So I got Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition and predictably, I destroyed my arm with it. Again. For the third time in 18 months.
"You overpaid for my shoto ass!"
I couldn't be happier. ...well, aside from how it took me 54 continues to finish the game with C.Viper on Hardest, but that's another story of another dark, dark day.
But lo! I got the disc version of the game for posterity, in case my PS3 ever dies years after PSN is no longer available. Apparently I was supposed to get extra costumes for the four "new" characters as a bonus. I got nothing of the sort.
I saw Legend of Chun-Li in theaters. Capcom owes me. So two weeks ago, I sent them a nifty little email:
Dear Capcom,
I purchased a brand new, disc-based version of Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition for PS3 on Saturday, Aug. 27, and I did not receive the alternate costumes for Yang, Yun, Oni and Evil Ryu. According to information culled from the Playstation Store, "it is not necessary to download this content" if I have the disc. I have purchased most of the other downloadable costumes for this series and am familiar with the process of getting them to work; said costumes simply do not appear as an option on the character select screen.
Were the costumes supposed to be available when I first turned on the game? Or did they come as a download code that simply didn't find its way into my new copy? Either way, would it be possible to rectify this issue, perhaps with a download code?
I have been a loyal Capcom customer since the late '80s and I own all three revisions of Street Fighter IV (and basically any game with the Street Fighter logo). I even saw both Street Fighter the Movie and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li in a theater, so for a guy like me, not having a full compliment of alternate costumes has me bummed out.
Please forgive me if this e-mail has been sent to the wrong address, and if possible, please forward it to where it needs to go.
Parishioners of Catholic churches (and possibly other variations of Christianity as well) are asked to donate a little bit of money to their place of worship during services. This is called an offering. When I was a kid, they just passed around a bunch of wicker baskets and people threw in a dollar or two each. I haven't been to church in a few years, so I was surprised when I found this lying around my house:
Apparently, offerings are now given in envelopes with the family name on them, possibly so parishioners can keep track of their donations for tax purposes.
So why am I posting this on a blog about video games, you might ask? Well, if you take the illustration in the lower left hand corner and flip it sideways...
HADOKEN!
The power of Christ engulfs you, apparently.
For comparison:
From the Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES) manual
Whenever I used to wear my Street Fighter shirts to church, I always felt out of place and just a touch blasphemous. Little did I know that Jesus is a Ryu player.
Capcom’s seminal side scrolling brawler Final Fight helped revitalize arcades in 1989, but by 1991, the arcade scene was all but finished. Final Fight began its life as Street Fighter ’89, the sequel to 1987’s relatively unknown one-on-one fighting game, Street Fighter. Ironically, it would be the true continuation of the Street Fighter series that would bring arcades back from the brink of death.
The immortal title screen.
When Street Fighter II: The World Warrior found its way into arcades in early March 1991, video parlors were no longer the domain of the unwashed gaming elite: From novices to power players, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior brought together the masses with its colorful selection of unique brawlers, from a thong-clad Russian wrestler with a Mohawk and an India yoga master who could stretch his limbs across the screen and a deformed Brazilian beastman who could harness the power of electricity through his skin.
SFII machines started cropping up everywhere, from laundromats to pizzerias. I even discovered one unit placed under a pavilion in a Floridian park, where I battled and defeated a noble Ryu player.
An SFII aracde unit.
Street Fighter II put competitive play on the map, something that up to that point had been a rarity. Players could finally determine who had the more advanced skills, and by the time Street Fighter II: Champion Edition came out a year later, gamers could fight mirror matches for a truly fair matchup. There’s no telling how much money the SFII faithful poured into arcade machines, but it’s a safe bet that Street Fighter II units were nearly as profitable as some fast food vendors at the time.
SFII was also responsible for many of the fighting game conventions that players nowadays take for granted, including half- and quarter- circle motions and charging attacks. Most fighting games released in the wake of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior have utilized similar controller inputs.
