Showing posts with label Street Fighter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Street Fighter. Show all posts

Street Fighter Movie Sequel as imagined by AI!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBgy-0WIAECCYF?format=png&name=360x360

 Hey, the AI Curio Bot has had a revamp as of late, and is now more likely to produce recognizable faces than unrecognizable soup.  So me, in one of the accounts where I didn't get carried away and created stuff that got me blocked, I've been creating imagined casts for stuff to keep me from trying to create stuff that will get me blocked. Here's my idea of what more or less what a Sequel to Street Fighter from 1994 might have looked like.

My idea is, they release Street Fighter II in roughly 1997, and I imagined actors that might have been around and that might have been cast in these roles and characters that existed back then, so no Kimberly or El Fuerte played by Jennifer Lawrence and  Diego Luna. Anyway let's go.

 

Guy (Dante Basco)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBYR-cWAAEUgvN?format=png&name=360x360https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBYR0iXkAAxvlq?format=png&name=360x360

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBYSQfXoAA2xnN?format=png&name=360x360 

 Hugo(Shaq)

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBR3_AWYAQgcyv?format=png&name=small 

 

 Shadow Lady(Ming Na Wen)

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcBBHAGX0AAel40?format=png&name=360x360

Poison (Candis Cayne) 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcAoAoLXoAYMMOI?format=png&name=small

Gouken (Sonny Chiba)

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcAjK8TWYAEPjVV?format=png&name=small

Sakura (Thuy Thrang)

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcAfhl_WYAAqVTF?format=png&name=360x360

(Cody) Austin St. John 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb_45lLXEAEz71y?format=png&name=small

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb_45boXoAIu3kI?format=png&name=small

Elias Koteas as Alex

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb-PMSNWQAIBaJs?format=png&name=small

Patrick Stewart as Senoh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb90F0zWQAEuBNl?format=png&name=small

Brad Dourif as Necro

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb9TVBgXwAA5fL1?format=png&name=small

Daniel Berdhardt as Gil

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb9K4w4XoAAHMtD?format=png&name=small

Talisa Soto as Rose 

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb9GX-nWAAUEhO7?format=png&name=small

Neil Patrick Harris as Eagle

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb9AQ1OWQAAaqIg?format=png&name=small

Aaliya as  Elena

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb85Cj8WAAUvWzk?format=png&name=small

Mark Dacascos as  Akuma

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb8vdNIXkAAAIkF?format=png&name=small

Ving Rhames as Birdie

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb8qcacXEAIqvff?format=png&name=small



There's more but they're not as good and you can look at them here! Now you may say this is bad casting or the costumes are bad but...yes. This is what a Street Fighter sequel would probably have been like.  I will will it into the world.


AV Bishoujo Girl Fighting is a harder Strip Fighter 2


Copyrights truly make the best games.

 Look, I never set out to make make Fighting Female July a month where I talk about sexualized fighting games, nor is it my belief  that such a topic having covered mostly that in it's 4 year's run  some kind of statement on women in fighting games in general. There is a lot of that, yes. A lot a lot a lot a lot. But it's not ALL of it.

In my case, at least, it's more to do with circumstance. This whole thing began when I played a few bad rounds of Seifuku Desetsu,  and before I knew it I was looking for female fighitng games of all types. I WANT to try the Melty Bloods and ?s of life, but so far I keep falling into the Variable Geos and Strip Fighters. What's a blogger to do?

So, moving forward. AV Bishojo Girl Fighting is an NES pirate game by the same team who made the old NES Pirate Street Fighter 4 and Kart Fighter. That right there could be it's own review, if you know at least a couple of the things I mentioned. NES wasn't the ideal home for fighting games, and there's a reason there's so very few of them on the system outside of illegal pirate games.

So the gimmick on this one is: girls from completely unrelated franchises, with their names mangled or completely changed, all fight for supremacy. Chun Li made it mostly unscathed. Ranma from Ranma 1/2 becomes Ramma. Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon is now Sugico.  Tracy/Bunny from SF4 now have a 3rd Playboy Cat/Rabbit in Marry, which makes her a clone of a clone as they all come from Erina Goldsmith of Variable Geo fame.
Look, I don't know much about Ranma 1/2, but I'm pretty sure there's no Vivians there.


But that's not all that crosses over from that, a handful of stages from that made it into this, including the Royal Navy Battleship and the  Factory. Horribly enough, Marry's stage IS her old stage, Circus Car Show, but it's now switched musics with Jungle bridge stage, too. Some of these SEEM like they should be on SF4, too, such as New York(Sailor Sugico's stage, somehow)  and Taj Mahal.
Sailor Overpriced Housing!



