Tag: blanka

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.

Fighters Portrait: Vol. 2 Blanka

Blanka, Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior, Amazon River Basin Stage

The creation and backstory for the character Blanka is complete hodge-podge. A character that Capcom designer”Akiman” admits went thru several unrelated iterations before someone colored in the skin green and the feral jungle beast from the Brazilian Amazon river basin was born. Hearsay suggests that Blankas green skin came from the consumption of chlorophyll in jungle plants, and his electrical powers are due to an education from electric eels within the river. The ending scenarios for Street Fighter 2 of course tell us he is a lost human child that grew up alone in the Jungle. His mother recognizes him as her son “Jimmy” due to the anklets he is wearing; which she claims were a gift to him as a child. That lore addition throws a bit a of wrench into the works however, *adjusts glasses*, because these are HUGE brass anklets that in no way would a child ever wear. There is some official Capcom artwork from that time where there is remnants of chain links attacked to the anklets, suggesting he was captured at one point and broke free. It could also suggest these “gifted” anklets were perhaps shackles forcibly strapped to his ankles, and rather than him having been “lost” he escaped from an abusive home. Blankas fame after having defeated the evil Shadaloo boss M. Bison has drawn his mother out of the shadows in an effort to capitalize on her sons sudden success. I personally would rather that Blanka had a happy childhood full of eccentric gifts from his mother rather that torment.