Street Fighter Alpha

by Capcom for PlayStation

In 1991, Capcom revolutionized arcade gaming with the introduction of Street Fighter II. It took the setup of the first Street Fighter, of two characters facing each other in a martial arts contest, and took it up to 11. The characters were now large, colourful, and distinct, with crazy moves and satisfyingly fluid controls. Capcom then took this formula and tweaked it for the next few years, selling each new iteration at full price.

As much as the thought of all those different versions annoys me now, I was thrilled by all the new Street Fighter II games back when I was in junior high. Imagine how thrilled I was when Capcom announced an all-new Street Fighter, with a visual style based on Capcom's gorgeous X-Men and Darkstalkers! That it was Street Fighter Zero and not Street Fighter III dampened my enthusiasm for a time, but any disappointment was gone by the time the game hit North America as Street Fighter Alpha. After a bus trip to Toys R Us, I made it the first game I would buy for my PlayStation.

Street Fighter Alpha is a fantastic looking game. Capcom would use the anime-styled character sprites originating here in different fighting games for the next decade, with their final bows coming in 2004's Capcom Fighting Jam and 2006's Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX. The backgrounds are attractive, although their pre-rendered style was jettisoned for further games in the series. The strangest aspect of the visual style is the subtle placement of the letter 'Z' throughout the game - something that makes sense for a game named Zero, but not one named Alpha. The PlayStation version is hurt by tons of loading screens which interrupt both the flow of the game and the attractive screen transitions from the arcade. Another disappointment comes from the lack of characters to play as - at ten, Alpha contains the fewest available characters since the original Street Fighter II. The three hidden characters just barely manage to edge Street Fighter II out for total cast members.

It plays the way you expect a Street Fighter game to play - something that's not always easy to pull off, as evidenced by the Street Fighter movie game and the Street Fighter II DOS port. There's a nagging feeling that the gameplay is a little bit too much vanilla Street Fighter - one certainly reinforced by the number of systems the Alpha series spawns in its subsequent games. The game is even replaced in the Street Fighter fiction by its sequel, indicating Capcom may never have been have been completely happy with Street Fighter Alpha. Sadly, I've never been good enough at Street Fighter to detail Alpha's strengths and shortcomings as a fighter beyond my vague misgivings that ultimately weren't strong enough keep me from enjoying myself a great deal.

Ultimately Street Fighter Alpha was a very conservative choice as a purchase, and I was much better served by the next couple of games - both of which were chosen by my brother. And a better fighting game would have been Tekken 2 (although I'm not sure I have ever played it). But I like to think I've learned my lesson: take some damn chances sometimes! It'll be okay.

Despite that, it should come as no surprise that the first game I intend to buy for the Nintendo 3DS is Super Street Fighter IV. Hey, at least this time it's likely the ultimate version of the game, not the one that replaces it a year later. That one, Street Fighter IV, I bought for the XBox 360. And also the PC.

CyberSpeed

by Mindscape for PlayStation

I got a PlayStation on my fifteenth birthday. It was the first time I bought a video game system with my own money; it was the first time I had bought anything that expensive. After giving $300 (plus tax) to the Sony Store, we set out to Blockbuster to have something to play on the system. The game I had my heart set on: Namco's Cyber Sled, a game I had played in the arcade and loved.

In 1996, Blockbuster had enough money to have two cases on the shelf: the original game box, and the Blockbuster box behind it containing the actual game. Unfortunately for fifteen-year-old-me, Blockbuster had put the wrong game behind the Cyber Sled box. Instead of Cyber Sled, it was Mindscape's CyberSpeed. It was disappointing, but my brother and I made do.

