottom row of characters could stand to have their designs radically altered, but in particular, I think that gold golem thing (Hutzil) could be re-worked.  So he’s there, but I want to see him re-imagined.

Digital Release – Low Price Point – Limited Availability – Frequent Events

Here’s where my suggestions get bold.  These kinds of games have such periodic release dates, we may as well embrace it from the get-go.  Let’s agree that there should be an updated version of the game every year.  But let’s not stop there.  I want a game that sticks to a strict real-world schedule that rewards me for coming back to the game.  Here’s my suggestion:

Build the game around the winter solstice.  The game can only be played in the three months before and three months after the solstice.  This means late September to late March, which is about the time we need media to be excited about – the days are getting shorter and colder and generally more depressing.  You’ll notice this is when new TV shows come back on the air.  This half of the year is also peppered with holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the solstice, Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s.  I want to see new content (maybe playable characters, play modes, stages, etc.) associated with those holidays.  This way, the community can more frequently bond over the changes to the game.

The game would also be tracking which character you play the most, effectively determining your favorite.  After a month of play, the game makes you play a special story mode with that character that ends in the DEATH of that character.  DEAD.  Meaning you would be unable to use that character while he/she is dead.  Naturally, a month or so later you’d be able to resurrect the character somehow, but I like the idea that the game forces you outside your comfort zone, but would also force the community to mix up their own tactics as well.  Let’s say the first month of on-line play is starting to get tough because people are so well in-tune with their favorite character – but now, one month in, they are forced to explore the other characters.  It’s all in an effort to level the field without over-simplifying anything.

Oh and let’s keep this thing around $20.  Especially if it’s going to be taken away after 6 months.

A Few More Demands (as long as I’m making them)

No come-back mechanics.  The community is asking for this – no one wants to deliver it.  No hyper-combos, no super-arts, no ultras.

A sweet spot for combos – I’d like to see a number of hits that makes a combo deal more damage.  Let’s say 6.  A 6-hit combo gets an extra damage bonus.  5-hit doesn’t get it, 7-hit doesn’t get it.  It would make everyone more mindful of what exactly they’re doing.

Similarly, let’s get a ceiling on hits-in-a-combo.  I’m setting it here as 11.  Any combo greater than 11 hits can be interrupted by your opponent pushing any button and knocking you out of the combo.  It’s a good way of preventing infinites, but it also just keeps games civil – no one showing off with any kind of moronic 85-hit combo.  I mean 85 hits?  What’s the point?

ALSO, it’d be cool if the loser of the round got to alter one of those two numbers (sweet spot or hit ceiling), by making it one higher or one lower.  So if I lose round 1 because I was hit with too many six-hit combos, I can up that sweet spot to 7 and mess up the next round for my opponent.

More story mode options.  Everyone gets their own unique story – and a good one at that.  No more shitty half-animated cut scenes.  Also a full campaign mode like Mortal Kombat did.  In addition, I’d like to see some special event stories; remember that opium nightmare idea I had earlier?  Maybe you have to fight through a series of colorful surreal challenges before you earn the right to play in those trippy color-levels.  And the death and resurrection stories too.

Most of my suggestions are presentationally based.  But I think that is where fighting games are traditionally lacking, and it’d be worth it to have a game I wouldn’t mind showing off to my friends who aren’t fans of the genre.  And that’s all I’ve ever wanted: a fighting game I didn’t have to be embarrassed by.

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All 3 Punches, All 3 Kicks – (week 3)

19 Oct

Last week, I made a laundry-list of fighting game franchises that I would like to see return to the market.  Primarily, I picked games that had an interesting aesthetic or had something to offer presentationally that the current crop of fighters don’t.  I was focusing on style over substance, which is a little strange for me.  A former roommate of mine (who might recognize this as the second time I’ve made reference to him in a week) once gave me a really hard time about the quality of the opening cinematics for Street Fighter IV.  I replied that the story of Street Fighter IV wasn’t told in cheesy little half-cartoons, but that the narrative played out in the fractions of seconds between punches.  Obviously, I was defensive.  The story of Street Fighter IV, as presented by Street Fighter IV, is shit.  Total shit.  Herewith, the story of Ibuki:

Then it launches into the game.  You fight some dudes for a while and then this happens:

Ibuki beats up Sakura and then battles a blue man-machine named Seth and then:

Look at the way this characters is depicted.  She’s a boy-crazy ninja that goes to school and wears revealing clothing.  These cut-scenes are  characteristic of the whole genre’s views toward story, women and violence.  As much as the excellent mechanics make this sort of thing easy to ignore, it’s a damn shame that we have to.