Street Fighter II spawned the one-on-one fighting game craze of the early and mid ‘90s and – however unintentionally – gave birth to games like Killer Instinct, Weapon Lord, SNK’s long list of fighters, and perhaps the series’ biggest rival, Mortal Kombat. Tensions ran high between the MK crowd and the Street Fighter faithful, but given that the latest lukewarm Mortal Kombat entry resorted to the inclusion of D.C. Comics superheroes whereas Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter IV almost singlehandedly revived the 2D fighting genre, it’s clear which side “won” the debate.
HADOKEN!
After FIVE separate Street Fighter II upgrades, all but the hardest of the hardcore were interested in the likes of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the final version of the game which hit the arcades in 1994. Perhaps with good reason, players begged for a truly new Street Fighter experience. In 1997, Capcom tried and arguably failed to recreate the ol’ SFII magic with Street Fighter III: The New Generation. While SFIII was technically superior to its predecessor in the eyes of true fighting fanatics, with its unfamiliar and frankly weird cast, it failed to capture the attention of casual players, who had moved on to the likes of Tekken 3 and other 3D fighters at that point. The third incarnation of Street Fighter III – Third Strike – is perhaps the greatest fighting game ever made, but by the year 2000, the Street Fighter series had become inaccessible to casual fans. The arcades where ailing again, and Capcom simply didn’t have it in them for another SFII-style revival.
Go Chun-Li, go!
We all know how the story ends: The arcades have gone bankrupt sans a few Dance Dance Revolution games, and the console versions of SFIV harken back to the days of SFII. To some extent, casual players have made a comeback, but not nearly at the level of the classic fighting action found in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. But hope springs eternal and the cast of SFII will never die. Maybe one day, another Street Fighter title will captivate the masses once more and bring arcades back to life.
* * *
Don't forget to vote for your top three games of all time! Just leave a comment and I'll mention your choices in a future article here at Wordsmith VG!
Tomorrow: A down-to-earth #1 title!
* * *
This article is dedicated to Claire and Chris Shortle and the fight against cancer. You don't know them, but if you're religious, please keep them in your prayers. And if not, play a round of Street Fighter II in their name; anything is appreciated.
Since the days of Ducktails, Megaman and Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers, I've been enamoured with all things Capcom. In 1992, the SNES version of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior came along and exploded that passion into a near obsession, and by the time I was entering the fifth grade, Chun-Li, Ryu, Guile and the Red Cyclone himself, Zangief, had become my eternal heroes.
The other kids in my class were starting to gain an appreciation for rolemodels like Anne Frank, Ben Franklin and probably some other people who's names escape me right now, but may or may not have "Frank" in their name; I like those historic heroes too, but it would be a massive lie to say that their attitudes and values affected my development as a human being more than Street Fighter's perky pugilists. Before you close out the window and never visit this blog again, consider this: While they're not exactly three dimensional characters on their own, the core values of Street Fighter's good guys are actually an excellent guide for living one's life in a moral, fulfilling way. Ryu represents discipline, power and persistence without overindulgence; Dhalsim is full of love for his family; Guile proves that revenge is all-consuming and letting go of hate will settle your soul; and Zangief loves vodka. Also, I'd like to see Ben Franklin wrestle a grizzly bear, shoot fireballs or flip upside down and show everyone his underwear. He can't. Therefore the Street Fighters are better.
It's a dream match of mine.
I think I went temporarily insane when I noticed that my Capcom heroes had started appearing on television one Saturday morning at 7:30 when the oversized feet of none other than Megaman went jogging across my screen - WITHOUT the NES powered up! I say "I think" I went crazy because other than the show itself, I remember nothing of the next seven hours. I woke up in my neighbor's tree house with only Megaman 1, 3 and 6 covering my wet, naked body.
