Subatomic Brainfreeze

Super Street Fighter IV COMPLAINT POST

The impressions post was getting way too long, so I've put my SSFIV complaints here.

I still think the lack of a real tutorial is absolutely criminal in a game of this nature. These games are hard to learn even the basics on, and there is nothing in this game even telling you what the basics really are. Trials, just like last time, go directly to hard combos after about ten minutes with no explanation whatsoever. New players are still being flung into the pool, and the pool is way too deep. Rather than go with simple strategy, they teach you combos that you won't be able to land because you don't know how to get in for the hit in the first place. "Buy the strategy guide" or "go online" shouldn't be step one to learning the game here.

Trial mode doesn't let you watch the combo you're supposed to perform before you do it, either. You're just supposed to figure it out yourself, and for some of these combos there's a major prerequisite or obscure, advanced technique that you're just not told about. It's kind of baffling that they didn't fix this, and it's also baffling that they didn't fix the controller config screen to the sensible model that every other fighting game uses.

It's great that SF4 is built with so much direct input from the hardcore community, but Capcom really should throw a little attention to the 99% who haven't been playing at high levels against other people for years. I'm not one of these people, mind you, I'm just saying what I see. This is still a gamer game, but even most gamers are often perplexed by or are oblivious to the inner workings of these games. Just like the last one, SSF4 doesn't reach for these people at all. How is the flowchart Ken supposed to know he should do anything other than Hard Punch Shoryukens all day? I think for all the talk about expanding the community for fighting games, the lack of any teaching whatsoever in the game itself is a tremendous missed opportunity.

Link combos are still ridiculously strict: when world-class champions like Wong and Daigo are still regularly flubbing their bread-and-butter combos in tourney situations-- when an effective defensive technique is to do Shoryuken motions while getting hit during a combo, in the likely case the other guy will screw up-- that means the system needs fixing. The system has not been fixed. This is unfortunate.

Everybody has a new ultra combo, and you have to choose one or the other before the fight. In a lot of cases, one of the Ultras is completely inferior: Ryu's Metsu Shoryuken has a spectacular animation but I don't think anybody's going to take it over the infinitely more useful Metsu Hadoken. Ultimately, the problem from SF3 rears its head and the other ultra combos are just never going to be used. Just sayin'!

Super Street Fighter IV impressions

Okay, I want to get the single most important point out of the way. The amazing theme song is gone, and while this was inevitable, (Japanese boy bands, you know) it is really sad.

Like a lot of people (check your local independent, non-Gamestop games retailer), I've scored Super Street Fighter IV early and haven't really stopped playing since. Between press copies and piracy, the game has been amazingly overexposed since release. Fans already knew everything there was to know about it before it even made it into our hands, and that didn't stop any of us from rushing to the store three days early to pay up. The sheer amount of content is so heavy that it's really hard to stop and make an impressions post so soon, but I figure I already have enough to say to fill a very, very long blog post and should stop making excuses.

Super Street Fighter IV is a fighting game upgrade, which have traditionally had a hard time. Fairly or not, they are usually viewed as being old content resold for the cost of a new game. Here's how I see it: competitive games are living machines. They don't end until everybody on the face of the earth has stopped playing them. SF3: Third Strike is still alive. Guilty Gear XX is still alive. The mid-90's obscurity Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire was alive as recently as two years ago, and maybe people are playing it now.

As a serious genre enthusiast I understand, accept, and frankly welcome the yearly game overhaul. As solid as SF4 was, its flaws became apparent with time. There isn't an SF4 player that didn't have a laundry list of "fix this" or "change this" on their mind a couple months in. So the release is justified to the niche who play the game a lot, but it's a hard sell to everybody else who bought the game a year ago and didn't get all that into it in that time.

The developers knew this coming in, so Super SF4 is an upgrade of unprecedented size. Most notably, ten characters have been added to the 25 from before, and everybody has been given new moves. There are bells and whistles and sprinkles too (car smashing and barrel-breaking bonus stages from Street Fighter II are back), but the ten characters are what's really important. 35 characters is an incredibly huge game, even in this genre. Ten damn characters is really an achievement. Super SF4 is the size of two other fighting games at this point. So that's your selling point. Let's get into the actual game.

A long search comes to an end: HERE IS THE PRINCE OF TENNIS FANDUB

Here's how this went, guys: earlier today, my bro Ko from welcome datacomp found a guy with the file in question, one thought lost to time. I will credit him with his amazing Danbooru tag. As my router is currently torrent-averse, I put this up on Megaupload, but apparently it was already there. The file "uploaded" instantly. Well then, what we were looking for must have been under our noses the whole time. The treasure was always inside your heart! Without further ado, here's the fandub. If you want to stream it, here you go. Don't chicken out!