 Characters LOOK like they're from disparate franchises, with  inconsistent sprite sizes that make some characters  look ridiculously taller than the others.
Maybe they should have called this one Capcom Fighting Jam 4.


So you got a very basic set of punches, kicks and specials. The specials can be pretty hard to pull off, and sometimes fail to actually connect, which means that you should focus on the first thing.

So you go toe to toe with these girls, and if the other girl loses a round, you generally see an image of a girl having a wardrobe malfunction, and after  the final round you will see her all naked and stuff. Pretty sure there was one where it happened backwards, though. Of note that the girls are never actually the girl you're fighting. Not even slightly.
Although, let's be fair here: neither do the vs screens most of the time.


So, as you see, this is exactly the same as Strip Fighter 2, which forces us to confront a reality in which not only did someone play SF2...but then they said "that has some good ideas, let's put them in  a NES bootleg game". It even also ends by running you through all the pics of girls you'd previously seen. Thankfully the ingame game doesn't try to be sexy, other than tarting up Chun Li and Ranma Ramma a bit. I wonder when GameS Studios is going to get on this one's case.
But then again, maybe their vision was of a ditsy drunk tourist called Jean who hangs around the Taj Mahal fighting people.


The AI of this game, though...damn. Some enemies are manageable, but my run as Shmailor Fercury had me run into some relentless characters. Playing defensive against this guys is a fool's errand. Blocking is hit and miss, specials sometimes to less damage than normals...it's pretty messy. So when the AI gets cheap the only thing you can reliably count on is constantly spamming one of the punch/kick buttons, or jumping back, and trying to hit the enemy as he/she approaches. If you get your timing right you can get their health down pretty good like this, but watch out, as after a couple of hits they get dizzy. Your first instinct is going to be to rush in and get a free hit, but don't. They ALWAYS end their dizzy state before you get there.


In terms of play, there's no multiplayer,  and the only option in options is difficulty, and even then cranked at maximum. Humorously enough, the continue screen doesn't let you continue OR quit, and you can't get out of the ending either. Oh, and if you want to get the low color hentai images, you better play the hard dificulty, too.

Vivian was later sacrificed for killing and eating Chun Li.

So basically this game is like a harder, more glitchy Strip FIghter 2. Completists might get a bit of a kick, and you may get a bit of a rise out of how bootleggy the whole thing is.(The start menu music is from Sailor Moon, and when you pick something a jingle from Sonic plays, I'm kind of surprised the New York Stage isn't ripped off from the NES TMNT Tournament fighter's better New York stage). However the game is too broken, too buggy, and too brutal to be any decent amount of fun. It also doesn't have multiplayer, so basically...no, don't play AV Bishojo. Instead, get the  version of this characters for Mugen, get in their files and change their names, and put them all in one game, and browse Hentai Foundry while  playing it. It's bound to be more balanced, have better A.I., and the porn will be better, too.

Fighter, Female, Black #13


 (According to an article made last year there have only ever 13 playable female characters. The list doesn't include fighting game characters for reasons I don't agree with. As such, I have decided to put a spotlight on 14 of these characters, to see what is being dismissed here. There are MORE than that, but I admit, not MUCH more.)

Laura Matsuda

Game
Street Fighter 5

Bio
She's Sean's Sister. And Sean's like...Ryu's son? Or Akuma's? I don't know, it was a pretty boring anime.

How Black is she?
She's Half Black Half Japanese, but instead of representing Japan in a beauty contest(man is THAT gonna be old when this is posted...), she's representing Brazil in Street Fighter.

Prominence
I'm writing this in November 2015 and haven't even decided WHEN it'll launch. You tell ME if Laura is now the most important Street Fighter character in the world.

Fight examples

Flaws

The SF guys always struggled with how to properly stereotype Brazil. But after 20 years, they finally figured it out: Wrap a Batucada girl in the Flag of Brazil.

Like, this chick obviously has had more surgery than Poison, has both long flowing locks AND cornrows,  and probably shoots Favelas out of her butt for all I know.

Pros

Instead of being yet another wiggle warrior, she was actually given a rough moveset including lots of grapple moves. That counts for something, right?

Honorable mentions go to the 2-3 females in Capoeira Fighter, a chick I'm pretty sure was Black in Bloody Roar, and any others I may have missed. There's a lot of fighting games out there, and when I think I've seen them all, I run into more. The point of this was never to say that representation is a non-issue, but that you don't need to dismiss what you already have to ask for more.