Here's the show's into, ripped from the Megaman DVDs I bought years later. And in case you didn't know, here's a quick description of the plot: Built by Dr. Light, Rock and his sister Roll are soon recruited into the war against the evil Dr. Wily. Rock is transformed into a super fighting robot known as Megaman! Roll... was given a vacuum attachment! Fight! Mega Man! For everlasting peace!
Truth be told, the Megaman TV show isn't exactly Shakespeare meets Terminator like I would have hoped for, but it was a decent way to spend a Saturday morning while chowing down on last night's leftover pizza. There are only a few glaring continuity errors, like Protoman being evil and Gustman and Cutman having a starring role; everyone knows those two sucked horribly at life, even in the game. If Dr. Wily had taken the time to build new henchmen instead of just reconstructing the old ones when they inevitably got their cans kicked by the Blue Bomber, he just might have been able to take down Dr. Light's lapdog and rule the world.
Oh well. C'est la vie.
The Capcom cartoons didn't end with Megaman; soon, Street Fighter received its own animated makeover, ignoring far more things in the game's established cannon than the Megaman show ever did.
Based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia film of the same name, Street Fighter is the action-packed tale of Lt. William Guile's battle to take down the evil Shadowloo/Shadowlaw terrorists lead by the dastardly M. Bison. If you're an astute gamer, you know what's wrong with that last statement: It's based on the 1994 Street Fighter movie. That means that Guile is the main character instead of Ryu and all the good guys work together like some sort of fireballing, face-punching basketball team. Still, the Street Fighter cartoon was an okay waste of a half hour and I got to see my heroes battle it out in full animated glory.
Now the Darkstalkers cartoon... that's where things started going very, very wrong.
Darkstalkers is the messed up tale of a little boy who hangs out with a super hot catwoman named Felicia. Boy and cat battle the evil alien Pyron for control of the planet Earth, with the aid of "good guys" like wolfman Jon Talbot and huge, stupid Frankenstein monster Victor, all while Felicia is so hot that steam pours off of her all the time.
Darkstalkers was a relatively unknown Capcom property at the time it took the cartoon plunge, so I'm not really sure what the reasoning was behind the move. The Darkstalkers show is a re-imagining of the arcade original, toning down the mature themes and sexualized atmosphere that made the game so appealing in the first place. Felicia is the focus of this mess, but she's also picked up some little boy along the way who has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the established Darkstalker mythos. Also Felicia is wearing more clothing than in the game, which wasn't too hard to pull off but was still very annoying to me when I was 12. Felicia and the stupid kid run around trying to stop the "bad" Darkstalkers, which is basically everyone else. Honestly, I wouldn't have watched this cartoon if it didn't have "Darkstalkers" stamped on it, but at least it was entertaining to see peppy animated versions of my favorite Night Warriors.
Overall, the CapToons provided a decent, if occasionally mentally challenged supplement to my daily gaming, despite their reckless abandonment of sacred cannon and disregard for, uh, actual quality.
For a lot of us, it took last year's silver screen stinker Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li to make us realize just how good we had it with the 1994 Van Damme vehicle, Street Fighter: The Movie. People like me, however, saw the quirky charm of lovable Adams Family frontman Raul Julia taking on the role of M. Bison - a character who really puts the "dick" in dictator - and the theater-shattering, Godzilla-like battle between SF titans Zangief and E. Honda. No one is quite sure why military man Guile was the star of the show instead of Ryu, or for that matter, why the blond bomber who was born in the USA like Bruce Springsteen had a thick Austrian accent. Regardless, SF: The Movie was a silly popcorn flick packed with cheap laughs and high-flying kicks, and even though it distorted the Street Fighter mythos, it didn't shatter it into five million crappy pieces like The Legend of Chun-Li did.
Though Street Fighter: The Movie enjoys a bit of a cult following (as evidenced by it recently appearing on Blu-Ray), the PlayStation and Saturn versions of the game based on the film have slightly fewer fans. Okay, it's basically only me, and my fandom is one third nostalgia and one third love of all things Street Fighter; the rest is probably just stupidity.
