Annotated Appendix: Hugo

Want to know a secret? I know next to nothing about professional wrestling. I mean, I'm a dude that just turned 41 so I watched all of that old-timey WWF stuff from the 80s that was a playground requirement, but anything after I hit 6th grade and I just shrug my shoulders. Lucky for me the Venn Diagram of gamers and wrestling fans is a nearly perfect circle, so it was easy to find some technical advisement. I probably really screwed something up (and I'm sure I will be told) but I don't know. I think I faked it pretty well! Thanks, Andre!

This is an episode that seems to be hotly anticipated by my small, beautiful cult (and I love each and every one of you), and I think I can guess why: The Andre thing is so blatant, and there's so much proven history about this character that I think folks just want it confirmed for them. I hope you enjoy all of it in as tidy a package as I could make for you. It was super fun to research, and since the script came quickly and a little more tightly than the Ken episode, this is one of those magical moments where everything just flowed like it should.

EXCEPT when I edited things together. It turns out that adhering to a certain format painted me into a corner with this one because I had to shoehorn in Hugo's Arcade mode path someplace. It just feels super awkward and I wish that I could have found a better way that isn't so obviously crammed in. In fact, this was the first time I considered knowingly dropping it from episode. Have a plan and stick to it, I guess. Still very unhappy with my own planning here, and now you'll never un-see it, either. 

Things that should have been in this episode: For all of the talk of 2nd Impact, I probably should have found a way to show more footage of it. Hugo, for instance, has an infinite, I believe. I mean, there's not a whole lot of reason to show any of it per the script, but the episode feels a bit empty without it.

The other is a video I am still sure existed at some point, but maybe I'm just going lockdown nuts. For the life of me, I remember a promo trailer for Street Fighter X Tekken that made a vague joke about Poison's gender, but I cannot find it anywhere. I took to Twitter and a mutual that used to work for GameTrailers (RIP) couldn't recall it, either, so maybe I've just been hallucinating all of these years. I swear it's out there, though, and you can hear me reference it just after talking about Ono.

It probably could have also used better match footage, I guess. My players aren't experts with the character, even though they definitely have some skill. So with that, here are the videos that are worth a look if you're down to pick up Hugo:

SFV player/ streamer AutoMattock is also a 3rd Strike believer and made a nice video covering some high-concept Hugo play. Not necessarily a tutorial video on the character, but some good ground to cover. I give him a shout in the episode. Seems like a nice enough cat. 

For PhD Hugo study, though, there are two well-know Japanese masters: Hayao and YSB. A quick YT search will net you plenty of footage to comb through (both still regularly play at Game Newton exhibitions in Japan), but go-to 3S channel Feetwork 101 has a great breakdown of YSB play. I generally gain a new appreciation for every character that I cover, but I don't think I'll really mess around with this guy now that this episode is out the door. Watching this video, though, makes me occasionally reconsider.

One last thing: try to count all of the Princess Bride references. Do it. Count them.

Closing out on something not necessarily connected, with the pandemic not slowing down, FGC tournaments are doing the best they can to give players an avenue to test their mettle. I think this is worth supporting. Today, in fact, Chicago major Frosty Faustings announced their annual midwinter event will be completely online with totally free entry fees. The format for each game is platform-specific, and 3rd Strike will have theirs over Fightcade 2, which is pretty nice. Even if you get pounded into dirt, everybody should enter this. If you've got a PC that's wired to the internet, the only thing you'll lose is your time. 

Thanks again for sticking with me! 

Annotated Appendix: Ken

 A good place to start the home stretch is many players' favorite character. Well, a character that basically everybody can play, at least. Ken is awesome in this game, which is something most anybody that's heard of 3rd Strike knows well, even if it's only from the Daigo Parry. It's hard to really know why, though, which was maybe the biggest point I tried to make with this episode. The other is what happens at the top: Ken represents competition -- in fighting games, in video games, in series lore-- and there's credit owed to him that I think both lay gamers and FGC mainstays often overlook. A little high concept, but that's also one of the reasons I make these things.

This episode was tough to make from a writing perspective. I hadn't written a script in a long time, and this one was curiously difficult to pound out while I got back into the swing of things. Flaws in early drafts meant that I just kept adding things (and adding, and adding, and then adding some more), and while I knew this episode was going to be long, I didn't think it would end up this long. Still, I don't think its egregious (at least, I hope it isn't), but I probably could have used an editor here. The Hugo script is mostly written at this point, and it already feels tighter. Maybe I just needed Ken to help me shake off the cobwebs. 

Things that should have been in this video: I mention Eliza as having a famously re-drawn sprite for her early appearances in the various SFII endings, but I just couldn't squeeze them in here without really mucking up the timing for everything else. You should look them up, though. It's some nutty shit.

Something that you might find funny about the match footage in the first part of these videos is how one player is always getting beat on by the others. I don't mind telling you at this point that this is me. I play with a handful of really talented players, and one in particular is just about great with the entire cast. When we get together and play (largely online these days), it's a real bloodbath for me. Most of the time, you can probably figure out when I'm playing now that I've said that. Just thought you might find it funny.

Things purposely left out: The Daigo Parry. Yes, it's famous and even alluded to in the voiceover, but if you're watching this video series you have already seen it, and probably dozens of times. It's also not entirely illustrative of Ken's abilities more so than Daigo's for pulling it off under that kind of pressure. At the point it happens in the match, Justin Wong's Chun had so little life left that nearly every character could have come down on him with a round-ending combo. This isn't to take anything away from Daigo and his skill, but he could have done it with Dudley or Yun or whoever. 

BUT, if you want to learn high-level Ken play, you could certainly do worse than watching old Daigo match footage, which is all over YouTube. For my money, though (and, surprisingly, Daigo's, too), Deshiken is the best Ken player on Earth. Your Ken homework should start with this video from the best American Ken player, FrankieBFG. I know I link to his stuff a lot in these appendices, but the guy breaks down expert play to the point of mutating them into master classes. All of these are worth a watch. 

With that, I think I owe you an apology. I went into this video series expecting to be finished a year ago, and this has dragged on way, way too long. I start basically every one of these appendixes moaning about how it took so long to make x episode, and that's something that needs to stop. It turns out, the pandemic really hit a lot harder than I thought it would. Between trading parenting duties with my wife and teaching our 5yo kindergarten while also working our full-time jobs, the thought of doing anything after the day is over besides having a drink and falling asleep felt like more work than I wanted it to. That ground things to a halt. I don't make money off of these and I enjoy doing them, but once they feel like work it can be hard to get back on the bike, as it were. The end is in site, though. As I said, the Hugo script is pretty much done, and the footage has been captured, so I should be able to knock that one out quickly. I just want this stupid year to be over. I bet you do, too.

I hope you're safe. Happy Holidays, and thanks for sticking with me.

Annotated Appendix: Gill

You know, I was really on a roll with these since the pandemic started, and then I finally got to the Gill episode and *poof* all of my footage had disappeared. That sucked. Anyway, we should be back to our biweekly schedule now (maybe!).

This is the first episode that is wholly affected by the Covid pandemic, too, and you can probably tell. I had always planned for this episode to have more CPU interaction as a last resort, since nobody I know plays 3S Online Edition where Gill is playable. That means I needed to be a little creative with the footage for the first part of the episode, and dig out my PS3 to record training footage for his move set for the second. It works out fine, but the visual differences between versions of the game kind of drive me nuts. Nothing you can do about that now, I guess.

But, and here's a little inside baseball, I thought there was. I also own the game on 360, where the quality of recording via Elgato is supposed to be better (PS3 recording only goes up to 1080i). It's not egregious, I guess, but I can tell the difference in the 30th Ann. Collection vs. 3SOE and I bet others will, too. Why did didn't I get 360 footage? Well, it turns out there's some weird HDCP issues with Xboxes using HDMI cables. At least, it was a problem I was running into. The footage was recording correctly on my computer, but the image on the TV was too distorted to make anything out. The real problem is the 2-3 second delay from button input to what gets recorded, though, and since I needed a single player run of the game to capture win quotes and CPU opponent paths, this was untenable, even for a busted character like Gill. History is saddled with 1080i, it seems. 

Other fun weirdness: 3SOE runs the game in its proper resolution, but only during matches (unless you were one of the savages that stretched the game to widescreen in the options menu. Please stop following me if this is you). The win quotes, player select, and opponent paths are all widescreen. This made the windows in the episode a little different to size. Not that big of a deal. This is the first, and hopefully only, episode, though, that I needed to pull SFIII game footage off of other YouTube channels. If you've ever watched my Annotated Symphony of the Night series, you can tell that this is something I try to actively avoid. I like to source my own video footage because I can control the quality of the output (above paragraphs notwithstanding), but since I don't own a Dreamcast or a copy of Double Impact, I needed to get Gill's ending footage from 2I from another YouTuber. This person was credited during the ending card. Oh, and yes, I call it "Double Impact" in the episode but show the Japanese version of the game, which is formally titled "W Impact." The Japanese box art is just cooler. An intentional screw up.