Next Month, 13 female fighting game Puerto Ricans. Oh, there are none? Well, 13 Puerto Rican playable females in all of videogames. Neither, huh? Uh...13 Puerto Rican playable characters? 13 Puerto Rican at all characters?

Fuck.



Black, Female, Fighter #8

(According to an article made last year there have only ever 13 playable female characters. The list doesn't include fighting game characters for reasons I don't agree with. As such, I have decided to put a spotlight on 14 of these characters, to see what is being dismissed here. There are MORE than that, but I admit, not MUCH more.)
How Black is she?


Elena

Game
Street Fighter

Bio

How Black is she?

Well, she's certainly from Africa, but she's never been displayed as having strong african features. Compared to Birdie and  Balrog, anyway. But Birdie wasn't always Black. ANYWAY...

Prominence

Elena's an on again off again character. She was in SF3, skipped 4, went to Tekken vs Street Fighter, then had her assets reused in a later version of SF4.

Fight examples

Flaws
If you wanted more out of your black characters than a dance fighter, or if you wanted more out of your African characters than just "girl in loincloth" then you're shet outta luck.

Pros

Still Better than T.Hawk.

Also, her lanky and tall build and leg only moveset make her unique, even among dance-fighters. She's not a bombshell like Christie and Adrianna. You can take her seriously even if being naked all the time is her M.O.

The 7 games in the Street Fighter series Capcom wants you to forget




Street. Fighter. 5. For a few years there, it felt like the series was never going to move beyond 2, but boy oh boy, has time flown while kicking and spinning in place.

It's kind of amazing that the granddaddy of modern fighters is only five games old. After all, later serieses like Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Soul Calibur are looking at 10, 7 and 6 entries.

I guess you could say Capcom prefers quality over quantity. But it'd be more accurate to say it's easier to make a bunch of bad games, then produce some new shotos and everyone will forget. Here's the five games you can fondly look back on and say "yep, them sure was bad times."

Street Fighter

Dropping the Mike.


It's kind of hard to fault the original SF for being a shitty fighting game, because a lot of what made fighting games non shitty did not yet exist or was very hard to do. In fact, the game was originally controlled by punching it, which means it actively counted on your hate.

But it's on this list, because in it's anniversary, Capcom released a big box of filled with pretty much every game, anime and movie based on Street Fighter BUT Street Fighter. That's a sad way to spend a birthday.

 

 

 

Street Fighter Movie

THE ONLY FIGHT IN THE GAME.

No, not Street Fighter THE movie( The Game...see below). Street Fighter Movie is an FMV game with some fighting game frosting, based on The Anime of Street Fighter 2. You play the role of a robot quietly stalking fighters and learning their moves, and near the end you can have a fight with Ryu.

So, you know, the next time they give Chun Li her own movie, remember that they gave a generic robot from the anime a game all to himself, and that's more solo game that they ever gave Ryu or Guile.

Street Fighter Mouse Generation

Why, yes, that IS Barrack Obama. It was...it was a weird time. Liking an American President hadn't been easy in 8 years and...

Sometimes I play fighting games on a keyboard, okay? Sometimes you can't wait of your arcade sticks arrive to take your MUGEN for a spin.

But a few years ago, Capcom tried for something even less good, with Mouse Generation. The game, playable online, had you do motions with the mouse.

It also had a feature to swap the parts of the characters, so you could put Chun Li's legs to Bison's torso, creating presumably a self hating abomination.

You could also swap body parts with characters from anime like Cyborg 009 and fish and shit. And now you can't, because it's offline.

 

Street Fighter Ex

I...mean to high five you ! It's not my fault my hands are blocky Hulk gloves!

 

 Street Fighter 4 is considered the serie's entry point into the 3rd dimension. After all, we all remember Street Fighter 3's beautiful 2d sprites.

However that's because most fans tend to outright ignore Ex, a fighting game that awkwardly bumbled the series into the poligonal world of the Playstations 1 and 2.

For 2 games(or 3? Is Ex + Alpha it's own game?), the series had the classic fighters in a morose, endingless, floaty mess of a game. In the end Arika, who developed the game for Capcom, went it's way and took every character they made for it.

Street Fighter the Movie

No.

When you do a big movie you do a tie in game. But what if the source material IS a game? Then you leave it alone.