Violence, Hyper-Violence and Ultra-Violence

Video games notoriously come under fire for their depiction and frequent glorification of violence.  It’s probably a fight that will rage on for ever and ever because violence makes for such compelling storytelling and action.  It’s just too much fun to shoot an alien and watch it explode or run over a hooker or whatever.  We’ll never come to a cultural consensus on what level of violence is appropriate in games.  Fighting games in particular have an impossible task – the defining characteristic of all of these games is someone beating up someone else.

Violence: A lot of fighting games see it as a non-issue: just deliver the violence and leave it at that.  I’m taking about your Street Fighters, your Tekkens, etc.  As surprising at it sounds, this seems like the most responsible way violence is handled in these games: ignoring it.

Hyper-Violence: Some games try to dull the shocking nature of the violence by making the action surrounding it insane.  Usually, the comedic or cartoony elements are exaggerated so the whole spectacle emphasizes more the action and less the violence.  It basically turns the game into a Looney Toones cartoon.  Consider the following:

No guts, no gore.  Just crazy bullshit.

Ultra-Violence: And then there are those games that really emphasize the brutality of the fights.  Usually, these games allow one character to actually kill another.  I still don’t totally understand if these games are doing so with a sincere love of violence or if it’s intended satirically.  Over-the-top skinnings, disembowelings, and beheadings could be good for a laugh but more often, it just comes off as horrifying.  True to form, the video example I’m providing is form Mortal Kombat:

I watched all of these, and they’re all pretty gruesome, but I think Noob Siabot’s at 7:52 takes the cake.

I’m not campaigning for fighting games without violence.  I’m not insane.  Violence can be powerful in narratives and games and I just wish there was more substance to justify such violence.  If there’s a good, character-driven reason Kano should rip Stryker’s heart out, tear his head off, jam the head in the heart-hole and then kick him in the face, I say “fine.”  But the lack of context does a disservice to the violence, just as the violence does a disservice to those wishing to legitimize games in our culture.

Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.  Boobs.

Then there’s the problem of depictions of women and sex; ne’er the two shall be separated.  I suppose it is something that there are female characters in fighting games at all.  The problem here is as it is in so many other mediums (comics, actions movies, video games in general), women are physical impossibilities who no traits other than those which make them sexy.

Female fighting game character are designed absurdly.  A few examples from recent popular fighters:

Cammy – Street Fighter series

Morrigan – Darkstalkers series

Mai – King of Fighters series

Kitana – Mortal Kombat series

The common themes here are obvious.  And these aren’t the raciest examples I could come up with – this is about par for the course.  Male characters are never sexualized to this degree and female fighters are never characterized beyond what you see above.  I can understand that these games have a hard time escaping the bonds of violence, but the bonds of sex?  They seem to love it – none moreso than Dead or Alive.

The Dead or Alive series started out as a fighting series that largely featured busty women.  I’ve been told that the combat in the games is really quite fluid and satisfying, but I simply cannot get past the designs of the characters, so I’ve never tried it for myself.  So enamored with the shapely characters was the studio that they released a spin-off game called Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball.  Guess what you do in that one?  Because the market apparently wanted more babes but less game-play, they eventually produced a game simply called Dead or Alive: Paradise.  I urge you to click on that link… but maybe not at work.  Oh and yes, you are a pervert for spending any time on that website.  But my point is this: how can any self-respecting man or woman continue to play games from this series?  What do you tell your friends who don’t play DOA?

It all feeds into the idea that the game creators aren’t taking presentation seriously.  Anyone that was concerned about the viability of a story or a universe or a set of characters would call shenanigans on this non-stop parade of T&A.  I am a fan of fighting games, and I wish I could be proud of that fandom.  As it stands, I just can’t.

That Girl is Poison

Meet Poison.  She’ll be making her first ever appearance as a playable character next year in Capcom’s Street Fighter x Tekken (it’s pronounced “cross,” damn it!).  She made her first appearance in the 1989 arcade machine Final Fight.  She and Roxy were two street-thug characters that the players would have to beat up as they battled through the slums of Metro City.  This is all well and good.  But when the studio prepared the game for localization in America, the Japanese developers feared that American audiences wouldn’t want to beat up women.  The solution?  Turn those women into transvestites, obviously.  This way, they wouldn’t offend women’s groups.  I guess this was before GLAAD was paying attention to video games.

The character would make a few other appearances throughout the years, usually in the background somewhere.  She serves as Hugo’s manager in Street Fighter III and generally provides a nice sense of continuity by simply showing up in various games.  But now that she’s stepping out of the background and into the ring, Poison’s gender is once again called into question.  In fact, here’s an interview with Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono on the subject of Poison conducted by EGM.

Capcom’s official stance on Poison’s gender is that they have no stance.  But a Capcom rep is quick to jump into the interview to state that they are working with GLAAD to make sure they aren’t being offensive with the character and the other characters’ reactions to her.  That sounds to me like he’s saying that she is a trans character, but the studio (for whatever reason) doesn’t want to embrace this unique aspect of the character.  I have never played a fighting game with an LGBT character – why can’t I start with Poison?  What does it mean that they feel the need to obscure the queerness of the only queer fighter they’ve ever designed?

It means that the genre is too juvenile to include any thematically challenging material.  Which is really pretty disappointing.  It’s 2011, isn’t it?

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that fighting games meet me halfway.  I’d like to believe that this hobby is about more than gore, tits and homophobia.  Well-made games will always have their balanced fighting systems to fall back on, but for once, I’d like the background to be substantive and mature.  Perhaps the game can be more fun when I actually care about the character as a character and not as a set of moves and statistics.

I’ll be back next week to wrap up this month-long experiment.  It’s been fun using fighting games specifically to discuss some trends in gaming in general.  We had a nice back-and-forth last week about on-line play and DLC.  Maybe someone can share a game that treats its female characters with some respect.  For bonus points – anyone know of an LGTB character in a game?  Other than Birdo, that is – not like Nintendo has stepped to this one either.

Week 1 (10/5) – Why it’s a problem

Week 2 (10/12) – Saturation and missing franchises (a return of the 1990s)

Week 3 (10/19) – Juvenile attitudes toward sex and violence and shitty, shitty stories

Week 4 (10/26) – Where I think there’s a TV series in the competitive scene

If anyone would like to play with me, I play Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and Street Fighter III: Third Strike: On-line Edition on the PS3.  My handle is SWF4815162342.

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All 3 Punches, All 3 Kicks – (week 2)

12 Oct

While the arcade scene birthed one-on-one fighting games, the genre had to grow in living rooms.  Ten year olds all over the country plugged in their rented copies of Street Fighter II into their gray and purple SNES and called the neighbor kid from from across the street to play.  Using the four-face-button-two-trigger-button layout that ended up dominating the home consoles for 2 decades, children explored the characters and their move sets without the pressure of time, or quarters or competition.  I can’t count the number of times I started a match with my little sister, with the timer set to infinity, and just tried to figure out the game.

After learning a thing or two, I would return to the arcade only to find my skills were outdated.  Street Fighter II went through numerous iterations in the arcade, and they all differed slightly from the home versions of the game.  I might have been cultivating my skills on a very specific version of Street Fighter, but I was also generally training my brain for any one-on-one fighter.  Which was good because by the mid-90s, that was only kind of game in the arcades.  Oh sure, there was the occasional classic arcade game or brawler or ski ball, but if you wanted to play at the arcade, you damn well better know how to fight.

New fighting series came out in droves and eventually choked demand entirely.  It was just too much.  I’ve read numerous times that “the novelty was wearing off,” which would explain the increasingly desperate attempts to set a new series apart from the rest.  Hyper violence, dinosaurs, 3D, comic book characters, removable limbs – they tried everything.  But by the end of the decade, only the true devotees were still playing.  A handful of series kept the genre alive on consoles – Smash Brothers, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive – but scene lay dormant until 2008 when Street Fighter IV brought all those old passions and frustrations back.