Things that should have been in this video: I mention at the end of the episode that Gill's face for one of his win poses is redrawn. Should have included that. The smirk on his face for NG and 2I is just too dopey not to see it. Sorry.

Finally, I thought about calling this one Gill and Urien, Part 2 just like how I renamed the Yun and Yang episodes. After finishing the script and the episode, though, I found that they don't rely on each other like the twins do. The differences in design inspirations are just too far apart for the episodes to be coupled together, even if we're just talking the title of a YouTube video. I also wanted to make it somewhat special by calling it another BONUS STAGE, even though it's not a video about punching a car or whatever. I mean, he's not playable in most builds of 3rd Strike, especially these days with 30th AC and Fightcade emulation being the most accessible way of playing the game, so it's a bonus, right?

...Right?

Annotated Appendix: Twelve

Like Necro, Twelve is another character that I have a perverse respect for after making this video. Specifically, I mean I didn't realize the two characters share more than a backstory after analyzing their normal move sets. Not that I want to play as Twelve after this, of course, but still, that's a cool touch that one would expect of Capcom games of this vintage.

I just never paid attention. I never wanted to. Twelve suuuuuucks. I know he has his fans, and there's a few decent high-level Japanese Twelve players out there, but goddammit, if the first of half of this video shows nothing at all, it's that none of my other player team or myself can do any real work with the character because there's. Just. Nothing. There. He's only got one actual combo, and everything else he can do is completely dependent on super meter. I mean, Samurai Shodown games are essentially built this way at their core, but at least in those, one good attack can do decent damage. Poor Twelve just can't dish it out.

But enough complaining. This video was a pleasure to put together because after being away so long, it's nice to come back with a character that doesn't have as much baggage as, say, Akuma or Chun. With the pandemic going (and going and going), I've been much more busy working than I thought I would be, and that's really ground things to a halt. At least with the Twelve episode, I can shake off the cobwebs because the next few are going to be meaty. One is going to be a Bonus Stage episode in between Yang and Ken, just to spoil things a bit.

And speaking of bonus stages, who knew that Twelve had a unique win pose during his? I sure didn't.

Things that should have been in this video: Twelve has a wide variety of combos out of the XCOPY that are dependent on the other character. Like everything else, it starts with crouching LK into the AXE, comboing the super, and then a move out of that. Imagine it like V-Trigger in Street Fighter V, but with a much shorter window for timing the post-super link. It can be a little easier if the opponent jumps at you and Twelve just goes into the AXE/SA/character attack, but this is one of those instances where I was frankly too lazy to record them. They're hard, and never worth it, since high-level Twelve players, such as they are, never even use the XCOPY. Yeah.

Speaking of Supers, SA2 can combo from a close MK, a super jump cancel, and then the SA. I should have notated it better in the video. I also could not for the life of me do it against another Twelve, which makes me think that it only works against taller characters like Urien. After inspecting the second 3rd Strike Gamest Mook which pictures it working against Necro, though, I'm probably wrong. It still might be character dependent, but like the above XCOPY screed, I just stopped giving a shit once I landed a combo that worked. Apologies.

Lastly, I wanted to show the exact translations of his binary code win quotes, and even get some footage of the console-specific Urien quote, but I honestly didn't have any room. I backed myself into a corner when I wrote and recorded the script, and it would have been too much to fix when I started editing everything together. Sorry, but you're just going to have to take my (and the internet at-large's) word for it when it comes what he's saying. I actually did try to run these codes into binary/ascii translation tools that I found online and they never matched up, which is why I mention in the video that they're not a 1:1 translation.

Today, I am trying again to file for unemployment after my work furloughed me. So far, it has gone as awesome as you may have heard from everyone else trying to do the same thing. I'd like to take this moment to really thank my Patreon supporters out there. I don't make a ton of money on these, but your help really means a lot to me, especially in this moment.

With that, I hope you're doing well and staying safe. These are hard times, and even harder in the face of racial tensions that, in a perfect world, should have been eradicated millions of years ago. As a straight, white 40 year-old dude, I don't have any right to say anything other than I support protesters, grieve for their losses and champion their gains. Black lives matter. In a way, it's a pleasure to work on a series of videos about a game, one of the first that I can think of across the medium, that embraced the African American community. Maybe you can find some comfort in that if you can.

Take care.

Annotated Appendix: Q

I couldn't wait to make this one.

Like the Urien episode, I have been bottling up some wild speculation for over a year before I finally sat down and made the thing. I've stockpiled rare art, went through old magazines and strategy guides, and watched lots (and lots) of high-level Q footage to be as prepared as I will ever be to produce this. I mean, it kind of sucks that Capcom finally did something with the character in the form of G, but still, after looking all over the internet to find any more weird explainers for this character and his backstory, I'm confident in the conclusions I've come up, even if they're total bullshit. I really hope you enjoy this one!

Things I should have brought up in this episode: his outfit colors. As Capcom is not shy about their comic book inspirations, Q definitely has some trench coat-sporting antecedents that are called out by whichever button is pressed when selecting him, but these, of course, have never been confirmed. The yellow is certainly Dick Tracy, a 1930s comic strip crime fighter. The others are more open to interpretation. I think the hidden color (big butter Q) is basically the primordial representation, just like how Twelve looks. The white is likely a shout out to the original appearances of DC/ Charleton character The Question, mentioned early in the video. (sadly, there's no blue color scheme to make reference to the 1980s, and by extension, phenomenal 2004 Justice League Unlimited Question) The red? I don't know, Carmen Sandiego? Happy to hear other thoughts on this.

Screw ups: I actually had footage of the kara throw that, for whatever reason, didn't make it into this video. Since I mentioned it prominently, it should have been there. There's also some awkwardness in the clips of his UO after bringing up the dashing overhead punch, but whatever. Sorry, that's never getting fixed.

But that's only the first half. The back half talks briefly at the end about some of the Japanese gods and how they've grokked Q, but only in passing. I've actually done this before in other episodes; some characters have specific names attached to them, but I don't bring them up very often. This is the episode that illustrates why I don't.

By that, I mean that we need to talk about Kuroda.

For those not familiar, perhaps the greatest living 3rd Strike player is a Japanese man named Kenji Kuroda. If you think that that last sentence is hyperbole, trust me when I tell you that he can more than effectively use every character on the roster, has been a mainstay of the game's tournament life since it began, understood its engine so well that whole play styles and setups are named after him, and has had many, many DVDs produced of his play for students of the game to buy. Several of them were officially sanctioned by Gamest magazine. While most people consider Daigo Umehara to be the face of this game after he basically saved mainstream FGs, its Kuroda's influence that largely hangs over 3rd Strike. It's impossible to overstate Kuroda's importance in its continued maturation and legacy.

But Kuroda is also quite possibly a sexual predator. Last year, he was arrested for sexual misconduct with an underage girl. Twice. Other young women seem to have come forward with allegations of wrongdoing, and since there haven't been any updates to these stories in the Western gaming press, it's impossible to know what's really going on or his, perhaps probable, convictions. He has been largely and conspicuously absent from high profile tournaments over the last year, including Cooperation Cup, which is telling. In a time where important fight game players are under scrutiny for horrific behavior, Kuroda is a name that is becoming hushed within 3rd Strike circles after many years of adoration. He's also one of the main reasons Q is a viable tournament pick, even if he's low tier.

While there are certainly other great former and current 3S players that use Q (again I'm going to direct you to one of FrankieBFG's 3S Film Room videos of the inimitable TM), Kuroda basically put this character on the map. Because of what he may be involved with --or perhaps in spite of which-- I have a hard time showing any of his footage or mentioning him by name as opposed to someone like Sugiyama's bonkers Necro play. This may be a situation of me passing sentence before judgment and probably is, but since I'm making these videos, it's for me to decide. I can't tell you not to go looking around YouTube for Kuroda match footage, but I'll never send any your way.

I'm in the writing phase for Chun Li's script, and I might take a quick break for a moment after that's finished. Then again, I might just finish the column of characters with Yang and take a break after that. Either way, a short break is likely coming, and probably to work on this incubating Tekken idea I want to get across. All the same, thanks again for watching, and Happy Holidays!

Annotated Appendix: Remy

Oh, Remy. I don't feel as bad for him as I do for Sean, I suppose. But having saying that, Remy was basically made to be screwed, and I don't think I could come up with changes that could help alleviate that based on the game (without totally breaking it). I'm not a smart video game designer, though.