Hell naw! You make a game of the movie anyway! And so, since Street Fighter the movie was based on a precise fighting game, the one that set the bar, naturally they got the developers of unplayable mess Time Killers to handle the game. That's like getting M Knigt Shyamalan to direct Star Wars. The fact he's directed stuff before is evidence only to him being wrong for it.

The gameplay is the worst of any Street Fighter until you can prove you played Mouse Generation. An infinite can be a simple as "hurricane kick then dragon punch."

 

Streef Fighter The Movie also takes a cue from Mortal Kombat, with digitized sprites (that's fancy talk for "photographed images")of the cast that was willing/alive. It doesn't feel like playing the movie, though. It feels like somebody vomited Mortal Kombat all over my Street fighter.

Street Fighter 2 Tiger Handheld

WHERE'S SAGAT? HE'D LOVE THIS!
Swift strategy, multiple characters, excellent music...this and many more elements that made Street Fighter 2 a success where completely absent from the Tiger handheld .

For those who were born after the towers fell, Tiger handheld machine were basically as powerful as calculators, and their games just as fun. For around 20 dollars, you could get this individual games, and while there were many original games, many were licensed franchises.

So obviously, you slap a Street Fighter sticker in a that sucker and you cash in. For those who didn't buy a console, didn't ever see the inside of an arcade, and whose parents couldn't tell the difference between Mortal Kombat and Myst, this might have been their first "taste" of Street Fighter.

Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter

 
Cylsim forever! <3 br="">
 Okay, hear me out. I'm not saying this game is BAAAAD bad. Just...

You know, X-Men vs Street Fighter was a pretty cool game. It was Street Fighter's first real crossover game, and kicked off the Vs series, of which Tatsunoko, Tekken, and Snk saw entries.

And most importantly, each game in the vs Marvel series had new characters that hadn't been Sprites for other games. Obviously XvSF had Rogue and Sabertooth and Cammy and Guile, Marvel vs Capcom had Venom and Captain Commando, Mvc 2 had The Cactus Guy and Cable.

But MvsSF suffered from a bad case of not giving a fuck, so it had none inherently new characters, unless you think putting a coat of dark on Sakura makes her a "new" character. In fact, it has the same final boss, with a somehow robotier Akuma as dressing.

 

So while I'm sure it's a perfectly playable entry into the versus series, in a RELATIVE way, compared to other games in the series, it FUCKIN SUCKS!

You may have noticed 7 is larger than 5, which may indicate Street Fighter has more misses than hits. So I want to be fair : there's been a fair amount of non-numbered entries that have been fairly good, such as the Alpha series. And most of these games are better than, say, getting punched in the asshole(Not YOU, Sf1 and SF The Movie! Sit down.). In the end, we love Street Fighter, even if one fourth of the cast is Ryu with a different head and the vanilla versions become outdated in 6 months. Even if our favorite characters, haven't been seen in close to two decades. We wouldn't care if Sf made a bad game only if we did care about SF at all.

 

 

Unlicenced Lawyer : Van Damme's Guile

There once was a time, then a Street Fighter movie did not exist. Not a single one. There were not enough cartoons and animes and comics about Street Fighter to fill a Wikia. There was no Alpha, no Ex, no "Assassin's Fist" and certainly no "VS Tekken". There was only "2", 12 characters whose lives as far as we knew revolved solely around hurting each other in.
Ok, there might have been some.

In that world, full of optimism and potential, the announcement of a Street Fighter movie did exist. Back then, we weren't "tired" of remakes and adaptations(I guess with the record breaking millions these adaptations are making now, you could argue our tiredness can only carry us so far.) A Street Fighter movie was not a horrible suggestion: it was the alternative to no Street Fighter movie.

So the movie was made in 1994. They made some...choices with it. Some of those choices do not sit well with the most hardcore fans, who's clinging to a "sola interactiva" philosophy is as commendable as it is ill advised.
"They ruined T. Hawk!" yelled no one.

There's plenty of deviations that I would not have done, should this have been MY Street Fighter movie. As many, the 20 years since have mellowed my views on it, perhaps nostalgia catching hold, but that doesn't mean we can't have a better version. However, I am here to speak on behalf of one of the movies most fought about elements, it's lead character  Guile, played by Jean Claude Van Damme.

It's easy to see why they would be angry. Of all the National charicatures in Street FIghter, Guile is easilly the harder to screw up: A big, American military man. Why they went with a guy with a heavy Brussels accent, we might never know. We do suspect it having to do with getting a big name in there. Yeah, they where obviously only thinking about only the almighty dollar. But what do we know about Guile? Well, he looks like this.



