Viva Oktober-Fist... and Horror Gemonth! Darkstalkers

I was all set to eschew Anne Lee's Horror Gemonth and do my own thing, but then I remembered Darkstalkers. Out of the hundreds of fighting games released in the 1990s and beyond, it's my absolute favorite, and with a cast of creepy monsters, it's the perfect way to celebrate Halloween. How do I love Darkstalkers? It may take a while to count all the ways.

One of the best reasons
to own a Saturn.
(image from Giant Bomb)

One: Darkstalkers was the first fighting game to look incredible and play the part. Before its release, you usually had to settle for one or the other. Street Fighter II was brilliantly designed but had an unremarkable art style cribbed from 1989's Final Fight. On the flip side of the coin was Martial Champion, which had colossal characters but rather dismal gameplay and a dearth of special attacks. Darkstalkers stretched the boundaries of video game visuals with its color-drenched backgrounds and clever animation, but it was a great game even without the window dressing. Darkstalkers got even better in the sequels, leading to...


Two: Darkstalkers was the reason I bought a Sega Saturn. Hell, I was so impressed with the Saturn port of NightWarriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge that I bought the game months before I owned the system! There was a conversion of the original Darkstalkers for the more popular Playstation, but it was outsourced to Psygnosis and suffered from all the usual shortcomings of early PSOne arcade ports. Beyond that, NightWarriors was more refined, with extra characters and the option to fill your super meter up to nine times. Playing the game with the Saturn's fighting game-friendly joypad was also a better option than the Dual Shock or its predecessors.

The Darkstalkers cast. Really, how
could you not love these guys?
(image from Popcults)

Three: Darkstalkers has a brilliant cast of characters. The game was originally supposed to star monsters from the Universal Studios film library, but the creatures dreamed up by Alex Jimenez and touched up by Capcom's art staff are so much better. You've got a vampire who shows his dark side whenever he attacks, a ghostly samurai with a cursed sword, a hyperactive feline fatale with a massive mane of hair, a punk rock zombie, and a werewolf who actually looks like a wolf and not some guy who fell face-first into a puddle of Rogaine. Future games included everything from a kyonshi with Swiss Army sleeves to a ruthless bounty hunter disguised as Little Red Riding Hood, making the cast even more deliciously demented.

Four: Darkstalkers is a pretty good reason to own a Vita. Although Darkstalkers Chronicles: The Chaos Tower was designed specifically for the PSP, it's even better here thanks to the system's vivid OLED screen and a more responsive D-pad. The system's four face buttons hurt the game a little, but it's still extremely playable... just set the shoulder buttons to three punches and three kicks and you're in business.

Five: Darkstalkers had a cartoon, which... uh, forget the cartoon.

Fear this reaper.
(Image from NowGamer)

Six: Darkstalkers was an important evolutionary step for Capcom games and the fighting genre as a whole. The chain combo system is similar to the ones in Killer Instinct and especially the Marvel vs. games, which would come years later. It also ran on more advanced hardware than the first few Street Fighter games, broadening the horizons of the art staff and paving the way for Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III, and competing games like the Guilty Gear series and Skullgirls.

Capcom hasn't released a Darkstalkers sequel since 1998's Vampire Savior, and because of the middling sales of the Darkstalkers Resurrection collection on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, it doesn't look like we'll ever get one. However, the last two games in the series have aged pretty gracefully, and are tremendously fun to play whether it's Halloween, Thanksgiving, or a week from next Tuesday!

Viva Oktober-Fist! Learning to Love Tekken

And goofy haircuts.

It's been nearly twenty years since the Tekken series first debuted in arcades... and it's taken me about that long to find the charm in the franchise. However, after picking up the PSP version of Tekken 6 at a steep discount, I'm determined to squeeze every drop of entertainment out of it that I can.

Some things I've learned from my time with Tekken:

* It doesn't hold a candle to Street Fighter X Tekken, but it looks pretty darned nice for a PSP game, and is more than acceptable on the beefier Vita. The fighters' faces are more detailed than the rest of their bodies, but you don't notice much when the camera's zoomed out. What you do notice are the attractive backgrounds, including a dimly lit backlot with train tracks in the distance and ground zero at a messy tomato festival.