This column of characters on the roster screen is maybe the easiest because so many are specific to 3rd Strike. It makes each episode of the series a little dry of long explanation, but they feel very focused, which is nice. It also helps in getting the videos done quickly, so please rejoice in this time of bounty. I've been sick off and on lately, so I apologize for the raspy voice in this and a few future episodes.

Fun stuff about Remy that I probably should have mentioned in this episode: I've brought up several times that 3rd Strike is a very clever amalgamation of different fighting game mechanics, not just "Street Fighter II with parries." It's subtle to the untrained eye; some characters have launchers for juggles like in 3D fighting games, while others have air dashes like "anime" games, etc. Remy, though, represents this in a regressive sense. His gameplay actually is, essentially, "SFII with parries," which is precisely why he kind of sucks. Even the fan hack 4rd Strike fundamentally changes him given the buffs to the Cold Blue Kick (at least, in my opinion). Still, there are good, high-level Remy players out there, but they're few and far between. For reference, FrankieBFG, perhaps the best American 3rd Strike player (definitely the best Ken player) has a YouTube channel that breaks down the gameplay of a few Japanese masters. His Pierrot video is great, and counts for you as extra credit.

Fun stuff about Remy that never really fit into this video: First, famous FGC player Viscant went on an equally famous screed some years ago decrying the parry system that is still widely available to read online. He doesn't call Remy out specifically, but it's clear that the character is in the back of Viscant's mind since he levels his biggest criticisms via zoning characters, which Remy clearly is. I don't 100% agree with everything he says, but he makes valid points, so much that I included some of them as counter arguments in the parry episode. It's worth reading if you can put up with insipidly childish forum behavior from over a decade ago.

Second, and I cannot prove this, but I'm convinced that Remy is either Guile or Charlie Nash's illegitimate son. His hair color is blond in most of his alternative outfits, is the only male character with long enough hair to gel it in the ways that these past heroes can, and his goddamn move set is just so similar. I'm more inclined to lean into Charlie, actually, because of Remy's one-handed Sonic Boom toss, which was also a Charlie thing. In the grand scheme of things, this shit is completely inconsequential given that Capcom has essentially disowned Remy over the years, but still. The Truth is Out There.

Aaaaaaand speaking of which, the Q episode is in the can and will drop in two weeks. It's nice to be on a schedule, but this might be the last one for a little bit so I can get my people together to record Chun/ Makoto/ Yang footage. I do them in chunks that way. Look forward to the next episode, though. I go into some seriously out-there speculation about the character which in no way holds up under scrutiny.

Other than that, I'm planning a footnote episode on a Tekken combo. Yes, one specific combo. I think you'll enjoy it. The Demon's Souls long play video also got some traction, and I'd love to do another one of those someday, but it's really a matter of finding the right game to stream. I'm liking this streaming thing, though, so who knows.

Enjoy the video, and thanks again for sticking with me!

Annotated Appendix: Yun

There is nothing more scary than Yun.

Chun is manageable, even with her busted super, because that's all she's really got. Yang is something I can put up with, even with Yun-like movement. Ken is Ken, and everybody knows how to play against Shotos. But Yun's a motherfucker; that tiny super meter gives him almost constant Genei Jin. That sucks. I didn't mention it in the video because I feel it gets a little too far into the weeds, but the Genei Jin makes the game feel like a Capcom Vs. game or Tekken-- it activates, and you're just sitting there taking damage. Half the time, I just take my hands off the stick when I get caught up in GJ combos. There's nothing you can do once a decent player lands a hit except to watch your HP slowly bleed out. Screw Yun and the Genei Jin. SCREW HIM.

With that out of the way, this was another episode where I needed to rely on other players for help. My distaste for Yun is such that I refuse to learn to play him, which you can clearly tell in the mirror match footage in the first half of the episode. Since it actually does take significant skill to use Genei Jin effectively, I tasked my other player with using it exclusively while I rotated the other two supers. This also meant that I could just recycle his super combos for the back half of the video. This is something that I don't like doing, but there was no better footage to be made based on how he played unless we started rotating opponents (the SF3 games have many, many character-specific combos).

I also wimped out on making video for the New Generation infinite combos. Yes, there's clear documentation on the process of landing/ completing them online, but you know. It's Yun. I hate Yun. If you follow me on Twitter (which you should), you will even find me hating on Yun there. Mostly on the weekends when I'm drinking. Seriously, fuck Yun.

(Again, I am compelled to relent a little and say that it's very hard to use the Genei Jin well. Players really need to put in some time in the training lab to get things right, and since there are so many character-specific combos, it can be a lot to account for. Big thanks to my buddy John P. that plays a slamming Yun.)

Anyway, I have a bit more freelance work coming up in the next week, but the next episode is just about ready to go. The great Demon's Souls 10th Anniversary Stream/ Long Play was a nice little success (the whole thing is on the YouTube channel in one big clump), and it helped get my rump in gear to finish a few more episodes on the quick. I've also got the script for Q ready to record, and am outlining Chun's episode starting today. Progress! Anyhoo, expect the Remy video to go up in two weeks.

In the meantime, thanks again for watching and supporting the series. Tell all of your friends, and remind them that Yun is bad. He's bad for all of us.

Annotated Appendix: Parries

Here's something that I didn't mention in this episode: The background here is clearly New York City. If a player scoots backward enough that the camera moves, which isn't that hard since players naturally want added distance from the thrown basketballs for more time to parry, they can see the Empire State Building in the upper left corner. It's pretty easily missed, actually. Your eyes don't shoot right up there when Sean is tossing balls at you. Sean has some sort of relationship with NYC, though. His stage in New Generation is set there, and there seems to be some sort of background as to why in NG's Gamest Mook strategy guide. Sadly, though, it's all in Japanese, and outside of the katakana, there's only so much I can glean from it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the first Bonus Stage episode. As we worm our way through the rest of the cast, we'll have another one right before we hit Ken (it will probably be obvious what that's going to be about sooner or later). Some inside dope- I actually tried to do more clever things with the editing in this one, but it didn't exactly work out, which is why some of the characters repeat. Not worth getting into what that was going to be, but it was a learning experience. For the clips on the right side of the page, and I don't know why I feel I need to apologize for this, but I was stuck using the record-able training footage from the SF 30th Anniversary Collection. For some reason, I couldn't get a second controller to work the other day when I was trying to do some little things (and my poor wife was even willing to help out. Very game of her), which is why you see the little "play" icons and stuff on the lower right side of a lot the side windows. I find that hideous. Sometimes, though, you just have to suck it up.

I probably should have also included some footage of really amazing parries, but I figured you can probably find a lot of that on the internet. For something to start with, here's a stone cold classic. There are more out there, just do a quick search after you're done watching my video and nagging all of your friends to do the same thing.

Lastly, for those that don't know the game very well, it probably sounds stupid that I called the blocking parry a "red" parry based on the footage in the side window. The thing is, a character flashes red when this parry happens, and this often doesn't come across in game footage running at 30fps, which this video series is. If you look for more parry footage on YouTube you'll find that this is a constant, but by no means egregious, problem. Just trust me, though, that if you're learning the game you've probably already stumbled into a red parry and maybe didn't know why. You're welcome!

Thanks again for watching!

Annotated Appendix: Akuma

This one was intimidating.

There are a lot of Akuma videos on the internet, and many of them basically touch on the same subjects. The trick with this episode, and essentially how I want to do things, is to make sure that everything I record is verifiable and cited. We're lucky that we live in times when most of this info is starting to come out and can easily be obtained, but still, the Street Fighter series has a real problem with facts vs. "internet wisdom." So that was the first real challenge with this episode.

The other, of course, is length. I've touch on this before, but legacy characters like Akuma have a lot of baggage, so wrestling with how long these episodes should be is going to be hard. At just under 26 minutes, this is just about too long, and things are only going to be worse for characters like Ryu and Ken that have been around from the beginning and have a ton of things to talk about.

Here's the thing with YouTube videos: the creator suites that are available on the site give you tons of metrics- how many views you get, sure, but also how long people watch videos. This is important because you can tell with some range of accuracy when folks dip out of the stuff they're watching. A video close to a half hour long is far outside of this, at least for me, since the majority of people watching only tune in for about the first half of each episode. Honestly, that's fine for me. It seems people want more of the design and trivia info than gameplay (which, I guess, would only interest me, too), but I think the latter half is still essential viewing to get the scope of a character. But, again, that means you're sitting in front of a loooong video. One solution is to break them in half, but I don't feel as though you the viewer are watching a sort of "complete set" that way. Things even out, though. For every giant Akuma video, there's a 13 minute Necro episode. Some of the other characters (Q and Remy, I'm looking at you) are going to wind up on the shorter side, and this should balance the time for everything else. Whatever. Sorry for the long episode.