Wait a minute: American military, huge muscles...early 90s... things that were popular... people with jowls and pronounced chins...


If you think about it, it makes sense to think that, when trying to represent an "American" martial arts/stock character, Capcom's designers would look at what was popular in American Cinema, and nothing was more popular than Arnold at the time. You can accuse Capcom of being ripoff artists, and you'd be right about that. But not only where they not the only ones, but they where pretty good at it, too. They put John Matrix in the hair of some nazi guy from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and then boom! New character.

In this sense, Jean Claude Van Damme is the perfect choice for Guile:  a thickly accented action movie star. There's no way they would have gotten Arnold at the height of his career to play a big, cartoony setting like this, at a time where he was selling movies for himself. And besides, as far as having someone  doing stuff like this:

It makes sense to bring in a guy who can do stuff like this:



I say we have all been a bit unfair to Street Fighter: The Movie in this sense. Now, was giving Van Damme a moving speech a bad idea? Maybe. Was making his pants blue instead of Green a betrayal of SF cannon? Perhaps. Should The Boxer have been working for Bison and the Russian Guy have not been? Definitively.  Is the movie perfect? No. Is Van Damme the Worst Possible Guile? Not on your life, bud.

Now, who wants to hear about how I think Charlie should be played by Tom Cruise?
You know I'm right!


5 things modern fighting games should not be doing.







I remember it like it was yesterday. My father and I walked into this place where he used to buy old issues of various magazines. And out in the corner, there she was. Street Fighter 2. I was intrigued. I had seen coin op games before, sporadically, but Street Fighter was  a new game to me. One that I'd never played before. I begged for money, as children are wont to do. I sacrificed that coin to watch an Hindu Stereotype beat my American soldier stereotype to a pulp.

Since then fighting games have come a long way. THey've evolved, developed intricate storylines and new, radical playstyles.  They've become an entirely different beast.

In some ways. In other ways they're stuck 2 decades ago. My love for fighting games calls me to request that these 5
things become better, so that our beloved genre can continue to flourish and grow. So yes, I am salty that some fighting games still have...


5 Slideshow endings

When the fighting game boom took place, the capacity for them to tell a story was fairly limited by memory and space. There just wasn't enought to put much audios or, god-forbid,  videos. Most of the storytelling was done via little pictures and words that told the story. Any full featured endings or such would have eaten into other parts of the game, basically forcing you to cut out characters and stages to make room for endings to the characters   you were going to have.

This was true of all games back then, and now only true in little cellphone games. And fighting games, apparently. How else can you explain that as far back as 2011 Mortal Kombat was still having the bulk of it's arcade endings be  slideshows with pictures, now merely updated with narration?

I know MK also had an expansive, movie like in-engine story mode, which it inherited form it's predecessor. This does not make it better...it makes it worse. Because you can clearly see they have better in-engine capacities, motion capture,  voice acting and overall storytelling capacity that they did the last time they tried individual  theatrical endings  25 years ago, and they still decided they wheren't going to bother with anything but a narrator telling you what happened.
"And life...had never been sweatier."

If this seems like I'm being petty, think about this: if another, non-fighting game franchise did this kind of ending, whether it was Final Fantasy, Halo or Assasins Creed... would people put up with it? Because Mortal Kombat is one of the most recognizable fighting game franchises in the world, now owned by one of the larges corporations in the world, and they still settled for the storybook bullshit. It's not some little indie  game made by 2 people, why should it's endings
suggest otherwise?

Fighitng game endings give you a goal to fight towards. Mortal Kombat's little movie was a fine endeavor, but you can't even play as every character in it.

But in the fighting game world, even that seems like being extremely generous, when others can sell you...



4 Bare bones packages  with nothing but fighting

Holy shit, a new Killer Instinct! After all these years, Microsoft finally got on that! Now I can see what's been up with B. Orchid and the gang since they time-traveled and fought a devil gargoyle!

Except  somehow they manage to ship a game more bereft of options than  getting mugged by a Pokemon. What? Oh, whatever, at least I have King of Fighters XII.

How does this happen? A fighitng game used to compete by being a package that they tried to pile value on. Story mode, and other modes other than "fight other dudes, until you get tired." Killer instinct Gold was shipped to the Nintendo 64 filled with as many things as they could fit in to offset the fact you where playing Killer Instinct 2 on a controller  designed by the Spanish Inquisition to tear your ligaments.

