Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys? Terra Cresta

Look, I'll start writing about fighting games again really soon, I promise. Right now, though, I want to show you something I turned up while doing research for an article on Hardcore Gaming 101. (I'm writing something for them! I know, I'm excited, too!)

It turns out that Terra Cresta, the overhead view shooter that I'd reviewed last month for Shmuptember, was more popular in its home country than it was here in the States. In fact, it was so popular that it inspired its own toy, with another coming soon. Here's the first one, released in the 1980s:

This is the Double Detach & Combine Terra Cresta. All five ships from the game come together to form the mighty Wing Galiber. But that ain't all, folks! Since turning the ship into a phoenix would probably just melt the plastic, the manufacturers took a page from Voltron and made the alternate form a towering robot. Observe!

Yes, I've seen better robot toys too. This Pixiv image posted by MIP makes him look more presentable. I'm not sure if MIP himself drew this or if it was promotional artwork for the toy, but either way, it was worth sharing.

Special thanks to Marionette Mind for the images.

This may have been the first Terra Cresta toy, but it won't be the last. Takara Tomy plans to release its own Wing Galiber at the end of the year, as part of its Shooting Game Historica EX series. Only concept drawings of the toy exist so far, but I have every confidence that the finished product will look a lot better than the Double Detach & Combine Terra Cresta figure.

You can pre-order the Wing Galiber from AmiAmi (where I got the picture) or my favorite online retailer of import gaming goods, National Console Support. At sixty dollars or more, it'll tear a big chunk out of your budget, but nobody said this hobby was cheap!

He Slices, He Dices! The Ballad of Strider 2

I'm gonna take a break from Oktober-Fist... you know, soak my bruised fists in Epsom salt for a little while, and talk about an unrelated game I picked up for my Vita. Strider 2 was recently released on the PSN download service, some fourteen years after its debut on the PSOne, and as a Capcom fan from way back, I just had to have a copy for myself. The game's gotten a mixed response from Strider fans, and it's not hard to understand why, but let's discuss the good news first.

A knight on a robot horse? Sure, why not?
(image from arcade-museum.com)

And here's your headline, ladies and gentlemen... Strider 2 is a welcome return to Capcom's CPS1 days, with a dash of modern technology to make it go down smoothly for players raised on polygons. Futuristic ninja Hiryu and his many foes are hand-drawn, but the backgrounds are three dimensional, adding cinematic flair to the manic gameplay. Like the original Strider, it's got a barely coherent action film vibe, with Hiryu scaling German castles, charging down booby-trapped hills, and slicing through massive enemies which burst into a shower of blue coins. It rarely makes sense, but man is it ever stylish!

Strider 2 includes an arcade-perfect port of the first game, a blessing for long-time fans who won't be happy with the ways the sequel differs from the original. The first Strider was a viciously tough platformer which demanded precision and sharp reflexes from players. If you could beat the game, especially on the Sega Genesis where continues were meted out as generously as orphanage gruel in a Dickens novel, you were worthy of all the praise your friends could muster. 

Which disc plays Strider 2? The answer
may surprise you!
(image from JustGoVintage)

By contrast, the only skill you need to beat Strider 2 is the ability to press the Start button in twenty seconds. It's a classic button-mashing arcade experience, giving the player a generous life bar and all the continues they can eat. If Hiryu falls off a cliff, he's returned to solid ground with a little less health. If he dies in a spastic crescent-shaped explosion, he can return with no lost ground and no penalty aside from an unflattering grade at the end of the stage. It's easy, is what I'm saying. Easy and mindless, in the same way that Final Fight and Metal Slug were. Foes blindly run toward you, and you cut them to ribbons. Occasionally, you bound over chasms that would have presented a challenge to Hiryu in 1989, but are no threat now that he can double jump.

I actually dig this style of gameplay, and have been too busy soaking in the sights and sounds to complain that Strider 2 is being spoon-fed to me. I'm fighting the Ton Pooh triplets in rush hour hover-traffic! I'm hacking up parka-clad thugs as penguins merrily march past me! I'm picking up barrels and cows and the stars of long-forgotten Capcom games for points! I'm having absolutely no difficulty doing any of these things, and I don't care! However, you might want to reconsider buying Strider 2 if a silly little thing like challenge means something to you.

Days of Future Past: Street Fighter III vs. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

"I knew Street Fighter III. Street Fighter III
was a friend of mine..."

I like SNK. In fact, I probably like the company more than it really deserves. Through the years, SNK has piggybacked on the success of games like R-Type, Final Fight, and of course Street Fighter II, while rarely meeting the standards set by those groundbreaking titles. Sure, they'd stumble across the occasional masterpiece, like the Metal Slug series. However, more often than not, SNK's games would be the RC Cola to Capcom's Coke... perfectly palatable, but not quite up to snuff with the real thing.

Right back at 'ya!

That tradition of second-bestery continues with Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Designed as a direct response to Capcom's Street Fighter III games, Garou is a pleasant continuation of the South Town series and a welcome departure from the messy Real Bout games, but it's no match for Third Strike. The new characters aren't as imaginative, the gameplay lacks Street Fighter III's relentless aggression, and the Neo-Geo shows its age next to the CD-quality sound and buttery animation of Capcom's CPS3 hardware.

Rock Howard: The next generation of
South Town heroes.

However... however. Garou is an excellent game considering the advanced age of the Neo-Geo hardware, and it does a nice job of expanding on the South Town mythos. Characterization has always been the one thing SNK consistently did better than Capcom in the 1990s, as evidenced by the game's star Rock Howard. He's the orphaned son of South Town villain Geese Howard, raised by Fatal Fury's Terry Bogard and possessing the skills of both fighters. Capcom didn't give players much reason to care about its paper-thin characters, but if you've been paying any attention to the South Town series over the past two decades, you'll care about Rock. Does he have the pure heart of his foster father, or is he destined to travel down the same dark path as the elder Howard? It'll be the motivation that drives you to finish the game in spite of SNK's predictably infuriating final bosses.

Mark of the Wolves isn't as good as Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Given the history between Capcom and SNK, I doubt anyone expected it to be. Nevertheless, as a conclusion to the Fatal Fury series and the last truly important fighting game on the Neo-Geo, it's good enough.

Viva Oktober-Fist! Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX

Tastes great, more fighting!
(image courtesy of RickDavisPhotographic)

It's officially Oktober-Fist, so step up to the bar and have a nice frothy mug of whoop-ass! Our first selection is Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX, originally brewed in 1998 and served in a chilled mug we call the PSP eight years later. It's even more refreshing in 2014 thanks to the crisper screen and the fighting game-friendly joypad of the PS Vita.

Like trying to stuff Godzilla's foot into
Cinderella's glass slipper.
(image courtesy of the Street Fighter Wiki)

All right, enough with the strained beer metaphors. MAX isn't the first time Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released for a handheld game system... it was ported to the Game Boy Advance four years earlier by British development team Crawfish Interactive. However, as valiant as that effort was, it was still burdened with compromise... not just the kind of compromise that the limited hardware made necessary, but the compromise of a cartridge that was much too small for the designers' lofty aspirations. The sixteen megabyte cart size demanded by Capcom meant that stages had to be cut, voices needed to be recycled, and the World Tour feature from the console games had to be trimmed down to a simple character edit mode. There are rumors that a more complete GBA version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 exists in some form, but since Crawfish disbanded shortly after the retail game was released, it's unlikely that it will ever surface.

Two opponents for the price of one!
(Image courtesy of mehargames.blogspot.com)

Luckily, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was less of a handful for the PSP. The spacious UMD format left more than enough room for all the features from the console versions of Alpha 3, plus a few extra bonuses. (Well, Ingrid from Capcom Fighting Evolution counts as a bonus, right? Right? Hello...?) It's not just a more complete game, but a more satisfying one thanks to the PSP's cutting-edge hardware. The characters are larger, the soundtrack no longer has a shrill chiptune edge, and the control improves considerably with four face buttons instead of two. Alpha 3 on the Game Boy Advance is good for what it is, but it's hard to imagine why anyone would slum with it when it's so much better on the PSP... and better still on the Vita.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 introduced Sakura's
rival, the Nellie Oleson-esque Karin.
(Image courtesy of Fighter's Generation)

How does it compare to past Street Fighter Alpha games, though? Well, to be honest, the X-Games presentation of Alpha 3 was a turn off to me, at least at first. You get a lot of flashy ticker tape messages, a more intense soundtrack, and a fight announcer so obnoxiously earnest, some CPS2 emulators give you the option to turn him off completely. ("Beat 'em up, guys! Go for broke! I sure hope my check from Capcom clears...") However, like so many things from the 1990s, the revamped look has sweetened with age. What seemed like desperate trend-chasing then seems charming now; a nostalgic snapshot of a bygone age. The high-energy presentation also lends a sense of urgency to each fight which the previous two Alpha games lacked. When the pace has shifted into fourth gear and your heart is pounding along with the thumping background music, the stakes- and the excitement!- of each battle are raised considerably. I didn't see the wisdom of the turbocharged design in 1998, but it makes a lot more sense in hindsight.

Velkommen Oktober-Fist!

