Tag: arcade

Street Fighter 2: World Warrior 1CC

Blankas mighty hand raising the traditional salute for a completed 1CC

Earlier this year I checked off an achievement I have wanted to do for a very long time: One credit clear (1CC) Street Fighter 2 World Warrior with Blanka. SF2:WW has been a seminal game in my life and I come back to it, and its many sequels, very often. One of my earliest arcade memories is attending a dog track while on vacation as a kid and spending most of the time watching an older kid defeat M. Bison with Blanka on a outdoor SF2:WW machine. I do not believe it was a 1CC (not that I thought that was even feasible as a kid) and would go one to credit-feed my way through the game plenty of times myself. But a 1CC is the ultimate goal; to put in one credit and ride it all the way through to the end. Now several decades later I can say I’ve achieved that and it felt pretty good. I don’t believe this is considered too difficult of a task, especially for experienced fighting game players, but World Warrior has a pretty stubborn a.i. and the damage calculations can be totally mind boggling and wipe you out very suddenly. After a few weeks of intermittent attempts and I finally got the rhythm down and basic combo I could exploit the entire opposition. The only opponent to give me fits was Claw (Vega/Balrog) and that was mostly due to impatience on my part. Claw would lock into a routine of evasion and wall jumping attacks and eventually I would make foolish attack and be punished. With repeated attempts (after restarting from square 1 each time) I finally found a way to sneak in with a poke to break his pattern and then punish. Sagat and Dictator (M.Bison/Vega) afterward pale in comparison and I molly whopped them in the eventual 1CC run. Very satisfying. The next step would be to crank the difficulty up to 8 stars, but I expect that to be extremely obnoxious. Maybe in another 30 years.

Puyo Puyo etc.

Suketoudara attempts intimidation

Puyo Puyo is making quite the come back the past handful of years. I never had much of a taste for it in its first handful of decades, but after being reintroduced via the mashup puzzler Tetris Puyo Puyo when it came to the Switch I felt it click in. However, I was turned off by the presentation of T.P.P., so I went dormant a bit again until M2 ported the initial Arcade release of Puyo Puyo as part of the Sega Ages Switch line — its 90s arcade aesthetic being more my tune. Plus its been translated for the first time and really has a nice weird vibe without being annoying (like T.P.P. is). Of course my luck would be the following week SNES for Switch Online arrives and inexplicably brings along an untranslated Super Puyo Puyo 2 to the service that I already pay for. Its different enough that I don’t mind having both titles; but maybe its the Celestial Lords of Puyo telling me I should make up for lost time?

Art of Fighting 3

Re-creation of the AoF3 Promotional Flyer

Art of Fighting 3 is a marvelous fighting game, specifically a marvelous single-player fighting game. While I will sing high praise for the entirety of the Art of Fighting series (again, especially as a single-player experiences), the third entry really is the gem. The city street grit and grime of the first entries in the series is replaced by dusty roads and the vivid color thats reflecting off the rural Mexican landscape that AoF3 has transitioned to from South Town of the first two titles. A family crisis still needs to be solved, and Robert has become the central hero this time in place of Ryo (who now plays side-kick).

The trademark enormous sprites and zooming camera are still present but a new touch of flash has been added with smooth motion-captured animation and fast dial-em-up combos. As the flyer suggests, the animation was captured from stuntmen and fighters. Its an extremely impressive and smooth look. Unlike other capturing techniques done by contemporaries, SNK took that captured human-motion, converted it into 3D models, and then rotoscoped over the 3D animation. The few extra steps cuts down on any sort of uncanny valley (and thankfully isnt just sprites made from digitzed actors like in Mortal Kombat). The heavy impact movesets of the previous games is still present, but now there are quick moving, pre-built, combos the user can “dial in” with a string of quick rythmic commands that feel like the final touch to round-out the fighting style.

Unfortunately AoF3 is a bit of a lost child within the 2D fighting library. Coming out in 1996 it was already facing enormous competition, plus was a third entry in a series that never became much of a name to being with, PLUS it had scarified nearly all of its established cast of characters in favor of a new location, PLUS PLUS the wave of 3D fighters was establishing itself and taking the lime light away from 2D fighters as a whole.

I can’t recommend it enough that you spend some time with this title (and its soundtrack!). Its widely available at this point for pretty much anything you’d prefer to play it on.

Further Reading (viewing): Here is a nice bit of video for those more familiar with the game, or just want to see a curiosity. Its a tournament focused singularly on fighting as the AoF3 final boss character Wyler! Conducted by Game Center Mikado, an arcade in Japan that hosts and streams a wide variety of fighter game tournaments, often with special stipulations like this.