* It's technical, almost to the point of obscenity. I went to Tekken Zaibatsu to look up a moves list for the Jackie Chan-esque Lei Wulong, and it was a daunting fourteen pages long. Seriously, count 'em for yourself! Some attacks are dependent on your position, your opponent's position, your distance from the wall and the other fighter, the current lunar phase... it's complicated, is what I'm saying.

Newcomers to Tekken 6 include Miguel and
the creepy contortionist Zafina.
(image from Modojo)

* The combat system seems like a random jumble at first, but things start to fall into place after a few dozen matches. There's a button assigned to each of your fighter's limbs, which isn't far removed from the two punch and two kick buttons in most Neo-Geo fighting games. Pressing a punch and kick button together throws your opponent, while pressing both kicks (usually) switches stances. You can move around the playfield by double-tapping up or down, and charge toward your opponent by double-tapping toward them. Running sets up some interesting possibilities that weren't available in Virtua Fighter... if you do it from halfway across the screen, you can tackle your rival for minor damage. Do it from a greater distance and you can shoulder check them for a lot more. 

* Never stop attacking. Whether they're on their feet, on their back, or stuck in mid-air, your opponent is always vulnerable, so keep that punishment coming! It may not seem sporting to kick a man (or woman, or panda, or wooden automaton...) while they're down, but unrelenting aggression is a big part of what makes Tekken Tekken.

* I'm a little surprised by how personality-impaired these characters are after playing Street Fighter X Tekken. You get comments before and after every match that offer some insight into each fighter, but the outrageous facial expressions and exciting cinematography from SFxTK are deeply missed. Tekken 6 is too grim for its own good, although there are rare moments when a sense of humor creeps into the gameplay. After all, one of the stages is set in a Swiss pasture, complete with wandering sheep and yodeling!

A Sublime Scrap: Dreamcast Fighters (part 1)

The Dreamcast was one of gaming's most fascinating paradoxes. It was a 21st century console that came to the party a few years early and left just as the festivities began. It had all the good games in 2000, while the Playstation 2 got all the attention from customers. It courted a young male demographic, yet had a distinctly feminine, sterile design, looking disconcertingly like a Japanese tampon dispenser. Considering Sega's misfortunes in the late 1990s and its eagerness to abandon the Dreamcast shortly after its American debut, perhaps this peculiar system shouldn't have existed at all... but gamers were nevertheless glad that it did.

Captain Parakeet here is tougher than he looks.
(He'd just about have to be!)

Without a second analog stick or the horsepower of later consoles of its era, the Dreamcast didn't do everything well... but one genre it mastered was the fighting game. Arcade hits that were a challenge for the Playstation and Saturn were no trouble at all for the Dreamcast, and it was capable of so much more. Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive 2 are still considered some of the best games in their class, and even the bad fighting games don't seem so awful in hindsight. Take Plasma Sword, for instance. This Dreamcast conversion is barely improved over the Playstation-powered arcade game, with flat levels and noticeably boxy character models. It's hardly brimming with technique, either, but it's still dumb fun to cut down a motley assortment of cyborgs, hairy giants, and space cockatiels with your light sab... er, plasma sword.

Freeze, punk! (Sorry.)

Mortal Kombat Gold is another Dreamcast dud that's sweetened with age. It's painfully dated next to the 2011 Mortal Kombat remake (even the Vita version!), with stiff animation and splatters of blood that look more like scattered gems. However, it at least plays like classic Mortal Kombat, which is more than can be said for the dreadful Deadly Alliance and its sequels. It's fast and frantic, and the addition of weapons doesn't gum up the works like the many pointless features in the Bush-era Mortal Kombat games. (Why give each character three fighting styles when none of them are any fun to use?) The two on two battles are also a welcome feature, although you can't swap fighters on the fly like you can in Mortal Kombat 2011's tag-team mode... one character just leaps into the fray after the first explodes in a shower of blood and limbs.

Tennis the Menace.

The Dreamcast fighting games that were pretty good in 2000 remain so today, although I'vestill got mixed thoughts about Rival Schools 2 after all these years. On one hand, it's the best high school-themed versus fighter in a crowded market (trust me, there are a lot of these in Japan), with outrageous parodies of familiar student archetypes. You've got a surprisingly tough bookworm, a big-breasted cheerleader, and a dozen flavors of athlete, ranging in size from a tiny tennis phenom to a (literally) barrel-chested sumo in training. It's hard not to love a cast this crazy, but the gameplay is a harder sell. It borrows from a handful of previous Capcom fighting titles, resulting in an awkward patchwork that doesn't play as well as any of the games that inspired it. Combos feel stiff, jumps don't have enough horizontal reach, and in an unwelcome change from the first game, super moves can be interrupted with a brief showdown which the computer opponent usually wins. It's not Capcom's best work, but Rival Schools 2 certainly has its moments. There's nothing like calling out your massive partner to shrug off hits meant for you, then flatten your would-be assailant with a tooth-shattering blow!

