Annotated Appendix 2

Mmmmmk, so here we have Episode 3...

It doesn't look like it, but this one kind of took forever to make, even though it's not quite like the information dump that the first episode wound up being.

For one, the info here was a little challenging to parse out when it came to Maria and the Clock Room. It's kind of a lot of info to get through, so I tried to write a script that was as succinct as possible while also covering a lot of ground. Now that it's out in the wild, I hate it, really. This is one of those instances where I recall all of the times I dreamed about doing something like this and what I would say about any given topic. I'm absolutely sure that in my head I had way more interesting things to say (or at least more fun ways of saying them). It's done and it's out, though, so fine. Let's all move on with our lives.

This video was also chock full of little tidbits that weren't in the original script that had to be added with some re-recording later. I'm pretty sure the differences in the dialog levels make that abundantly clear. Truth is, I had to do those extra audio recordings at something like 11:30 at night when everybody's asleep in the house (including my year-old baby), so I couldn't have these saucy tones booming into my little Snowball mic.

More on that end, and really the point I'm slowly getting to, is that this has been a very complicated couple of weeks for me professionally. My work life is changing pretty drastically --and not really for the better-- and this is by far the busiest time of the year for me, so other things like video editing and script writing didn't get the attention they probably could have used. I'm glad I caught some of the glaring flaws before completing the video rendering and putting on the internet, but even though this is much lower on the priority list for me than how I feed my family and pay my mortgage*, I need to be a more careful of the script writing to make sure all of the facts are in there. This is going to be especially true for a few of the upcoming videos like the Outer Wall and the Long Library where there's lot to talk about.

Whew. Ok. Another difficult part of this video is plugging in the background filler to the backtracking moments, like when I opened up the section previously blocked in the Entrance and went back through the Cthulu/Devil fight and back up the chimney with the Marionettes. Not a super long section, but definitely a lot of silence to fill, so it was a matter of finding the best piece of trivia to inject there that's both appropriate in length and situationally useful. I tried a few different chunks of dialog to use, and they were either too long, or it made more sense to use them in a future video when there's an example that's found in the same place (like, say, explaining elemental damage).

Alright. On to the Outer Wall.

*Really, not that much lower.

Annotated Appendix 1

Well, hi there.

That thing at the top? Yeah, that's Episode 2 of the series, which was just posted early this morning. I haven't had a chance to dig into the episodes here since posting them, but the response to the first was very promising, and the comments were more than supportive. If you're reading this and you've commented, then thanks again for the views and the kind words.

Let's get into the process a bit regarding this first two videos. These both wound up being kind of awkward with the way it seems that I'm forced to do these for one reason: choreography. See, there's just too much to say about a given topic that by playing a normal game and not stopping to smell the roses once in a while that it's certain that my commentary won't be able to cover everything. A good example of this is in the first episode where I hit three big facts about the Death encounter. Without stopping there for a certain length of time, I wouldn't have enough room to talk about the Bone Scimitar enemies (both of which are unique, it turns out) and the Red Rust sword that the red one drops. It turns into real logistical problem when actually playing the game.

The solution, then, is to write tight scripts, record them in Audacity, annotate them so I know what's coming and when, and then listen to them through headphones as I'm playing the game. As you can imagine, it's kind of a painstaking process, but I'm trying to cut down on the amount of time that Alucard is either bum rushing through commentary or just standing around in silence, so I'm trying to get it down to more of an exact science.

The other problem with this (which is something I re-learned the hard way the other night) is that SotN isn't a game with multiple save files. If I complete a section and think, you know what, I should re-record that, I have to do it with a separate run of the game, which is something I'm trying to actively avoid. I think people would eventually catch on, and my schadenfreude would be lost. We don't want that, do we? Honestly, I want some semblance of consistency with the videos, and to me, that means one unified playthrough. I'm not saying that this won't happen down the line, though, so please keep your pitchforks and torches in the shed now that you know the reasoning.

The good news is that the actual recording and editing is getting a lot easier now. I've decided to put the kibosh on the PS3's smoothing option when playing PSX games. This doesn't completely translate into crystal clear pixels on a YouTube video, but it makes me feel better, I guess. I'm still using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 17, though, so I'm at least getting a sense of authenticity with it, even though it's not on original hardware.

The second episode was much more dry of interesting things to say, though, sadly. One thing I probably should have mentioned is that most of the enemies in Alchemy Laboratory are all old timey monsters from the very first game, other than the Spittle Bone, Bloody Zombie, Bone Scimitars and the bosses. In fact, they all come from the second to last level where you fight Death, which may have something to do with the Grim Reaper's appearance at the entrance and Slogra/ Gaibon being the first boss, but that's a bit of a stretch. Anyway, the Marble Gallery is a larger area, and I should still have more fun things to talk about more often.

Part of those fun things is something I'm going to playfully call "backtrack filler." Mapping the entirety of the game (not counting outside of the castle, which I'll only briefly mention) can take a fair amount of time, and there's definitely going to be some episodes that are a little on the quiet side as I blast through old areas to find previously inaccessible chambers and locations. I'll be using these moments to talk about as much of the background development history of the game as I've dug up. I worry that I don't have enough to fill the entirety of the game, but I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So yeah. Part 2. It's a scene, man. Lucky for me, I have a week off of work soon, so I'll try to blast through another video within that time, because life is about to get pretty nutty for me over the next month or so.

Thanks again for watching.

Annotated Update: I Swear This is Going to Happen

Aaaaaaand hello.

Just a few updates while things are moving along. Last week, I posted the intro video on YouTube. It's still a little rough and could probably use some polishing, but I needed the thing to see see some daylight for my own sake. It's been a few months since I started this whole thing in earnest, and it's discouraging not to have much to show for it after a long stretch. I mean, I'm certainly fine playing Castlevania games whenever I get a free moment, but after a while, it was starting to feel like I made this whole thing up as an excuse to sit around and play a bunch of Castlevania games (again, not the worst thing).

Now, I get that having this crudely edited video on the internet without context seems kind of dumb, so I've been working as quickly as I can to get an actual first video up by (hopefully) this weekend.

Of course, there have been snags:

First, I decided I was going to hook up that magically little Elgato to my PlayStation 2 to get Symphony footage from that. Nope. I'm running the PS2 off of component cables, which isn't normally a bad thing if we're trying to grab footage from, say Vice City, Stella Deus, or any other rando PS2 game. The problem is that the console downsizes the resolution automatically when you plug in a PSOne disk, which the component cables can't (or won't) properly send through the Elgato. Normal composite cables would do the trick, but A: I don't have them anymore, B: I want my PS2 games look as saucy as they can on the beautiful mountain of a TV it's hooked into, and C: there isn't a chance in hell that I would go looking for some at this point, especially if money is involved.

No problem! I have a PlayStation 3, which is spectacular in that all PS3s natively play PSOne games, and they naturally upscales them to wondrous effect. But this Elgato, though, was given to me second hand (read: bestowed upon me not unlike from on high. I can't complain) and without the appropriate PS3 cable. I tried just hooking in the PS2's component cables, but couldn't get them to properly work. I didn't want to do it, but I wound up nagging the guy that gave it to me to dig around his parents' house for the PS3 chord, because it would have cost close to another $20 with shipping to get a new one. Nuts to that.

This minor setback has been solved, thank goodness. The dude found the cable and dropped it off the other night, and the PS2 components would have worked fine if I would have just been smart enough to properly configure them, so the only real "problem" here was my own idiocy.

But let's keep that trend going for snag #2 --the voice recording. Over the weekend, I decided to record the VO for the first script, which covers the moment you turn the game on through the entrance to the Alchemy Laboratory (which is still pushing 15 minutes!). Now, I solved all of my dialog recording problems about two weeks ago, so I sat down, freewheeled an intro speech that will run like a teaser before each episode, and the pulled up the first script. There were a few stumbles, sure, but that could be easily edited out. But no, this whole thing needs to get recorded again after some extensive audio surgery last night. I suppose you could blame the vodka for this, but again the real problem here was me. (Lesson: only record your voice drunk for podcasts).

Snag #3 has to do with making a better title card and an appropriate background for the videos so you're not staring into the fringes of a black abyss while they're playing. I'll get to that later today on my way through snag #4...B roll...

...Which is the worst.

I knew it was going to be tedious, but that's part of what will hopefully make the whole thing special. I want to source video from other people as little as possible for this project, which means that I need to do a lot of side stuff in Symphony (and a few other games). And, by a lot, I mean a lot. Busting out of the castle. Showing off all of the weapons with special moves. Glitching into the grate right underneath the castle entrance (ok, that one might get pulled from someone else's YouTube). It's a big job.

But that's the point.

I swear to whatever god you may or may not believe in, I'm going to get a fucking video up this weekend.

Annotated Update

So, I made this big statement about this big plan and it's turned into a big, big job. But I saw that coming, so it's ok. Really, though, it's turned into just a little more work than I anticipated, but for the amount of work I thought it would be in the first place, a "little more" really just pushes this from a massive undertaking to a super massive undertaking.

You know what the problem is? Castlevania games, that's what. I thought I'd replay the ones that I know just to get a refresher and capture good footage from them. Then I figured that I'd play some of the ones I skipped to make sure I didn't miss anything that may have been referenced in Symphony. Then I realized that if that's going to be the case, I need to play everything from every platform that came out before 1997 just in case. The point of this whole exercise is to be thorough, so I, you know, need to be thorough.

On the plus side, a very generous friend of mine set me up with legit a copy of Sony Vegas, which is a very easy editing program to use, though it's a fairly old version of the software. After a little tinkering, I'm a lot more confident in my original vision for the videos with as little compromising as possible. But there have still been some hurdles. I'm struggling to use my rudimentary pixel art skill to make a title card for the whole thing based on the actual Symphony title screen (meaning GIMPed into the actual Symphony title screen). I took a good swing at it a week ago and it needs a whole lot more work than I've been able to put in so far, so if anything holds the whole endeavor back, it could be that.

Second, I'm doing all of this --all of the video capture, all of the editing, all of the sound recording, etc.-- on my laptop. It's only about a year old and has a nice amount of muscle to it, but this thing was not built for the task I'm asking it to perform. Do me a quick favor and silently pray for it's endurance over the next few months.

Update's over. Time to finally play Kid Dracula.

The Annotated Symphony of the Night

Hi there.

If you've been following my Twitter feed over the last few days (and you should...?) you may have seen my little advertisement for something of a passion project I've been wanting to do over the last few years: annotating Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I've wimped out of doing it for a thousand different reasons in the past, but now that consumer video recording and editing have become cheap and easy-ish, I've pretty much run out of excuses. So, whenever it gets done, a series of videos going through chunks of the game will hit the internet, and you're going to love it. Promise.

But what does "annotate" mean, anyway? In simple terms, annotations are notes on a given topic, and an annotated guide to, say, a book or a film details and explains small, individual pieces that make the larger whole. Very few games, if any, receive this kind of treatment.

Symphony of the Night, released in NA in 1997, was meant to be something of a swan song for the series to that point as Konami was developing a new 3D game for the Nintendo 64 that would wipe the slate clean and reboot the franchise. Koji Igarashi, the co-director of the game and co-scenario writer, was an unabashed fan of Castlevania from the beginning, and used the limited resources his team had to not only nod at the past entries that came before it, but also cram in as many references to religion, mythology, literature, and folklore as they could. On top of that, Symphony is so loaded down with secrets that, when looking at it in terms of scope, makes it both a masterpiece of design and something of a miracle that it all worked.