Okay, Anne Lee's had enough fun. This time, I'M going to declare a month! Since tournament fighters are among my all-time favorite video games, I'm going to brand the next thirty one days Oktober-Fist. There are plenty to choose from, so pick a favorite (or even an obscurity) and give it the love it deserves. Alternately, you can pick a terrible fighter and tear it to shreds, like I used to do on my old web site. Either one'll work... I ain't picky!

C-C-C-Computer Games

Lots of stuff to report in this brief update! First, my new computer case arrived in the mail this morning, and I spent most of the day taking the guts out my yard sale PC and transferring them into it. I'm pleased to say that the operation was mostly a success... the Frankensteined system works like a charm, although I do have a few quibbles. First, I don't know what the hell to do with the USB 3.0 port, which this motherboard evidently doesn't support. Second, there are a couple of metal tabs that weren't properly tucked in when I inserted the motherboard, making it a little tougher than necessary to use the network port. Finally, the motherboard doesn't seem to natively support case fans, so I'll have to plunk down a few dollars for an adapter. Still, this is a very good start! I just need a graphics card and maybe some memory and this bad boy should be ready to rock.

There's surprising attention to
detail in this game, including these
grazing cows and the smoking
holes left by your bombs.
(image courtesy of chinese.cari.com.my)

Let's see, what else? After many years, Raiden II has finally been decrypted and is running in the latest build of the MAME arcade emulator. This was a tough nut to crack, with encryption that refused to be broken even after the CPS3 hardware and its frustrating suicide battery was foiled by hackers. While it's true that you could play a pretty accurate conversion of Raiden II in the early Playstation release The Raiden Project, players at long last have access to the real thing! Special thanks to Frank Cifaldi for breaking the news on his Tumblr page.

Okay, onto the next thing. Sony's currently selling a bunch of Playstation games from Capcom and Square-Enix Europe for reasonable prices, and upped the ante this weekend with a sale on various racing games. None of those titles were Burnout Legends or Dominator, unfortunately, but Need for Speed Most Wanted is available for both the PS3 and Vita for only five dollars. The game didn't hook me at first, but it's slowly winning me over with its emphasis on outwitting a small army of relentless police officers.

It's jury-rigged as all hell, but it works!

I'm sure there was something else... oh yeah! That Rhythm Heaven Fever controller I talked about making earlier is finished. After the buttons I ordered from Hong Kong arrived in the mail, I slapped 'em on the body of an eviscerated arcade joystick and connected them to my Wii light gun, using the cable from an old 2600 joystick. The end result is a perfectly ghastly, but perfectly functional controller designed for exactly one game. Bashing those big buttons makes the game more cathartic (and noisy!), but it hasn't made me any better at it. Oh well... as a friend astutely observed, I could always use it to play Dive Kick. Or maybe Track 'n Field...

By Our Powers Combined: Building a Gaming PC

First, I just wanted to let you know that Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max is available on the Playstation Store for just three dollars. If you've got a PSP, or better yet, a Vita, I would suggest you jump all over this deal like a starving wolf on a steak. I thought I preferred Street Fighter Alpha 2, but the high energy presentation and wider character selection of Alpha 3 is really winning me over. I already had Alpha 3 on the Game Boy Advance, and while it was an admirable effort, the PSP game is a whole lot closer to the console versions.

Okay! With that out of the way, let me tell 'ya 'bout my plans for the immediate future. I'll be flying south for the winter in a couple of months, but before that happens, I'd like to take the computer I bought from a yard sale and turn it into a high-octane gaming PC, on par with the recently released Xbox One and Playstation 4. I've already got a ton of Steam games from past Humble Indie Bundle sales, and if I can be devastatingly honest, I'm just not interested in this console generation. I suspect I'd have a lot more fun with a machine with an established library, which can be used for more than just video games.

I've done some research, and here's what I'll need to finish this project:

Phoenix image courtesy of
sandara.deviantart.com

I've got the computer, of course, and the case on the top right should arrive from TigerDirect in about a week. I would have been happy with the computer in its original case, but its size and reliance on a weak, proprietary power supply greatly limited my expansion options. The Cougar mini-tower on the top right has room for both a standard power supply and larger video cards, which will ultimately save me money and headaches in the long run. If I don't short out the motherboard or improperly connect peripherals during the case swap, anyway. (gulp)

After that, I'll need a video card and probably the maximum eight gigs of RAM this computer can handle. The memory can wait, but the video card is a must, as I'm eager to run emulators for the Saturn, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2, and there's no way that can happen without one. Folks have recommended the GeForce GTX 750 ti for its performance, price, and low power consumption, but I'll probably slum with the vanilla GTX 750 because that one's even cheaper, and the performance hit is negligible.

Once I get all the parts in place, I should be set for gaming... for a few years, at least! Wish me luck, folks.