Why  would something made 11 of years after Soul Calibur from Dreamcast decide that features aren't important? Why is offering replay value optional in this genre?


3 A disturbing obsession with guest characters.
"Hey, a loud, organized fight is technically an assasination if you planned to murder the guy."

Everything was fine in fighting game-opolis. The birds where singing their chip-tunes and the flowers were swaying in repeated animation cycles, their beautiful palettes entirely dependant on the button you pressed to choose them.And then Soul Calibur 2 happened. The sequel to one of the most well revieved fighitng games of it's time, SC2 did something that would innexplicably become a trend in fighitng games till today: It added characters that had nothing to do with the Soul Calibur franchise, specifically undead emo-demon Spawn from the Image comic of the same name for the Xbox, Link from Soul Calibur for Gamecube, and Heihachi, from Bandai's other fighitng game series for Xbox.

Sure, the idea had been done before. Earth Worm Jim was in Battle Arena Toshiden,  and even Soul Calibur one had a guest character in Yoshimitsu. But those guys wheren't in the cover of their games. Putting them in was a cool thing to do.

Now it seems a fighting game can't be complete without some guests, DOA had a Halo Spartan and some Virtua Fighters, Mortal Kombat had Freddy Krueger, Soul Calibur had characters from Star Wars and Assasin's Creed. Even the frickin Street Fighter/Tekken crossover decided to add some weird manga cats and the guy from Infamous. Don't be surprised when Guilty Gear finally caves in and announcess Shrek.

Is there something inherently wrong with guests? No. But guests would be better if it didn't feel like there was some weird mandate that there has to be at least one guest character. On Kratos' case this might actually be the truth, since he's already been in Soul Calibur  and Mortal Kombat.

To be frank, it feels a little like cheating the fans to, instead of giving the spot to a character from the franchise people haven't seen in a while, or adding new characters to grow the roster, they go "No, you can't have Raibow Mika. Here's Sam Witwer in a robe. He'll not be seen after this, so enjoy."





2 Unlockable Characters
A new character has been unlocked!

Unlockables where a part of a game's replay value. They'd slowly trickle new content to the player as he played, rewarding continued returns.

But this has no place in Fighting games anymore. A fighting game is not supposed to be have finite replayability, like a Campaign in a First Person Shooter. It's supposed  to keep inviting you in to try new things in it and to challenge yourself, like a puzzle game. Unlockable characters kind of limit that by saying, "even though you know and we know that there is a character called Jenny Cho in this game, because she's on the cover and everything and the Internet exists, you need to grind in story mode a bit to play as her."

It's a real kick in the pants too, especially since at least in the old days when something was locked, there was a good possibility for a cheat to be available to unlock it.

1 Not having  sufficient DLC characters

Ultra Street Fighter 4 is Capcom's way of saying "No matter how much Internet and 3D we have, we're still the same cheap bastards that reisued Street Fighter 2 for 4 years, and we'll die before we give up on our comprehensive asset recycling program". The game grabs a bunch of leftovers  from Street Fighter X Tekken, adds Cammy in a mask, and then expects everyone to jump into the 4rth or 5th Street Fighter 4 SKU.

It's arguably slightly less awful than the traditional practice of releasing  the same game with some slight changes and 3 new charactes, because at least this one only costs like half of a new game and you can download it into your Super Street Fighter Megamax Super Duper arcade edition, but it's arguably worse than what it would have been to, one by one, continue to add new characters to the game.

We're already in the DLC age, I don't know why most fighting games play it so coy with this. Street Fighter outright refuses to have stand alone DLC characters. Mortal Kombat only had a handful. Marvel vs Capcom 3 had 2, and then decided to jump back later in the year with a 60 dollar reissue with 6 more characters.

 What I haven't seen is a fighter that doubles it's roster with DLC.  Costumes are fine, but a character adds real value to the game. Are you gonna wait to be beaten to the punch by EF 12, developers? I'd like to see a fighting game franchise forgoe just hitting the reset button to make a new reiteration every couple of fiscal years and just make the one game they have continue to grow in it's roster and features. Some are better at this. DOA5, Injustice, and Skullgirls seem to have had comprehensive DLC schedjules, that don't just seem like they're doing it because their mommy forced them.  Killer Instinct seems to have gone too far into the forest with it's "make everything DLC" plan. Let's hope more games follow the good examples and continue to grow their games rather than ditch out the baby with the bathwater.

Original characters: Do steal.


What are you guys watching?