Box Art Cover: New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe
Author: Jeff
Box Art Cover: Toki Going Ape Spit
A cover of a cover, plus associating a game with place you’ll never visit again.
Toki: Going Ape Spit was a game I never owned as a youth but had played several times at a friend of my parents house. It was owned by the only adults I knew that owned a video game console but did not have any kids. As far as I had known to that point no adult had any reason to own video games for their own enjoyment (this is circa early 1990s). My parents never played games minus a few Christmas-related scenarios, and neither did the parents of any other kid I knew. These people were hip apparently and owned a Genesis with 2 games for it — one being Toki. The Sega Genesis was always a bit foreign to me so I would get excited by any chance I had to play it, but Toki: G.A.S. is not a super well honed platformer, nor does it really jump off the screen at you when comparing it to what else had been coming out (my experience with it was several years after it was released), but I was more than happy to consume any game presented in front of me.
Decades have passed since then and I’ve been revisiting the mish-mash of Toki titles that had been released in that era; spurred by my playing of the 2018 Golgoth Studios remake of the original TAD Corp. Toki arcade title. It was via this remake that I learned that there even was a Toki arcade title, and that the Genesis game is more of a semi-sequel / expanded port (and also the only one with the Going Ape Spit sub-title). The Genesis game is really the runt of the litter compared to other releases that are more faithful to the arcade game (like the NES port, and the arcade remake). Toki: G.A.S. just simply does not control as well, has a duller color palette, and the level design is far more frustrating.
I’ve always managed to keep old games as part of my current interests that I don’t necessarily have a lot of nostalgia or sentimentality for games of bygone eras, but Toki: Going Ape Spit does seem to have managed that to some small degree because any and all memories ive had with it are super specific. It was a real surprise to me that it jogged such a vivid memory of playing the game, at most two times, at the home of a co-worker of my fathers. These weren’t long lasting friends of my parents either but I can remember visiting them far better than several other people my parents knew who I had probably visited or met with more times. Thats a bit lame in a way, but thats the power of an orb-spitting Ape who wears a football helmet, I guess.
Fighters Portrait: Vol. 6 Aoi
Aoi Umenokoji was one of the two new fighters added to Virtua Fighter roster in VF3 and her character design was meant to take advantage of the new Sega Model 3 arcade board it was running on. When VF3 and the Model 3 arcade board were shown off in a video demonstration at the AOU show (Amusement Machine Operators’ Union) in 1996, Aoi was shown first and foremost in the demonstration with long flowing sleeves meant to move and react like real fabric. However, when the game finally arrived in arcades and later on Dreamcast, her flowing sleeves had been chopped off. I have to assume there was just too many issues with them clipping through other characters and other potential problems.
Fighters Portrait: Vol. 5 Yun
“Perhaps you’d prefer to challenge me at a skateboarding game?”
Although he never uses one in battle, Yuns distinctive character trait is his skateboard. However, the board is never depicted uni-formally through out his appearances in the Street Fighter 3 and Street Fighter 4 series of games.
Yuns board in his official Capcom Street Fighter 3 art looks like this:
In these drawings his board is clearly based on the same idea minus a few differences in one having a tail guard, the other a nose guard. Both are red, have yellow rails and wheels, and similar graphics. The similarities here are not by accident because his board is 100% based on a real world skate board: One of Scott Oster’s Dogtown boards from the 80’s.
Its only in official artwork (and in his SF3: New Generation winning quote image) that you can get an idea of what the deck graphics are in the SF3 series of games. During a match you only see Yuns skateboard appear when he is the opponent being fought on his own Hong Kong stages. However, in those instances the design of the board is linked to his characters sprite colors, and usually will not match its representation in artwork.
In Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Yuns stage is changed and he no longer has as dramatic of an entrance as he does in the first two SF3 games. He merely hops in from offscreen on the right and the board rolls away, with the same color scheme matching his character sprite. The main wrinkle that SF3: Third Strike presents is an odd change to the shape of his deck that I dont think ive ever seen a Skateboard have. Its only visible in SF3:TS during his win quote:
For whatever reason the tail of his skateboard now has a very sharp 90 degree corner with no curve at all. Some old school decks did have a more flatter tail, but never to an absolute point like that, so its a very odd illustrative decision. That same shape carries over into his Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition / Ultra ending:
Its especially odd to see that in SF4 because they use a fully 3D modeled skateboard for Yun in that game and it does not have a tail like that. The Street Fighter 4 design also totally scraps the Scott Oster deck graphics for an original design.
The deck carriers over the star-burst background from the SF3 deck, but swaps out the central artwork and Scott Oster/Dogtown names for “White Dragon, Masters Foundation”. Im guessing with how much more visible the entire deck is in SF4 they opted against directly referencing an existing skateboard to avoid any potential conflicts. Yun has also moved past the trend of attaching plastic rails and nose/tail guards to his board.
The only other time that Yun makes a unique appearance with his skateboard is a minor role in the background of the Half-pipe stage in Street Fighter X Tekken. You never get to see the bottom of the board because he never attempts any tricks, he just rolls back and forth along the half-pipe as the fight in the foreground carries on but it is the signature red with yellow wheels seen in most official artwork. Now with Street Fighter 5s roster complete its unknown if we will ever get another change to see what may happen with Yuns skateboard next. We could have to wait for the rest of our lives.
Fighters Portraits: Vol. 4 Kazuya
When it comes to boring 90s fighting game protagonists Kazuya is certainly right in line with several others — at least upon first blush. If you were to walk up to the arcade cab and watch the demonstration for 30 seconds, once Kazuya comes on screen you immediately know he is the central character. He looks like an action figure that would simply be named “Martial Arts Man” but he gets more interesting if you know his backstory: mainly that his father threw him off a cliff when he was five years old and that he has the devil inside of him! Very dramatic! But he is simply presented as calm & cool and devoted to martial arts, its pretty generic. Later on in the series they ramp it up and give him a purple coat and plaster a permanent stern expression of his face to know how bad of a dude he really is. Long gone are the days when he could enjoy the simple pleasure of throwing his father off a cliff:
Fighters Portraits: Vol. 3 Lau Chan
Lau Chan is the canonical winner of the First World Fighting Tournament in Virtua Fighter 1, however, the honor is short lived because he is by default the first character you will fight in Virtua Fighter 2. Even if you pick Lau himself as your character in VF2 you are forced to face yourself, the reigning champion, in the opening match of the tournament. Sega has ensured that Lau will be the character to be defeated the most times in single player matches. Its one thing to win the belt, its a whole other thing to defend it.
Virtua Fighter CG Portrait Series Vol.6 Lau Chan
One of the more unique releases by Sega during the Saturn era was a series of “CG Portrait” discs, one for each character in Virtua Fighter 2. These discs were essentially a multimedia chapter of an art book for the game that featured a series of CGi Renderings of the character and other elements mixed with photos displayed along with the characters theme song, and also a Karaoke version of that same theme song. The Virtua Fighter series has always had a bit of a sparseness to it beyond the central gameplay, so these acted as (slightly) more robust extras. However, at ¥1280 a piece (roughly $13 usd), and 10 retail releases its maybe expecting too big of a stretch from the fanbase. But hey, that was like 25 years ago, now you can just watch it on YouTube: