Public Service Pronouncement

Don't let this happen to you!
(image by Gus Allen for Atari)
(the good one, not Infogrames wearing its
skinned carcass as a coat)

I'm loathe to link to anything written by Brian Ashcraft, the little jerk who banned me from Kotaku years ago, but this is nevertheless important enough to put that slight behind me for a few minutes. Do you have a PSP? Open the back and check the battery. If it's starting to do its best Jiffy Pop imitation, chuck it and get a replacement. Not only will the battery not work in that condition, bad, bad things could happen to your system if you let it continue to expand. At the very least, the door on the back will warp from trying to hold in the swelling power source. At the very worst, the battery could burst open, soaking your PSP's internals in corrosive acid. Trust me, you don't want that... replacements aren't cheap, especially with the pandemic inflating classic game prices.

Amusingly, this recently happened to my 3DS... after getting irritated with the system not holding a charge, I opened the back panel and discovered that the battery was plumping up faster than William Shatner at a Star Trek convention buffet. Let that be a warning to you... regardless of the manufacturer, age isn't kind to rechargeable batteries. (Or William Shatner.)

This whole week has been a learning experience for me. After having no end of trouble running Batocera on the PC I rescued from a yard sale, I learned that you can't run the software from just any flash drive. Neither the Verbatim I bought from Staples (for way too much money) nor the Memorex I had lying around were up to snuff. However, the Sandisk Cruzer I had previously reserved for my Xiaomi worked beautifully, running games and transferring files with ease. Thanks to the Batocera Linux Twitter for the suggestion.

By the way, did you know even an aging Core2Duo can run games for turn of the century consoles like the Dreamcast and GameCube? I do now! I ought to discuss my experiences with the quirky Atomiswave library, but alas, that will have to wait for a future blog entry...

Street Fighters, Too

"I heard you were talkin' shit about me! You wanna fight?"
"Yeah! Let's go down to the market district!"
"Should we wait until they close?"
"No! Let's fight during regular business hours!"

Roy Wood, Jr.

Just a little levity before I begin what will likely be a very pedantic blog entry that will make all but the biggest Street Fighter fan's eyes glaze over. Picture it, Sicily America, early 1993. The Sega Genesis was starting to pick up steam, with major publishers like Acclaim and Konami already making games for the system. After years of licensing their arcade games to Sega, Capcom decided they wanted to be more directly involved with the Genesis, and signed up to become a third party licensee. 

You've seen that wonky picture of Mega Man
and Sonic shaking hands about a million times,
so here's something that's a little easier
on the eyes, courtesy of Archie Comics.

Naturally, Capcom's megahit Street Fighter II would be the first game they'd publish for the Genesis. Unfortunately, because the designers at the company were already stretched thin making games for the Super NES (or they just didn't care...), Capcom handed the game off to Opera House, an outside developer that had previously ghost-written the Genesis ports of Midnight Resistance and Captain America and the Avengers. 

Those games were okay (Midnight Resistance moreso than The Avengers), but "okay" wasn't going to cut it for a high-profile title like Street Fighter II, and the press and attendees of that year's Consumer Electronics Show had told Capcom as much after playing Opera House's beta build. The site Hidden Palace goes into more exhaustive detail, but the bottom line is that the game felt like a mid-tier release, noticeably compromised and unworthy of one of the biggest arcade hits of the 1990s. 

Pressured by criticism, Capcom decided to scrap what Opera House had given them and handled the port themselves. Special Champion Edition is what was ultimately brought to store shelves, and while it got a lot of grief from players who couldn't stand the rough voice samples and the need to switch between punches and kicks on a three button controller, it was nevertheless vastly improved over previous builds of the game. 

The characters were more cleanly drawn, the colors had more of the vivid "pop" that they had on the Super NES, and the letterboxing that turned the top and bottom of the screen into a black void was largely removed. As an added bonus, there was an extra "hyper" mode that helped it achieve parity with Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES. Was it perfect? No. But anyone who was paying attention to the game's development understood that it could have been much, much worse.