My money's on the walking tank.

One Dreamcast game I didn't get to play back in the day was Tech Romancer, but after trying it in an emulator I wish I had. It's not fighting in the traditional sense, but rather an epic battle between giant robots. Each metal colossus is based on a character from a popular Japanese cartoon- for instance, Giant Kaiser is a dead ringer for Mazinger Z- and the action follows suit with bright colors and big explosions. I haven't gotten the hang of the gameplay yet (super moves are possible... somehow) but I really like what I've seen so far. It's way more approachable than Virtual On, which offers all the confusion of piloting a fifty foot tall metal soldier without much of the fun. It's just a shame about the title, which brings to mind a really uncomfortable fetish.

I'll cover some of my favorite Dreamcast fighters in a future update. Believe me, there are a whole lot of them!

Gatecrasher

I've seen some stupid things from the Game-Я-Gate* mess, but this has to take the lead paint-frosted cake. Just... just look at this.

Listen, you little rectal wart. There's no feminist hiding in the bushes, hoping to extract the challenge from your video games. Nobody's taking away your killy-killy-bang-bang games packed to overflowing with blood, swearing, and barely covered breasts, either. Hell, there's a new title on the horizon called Hatred, which true to its name is the most antisocial yet.

Let's dispense with the absurd hypotheticals and talk about something that did happen to me ten years ago.

(walks into video rental store)
ME: "Hey, do you guys have Culdcept?"
CLERK: "No. What the hell is that?"
ME: "Well, what about Katamari Damacy?"
CLERK: "Nope, don't got that one either."
ME: "Well, what do you have?"
CLERK: "What we got is over there."
(motions over to a shelf with eighteen copies of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I kid you not, there were at least that many copies on the shelf)
ME: "Lovely. Look, don't you have anything a gamer from my generation would like?"
CLERK: "We stock what's popular. If you don't like it, buy something from a store."
(storms off grumbling)

So you'll understand when I say that I have no sympathy for the legion of überdorks who complain that the hobby is being taken from them. None, nien, zip, zilch, goose egg. You seemed all too eager to push old-school gamers like myself into the periphery by demanding polygonal games with all the whimsy of the latest Saw movie. Guess what? Now it's your turn to watch helplessly as the industry caters to a new audience at your expense. 

Besides, it's not like you're really losing all that much, since you've got way more options than I did in Playstation-dominated 2004. There are three next generation game systems, two older but still currently supported ones, two handhelds, hundreds of tablets and smartphones, and PCs with about a dozen different game distribution services. Believe me, you have options. And you'll have plenty of opportunities to satisfy your bloodlust. After all, there will always be room for that lowest common denominator schlock, as long as there's room in the video game industry for a movement as moronic as Game-Я-Gate.

To make a long story short (and at the risk of ending a sentence with a vulgar preposition), shut the fuck up.

* Yeah, I'm not spelling out the hashtag as it appears on Twitter. I don't need the flood of assholes.

This victory has strengthened the soul of... Gabrielle!

My new video card has opened the door to a world of cutting-edge gaming... yet I find myself returning to the fourteen year old Dreamcast library. The emulator NullDC runs the bulk of the system's library with ease, while bumping up the resolution of polygonal games to a crowd-pleasing 1440x900. That's, uh... (counts on hands) a buttload of pixels. Maybe even a buttload and a half!

I've learned a few things from my reunion with the Dreamcast. The first is that its graphics have gotten a little creaky in the decade and a half since the system's launch in 1999. The games we loved the most still look fantastic, but they're not always an accurate reflection of the Dreamcast experience. Many of the system's titles- even very good ones- are tarnished by boxy limbs, repetitive backgrounds, and coarse textures. The previously savaged reviewed Virtua Fighter 3tb is a good example of this, but so are more warmly received games like Power Stone and Rippin' Riders. Aside from a small pool of standouts, Dreamcast titles could never match the visual luster of later Playstation 2 games. 