Over Saturation

The problem of too-many fighting games – especially in an age where so much of the base plays on-line – is one of dividing the fanbase.  We’re currently on the third version of Street Fighter IV, and possibly because it’s been three years since the first or possibly because they’ve managed to keep prices down, most of the crowd has migrated to the most recent version.  A follow up to Marvel vs. Capcom 3 comes out in November, less than a year after the original.  If this divides the audience for the MvC3 series, the combatant pool for both games will suffer – never mind that fighting fans are already made to chose between Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom.  Throw in to the mix the recent Mortal Kombat release, which (for the first time since 1993) boasts a balanced roster and smooth, competitive play.

There’s more on the horizon.  A lot more.  Capcom is a few months away from releasing Street Fighter x Tekken (the x is pronounced “cross” – there, now you’re cool) and while there’s no word what it will look like, Namco Bandai is talking about their own take on that concept, the deftly titled Tekken x Street Fighter.  Namco’s not quite ready to tackle their version of the crossover just yet because they just released Tekken Tag Tournament 2 in arcades in Japan – expect that to crowd the international console market some time in 2012.

SNK Playmore’s King of Fighters XIII is being ported over from Japanese arcades and will be landing in US living rooms for the holiday season.  The big-titted Dead or Alive 5 from Team Ninja will test the jiggle-physics of the current console generation at an undetermined date in 2012.  I guess, unhappy with releasing only Tekken games, Namco Bandai will be putting Soul Calibur V into the world in March of 2012.  And while it’s a different kind of game, it should be noted that Super Smash Brothers will see releases on Nintendo’s Wii U and the 3DS sometime in the 2012 or 2013.

That’s 10 games.  And that ignores both download games that are popular (Street Fighter III: Third Strike: On-line Edition and Super Street Fighter Turbo: HD remix) and some recent duds in the genre (like Virtual Fighter V, Tatsunoku vs. Capcom and the atrocious TMNT Smash-Up).

This also ignores the one new fighting game property that’s coming out in 2012: Revenge Labs’ Skullgirls.  That’s an intimidating market for a brand new franchise to enter.  In a genre filled with crossovers and sequels (seriously, 13 KoF games?) it’s refreshing to see something original.

Does it stand a chance against all these known entities?  Do any of them stand a chance in such a crowded market place?

Missing Franchises

Well, what the hell?  If we’re going to dilute the audience into tiny niche groups, why don’t we just bring back all the fighting series we thought we loved as kids.  Naturally, I have a few suggestions:

Clay Fighters

Interplay’s Clay Fighter series appeared on the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64.  The central conceit was that the characters were made of clay and were battling for the title of King of the Circus.  Later games in the series would include characters from other silly Interplay games, like Earthworm Jim and Boogerman (both voiced in the game by Dan Castellaneta, by the way).  With the possible exception of Smash Brothers, there aren’t any fighters with a light sense of humor.  The Capcom games usually try to inject some, but against the background of beating the shit out of a dude, it never really plays all that well.  And Mortal Kombat’s humor is mostly of the “zomfg, i just ripped that dude in half lolz” variety.  I think a modern game studio could have a lot of fun with the fact that these characters are made of clay.  Also theme music:

Killer Instinct

Rare’s first outing with digitizing pre-rendered graphics was the highly-lauded Donkey Kong Country.  Using the same techniques, Rare developed a confusing little fighting game for the arcade and Nintendo’s home consoles.  The game pits humans and monsters (and at least one killer robot) against each other in mega-violent combat.  But the mega-violence was mostly surface-level and contained none of the humor or irony found in the MK series.  KI was focused on presentation and the game play itself was buggy and the character balance was awful.  But both the SNES and N64 releases came with a CD of re-arranged music tracks from the game and the in-universe fiction was compelling and simple.  Most fighting games suffer from incoherent stories and embarrassing music, and while KI didn’t revolutionize these things, it’s nice to see that they were trying.  If Rare, now working exclusively with Microsoft, were to pump out a new version of this game with some story sophistication and a non-japanese approach to the art and music and fixed their bugs?  That sounds like a contender to me.