Some inside baseball: I recorded this and initially put it up for Patreon backers last week, but forgot the "time over" and "jab kill" animations, so I plugged them in this morning and uploaded it again to YouTube. Also, as I was getting footage for the next couple of characters, it turns out that Akuma is not the only character with silent rival dialog. Instead of re-recording the voice for that section, I tried to carefully delete some of it, which is why it might sound a little awkward when I get to the part about fighting Ryu in 2nd Impact.

Next up is a Bonus Episode about Bonus Stages. The plan for the series is to go through each character in order of column, and the end of each column is a good place to plug in extras. I've got the script mostly ready to go, and should record the voice for it tonight. I know I say this every time, but hopefully this means a faster turnaround time. Man, I need to get on a schedule...

Thanks again for watching!

Annotated Appendix: Urien

While the Ibuki video might have been the hardest one to put together so far because of how little I knew of the character, the Urien video was challenging for the opposite reason -- I might know too much.

I'll explain. This video is the one I've been waiting to make all along. When I originally envisioned this project when closing in on the finish line of the Annotated Symphony of the Night, I thought how interesting it would be to make a video out of Urien alone. Collectively, the internet has figured out quite about the character already, and the official supplemental material filled in the gaps nicely, but it never felt concise to me. Sure, everyone kind of figured out how he's basically a bronze Greek statue come to life (figuratively), but that was largely the depth of it. Nobody got into the minute physical characteristics, or the implications of the name, or the dopey miss-localisations of his attacks. For that matter, I had never seen a video or piece of physical media that tied those things to his gameplay. That's where this series started to take shape; it was a thought experiment that I tried to make work as a series of character studies. So, when I say that he is probably the thesis statement for the whole project, I hope it makes a little more sense. It all started with this character, and I'm happy so far that there are plenty of interesting things to say about everyone else that it didn't end with him.

Except there's just so much going on with this guy that I found myself getting really deep into the weeds with his script. After a while, I took a step back and cut a few large chunks out of it because it was already getting long. These happened from the gameplay side, mostly. There's some much going on under the hood of most fighting games, this one in particular, that it gets hard to draw a line between what the world should know about a character and the game that he's in and what only the hardcore need to know. You've probably figured this out so far, but I've used each character in the game to illustrate one or two little things hidden within 3S's mechanics. Urien ultimately has four that I went over: the EX Super (or hidden supers), charge partitioning, alternate input commands for special moves, and the unblockable setups. For most other characters in the cast, this is too many for one individual video, but in his case, each of them define his high-level gameplay because players exclusively use his Aegis Reflector super in tournaments. It's true that I could have waited to use one or two of them for other characters (say, Remy showing off the alternate inputs), but I felt that these characteristics define this one individual more than most, and into the script they went. It's likely I'll run out of neat, "hidden" stuff to talk about in the future and will feel that Urien bit me in the ass here, but that's the point I'm making, I suppose: it's tough to know when too much is just enough.

I promise you that the Akuma video coming up will be just as meaty, but will come loaded with the same problems for me. There are a few "hidden" things to discuss about the inner workings of the game, which makes sense given we're talking about a perennially hidden character, but I've already axed plenty from that script because it's just too hardcore, and the hardcore already know about that stuff. Perhaps I'll circle back around to those things when I start to run out of that kind of stuff to say, but I suppose we'll find out.

I've also realized that I should be linking to some tutorial videos or something for some of these characters. Maybe I'll start doing that soon, but for now, let's talk about actual gameplay for a sec. I know Urien gameplay pretty well, but I'm shit at charge partitioning, which is an important component to high-level play. For all of the reasons I stated above, I purposely didn't go over the specifics of it because there are piles of videos on the internet about CP. For whatever reason, I figured each video would give people interested in learning the finer points of gameplay incentive
to do some further digging, but that might assume too much. Therefore, here's a few links to vids that each about CP that I found better than most:

Partitioning for Dummies
Urien Charge Partitioning 101

Plans are still sort of formalizing for a final episode, and it will probably include shoutouts to 3S true believers like The Shend that have been spreading the word for the last 20 years of competitive SF3 play. Let me know if that sounds good or not.

Anyway, thanks again for watching these. Please leave comments and ask questions. Sadly, I have some freelance work to get to over the next few weeks so the Akuma video might be a little slower coming than I'd like, but I can at least promise one about every month, so let's tentatively shoot for mid-April. After that is a full video on the parry system, though that will probably be much shorter (and harder to edit) (whoa is me).

Annotated Appendix: Necro

Now we're getting somewhere.

I was a little intimidated by this episode until I got into the writing. The Ibuki ep was difficult to put together, especially since she's a character I was never really interested in as an observer or invested in as a player. Necro for me was the same thing on both counts. But this one turned into the tightest episode so far from both an editing perspective and writing. I'm pretty happy with it.

If you've watched the previous episodes, you'll probably notice that this one didn't compartmentalize things like normal moves/special moves/ supers like the other ones had, and that's because Necro players sort of rely on opportunities for hook punches wherever they get them. Knowing that I was just going to lead into descriptions of that move and its applications, the gameplay section of his video was a straight line there and how his Super Arts complement the hook punch. I like that it wasn't just "here's this, and then this, and then this." Future episodes will employ this same approach, and some more than others.

The first part is more interesting for me, though. Yes, it's a lot of speculation on my part to infer that Necro has some sort of connection to Pagilacci. But as one of the comments rightly pointed out, Capcom has been very stingy over the years with real design notes for any of the SFIII games, at least in English. Outside of obvious visual influences for characters like Alex and Hugo, inference and speculation is all we can really go on unless proven otherwise, which is the direction I took the script here. The FGC and larger gaming community has pitched in over the years to make some connections and suss out possible influences for a lot of characters with little to no design documentation for us (me) to go on, so don't be surprised to hear these things bubble up in future episodes.

Having said that, Necro is a character that I've really come around to after putting this episode together. I don't really see myself using him for really competitive matches since I'm too old and have too little time to practice new characters, but I get why people like using him and have fun tinkering with him now more than I ever had. But now I'm wishing more people had put the time in with Necro so he would make for more of a tournament draw. Sugiyama videos (which you should look up) are great, but it can't be just one guy carrying the Necro torch!

I've got a script written and am laying down the voice for the next video, Urien, later tonight. The new PC is fabulous for editing video -which was the whole point of buying it- so I'm confident that I can put together the next ep as expeditiously as this one had come. After that, it's on to writing the Akuma episode, which should be on the long side. Further into the future is an episode about the parry system. Should be late into February, I'm thinking.

Thanks again for watching!

Annotated Appendix: Alex

Whew, here we are. Want to know what's hard? Fighting game videos.

Honestly, that's part of the reason I'm doing this game as a series. The SOTN stuff was all straightforward; once I plotted out the correct course through the game, it was just a matter of getting from points A to B in each video. Fighting games aren't like that, though, and I took this on as a challenge to myself to become a better editor. You could say it's been a learning process.

First, going through movesets for characters is a bit bland, and I feel as though this video in particular didn't make it any better. I miscalculated how much varied footage I should have gotten for move examples, which is why you're seeing a lot of repeated clips of moves here. As the time allows, this should change going forward.

Second, I can do all of the moveset stuff on my own with a training dummy, but actual match footage is another story. I recorded everything that bookends the videos in May because that was the only time I could get together with other 3S players I know to have some legit footage. I don't want to pull random match footage from online games. Not only are they unpredictable from a quality standpoint, part of me (and I know that it's probably all in my head) doesn't think that's fair to the other players that I'm essentially using them without their knowledge. I know there are tons of YouTube videos that do nothing but pull online matches and replay them, but that's not me, and not the point of what I'm trying to do here.

The nasty byproduct of that is, well, I don't have a good Alex, and neither do many of my friends, so the actual match footage is pretty lousy. Sure, there are some nice parry moments and a few situations that I come back around to in the VO later in the video, but it's pretty mid- and low-tier stuff. I'm sorry to say that you're just going to have to get used to that as we move ahead. Between the three or four guys that are going to help me with record matches, our knowledge of the roster is fairly wide and varied, but it's not all-encompassing for high level play. Hopefully, the stuff in the VO and the side window will make you forget that none of us have an Ibuki in a few weeks.

This brings up a good point about this particular video: there just wasn't that much to say about Alex. I mean, sure, I found some nice tidbits for the guy from the usual sources, but he couldn't possibly have as much meat to him as series regulars like Ryu and Ken (you can expect those videos to be on the long side). It did, however, dip our toes into what makes this game --and fighting games in general-- so fascinating to me on a character level. Most characters in this genre tend to be cobbled together cultural forces. By that, I mean that we have representations of folk heroes, of pop culture icons, of mythic figures. In some characters' cases, it's a lot of that stuff cobbled together. Yes, this can get very speculative. I've found no concrete evidence that Alex is named after Alexander the Great. However, when we get to other characters in the game, particularly those that have a relationship with Alex, we'll see that possible references like this fit contextually when we step back and take it as a whole. I think you'll know what I mean as I get deeper into the cast.