That's not the end of the story, though! Over the last few years, a hacker named Pyron had been busy sharpening up Capcom's port of Street Fighter II with patches, culminating in the release of Street Fighter II Remastered. Meanwhile, Hidden Palace has uncovered and released the two beta versions of Street Fighter II by Opera House... which seem to share DNA with a bootleg version of Street Fighter II called SF II' Turbo that's been available online for years. Nostalgia Nerd thoroughly covered that game on his YouTube channel... you can watch that video by clicking here.

Phew. You can already see this rabbit hole gets pretty deep. Hidden Palace and Nostalgia Nerd have already covered the history of these games, so let's look at their overall quality. Here's a handy comparison shot of the five games, in the same stage, with the same fighters.

One thing that stands out right away is that the colors in Opera House's two games are rather raw, lacking the subtlety of Special Champion and Pyron's later hack of that game. The carpet in Dhalsim's stage has fewer gradients, the image of Ganesh in the distance isn't as detailed, and the text at the top of the screen is flat, without the lustrous shine in Capcom's version. You see a lot of this in the Opera House games... the colors just aren't as warm as they are in the finished game, an issue that SF II' Turbo tries to address. The colors are a bit richer in that port, especially for the fighters, but it still skimps on the details. The introduction with two random guys battling in front of a skyscraper is missing, as are the brief bios for each character in the attract mode.

The sprites are entirely redrawn in Special Champion, and this quickly becomes evident in close-ups. Here now is Ken's victory pose, with Capcom's game on the left and the July build of Opera House's conversion on the right.

Ken, are you okay there, buddy? You look like you should be cracking open pecans on Christmas. The weirdness continues in the portraits before each match, with Zangief taking on an almost feline appearance in SF II' Turbo, which reuses assets from the Opera House games.

You start to wonder if Opera House based its own characters on the original Street Fighter II, where the designs were slightly off and didn't get revised until the arcade version of Champion Edition was released a year later.

It may take a sharp eye to notice some of the visual differences between the five games, but the differences in sound are pretty obvious. On the plus side, Opera House's two builds and SF II' Turbo has superior voice samples; a bit high pitched but nevertheless better than the rough, labored speech in Special Champion. However, practically everything else in Opera House's two games is worse, particularly in the earlier March build. The woosh of fists flying through the air sounds like a garbage bag flapping in the wind, the roaring of jet engines in the character select screen is missing entirely, and the background music is thin and cheap despite louder, more bombastic percussion. The July build and SF II' Turbo have improved sound effects, but the music regrettably remains the same.

Despite their subpar audiovisuals, the Opera House versions of Street Fighter II still offer solid if unexceptional gameplay. The control is tight, no attacks were omitted to conserve space on the cartridge, and advanced techniques like two-in-ones still work. Feel free to rip into a stunned enemy with Ken's devastating hard punch to hard shoryuken... it doesn't burn through as much health here as it does in Special Champion, but it's still just as easy to perform. Fighting games on the Genesis are a mixed bag, and the beta of Street Fighter II crushes the worst of them under its heel. 

The problem is that this is a pretty low bar... people expected Street Fighter II for the Genesis to be better than Deadly Moves, Fighting Masters, and Power Instinct. They also expected it to be on par with the Super NES version, but Opera House's game just... isn't. It plays well enough, but it looks cheap, sounds cheap, and lacks the hyper mode of Special Champion. A direct comparison between the outsourced betas and the finished version designed in-house makes it clear why Capcom felt the need to start from scratch.

Pyron's hack of Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition, titled Street Fighter II Remastered, further enhances Capcom's solid conversion, with over a dozen tweaks to the original. Some of these, like cleaner speech and brighter colors, absolutely improve the game, while others seem included just for completion's sake, and others still are slightly bewildering.

Here's one example of a change that wasn't strictly necessary. The fighter on the left in the opening sequence- the one who's always clobbered by the guy on the right- has been changed back to an African-American man. Frankly, having two blonde men battle, removing any possible racial subtext, was one of the edits Capcom made to the home version that I completely understand. At the same time, the switch back to the original design does make Street Fighter II Remastered more faithful to the arcade version.

Then there are the changes to the in-game elements, like the status bar at the top of the screen and the typeset. Capcom's classic serif lettering from the CPS1 era has been changed to fonts from Street Fighter Alpha, which are admittedly easier to read but are also slightly jarring in a game which predates that series. It may take some adjustment, but it's worth it when the rest of Street Fighter II Remastered looks like this...