Eternal Champions

Before they branched out into the third dimension with Virtual Fighter, Sega made this ultra-clumsy fighter.  It’s a time traveling rip-off of both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat while achieving the fluidity of play of neither.  I know much of the reason I hold this game in any esteem is good ol’ nostalgia, but there’s more.  The premise of this game is that there are historical figures from all throughout time (past, present and future) who were killed before they were able to achieve something great.  The Eternal Champion pits their souls against each other in combat.  The winner gets to return to their time and finish what they started.  It basically opens the door for any kind of idiot character you could want in a fighting game.  Look at that screen grab: there’s a caveman, a warlock, a ninja, an Atlantean, and a cyborg on the screen at the same time.  These characters hold no particular sway over me, but the idea of putting doomed warriors from throughout history in an arena and watching them fight is quite appealing.  Maybe better if it included some real historical figures.

Power Stone

Power Stone was a great game.  They made two of them, both released on Sega’s Dreamcast.  The game had a very 1930s look to it and it’s colorful, varied characters made the whole thing a lot of fun to look at.  But the game play is what really sold me.  The characters run around freely in a 3D space, picking up weapons and interacting with the environment while attempting to gain the advantage on your opponent.  Unlike the rest of the genre, characters don’t have special moves that require complicated inputs.  The depth of the game came form understanding how each individual character could interact with each environment and with each weapon.  I would love to see a new iteration of this game with a bigger cast and more game play options.  Unlike the rest of the games on this list, I don’t think it needs a big overhaul in play department.

Honorable Mention

Samurai Shodown and Darkstalkers should both come back as well.  I would imagine that we could see another Samurai Shodown if SNK’s other game, King of Fighters XIII performs well in the states.  And I assume Capcom will bring Darkstalkers back – they put 3 Darkstalkers characters in MvC3 for crying out loud.


It makes me nervous to see the industry repeating this same pattern, but I’m also intrigued to see what kind of drek gets pulled up from gaming’s past.  And let’s not forget about Skullgirls - something bright and new in a field a endless re-hashes.  Again, I’ll be back with more fighting game stuff next Wednesday.  See the schedule below:

Week 1 (10/5) – Why it’s a problem

Week 2 (10/12) – Saturation and missing franchises (a return of the 1990s)

Week 3 (10/19) – Juvenile attitudes toward sex and violence and shitty, shitty stories

Week 4 (10/26) – Where I think there’s a TV series in the competitive scene

If anyone would like to play with me, I play Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and Street Fighter III: Third Strike: On-line Edition on the PS3.  My handle is SWF4815162342.

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All 3 Punches, All 3 Kicks – (week 1)

5 Oct

I was 9 years old when Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was released in arcades in 1991.  The first time I ever encountered one of those arcade machines was on vacation with my dad.  He and I always had the misfortune to select the rainiest, dreariest weekend to head to the Wisconsin Dells for a little father-son bonding time.  It turns out that there’s not that much to do at the Dells when the weather sucks.  Sure, we paid our respects to Tommy Bartlett’s Robot World and ate three meals a day at restaurants, but most of our time was spent in the arcade.  At my insistence, I’m sure.

Now, this was the early 90s, so I played a lot of licenced brawlers.  Game studios correctly bet that a 10 year old white kid from Wisconsin would play any video game with The Simpsons, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bucky O’Hare or the X-men on it.  But then I saw something different:

I know I watched that machine cycle through that demonstrative fight over and over again.  Watching it now, I know exactly how the characters are going to respond, and I nearly get chills when I hear the blocky “SMACK” of Guile punching Blanka in the face.  I was immediately in love with the characters, the colors, the action, the systems.  I’ve played fighting games for the better part of 20 years and this month I’m going to dedicate every Wednesday to exploring my relationship with the genre.  First up:

Week One – Why it’s a Problem

If you don’t know, we’re in something of a fighting game renaissance right now.  The latest entries in the Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom and Mortal Kombat series combined have sold over 10 million copies.   On-line play has reignited the competitive scene and fighting game tournaments are seeing higher and higher levels of participation.  The internet in general has made it possible for anyone to become an A-class player; what was once closely guarded information about hitboxes and cancels and frame advantage is now common knowledge.  The recent re-release of Street Fighter III: Third Strike allows players to upload replays of their fights directly to Youtube.  Basically, everyone that plays these games in their living room is able to recreate the sensation of playing the games in their neighborhood arcade, back when that was still something that happened.