From a more practical side, the movest footage is still windowed because I needed to make references to other stuff on the side, but it winds up sitting in front of lots of empty space. Curious what your thoughts are because this might evolve, but future videos might do away with that format in the second half so there isn't so much dead real estate.

Sorry that this took so long to develop. I'm still working out some of the kinks here, and the VO on this particular episode is straight up bad, and these are things I'm actively working to fix. If I ever find the time to circle back to some of these for any kind of remastering, this will be the first video on the list. We'll see.

Thanks again for watching. Your feedback is always appreciated if you have a second. I'm already hard at work on the next episode, so I'll hopefully have another one up in a week or so.

Annotated Appendix: Attract Mode

Whew. Ok.

Honestly, I was beginning to think this whole thing was cursed after the problems I've been having. I had most of it edited together, and then found a few factual inaccuracies. I rewrote much of the script, and then got super sick to the point where I couldn't record my voice anyway. Then I went on vacation. Through all of that, I'm still waiting on YouTube to approve my Membership Programme status. Strange times.

Anyway, this episode was more or less an information dump. Most of what was said here wouldn't comfortably fit into character eps, so I had to stretch out the attract mode for more than 10 minutes, which is why you're seeing yet more random match footage. These are captured online, incidentally, so if you're a little upset that it's not high-level play, well, it's because I just felt like using Sean. Also, I'm only really an above-average player at best. Now you know.

The primary sources for this series info are interviews I've compiled from various online sources, art books from over the past two decades, and Japanese game magazines and strategy guides. Much like the Annotated SOTN episodes, you'll hear me reference back to a few specific things more often than not. The CFN interview with Sadamoto is a good starting point, so we should run into that quite a bit for specific characters. What's important, though, is that I show as much of the game as I can, which is symbiotic to interviews and references, so this episode was primarily used to get some general things out of the way before we get into specifics.

Obviously, accuracy is key, and occasionally, that takes some time to really nail down. Case in point are the Judgment girls, which many believe to be specific to a character's stage. I have found that they are not. This took a little longer to get right than I though, too.

I hope you enjoy the episode all the same. I'm already deep into the script and recording for Alex, and we should see that in a few weeks.

Thanks again for watching!

The Annotated Third Strike

So, after a long break, welcome to Series 2: The Annotated Third Strike. If you're coming in from watching The Annotated Symphony of the Night, then welcome! This is the first of the Appendices posts, and I'll do something like this for each episode of the series as I did for the last one.

Having said that, please read this entry because there's a lot of ground to cover up front.

THE REASONING

Symphony of the Night was something on my mind for years, and making the first video series was just stuck in my craw until I finally decided to make it myself after foolishly hoping somebody else would do it. The thing is, I never really saw past that. I actually made the Annotated SOTN as something of a portfolio piece so I could teach myself how to edit video, so the idea of doing a second or third series didn't even occur to me until the last few episodes when people started asking about what was next.

I looked at a few options before deciding on 3S, but I think I knew in my gut that this was always where we were headed. I started doing this whole thing because I both love and am knowledgeable about SOTN. The only other game I'm that would be comparable is 3S. I have played it at least once a week for years and years either online or with friends, and depending on the time of day you ask me, I would tell you that 3S is maybe the only video game that matters.

As a genre, fighting game videos are rampant on the internet, but they either go over deep lore of a character or tournament/ combo videos for the hardcore. I thought it would be worthwhile to bridge the gap, as well as challenge myself with jumping genres after the last series. If I only did Action/ RPGs (or even just Castlevania games), you would be bored, I promise. If I did an actual, honest to God RPG like a Chrono Trigger or (oh my God) The Witcher 3 as people have suggested, I might never be able to finish it. I suppose those things aren't off the table, but for where I am with my life and knowing my capabilities and resources, in no way would something like these be feasible, or even fun to watch.

But there are a lot of challenges with doing this video series, especially with how I'm planning to do them, so let's get this out of the way now: THIS SERIES WILL BE DIFFERENT THAN THE LAST ONE. Please internalize that statement.

THE METHODOLOGY

If we're comparing, SOTN is a game that can (for the most part) be broken up into discrete levels where research can be done specifically for each location. There was a lot of research to be done for each location, too. But it was all fairly accessible info, and Symphony was a game built on folklore, which, as long as you know what you're looking at, can be easily identifiable and researched. Other than maybe any given Soul Calibur, fighting games aren't like this. RPGs have a longstanding tradition of aping recurring fantasy or sci-fi tropes and references, and most other genre of game tends to build them on their own. That's what attracted me to doing 3S, too, this opportunity to really go for something different, but it also means that we have to look at the game through a different lens.

In doing the research for this series, it became very obvious that a lot of what happens in fighting games, Street Fighter games in particular, are pop culture mishmashes, which, if there was a thesis to this series, it would be that Street Fighter is a nerd culture goulash. This meant looking at a lot of different key references that have popped up lately (do yourself a favor and look up the movie The Hard Times if you're bored) as well as digging into things like names, locations of stages, and so on.

SOTN, though, is a relatively easy game. Fighting games are only easy if you're punching a dummy opponent. This means that the first part of each character video will go over the wackier, research-able stuff that I just mentioned along with any relevant art, translation differences, and other stuff. The second half has to get into the actual gameplay. However, with SOTN, I wanted to show as much of the game as a person could possibly see. With 3S, this will not be possible. I can't possibly get into every combo for each character playing against the rest of the roster because of how quirky the game is on a character-vs.-character basis. On top of that, these aren't meant to be combo videos. Plenty of that stuff lives on YouTube already. So the plan is to show all of the normals, specials, EX specials and SAs of each character and touch upon some of their more notable uses, and then get into some depth about how their competitive play works. You will see combos that may be specific to certain SAs (because that's how competitive 3S works), but please don't expect hours of nutty Necro corner juggles.

GOING FORWARD

Base on what I just said, then, I'd like to ask that you be patient with the rollout of this series. The plan is run at least 1-2 episodes per month, but these are, even compared to the Annotated SOTN, incredibly hard videos to make. I'm more of a writer and researcher, and not really a great video editor, and these are a lot of work to plan, write, and then piece together. I'm maybe an above average 3S player (even after all of these years), but I'm lucky enough to know a few pro-level guys that can help me with the combo videos. But then again, someone's actually going to have to suck it up and get good enough with Necro so we can do those nutty corner juggles. These things take time and practice. It also takes coordination with other people's availability. This isn't my full time job, so please understand that I want this (and all Annotated series) to be quality first, so if I slip a bit, at list this is going to be the biggest reason.

YES, THERE WILL BE A PATREON

Getting back to the research for a second, there are a few primary sources that will continuously come up in the series. Finding more has proven a fun, but tremendous challenge. It's also gotten a bit on the expensive side. 20 year-old strategy guides and comics that are long out of print aren't easy to come by on the cheap. I'm perfectly happy to dump my own funds into doing these things, but going forward, I need to start thinking of ways to supplement the cost of doing business, here. If, say, my rickety old laptop takes a dive, something that was always a threat with the SOTN videos, then I'm in some real trouble, and it will slow everything way down. I need a cushion for this eventuality to some degree.

Understand that I don't plan on living off of this. That would be too much to hope for. But also understand that every dollar that you donate to the Patreon will be used to make this and future series better. I really need some translation help from some of the older materials, for example, and I believe that people deserve a fair wage for that kind of service. The Patreon will be for this purpose alone. 

When will this go live? Not sure right now, but hopefully before the next video hits, so I have a lot of work to do. Having never done something like this before I don't think I can offer decent physical rewards for tiers in good faith right now, but things like early access to videos, scripts, and polls for upcoming series aren't unreasonable. Please consider donating if you can. If you can't, that's perfectly fine, too. Just help me spread the word.

Thanks again for watching. I love doing these things, and the response so far has been positive. Don't forget that there will be the occasional discussion questions in the comments and further Annotated Appendices for each character.

See you in a few weeks!

Right Where It Should Be

As you might expect, I've been playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can lately. This means that, in reality, I'm playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can between the hours of 9:30pm and whenever I go to bed, M-F, when the kid is asleep enough that loud button presses won't wake her and my wife has had enough of television for the night and wanders off to read. Lucky for me, this tends to be prime time for the online fighting game crowd, so I can be soundly shown the business end of a fireball to the face like The Jesus intended.

But my League Point woes aren't what I'm getting at today, nor is this going to be some sort of poor man's review of the new game (but I like it!). Think of this more as an apology for an insult I never actually made.