We'll never know for sure how far the DC could have been pushed if it had been supported past 2001, but I tend to think that it would have hit a brick wall in 2003, around the time the Prince of Persia remake had been released for its competitors. I recall a friend offering this unflattering description of the frame rate in the Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2: "Just step into a crowd and watch the slideshow." No wonder it was an Xbox exclusive in the United States...

The other thing is that the Dreamcast was the 20th century's best system for fighters... not even the Neo-Geo and Saturn could touch it. Heck, it can even run Neo-Geo CD games with the aid of an emulator, and without the absurd load times that took a sledgehammer to any enjoyment players could have gotten from an actual Neo-Geo CD. The Dreamcast could play 2D games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike that were beyond the Saturn's reach, along with 3D games that wouldn't have been possible on the dated Playstation hardware. Take Soul Calibur, for instance. The arcade game ran on modified Playstation hardware, but the Dreamcast version was significantly improved, with the rough polygonal edges smoothed out and a bounty of console-exclusive features.

Oh yeah, that brings me to the other other thing I noticed while playing Dreamcast games. After looking at the Soul Calibur cast, I've noticed that Greek warrior Sophitia is a dead ringer for another Mediterranean hero, Xena's sidekick Gabrielle. Just look at the two of them side by side! No way that's a coincidence. It's amazing how much developers cribbed from the likenesses of celebrities in the days before gaming hit it big.

(Poor Xena: Warrior Princess. It was a fun show before Hope and all that Quantum Leaping.)

Wednesday Night Vita-Thon II: Dead and Loving It

The Vita is doomed! DOOOOOMED!

But it's still fun. Here's a few games I've played on the system lately.

PIX THE CAT


Shiny on the surface but retro at its core, Pix the Cat is a smart reinvention of the classic maze game. It seems simple at first, with your wide-mouthed feline scooping up duck eggs, but the eggs quickly crack open, leaving you with a trail of hatchlings. You'll quickly be trapped by your brood if you don't drop the ducklings in nests scattered throughout each level. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, skulls, mines, and serpentine passages arrive to further complicate matters. If the action gets too intense, you can switch to a puzzle mode where fast reflexes take a backseat to careful planning. Between the fluorescent graphics and a wealth of features, Pix the Cat will make fans of Pac-Man Championship Edition and its sequel very happy... although they won't be as thrilled with its obscenely long load times. A-


NEED FOR SPEED MOST WANTED

Most Wanted is a shotgun marriage of the white-knuckle action of Burnout and the more realistic racing of the Need for Speed series. It's a forced pairing which will leave fans of both series satisfied, yet somewhat underwhelmed. The customization that was at the heart of later Need for Speed games has been kept to a minimum, while the crashes of Burnout aren't as frequent or exciting. The gameplay most closely resembles Burnout Paradise with its dozens of events scattered across a vast playfield, but it's a dingy rust belt town without the appeal of Paradise City. Having said all that, there's fun to be had in Most Wanted if you're willing to look for it. Races (although often too long) are still packed with excitement, and you can launch your car off ramps and into billboards, just as you could in Burnout Paradise. Chases by an ever-growing swarm of cops are the secret ingredient that makes Most Wanted more than just the diluted offspring of two of gaming's biggest racing franchises. B-

SOUL SACRIFICE DELTA

This one gave me warm, fuzzy memories of Phantom Dust, an obscure action game on the classic Xbox that was equal parts Power Stone and Magic the Gathering. In both games, you charge into battle with a handful of pre-chosen abilities, ranging from weapons to shields to healing items. However, Soul Sacrifice Delta lets you keep all of these powers at your fingertips, rather than having to frequently run back to home base for a recharge. It's also got a more entertaining storyline, courtesy of a living book which instructs you how to bring down the demon sorcerer Magusaur... when it's not subjecting you to withering insults. With its nightmarish setting and the option to slaughter defeated enemies to strengthen your magic, Soul Sacrifice Delta isn't one of the more optimistic games in the Vita library, but it's undoubtedly one of the best. A-