That’s where I first learned how to play.  I played against a gentleman who absolutely kicked my poor Blanka’s ass with Chun li.  He was kind enough to tell me I shouldn’t always rely on the strong attacks, as they are frequently too slow.  He also taught me how to do some of Chun li’s moves, in case I ever wanted to give her a try.  But now that’s any time I turn on the game.  I adore the fighting game community and I check a Street Fighter strategy and events website every day.  The problem?  I’m still not very good at these games.

Just to get an idea of just what level of depth we’re dealing with here, I’d like to refer you to this list of terms and acronyms.  This list is by no means exhaustive and I frequently find myself confronted with terms I’ve never heard before.  Terms, mind you, that refer to the rules of a game that I’ve been playing minor variations on for two decades.  I had been playing Street Fighter IV for over a year when I encountered the term FADC being thrown around in a discussion on lengthening combos.  The acronym stands for Focus Attack Dash Cancel and it boils down to a manual trick that you can do to skip over some frames of animation at the end of an attack to start the next attack sooner.  Valuable if you know how to do it, but totally alienating game-play mechanic for novices.

And increasingly, that’s where the problem is.  If I’m playing these games with my friends who don’t really play fighting games hard and heavy, I will win every fight.  I’ve put in the time and the research so that I can mop the floor with someone who hasn’t spent hours and hours with the same set of tools.  A hard accomplishment to brag about.  But then I take my game on-line and get schooled.  Rolled.  Destroyed.  Utterly obliterated.  It seems like the learning curve for these games goes on and on forever.  In my experience, you don’t reach a point where you just “get it.”  I know there are excellent players out there in the world – I’ve seen videos and I get beaten up by them every time I log on – but it just never feels like that will be me.

Every couple months, I decide to rededicate myself to one of these games and strike out for some competitive on-line play.  Inevitably, I turn the game off two hours later in a sour mood.  My losses outweigh my wins by at least triple, and I always think to myself “You know what?  You should really spend more time writing anyway.”  And the game goes back into hibernation for a while.  I’m still checking Eventhubs and keeping an eye on news because I love the games, but actually playing them comes in waves.

It’s this eye-on-the-news that becomes the real problem.  As we are in a boom for the genre, there is news about up-coming fighting games every single day.  Add to that, the increasing volume of combo and tutorial videos that show up on youtube, guides that pop up on eventhubs or discussions that take place on Capcom forums.  I can turn off the game, but I can never turn off the game in my head.  The golden ideal of a world where everyone knows how to throw a haduken, where everyone knows the EX version of that move goes through fireballs, where everyone knows you can cancel out of the crouching medium kick into Alex’s Super Art 1 – that world where we all play and speak the same language and love beating the ever-loving shit out of eachother… that world is beautiful to me.

I’m going to share a video here that most Street Fighter fans have seen before.  It comes from a Street Fighter III: Third Strike tournament in 2004.  SF3 employs a mechanic called “parrying” whereby a player taps forward (or down) at a very specific time to keep from taking any damage.  Normally in a Street Fighter game, you hold back to block, which prevents all but a very minimal amount of damage to be dealt to the blocker.  Parrying is risky and it’s hard to pull off.  This fight shows Daigo playing Ken vs. Justin playing Chun li, and Justin is dominating the fight.  He brings Daigo’s Ken down to just a sliver of health and then executes a “Super Art” move.  The Super Arts hit a bunch of times and generally spells trouble for your opponent.  In this specific instance, the Super Art would be overkill.  But then Daigo puts his parrying skills to work:

Did you hear that crowd?  This is the beautiful world I’m talking about.  I’m happy for the smaller moments of bliss that Street Fighter has given me directly, but man, it’d be cool to be in that world too.

Expect a new entry in this feature every Wednesday in October.  Here are a list of subjects I’d like to hit, but I’m open to suggestions.

Week 2 (8/12) – Saturation and missing franchises (a return of the 1990s)

Week 3 (8/19) – Juvenile attitudes toward sex and violence and shitty, shitty stories

Week 4 (8/26) – Where I think there’s a TV series in the competitive scene

If anyone would like to play with me, I play Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and Street Fighter III: Third Strike: On-line Edition on the PS3.  My handle is SWF4815162342.

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