See, Street Fighter V has come under a lot of flack over the past two weeks since its release for being shoved out the door in something of an "unfinished" state. For God's sake, reviewers have found, there's no Arcade mode in it, and the main reason for one to play it is to willingly subject yourself into the online meat grinder of Ranked matches which, for many of us, is like throwing your 9 year old sister into an NFL training camp. As the betas have gone on over the past few months, I was getting the sinking feeling that it was going to be a pretty bare bones package myself, and when it finally came out, it was hard not to felt a little let down on how thin the content was from a single-player perspective.

After two weeks of it, though, I'm switching my stance on this, and feel that the internet has been looking at this incorrectly. Not wrongheadedly, though, because there are definitely niceties that one could say should have been included in a retail release of a brand new Street Fighter game. But really, everything you need is right there, in as unobtrusive and unpretentious a manner as possible. It's, actually, straight to the point with almost zero filler, which most big budget games can't claim themselves.

Mode by mode, it's actually very easy to break this down. First, the main complaint is that there isn't a robust Story mode in the game yet, and that the included Story mode is laughable shallow. Now, in 2004, I played Guilty Gear XX and was downright flabbergasted at how complex and compelling it's dopey anime Story mode was, and wished that every fighting game from then on would have something so compelling. But this was still a side interest to me playing against other people and getting better at the game. Sure, I found myself as into Guilty's mythology at the time as I was any given Final Fantasy, but not so deep down, I wanted to learn the game and learn how to play it well, not learn how to cheese the computer so I could get the next phase of text boxes. There's a really big difference there. I get that there are people interested in playing a Street Fighter game so they can finally learn how Nash came back from the dead or to vindicate their Ryu/ Ken slash fiction dreams, but as Street Fighter IV was such a tournament success over the last few years has shown, this crowd seems more of a niche of a niche when it comes to this genre.

The Story mode that we're given, then, cuts through the bullshit. People that are into this stuff don't want to have complex nail-biting bouts with smart AI opponents, they want to beat the next guy to see the next story beat, and SFV gives them just that: idiotic computer opposition that a new player can pound on and an old hat to practice combos with. They don't need to be hard, they just need to be there, and they need to match up with the still art and dialog that bookends the fight. Though this isn't much a consolation to someone used to current Mortal Kombats or the Persona fighting games' Story modes, but the amount of art/ dialog that SFV is giving is at least that much or more than any and all versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III. If anything, it should act as the appetizer that it is for the Story mode update that's coming in June, giving people incentive to return to the game later, as their revenue model for the game clearly shows they want them to.

If the loose "plot" of the game is made to get through as quickly as possible, then, it's clear as day that SFV was developed for people to play competitively (and probably, as the speculation has gone, to make it more of an eSport draw), which means that it's going to have to send you online. But what does someone do between matches? Well, for now, it's a fair assumption that players will be sitting in the Training mode practicing combos and testing situations to be ready for the inevitable fight request, and if you've been playing like I have, you'll know that these can happen anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes apart, making the Training mode the ideal spot. Soon enough, though, and I have already felt this, the average player is going to get sick of hitting a punching bag, and will want something with some stakes involved, even if they're fairly low.

I ask you, would an Arcade mode really suffice? If you've already seen your character's story, which is mostly what Arcade modes are for in these games, then be honest with yourself and say no. Arcade mode is just there to pass the time between matches, and will loose their teeth the second you see the credits roll once. A Survival mode, though, with various levels of difficulty, is a better answer. Most nights so far, I'll fire up the game, head into Survival on Hard difficulty (which I still haven't completed, by the way), and see how far I get in the two or so hours that I'll play the game. Hard Survival mode has 50 opponents to get through, which means that I'll plow through a dumb AI opponent, cater to a fight request with an actual online player, and then go back to another AI opponent or two. Either the whole few hours have gone by and I'm too tired to keep it up, or Hard mode finally wins this war of attrition and my Ryu poops out around fight 30. Either way, I'm covering both bases: waiting for and then playing online competitors --why I'm playing to begin with-- and ultimately working toward a long term endgame in a 50-man kumite. 10-12 fights in Third Strike's Arcade mode doesn't fill that same void, and when I was playing SFIV, I would just spam focus attacks in the Arcade mode until someone pulled me out of the monotony with a fight request. Survival mode is much more fulfilling.

But yes, there are problems with all of this, and problems that are squarely on Capcom. For the first week, the servers were an overloaded shit show, which really hampers all of my enjoyment under this kind of mindset. This makes things especially lousy since you can't earn any in-game currency if the servers are down, making playing Survival and finishing it on any difficulty setting feel anticlimactic. I wish there were better combo training modes, too, like the ones found in Street Fighter IV. I have a feeling that stuff is going to come eventually.

The tools are there, though. If the servers are running well, everything is right where it should be. I'm not going to call anyone out online or talk shit about a review outlet for dogging on the game as a complete package; their opinions are their own. But as a Guy The Plays Fighting Games, this enough for me, because what's there is everything that I would be doing with any other game. Man, if only the entire universe just knew that I was so right about this and everything else, knowaddamsayin'?

[For All] The Good It's Done

If you're going to read this, you need to be ready to excuse the frothing temper tantrum of an old man...

So, the last time we talked, we got into some of the main reasons Street Fighter IV was not only good for fighting games, but good for the games business as a whole.

Today will be different. Today, we get some things off our chest.

I am not a Street Fighter IV hater, but over the course of the last seven years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I never want to play it again. In fact, at my normal weekly Street Fighter gathering, a guy convinced me to jump off of Third Strike to play him in SF4. Fair enough, I thought; you took your beatings from me, so I'll give you that same courtesy. The second the menu screens faded into memory, I knew that this was not the experience that I wanted to re-live. Going through them piecemeal will help to explain things a bit more clearly.

First, get a load of this:

What you're seeing is a roster of 44 characters, many of whom share a distinctly similar method of playing the game at its core level. This is a bloated mess. I give Capcom its due credit in that it balanced a roster of such preposterous size well enough so that more than only a fourth of the cast is viable (like in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2), but for a one-on-one game like a mainline Street Fighter, this is straight up too much. A glut like this will scare off new players, while more the more seasoned are only apt to find one or two main characters and stick with them over time. Sure, that policy isn't exactly new or bad for pro-level competitors, but smaller rosters give more incentive to become skilled with a larger section of the cast, making tournaments more enjoyable for spectators to both watch and participate in for the hope of a counterpick overcoming impossible odds. The best we really got with SF4 was this, which is honestly pretty great, but this is about as rare as finding a turtle that shits out solid gold ingots on your front porch.

On a more fundamental level, SF4 had a real problem with movement. Dashing was slow and didn't cover very much ground, and matches tended to feel like a crawl going from previous Street Fighters to this. I personally cannot stand it, but I give SF4 a pass here. The reason here is purely speculative, but after reading an interview with the Soul Caliber people a few years ago about how they slowed down SCV's gameplay to accommodate for the advent of network play, I got the feeling that Ono and the teams at Capcom and Dimps did the same for SF4. Since arcades weren't exactly common around the world at that point and online play did much to rebuild the FGC, I call that a hell of a net positive. Still, as a Third Strike player, I can't help but feel as though SF4 moves like two people throwing rocks at each other in a fish tank, which is certainly not for me.

Here is the great offender, though:

At around 2:30 in this video, legendary Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara demonstrates the absolute gulf between those of casual, and even competitive interest, and the very, very small population that will play this game at the top level. Go to any Street Fighter IV tournament video on the internet, and you'll find something roughly similar: a string for normal and special moves broken up by the occasional dash cancel. To the layman, it's just a guy hitting buttons. To the trained eye, it's ridiculous in its timing and stupid in execution. It is the 1-frame link.

1F link combos aren't exclusive to Street Fighter IV by any means, but they are as common in upper-tiered play as a low forward to a fireball in every fighting game in two dimensions. It's the process of attacking an opponent, and then quickly throwing out another attack that will connect before the opponent's animation resets from its hit stun. It's 1000% more difficult in execution than it is in explanation. Being so rife with them, SF4 players studied less of the fundamentals of spacing and gameplay to rifling through spread sheets of frame data to see what move connected to what.

Worse, this practice of overworking led to diminished returns in use. SF4 has insane damage scaling, which is the the game's way of making each subsequent move in a combo do less damage than it normally would outside of a combo. Basically, it means that if I hit you with three hard moves in a row, you won't be down to 50% of your health. SF4 took this to something of a hilarious extreme in the wake of this 1F link nonsense. That Daigo combo up there? Check out how much damage it actually does. In most Street Fighter games --including the newly released Street Fighter V-- one could logically do the same amount of punishment in a jumping hard punch, a low hard punch, and then a dragon punch. A lot less work for the same result. In that respect, I never wanted to put in the work it takes to do these goofball string combos. I never felt the need to.

So, Street Fighter IV, you're a swell game, but you're a swell game that needs to take a break from the spotlight, and I'm glad we have a new Street Fighter to take your place. I realize that this is all just my personal beef with what amounts to a very good videogame, but that's why this is my blog and not yours. So there.