It was fine. CyberSpeed is a futuristic racing game where you drive a pod hanging from a cable; a video game version of a hanging roller coaster. If you don't manoeuvre your pod during a turn, centrifugal force swings it to the outside. (And to those of you who are complaining that centrifugal force doesn't exit: you know what I mean so drop it.) To minimize the distance you have to travel, you want to be on the inside of a turn. You fire weapons at the other pods, which is common for futuristic racers, and whoever crosses the finish line first wins, which is common for races. Its hanging-from-a-cable gimmick remains unique to this day, probably because it only serves to make racing less interesting by restricting control to a single wraparound dimension in an unintuitive way. The graphics were colourful and fast and fantastic, although perhaps only because it was my first PlayStation game.

CyberSpeed's gameplay, which someone hacked onto PSP. Alas, no video grabs of CyberSpeed on PlayStation (or even Windows!) seem to exist.

That weekend CyberSpeed was the only full game we had, so we played the Hell out of it. It went back to Blockbuster at the end of the weekend, and I haven't give it more than a moment's thought about it until I wrote this. I'm probably the only one who has, given that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia entry.

Last week I bought a PlayStation 3 for $250, plus tax. To the best of my recollection, I never played Cyber Sled on my PlayStation.

New Project: PlayStation

So I saw this post on the wonderful video game site GameSpite.net, overseen by games journalist Jeremy Parrish, requesting people who played the original PlayStation, were good writers, and could hit a deadline. I immediately thought to myself "that sounds interesting!"

I then thought to myself, "I'm only one of those things. It would be irresponsible to actually offer to write at this point. But maybe I could do the others!"

Good thing I have my own blog to find out. Posts start soon.

Prototype

by Radical Entertainment, published by Activision for XBox 360

Prototype is a game I was looking forward to a great deal; I mean, it is an open-world game starring a super-powered character from the makers of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction! It's Ultimate Destruction 2 only you've got over-the-top shape-changing powers instead of just being incredibly strong!

What's frustrating about the game is that it does so many things right. The opening sequence, giving you a tease of what's to come later, is about as well handled as these things can be. And even when you flash back to the beginning of the narrative, the game plays brilliantly. But the game lost me fairly early on, and I'm not likely to go back to it.

What lost me? There's a mission where I break into an office building, and then I am chased out of the building by what looked to be four monsters to an army base. I enter the army base level (being a separate environment than the open world), one of the monsters follows me. I kill it with the rocket launchers left about conveniently (not sarcasm; it is military base, after all), absorb it, and gain claws. Then the other three jump in, and I was learning how fight these things, and I die a lot, but I come back at the checkpoint time and I have these claws now that are way better than my fists if not quite as good as the rocket launcher and eventually I beat all the monsters that were chasing me awesome!

And more monsters jump in the base, breaking the deal I suddenly realize I never had with the game that there were four monsters. I die again, and I have Ultimate Destruction on the bookcase next to me, Crackdown on the bookcase across the room, and Infamous sitting next to my roommate's PlayStation 3, and I realize that while it was fun for the couple of hours I played it, I don't want to play Prototype any more or even ever again and go to bed.

Final Crisis

by Grant Morrison, JG Jones et al; published by DC Comics

I originally started writing this as a comment on David Uzumeri's post on issue 7 over on Funnybook Babylon when it got way too long and digressing. Now that I've had a little time to digest the whole of Final Crisis (minus Legion of Three Worlds, obviously), I find that the channel surfing style I've seen mentioned on the internet makes it feels like Morrison tried to emulate how every other capital-C capital-E Crossover Event ties in to every other book in the line, only this time DC never bothered to publish (or even plan to ever have) most of the tie-ins.

Take Aquaman - clearly, the currently running Aquaman ongoing series tied in to Final Crisis and told the story of Arthur's return to Atlantis in its hour of need, except - oops, that title doesn't even exist and was probably never even going to. Mr Terrific & his OMAC Army getting from Antarctica in Resist back to the Castle (and what happened to the OMACs until #7)? Checkmate #32 and #33, also never even conceived.