In case you've forgotten, this is how Suzaku Castle looked in the official release.

Special thanks to Hidden Palace for releasing the Opera House betas and for its extensive research on the subject. Thanks also to GDRI for being a handy resource, and Pyron for his dedication to improving the Genesis version of Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition.

Gone Batty

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, folks. It's been too hot to do ANYTHING lately, but thanks to the approaching monsoon season, we're supposed to get a break from the brutal weather. Now that my eyes aren't bubbling in their sockets like so much cheese in a fondue pot, I can talk about my latest project. I'm piecing together an entertainment system from junk I've pieced together from various sources. You know, stuff like a five dollar PC from a yard sale, an excess monitor given to me as a Christmas gift, a controller I snagged from Goodwill for a few bucks, and... er, an overpriced flash drive from Staples that cost more than all those other things put together. Yes yes, I could have bought one from Amazon for a fraction of the price, but that would have taken several days to arrive. When they were handing out patience, I couldn't stand to wait in line for it.

Anyway. This is the system as it currently stands; a beater PC running Batocera from the extortionately priced flash drive. (No, I'm not letting that go.) I've actually tried the drive on two computers... it runs better on that i5-powered Fujitsu laptop I mentioned in a previous post, even adding themed borders around the games. Regrettably, the Fooj just isn't powerful enough to handle Dreamcast games... they'll run smoothly for a few seconds, freeze for a second, then briefly resume, only to repeat the process. 

The beater desktop with the Core 2 Duo processor won't touch them at all... after you click on the appropriate icon, the system jumps in, then quickly jumps out. It's almost as if it sized up the task, shook its head, and stormed away, muttering a "screw this" under its breath.

One thing both the computers do is randomly freeze for a second or two in menus, usually after scrolling down for a while. It obviously can't be the fault of the hardware... what are the chances two completely different computers would react in the same way? The blame has to fall on either the obscenely overpriced flash drive (see, I told you I wasn't letting this go) or Batocera itself. I couldn't tell you for sure, since I've never used this software before. It looks just like Recalbox, but for all I know it could be vastly different under the hood, and could be vastly more demanding.

Once I get the problem with the random freezes squared away, I'd like to see if I can get that desktop running more demanding games. It's got a PCI-e slot, but it's also got a cramped case that doesn't leave much room for expansion. The video card I bought previously wouldn't fit, just barely squeezing into the case but failing to meet the max headroom of the bracket slot in the back. I'll have to purchase a low-profile video card in the future, but what if the card won't work with this computer, or Batocera? Even if it does play nice, what if the card I purchase still isn't powerful enough to bring Dreamcast games to life? There are just too many variables, and not enough information online to properly anticipate and address them.

Why am I putting myself through this torment, anyway? Somehow I doubt it's worth the Herculean effort just to play Dolphin Blue, a Metal Slug wannabee with pastel porpoises in place of the usual pint-sized tanks. Stupid Sega/Sammy... you could save me a whole lot of time and aggravation if you'd just port the damn game to the Switch. Even Namco wised up and gave Americans Drill Land eventually.

Bigger, Badder, Sony-er?

Well, that came out of left field. EventHubs reports that Sony is giving some thought to buying SNK's parent company Leyou Technologies, and by extension the creator of the venerable Neo-Geo hardware itself. SNK hasn't been shy about bringing its IP to every console manufacturer and digital download service it can find, but under Sony, that could change in a hurry. That company likes to keep its properties exclusive to its Playstation line of consoles... and in the rare cases that it doesn't, it gets plenty of lip from its fanbase. EventHubs speculates that with Sony in charge, Terry Bogard may be one of the few crossover characters who won't return in the next installment of Smash Bros. I guess he'll always have a home in Playstation All-Stars. Hooray?

It's not like the fighting game community needed even more bad news this week, and this isn't even close to the worst we've heard. Nevertheless, you'd better grit your teeth and prepare yourself for the possibility of even more Playstation exclusive fighters in the coming generation.

UPDATE! We have more information on this story. Specifically, there's not much to this story. Twitter user ButtonsMcGillicutty states that SNK is owned by Ledo Millennium and 37Games, not Leyou Technologies as EventHubs reported. I gotta be honest, folks, I'm a little relieved that someone let the air out of this rumor.