The Good It's Done

From the perspective of a good eight years, it looks like Street Fighter IV and its children were monumental successes from the jump, and this is mostly true. Though sales for each subsequent upgrade and physical re-release couldn't have stayed steady, it's ubiquity in the fighting game space has lasted almost as long as as Street Fighter II --though without coming close to matching its monetary glory.

But that's ok, really. Success isn't always measured in dollars and cents, even in the rapidly changing development landscape and risk-averse console generation that Street Fighter IV found itself in. Yes, it did pretty well at the market --one source says roughly 8 million units by the end of it's string of releases-- but it wasn't one of the mega hits of the last ten years like singular released such as Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy.

I believe that this kind of monetary thinking is defeatist compared to the good that Street Fighter IV has done. Now that we're on the threshold of Street Fighter V's release, I think it's a fair time to assess IV's importance, because "important" is exactly what it is.

As I said last week, Street Fighter IV was designed specifically to appeal to an older, returning audience, so I don't really see the point in reiterating that here. What is worth mentioning was it's development and the embryonic period of its growth. It's now a well-publicized story that producer Yoshinori Ono had been working for Capcom since Third Strike (he was a sound designer) and wanted to make a new numbered game in the series for quite a while, which had been shut down by his superiors time and again. Capcom, a company known for taking a concept and drilling into the ground like a Seth McFarlane gag, had seemed to have bled as much money as it possibly could from the Street Fighter franchise. The PlayStation 2 era was basically keeping it in hospice as the publisher was content to release Anniversary compilations and quick cash-ins like Capcom Fighting Jam. The former did ok, trading more on nostalgia than innovation. The latter did lousy. Nobody wanted to play it, and now it's a laughing stock.

When taken collectively, though, there was a lesson here in these two releases in what the market could bear and who was buying. By the time the Xbox 360 was released, online play and an ephemeral downloadeable marketplace had become a viable concern, and one that the old guard like Capcom took notice of relatively early. 2006, then, is the year that Street Fighter punk broke. Whether it was a way of testing the waters with online infrastructure or to just cash in and bankroll another game in the newly-super expensive HD era, a port of Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting had made its way to XBLA. It's release, in hindsight, has become almost hilariously important to the landscape of fighting games.

The reason why, in short, is that it caused a seismic chain reaction of events outside of the scope of this particular writing, and this is something that I'll cover some day. What's ultimately worth mentioning are twofold: A) it had online match support, although this wasn't brand new for fighting games or even Capcom (the Anniversary's Third Strike port for the original Xbox could connect to the internet, as could a few Japan-only Dreamcast games) and B) it sold better than the company's expectations; much better, apparently. But, because this is the video game industry, there was a certain level of uproar. The online component of the game was its biggest criticism, and any review that you might look up from the time straddles the line between "hey, this is still a good game with bad connectivity," to "they should have never released it in this state." Still, in a single, inexpensive release of an old game, it reiterated to Capcom what Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Jam had already told them: people are willing to pay for old, well-made games, and almost as importantly, they wanted these old games online.

Two games were quickly placed into development around this time. The first was Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, lead by longtime fighting game tournament player David Sirlin and his team at Backbone Entertainment, and the Ono-produced Street Fighter IV for Japanese arcades and home consoles. Both were released in 2008, though the console versions of SFIV didn't arrive until early 2009.

As companion pieces for each other, it was clear that those hard-earned lessons learned in the PS2 era were becoming axiom. HD Remix broke records for day-one downloads, and acted as the perfect appetizer for SFIV's eventual home release a few months later where it quickly became a million-seller. Again, like the releases of the PS2 era, both traded on nostalgia mixed with refinement. But for any number of reasons --new systems, a larger cast, nicer graphics, whatever-- Street Fighter IV had longer legs, its release igniting the real renaissance in for the genre. Licensed products featuring the game and its cast were finding their way back to the shelves, and gaming sites were featuring match videos and interviews with creators with increased frequency. A new numbered Street Fighter was a big deal again, something it hadn't been since the late 90s.

I don't know how long Street Fighter IV was in development, but we can assume at least two years, getting the game past the proposal stage around the latter end of 2006 (close enough after SFII Turbo XBLA launched). That's about a year after the launch of YouTube, and roughly close to the launch of GGPO, two mutual monumental steps for both fighting games and videogames as a whole. With the latter, stable online fighting games were now possible with some clever latency masking. Though it wasn't as widely adopted by companies like Capcom, it was a clear step in the right direction to build a fighting game's netcode, and had to be noticed. The former, well, you know. SFIV's release a few years later was the absolute perfect timing for an ultra-competitive throwback genre to re-enter the mainstream. Online tournaments matches for training and glory were now a nightly ritual for even casual fans. Tournaments large and small were now being archived on the internet for people to study like playback tape at a high school football practice. Tournaments themselves went from tiny grassroots gatherings set up on forums to big, consistent business in terms of attendance and prize money.

The sum of these parts is that Street Fighter was doing what it did best in its 90s heyday: people were coming together again. Whether it was for competition or camaraderie, players could meet, play, argue, and learn from each other, and had further tools to do so on their own. This is Street Fighter IV's greatest legacy. Now that we're on the precipice of a new numbered Street Fighter in a few days --again, a big deal-- it was worth pointing it out, if only briefly.

I'd like to clarify something I said yesterday.

I realized not long after I wrote a nice chunk about Street Fighter IV that I implied that the game is bad. I'm not sure I want that to be the case in your head, but there has certainly been a trajectory to my opinion on the game:

1. This is new and good!
2. This is the fighting game norm
3. This has helped me make new friends
4. This is slow and plodding
5. This isn't what I want

Now, this still seems like I'm being overly harsh, but that isn't the case. In fact, I'm something of a proponent of the game even though I don't ever want to play it again. It's brutally obvious to anyone that reads this that, to me, the fighting game sun rises and sets with Street Fighter III Third Strike, and it would take both a similar masterpiece of a game and the time that I used to have to dump into it for me to be so in love with anything else. The cruel realities of both business and adulthood are against me on that one.

Maybe one of these days I'll write something about all of the good that's come from Street Fighter IV and its many upgrades, but I feel it's more important at this point to qualify yesterday's statements. I'm pretty sure you got that I was using Dhalsim as a metaphor for both fighting game development and the health of the current gaming industry (if only the large developer/ publisher side). But if you didn't, there you go, I guess. Street Fighter IV isn't really that far removed from what we're seeing currently with the new Star Wars movie; it's what you love intimately about the old ones, but with a few new characters and a couple of slight twists. During the previous console generation, things were awfully lean for companies that were swimming in money from the generation before it, and market-tested surefire hits were more the creeping norm than a sense of innovative adventure. Street Fighter IV is a clear product of that, though to its credit, it evolved into something much grander over time.

Comparing that to the Street Fighter III games as I did, which were almost a full reboot from a character and mechanical perspective (though, again, many of those character archetypes still exist), was meant to drive the point home. Maybe it also perpetuated a feeling that SF3 is better than SF4. Well, I guess personal biases creep in sometimes no matter what. Whatever. You're smart people. I think you get it.

Let's Meet Dhalsim

This is Dhalsim.

Meet him. Shake his hand. Study his movements and question his methods. He's sort of new around here, after all.

Ok, of course you know who Dhalsim is. He's a mainstay of the Street Fighter series; a perennial fixture of the roster lineup, and the Patient 0 of what has collectively come to be known as "zoning gameplay." Dhalsim is as new around video games as Sonic the Hedgehog.

But in about three weeks, Dhalsim won't be the yogi you know, and this is both as profound as it is assuring for the direction that both fighting games and maybe gaming as a whole will go.

They say that all successful sequels are the sum of the following equation: 80% old + 20% new. Street Fighter IV, the 2008 sequel that dragged the head-to-head fighting genre into a new found renaissance, practically had this tattooed on its metaphoric neck. Of the 25 playable characters (in the eventual home release in 2009), 19 were from previous games in the vast Street Fighter series, and of those, 15 were lifted straight from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the final iteration of the seminal 1991 title. Of these 25, 10 were all derivations of the basic "Ryu concept:" that is a character that can throw a projectile to bait an opponent into a jump, and then counter that jump with upward attack (like a Shoryuken or a Somersault/ Flash Kick). Street Fighter IV was a game with new mechanics that was fashioned to play comfortably with old ones, and your nostalgia was the primary selling point. It was a game meant for you to comfortably slip into that old t-shirt, and maybe add another layer on top for fashionable effect. By design, you already knew how to play Street Fighter IV.

By design, then, that will not be Street Fighter V. Sort of. We'll get to that, though.