INJUSTICE: GODS AMONG US

Whoever said "looks aren't everything" clearly wasn't on the Netherrealm staff when they were making Injustice. This fighting game starring the heroes and villains of DC Comics is the definition of style over substance, with fighters being punched through buildings, fed to sharks, and charging after each other in clashes worthy of an episode of Challenge of the Superfriends. In fact, the designers packed so many awesome sights and sounds into Injustice that they barely had any room for gameplay! Like other iffy fighters, it limits itself to three mostly random attack buttons, with a fourth button reserved for character-specific abilities. It makes memorizing each character's special moves tougher than necessary... not that you'll want to stick around to learn them after you've seen every super move and level transition. C

BLAZBLUE: CONTINUUM SHIFT EXTEND

There's an unwritten rule in fighting games that there has to be an oddball to round out the cast of generic karate experts, lightning-fast ladies, and brawny wrestlers. For Street Fighter, that was stretchy-limbed yoga master Dhalsim, and for Virtua Fighter, it was the perpetually drunk Shun Di. BlazBlue rewrites that rule by making all of its fighters the weird one. The closest BlazBlue has to an ordinary character is the vaguely Ryu-esque swordsman Ragna the Bloodedge; the rest of the cast includes a frantic cat girl, a child puppeteer, a creepy amorphous shadow, and a scarlet-clad martial artist armed with a pole and massive breasts. BlazBlue's bag of mixed nuts are brought to life by Arc System Works' crisp artwork and some surprisingly deep back stories, but the peculiar fighting styles and life bars that take an eternity to drain might make BlazBlue a hard sell for players who already own the faster, more intense Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter X Tekken. C+

Fighter's Misery: Virtua Fighter 3tb

I'm very disappointed in you, Sega.

Granted, it wouldn't be the first time. Sega's offered a steady stream of disappointment since the well-intentioned but badly botched Sonic Spinball. However, Virtua Fighter 3tb is the company's most bewildering blunder. Since its debut in 1993, Virtua Fighter was critically important to Sega; perhaps even more than its mascot Sonic the Hedgehog. It helped ease Sega into the 3D gameplay that would become dominant in the 21st century. It was the fighting game other fighting games wanted to be, as evidenced by Tekken and Dead or Alive. It was one of the few titles that made Americans seriously consider buying a Sega Saturn.

And this is the send-off it gets on Sega's last game console.

Pants... too... shiny! Can't... concentrate!

Admittedly, Virtua Fighter 3tb isn't a bad fighting game. Well, it is compared to other fighters on the Dreamcast, and the original arcade game, and players' expectations after Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn. When judged on its own merits, however, it's... okay. I mean, it's recognizable as Virtua Fighter. You've got the usual punch, kick, and guard, along with a button that grants some rudimentary 3D movement. If you press it, oh, about thirty times, you can lure the opponent to the edge of the playfield and knock them out of the ring. The stages are more organic than in previous Virtua Fighter games, with dips and hills in the topography. However, it doesn't add much to the action beyond window dressing, and it's not nearly as exciting as knocking your foes off buildings and down stairs, like you could in Dead or Alive 2.

There's a sumo wrestler somewhere in
that mess of polygons, I swear!

I tried, I really did, but it's hard not to compare Virtua Fighter 3tb to other Dreamcast fighting games. The graphics are well below the standards of fellow launch title Soul Calibur, with sharp-edged polygons that frequently clip through each other. The developers tried to disguise the low poly count with an extra helping of gouraud shading, but the hasty paint job only highlights the fighters' creepily skeletal finger joints and scraggly hobo hair. 

Virtua Fighter 3tb has a (tacked-on) team battle mode, but without the robust character selection of Project Justice, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, or King of Fighters Evolution, it gets repetitive in a hurry. If you fought Aoi in one match, don't be surprised if she comes back for revenge in the next. Adding to the boredom is the fact that you can't swap partners on the fly or double-team your rival. What you can do is wait five seconds for your next fighter to load after losing a round, which is all the time you'll need to reset the game and play the traditional arcade mode instead.

Finally, the game lacks the thrills of Dead or Alive 2 or Fighting Vipers 2, with a leisurely pace and little to distinguish it from previous games. Sure, you get a couple new characters, but one's not especially memorable and the other is a generic sumo wrestler Sega would like to forget, writing him out of later games. 

Luckily, that includes Virtua Fighter 4 for the Playstation 2, which set the series on the right track after Virtua Fighter 3tb derailed it. It's fun, it's gorgeous, it's readily available, and there's even an update with more characters and some compelling bonus features. Its only real flaw is that it's not on the Dreamcast, but Dreamcast owners are used to that kind of disappointment.