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.
Background beef delivery truck in the Sakura/Karin stage of Street Fighter Alpha 3
In the history of fighting game background vehicles this one is seemingly so specific that it leads me to believe it is based on a real truck. Follow this friendly red face for juicy thick-cut steaks.
Yun Lee, SF3: Third Strike, Hong Kong Shopping District 7:45pm stage
“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:
Capcom official artwork: left SF3: New Generation, right SF3: 2nd Impact, SF3: Third Strike art does not show Yun with his board.
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.
Two examples of 80’s/90’s street style skateboarder Scott Oster’s Dogtown decks
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.
Yuns entrance on his Hong Kong stage in SF3: New Generation, note the board matches his pants/armlets/bill of cap
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:
Yuns SF3:TS sharp cornered skateboard deck
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:
Yun being clobbered in his SF4: AE/U ending, with sharp cornered deck
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.
Yun with his SF4 deck that is not based on any real world skateboard design or company that I can find. The boards color is based on characters palette.
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.
Yun skating in the background of the Halfpipe stage in Street Fighter X Tekken
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.
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.
Finally got around to picking up the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection. This is the 4th or 5th collection of Street Fighter games ive purchased over the years, not counting stand alone titles, but this should be the last time! Other than a few specific version upgrades for the Alpha series and a couple remakes of SF2 titles, its pretty much as complete as its gunna get. Its a series I still love and always wins me over when ever I boot a title up. SF2: World Warrior is where it all got started, certainly for me, so I felt compelled to make some art focused on the classic roster.
MEMORY LANE My specific earliest memories of SF2 are as follows: 1. Being part of a group of kids gathered around the World Warrior machine watching another kid complete the game with Blanka at a Dog Racing Track while on vacation. 2. Pouring over either the EGM or Video Games & Compute Entertainment magazine with SF2 cover stories. I felt like I had discovered gold when I saw the cover art of the magazine at a grocery store. At this point I had only seen the game for one weekend and this propelled my obsession. 3. Renting the SNES version of World Warrior and being baffled by the move list. Once I could achieve firing off a Hadoken, my brother complained that those moves are cheating, “its like being able to punch someone from across the room”.
Ive been progressing thru each game on the Collection; completing the single player mode with Ryu. SF1 is quite charming and has really wonderful stage art. Its incredible the jump from SF1 to the SF2 however. Its fun to be able to easily see and control all the differences with each iteration of SF2. Simple things like the changing color schemes on the stages feels exciting, or how and when they update character portraits and ending art. Its also a nice reminder that Super Turbo arcade has really jacked up A.I. difficulty by default. May have to come back to that one later and progress onto Alpha 1 because I dont feel I will be making a lot of progress anytime soon.
I sampled some online play and was quickly dispatched in each SF iteration I played. I fared the best in Super Turbo, but was absolutely squarshed in SF3: Third Strike. The last time I played those online was over the original Xbox Live via the 15th Anniversary collection, so, a bit rusty — but, the thrill was still there.