Comparing sequels to Street Fighter II is like comparing sequels to Ridley Scott's Alien. On the one hand, they are competently-made science fiction films in that they all share the same conceit that whatever is happening, and it is happening to (and around) a woman named Ellen Ripley in some distant future. In practice, it is a horror movie followed by an action movie followed by a suspense movie followed by gobbledygook. Much like Street Fighter II, the first Alien movie was not the first movie of its kind, but it was a masterpiece of synthesizing what inspired it. Sure, there were probably other haunted house movies in outer space, but this was the haunted house movie in outer space, and all sci-fi horror flicks will be measured against it until I am cold and in the ground. 1997's Street Fighter III and the updates that followed it took these elements and altered them in a way that broke how fighting on a 2-dimensional plane is played. The fighting was more tactical and measured, and precise play was rewarded with easy wins. It's not a 1:1 comparison, but like Alien to Aliens, Street Fighter III took the foundation of its predecessor and rejiggered it into a superb video game (at least, by the time they got to Third Strike). Again, like your preferences in sci-fi film franchises, your palate can appreciate the tastes of both of these meals, but whichever you might consider "best" is up to the person whom experiences it.

In that respect, it's good, then, that each fully numbered Street Fighter game is different than the last. Variety's the spice of life, you know. Not so dramatically different as, say Final Fantasy XII to XIII, but comparing Third Strike to Ultra Street Fighter IV is certainly more than apples to apples. However, now that we have a little bit of history behind us and the release of the various "true" sequels, it's important to note these games' problems, especially in regard to our new old friend Dhalsim.

The first is re-acknowledge how fundamentally close Street Fighter IV is compared to Street Fighter II, which we're going to go ahead and cite as a major symptom of a gaming industry problem. Yes, SF4 has it's own complex system that players need to have complete mastery of to play at a tournament strength, and high level matches are littered with attack links that require stupid timing to perform (and absurdly stupid amounts of practice to perform reliably). Yet, at its most base level, it's the same game as Super Turbo with a few added layers to the onion: jump in to attack, hit an opponent with a low normal, and then chain it into a fireball. Not a flashy, high damage combo, but the Old Faithful of fighting game mojo that even a novice can perform rote. But again, this was the plan, and for good reason; fighting games had gone underground in the years between 1999's Third Strike and SF4's release almost ten years later, and the video game world had changed rather dramatically. Development costs for HD consoles had such a well-publicized spike that the middle class, B-tier developers of the world were fading away, and every large publisher of yesteryear were hemorrhaging money from one big budget flop to the next. Even though Street Fighter IV was comparatively modest in its development cost beside other Capcom games of the time like Lost Planet and Dark Void, it needed to be a hit for the publisher so it could be distanced from games like those specifically for their costly thud of a critical and commercial reception. SF4 needed to appeal to the old fan and the new.

Dhalsim, then, fit into this mold like that old t-shirt. His presence was easily recognized by old timers, and his inclusion in the game made him a dramatic shift away from the rest of the cast. He played like always had, though. Fireballs from across the screen used to dope foes into defending while he teleported behind them. Stretchy limbs could keep frustrated opponents at a literal arm's reach at mid-screen. Closer confrontations were handled by a signature Yoga Flame. This is how you could play 'ol Sim in Super Turbo, and once you got used to the movement in SFIV, this is how you could play Sim there, too. It was reliable. It was safe. It was boring. It was the norm of a console generation made manifest.

Street Fighter III was made at a different time with a different staff using different money that was, comparatively, flowing like a river, and our buddy Sim was there, too. Of course, it really wasn't the Dhalsim that we knew and loved, but that's just how SF3 was initially concocted: include Ryu and Ken, and then let's bake this whole thing fresh. But Capcom were already in too deep. They had created the archetypes for this whole fighting game thing, and they did too good of a job. Even if they started completely from scratch without a Ken and Ryu (which, depending on what you believe, was originally in the cards), most characters would hew pretty closely to what had already come before. Sure, Capcom's rivals and contemporaries were making new and interesting characters for their fighting games in terms of play style and mechanics (just look at the mess of characters in the King of Fighters series), but even most of those fall into a few loosely-defined roles that they themselves had created. Just to make it tougher on themselves, they were doing it with a game that fundamentally made "zoning" characters like Sim obsolete: the Street Fighter III series let you swat away attacks, making the risk of jumping over a fireball shot at you from across the screen much lower for an average player and practically non-existent for a pro.

So, while the SF3 games created a handful of players that were wholly unique like Makoto and Oro, it was crowd of reasonable facsimiles of older, better-established characters. Our man Dhalsim, then, was right there in front of you. He just had a new paint job and some reshuffled moves. Oh, and his name was Necro. But that was the beauty of it --Necro was a guy with just about all of Sim's normal attacks (or at least, the majority of the ones you'll recognize) coupled with none of the special moves. No fireballs. No teleports. No goddamn Yoga Flames. All of a sudden, these long limbs don't mean as much as getting inside for spinning punch combos and maybe a Magnetic Story super Hail Mary. Corner juggles were more the norm than distance setups and subterfuge. Necro was Dhalsim, but not Dhalsim. And at this point, not enough people really gave a damn.

Street Fighter III and its updates did fine for Capcom, but they didn't set the world aflame like its predecessors and the various spin offs had. Too little, too late, people cried. The 32-bit era was firmly upon us at home, and we could play our Tekkens and Virtua Fighters without dumping quarters into a "backward thinking" sprite-based 2D game like Street Fighter III. A new generation had looked upon a New Generation and shrugged. Besides, these weren't the characters that we fell in love with, so why bother, right? It was challenging and beautiful and fluid, but even as a Triple-A game of its time, it was just a little too left of center.

So Dhalsim languished. And then he perceived.

On paper (if this is paper), it's reasonable to say on a very base level that Street Fighter V's Dhalsim will be the best Dhalsim of three worlds; or, at least three distinct generations of Street Fighter games. I personally haven't used him in the betas, and we're still a few weeks away from the game's official release, so I can't really tell you for sure. But what a little more navel-gazing can tell us is that this is gross oversimplification. Street Fighter as a series has finally come to terms with its audience, and as a series, come to terms with its market.

This begins and ends with Dhalsim. Yes, he will play roughly similar to his older versions, but subtle adjustments to some of his fundamental attacks evolve him into a different character. Fireballs will now travel in an upward arc toward the opponent, and only by burning precious EX meter will they move horizontally across the screen. This sounds simple, but will be a drastic reeducation for older Sim players. Simple floating options will alter his movement, not unlike Oro from Street Fighter III, throwing off the timing of a defending player or one on the attack as he sails over projectiles beneath him. But he is not Necro. This Sim will still keep his opponents at a distance, and on their toes with misdirection that is classic to the character.

The roster for Street Fighter V small, all things considered. But it is this consideration that makes this new Sim, and every other character present, so measured and well-thought. Gone are the sea of "shoto clones" where now only Ryu and Ken exist. And between the two of them, the gulf between abilities is so much more pronounced that it's highly illogical to play them similarly. Each character, from new to old, fits a specific, purposeful niche, and though each character has their own specific mechanic tied their V-Skill. Most of these are pulled from various Street Fighter games of years past, giving older players something to easily tinker with and new players something to easily learn.

But the characters themselves are what's most telling, and what's most affirming. Though there are only four new characters in the game, each returning character have noticeable changes. Some are less subtle: Cammy isn't as far removed from her life in Street Fighter IV as Ken is. But that's ok. There are more alterations than not, and that suggests a level of trust that Capcom has had in its audience and development staff than it has for a long time. It suggests that, even though you know and love these folks from different games from across the vast Street Fighter-verse, you will be fine with re-learning this new game, character by character. It's a Capcom that learned its lesson from the rebellious Street Fighter III adolescence, but still has significantly retooled characters that a player that may yet recognize.

This is a good sign for fighting games as much as it's a good sign for the larger gaming spectrum. Like the games industry of 2008, the industry of 2016 is evolved and nuanced. It took Sony to bankroll SFV, after all, and this is turning into more of a necessary evil than people seem to be comfortable with. But that's a different discussion. What we're seeing are games that push its audience, like the SFV roster will do. Games that will push technology, content delivery, and DLC options, like SFV will do. Games that welcome community, and player sharing, and competition like SFV will do. All of these are healthy. All of these are necessary.

So. Say hello again to Dhalsim. Learn things from him. Buddy-punch his shoulder like the old friend that he is. He's an important guy.

A Quick Plug

USGamer published a feature today that I wrote about a particularly passive aggressive 3rd Strike troll. You should read it, and then tell everyone else to while you're at it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Go there right now.

Book editing is in semi-full swing. So, half swing. Mild swing, maybe. Whatever. The point is that I'm slowly picking away at getting one edit done so we can move this process along and hopefully have it self-published by the Fall, if not sooner. We'll see how that goes.