fighting games

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. 6 Aoi

Aoi Umenokoji, Virtua Fighter 3tb, Mountain Stream stage

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.

Virtua Fighter 3 1996 AOU tech trailer, posted by Dave Freeman

Fighters Portraits: Vol. 4 Kazuya

Kazuya Mishima, 2p Costume, Tekken 1, Acropolis Stage

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:

Tekken 1: Kazuya Mishima – A Father’s Fall, uploaded by SonKitty

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:

Lau Chan – Virtua Fighter CG Portrait Series Vol.6, uploaded by Game Archive

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.

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.