Despite my snarkiness, this works for me. The DC Big Events used to only last for one month, so the only time I was old enough to have the money and young enough to not have something better to spend it on than a comic book event and every tie-in issue was DC One Million (competing would have been things like Metal Gear Solid), which even then still had a few gaps in it (although that annoyed me at the time - "I GOT EVERYTHING AND YOU *STILL* DIDN'T SHOW ALL THE TITANS ESCAPING THE ROCKET RED SUITS?" - so part of me understands some of the complaints I see on the internets), so any other event I've ever read always has such gaps. What DOES bother me are the ways what ought to be major events are unclear - is Mr Terrific dead? (I don't think he is...) Hawkman and Hawkgirl? (I think so...) Final Crisis is magnificent and the rapid-fire quick cutting works, but simple failures in storytelling - in clearly showing what ought to be seen - keep it from being perfect.

All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder volume 1

By Frank Miller and Jim Lee with Scott Williams; published by DC Comics

"You've just been drafted. Into a war." Collecting the first nine issues of the monthly series All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder (ASBAR), this book acts as a sequel to Miller and David Mazzuchelli's Batman: Year One. To anyone expecting more of the same, or even coming to comics from the movie The Dark Knight - ASBAR chucks out the dark, serious tone of its forebears and replaces it with something resembling a fever dream. It feels fast (in stark contrast to how it felt to anyone trying to get it as a monthly series, as these nine issues took about two-and-a-half years to come out); the Goddamn Batman laughs as he beats the crap out of the underworld and messes with Miller's versions of the other heroes published by DC.

It looks like a million bucks - Miller writes to Jim Lee's strengths as well as he has to previous artistic partners, like Geof Darrow (Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot) or Dave Gibbons (Martha Washington). That first shot of the Batcave astonishes in its detail, and women like Vicki Vale seem effortlessly sexy. The appropriateness of some of the scenes can be called into question early on, but as ASBAR progresses it becomes clear that they are part of the Goddamn Batman's world: a technicolour Sin City.

Speaking of Sin City, the plot feels like what would happen if Miller replaced The Hard Goodbye's Marv with Batman and Robin. ASBAR is the story of how Batman recruits his iconic sidekick, Robin. Batman kidnaps the just-orphaned Dick Grayson, leaves Dick in a cave to fend for himself, puts some shortpants on the kid, and cackles like a madman the entire time. He seems to realize how deeply troubled - and lacking in training - Robin is when the Boy Wonder almost kills a man, finally giving Grayson time to mourn. And once the turning point is reached... the volume ends.

There is the matter of Batman's archfoe, the Joker, who is positioning himself to be the villain of ASBAR. When the Joker puts in his appearance in this volume he is quite insane; but he is dour, dark, and when he says "But I'm not very funny," he's absolutely correct. The Goddamn Batman is writ large across Gotham City and revels in being at his prime; the Joker takes himself so seriously, right down to the giant dragon tattoo stretching across his back. It's an inversion of the Batman/Joker dynamic in virtually every other Batman story since 1970.

ASBAR volume 1 is ultimately an unsatisfying read due to its inability to stand alone. How it holds up depends greatly on what comes next - which hopefully does not take until 2011 (or later!) to resolve. Miller sees all his Batman stories as taking place in the same timeline, so it is possible to see what happens eventually in Batman: the Dark Knight Returns and Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again, but those are hardly substitutes to getting an actual conclusion.

ASBAR is the Batman book you wanted when you were a fifteen-year-old-boy. It's Sin City: Gotham. It's spiritual sequel to The Dark Knight Strikes Again. It could very well be part of a joke Miller's been playing on DC for the last decade. If any of those things sounds appealing, All-Star Batman & Robin is for you. Otherwise - it might be best to stay away.

Where did everything go?

The old version of this, as personal blog, can now be found at http://oldisaytheenay.blogspot.com. This location will become a place where I review things, because "I Say Thee Nay" feels like much too good a name to waste not reviewing things on.