I'll be pointing all of these out during a concise playthrough of the game, with a small window embed next to it for additional video. I will be narrating the run of the game, and will add text underneath when necessary. Here is a crude mock-up of what you'll be seeing:

As I've never A: recorded gameplay footage before, and B: never edited video, the first challenges have been finding adequate programs that work on my own limited resources, and learning how to bend them to my will. For now, I'll be recording with a low-rent, but workmanlike program called FRAPS that's fairly common in gaming YouTube circles. It has its downsides --mostly because the files it creates are monstrously huge-- but is very inexpensive to use for the moment, at least for testing and training purposes.

Hurdle #2 is far more of an issue, as you can imagine. Both of the most common free editing options out there for PC, YouTube's onboard program and Windows Movie Maker, don't seem to have the capability of doing exactly what I want (at least, not that I have found so far). Simple as they seem to be for actual editing, I'll probably have to look elsewhere for the multi-windowed approach that I'm gunning for. I'm not super excited to do research for something like this, but that's part of why I'm doing it, so there you go. To the internet!

So here's the actual plan:

1. Record a test run through the game. Even though I've played SotN about 50 times or something, I need to make sure that I can competently play it without too many screw ups, and plan the most efficient path while mapping as much as I can in any given castle location. I'm most of the way through this now, and have already found some problems that I need to address in regard to how I'm recording the video and how I can compensate for it (the worst problem so far is the occasional dropped frame of animation and input lag from the controller. I know, it's not like I'm playing a fighting game, but in regard to how I traditionally fight things like Galamoth in the second castle, a laggy button press is the difference between a steady stream of invincible attacks and the business end of a foot to the face).
2. Start writing scripts. Based on how the test run went, I can start to accurately compile information and map out the text. This includes placing all of the enemies, the weapons found and dropped in each location, any visual cues from past games that come up, and planning on where to place the supplemental video. This is probably going to be the longest part, if not the hardest.
3. Record the master playthrough. This run will be based on the scripts with as little improvisation as possible. We'll see how that goes
4. Finalize scripts, start combing for supplemental video. This is where I lock down the scripts and either look around the internet for usable video from past games and other resources, or start recording them myself.
5. Play through a Luck run, farm everything. If stage 2 was the longest and maybe the hardest part, then this will be the most tedious. I need to find all of the weapons that have special moves in them and the other stuff that make references to outside works (like Tolkien. There's a lot of Tolkien going on in this game). Good thing is that you can play the game with a code that spikes your luck stat, essentially making this a little easier. Regardless, I'm kinda sorta not looking forward to this part, so I might try to dig up a 100% save file on the internet that's got all of this stuff already. Remember, I'm not only farming this junk, I'm recording it, too (but not the actual farming of it, lucky for you). 
6. Lay down the narration. Depending on the editing software I use, I could either do it right on top of the video, which is optimal, or record something via Audacity and embed it into the video, which is not. I've actually done some voice recording before, so I'm confident in my ability to pull this off and the little ticks and quirks of my diction that I need to watch out for. But it's not something I do all the time, so it will take some work. Please keep me in your prayers during this phase.
7. Clean up. Extra video. Extra audio. Figuring out how to put in the audio of that never-produced extra ending. Stuff like that. At this point, I should probably Photoshop some sort of cover image for this thing. I just remembered that I should probably also make a short intro video to explain the thought processes to this whole adventure. Shit.

At this point, I still don't have any idea how I'm going to split the videos and where those will take place. While I'd like to just make this one giant 5 hour affair, that would be a big, stuffed video, and I think getting them out in small chunks is probably more palatable for you the viewer and me that producer. Plus, this is a learn-as-you-go thing for me, so we should expect the quality of them to get better over time (right?). I'd like to have at least one of these out in the next month or two, so we'll see.

I hope you like Symphony of the Night, but that's a dumb thing to say because of course you like Symphony of the Night. That's all I'm going to be thinking about over the next few months, so I guess I hope I like Symphony of the Night. Which I do, or else I would never tackle something like this. Send me your tips on recording and editing, if you have them, and if you know a guy named Jeremy Blaustein, let him know I'm looking for him. I have to ask him about the Silmarillion.

See you soon.

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.