HADOKEN!
In 1995, my childhood friend Tom (the same chap who would soon introduce me to the wonderful, brazenly vulgar world of Duke Nukem3D) called me out of the blue to tell me that he had just come home from Blockbuster Video with a rented PlayStation and two games: ESPN Extreme Games and Street Fighter: The Movie. Along with a third friend, Ryan, we tore into those two games all night. After endless Street Fighter II upgrades, with its totally new graphics and sounds and even a new character, SF: The Movie was a breath of fresh air the likes of which I was desperate for that point.
Chun-Li rules, even in this movie.
I had to have a PlayStation of my own. For Christmas that year, mom dropped a ridiculous 300 bones on a generation one PSX that would, two years later, go bust. The first two games I got were, predictably, ESPN Extreme Games and Street Fighter: The Movie. Were it not for Tom and Street Fighter the Movie, I might not have gotten on the PlayStation train when I did; and I wouldn't have been introduced to staple series like Tekken, Ridge Racer, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstakers and more.
I was going to tell you that in Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game the music doesn't really fit the action, the controls are horrendous and that the characters look and sound like stunt doubles of the ones seen in the film, but instead I'm going to suggest that you pick up Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game if you see it at a used a game shop. Regardless of the shortcomings of this title, it offered something that was unique and fresh at the time it was released. Of the first generation PlayStation titles, this one holds up much better than many of them, including the original Battle Arena Toshinden or even the aforementioned ESPN Extreme Games.
So do me a favor: Sit down, pick Guile, and kick Bison's ass so hard that the next Bison wannabe is going to feel it! Now who wants to go home, and who wants to go with me?
If you're an American between the ages of five and 17 years old, I'm sorry. About 95 percent of you either went back to school last week or you'll be frantically buying a new wardrobe today or tomorrow and marching back into a classroom sometime in the next 72 hours. I feel your pain; I'm a certified English Language Arts teacher and if the economy hadn’t taken a headshot or 17 recently, I'd probably be captain of my first classroom right now instead of selling computers at Best Buy.
No more Thrill Kill!?
Your parents probably told you that you can’t play as many video games during the school year as you did during the scorcher days of the summer, which is a total bummer. And for you old people out there like me, just imagine how it would feel if someone told YOU that you can’t play Street Fighter every night! ...wait, that's called college. So to anyone lamenting the loss of their gaming hours, keep your chin up high and take note: There are people out there who think gaming holds an important place on the classroom.
One of them is me.
Last year I created a blog called “The Learning Game” as part of a grad school class. The blog focused on how video games could be intertwined with education to form something that the student AND the teacher could get excited about. In honor of students everywhere going back to school, I’ve imported and enhanced the The Learning Game to Wordsmith VG in its entirety. Think of it as the difference between the original Metroid on the NES and the Metroid: Zero Mission remake on the Gameboy Advance, only this time instead of stupid alien space pirates taking over some alien planet, it’s all gravy. Besides, you’re getting two posts a day, which is more than 1.99 times more words for you to read (or ignore)!
Pull up a chair and get ready to learn something from, class.
Examine the possibility of video games making the move from entertainment to educational. It's still far off, but the idea is much more feasable than it was 10 years ago.
If you’ve got some time to spare after class, take a gander at this essay comparing the world of Shigasato Itoi’s Famicom (NES) classic MOTHER 1 to the endeavors of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts characters. There’s more than meets the eye going on here in this progressively poingent essay. It was the first post here on Wordsmith VG, so if you missed it, now's your chance to get a little more studying in!
If you ever wanted to beat up one of the characters from Les Misérables, here’s your chance.
Arm Joe, created by an amateur programmer from Japan, is a one-on-one fighting game in the same vein as Street Fighter II and King of Fighters. Based on the Les Misérables musical, the game features anime style representations of Les Mis characters like Jean Valjean, Enjolras, Marius, Cosette, Éponine, Thénardier and Javert. The physical embodiment of judgment serves as the game’s final boss.
In case you’re wondering, the name Arm Joe is a parody of the play’s Japanese title, Ah Mojou, meaning “Ah, cruelty.”
As someone who has daydreamed about a one-on-one fighting game adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and a first person, 3D version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in just knowing that Arm Joe exists. However, the game itself has some control and balance issues: Some characters are hopelessly underpowered and others can easily win matches using a single attack over and over again. The graphics and sound are excellent, though, and overall it’s a pretty decent game. Given the fact that Arm Joe is a free download, it seems a little inappropriate to criticize it too harshly.
Arm Joe brings the characters of Les Misérables to life in a way that’s virtually impossible in any other medium. Introducing students to Arm Joe might just be the key to getting some of them interested in the novel or the musical, or it could be used as a sort of enrichment exercise after finishing Les Misérables in class.
Purists might complain that this game isn’t a faithful adaptation of the Les Misérables novel or musical – and they would be correct. Just consider Robojean, the cyborg version of Valjean who fires rockets at his opponents, and Ponpon, a bunny creature who has nothing to do with the Les Mis mythos who is inexplicably tossed in with the rest of the characters. However, a creative teacher might take the opportunity to discuss the differences and similarities between the works, as well as talking about how ideas, stories and sensibilities change as they move to new kinds of media. After all, there are some key alterations between the stage version of Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s original novel, so changes in new adaptations of the story are to be expected.
Teachers might also use Arm Joe to help explain the concept of parody to their students, given the humorous aspects of the game in contrast to the seriousness of the musical and novel.
I hope that more game makers, both independent and commercial, will use classic novels as inspiration for future video games. Faithful game adaptations of the classics might be one of the stepping stones in using gaming to educate our students.
A lot of gamers think that Mortal Kombat, or one of its many sequels, was the bloodiest video game of the early and mid ‘90s. Sega CD owners, however, know better.
Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side, perhaps the most blood-soaked video game ever to grace a Sega console, is a drastic improvement over the original Genesis cart in virtually every way. Solid controls, dark, foreboding visuals, a rockin' soundtrack and yes, gallons of the red stuff makes the sequel to Eternal Champions not only the best fighting game on the Sega CD, but one of the greatest fighting games of the post Street Fighter II era. A large, genuinely interesting cast of characters comes together in one of the most absorbing storylines ever to grace the genre. The gameplay is deep and the player is rewarded for strategy, so button mashers need not apply.
Challenge from the Dark Side is also crammed full of extras, from hidden backgrounds and more than a dozen secret combatants to insane combos and devilishly clever finishing moves that often turn dying into an art form. The ever-present danger of a sudden, flesh-rending death while in mid-battle pumps up the element of danger, and the fear of being torn to shreds by the very background in which you fight is reason enough to win the match or die trying.
This is one of the best, most challenging, and most engrossing titles I've ever played. I loved it when it came out more than a decade ago, and I'm still caught in its mighty, blood-soaked grip to this day. Seriously, how cool is it to lay the smackdown on a futuristic cyborg kick boxer with a film-noir style, trench coat wearing ex-cat burglar from the '20s, then, seconds later, battle a Neanderthal as pterodactyls zoom around behind you? I have to hold back tears of gaming bliss just thinking about it!
Stellar gameplay and a host of other reasons that keep you playing way, WAY past your bedtime make Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side a must own for anyone who has a Sega CD unit. Just do yourself a favor and don't get too attached to the cast.
This is one of the best, most challenging, and most engrossing titles I've ever played. I loved it when it came out more than a decade ago, and I'm still caught in its mighty, blood-soaked grip to this day. Seriously, how cool is it to lay the smackdown on a futuristic cyborg kick boxer with a film-noir style, trench coat wearing ex-cat burglar from the '20s, then, seconds later, battle a Neanderthal as pterodactyls zoom around behind you? I have to hold back tears of gaming bliss just thinking about it!