Eden of the East Movie 1: The King of Eden - WAIT, THIS SHOW USED TO BE GOOD, WHAT HAPPENED

In 2009, The Year of Shin Mazinger, I was also watching Kenji Kamiyama's wonderful TV series Eden of the East. It was a political SF thriller crossed with a ladies' manga: my kind of entertainment. I raced to watch this show as fast as the episodes came. The show's plot arc ended satisfactorily, but the main plot arc was unresolved. It was already known that there would be two Eden movies, and the final credits of the last episode confirmed that they would be the real conclusion of the story. Because of the obvious time lag between a Japanese theatrical release and any kind of availability outside of Japanese theaters, I opted to forget Eden of the East ever existed for a little while. Otherwise I'd just lose sleep wondering about what would become of Morita and Hagu-- I, uh, mean Takizawa and Saki.

Well, I guess I found out last night. Assume spoilers for the TV series and first movie after the cut.

Carl Macek 1951-2010: Rest In Peace

People who knew him better and people more eloquent than I have already spoken on the sudden and early passing of anime dubbing pioneer Carl Macek. I have very little to add. However, I will recap for the benefit of the audience: whether you loved or hated his work, Macek was a tremendous figure in early Western anime fandom. If you watched anime in the 80s or 90s, it's almost certain that you watched something the man worked on.

Most famously, Robotech was cobbled together by Macek out of three different shows in order to make enough episodes for syndication. Some people have never forgiven him for that. Most of the anime that used to run on Sci-Fi Channel on Saturday mornings was dubbed by Macek, and so was half of the stuff on the 90's Blockbuster anime shelf that I raided in my youth. So was Akira. The scripts frequently made a mess of the movie, but their character was undeniable. This guy did more to expose Japanese cartoons to the Western masses than anybody before Pokemon did.

Late one night when I was a kid, my dad and I were watching late-night TV together, as we often did. My dad would flip through our 80 channels and we'd stick with something for five minutes at a time before moving on, unless it was really important television like Beavis and Butthead. This particular night, we rolled onto Sci-Fi. It was the very end of Robot Carnival. This scene. I won't describe it: the whole thing is permanently burned into my memory. It was a major event. My impressionable young mind was changed, and from that night on I was actively seeking out anime. I would watch the Saturday morning stuff whenever my parents weren't around (remember, anime still had a bit of a rep in these days!). A few years later I'd rent out the anime section at Blockbuster. And so on, and so on, and eventually the blog you're reading right now sprang into being. I owe Carl Macek directly for sparking all that.

I would hit the internet eventually, of course. I'd move away from the inaccurate Streamline dubs and become a purist, and for the most part I'd start watching anime in Japanese. But for me and for a generation of anime fans, Macek and his Streamline Films were the gateway. It's impossible to measure that impact. Thank you, Carl.

Aniplex America is DOING THE BANDAI VISUAL THING

It's pretty impressive that I have to keep making this blog post. Good job, Japanese anime industry, I guess? Here's what's going on: American anime fans don't buy a lot of anime on video, and when they do they don't pay a lot for it. Japanese anime companies know that when a show is a hit, 10 or 20 thousand Japanese anime fans will pay ridiculous sums of money to own it on video. Keep in mind that video sales are where all of the the Japanese anime business' income comes from.

Japanese anime companies would really like American anime fans to switch this model, even though nobody was buying $30 4-episode DVDs after the market boom and Internet fansubs hit, and even less than nobody wants a $50 four-episode DVD, or a $100 two-episode Bakemonogatari Blu-Ray. Japanese anime companies don't appear to know or care about any of this, so they have repeatedly launched exploratory campaigns into foreign soil, each one a failure. Bandai did it first with Bandai Visual USA, a label that died on arrival with awesome ideas like "sell a movie for a hundred dollars". Now that the US and Japan are in the same region for Blu-Ray discs, Bandai is currently in the process of ruining their entire Blu-Ray business outside Japan, rather than figuring out a strategy that isn't guaranteed to fail.

Now Aniplex, one of the larger anime producers these days, is joining the party. In this ANN interview (note: ANN does pay me these days so you'll always wonder if I'm a bought man), Aniplex details its business plan for selling anime, starting with the Gurren Lagann movies. They won't be selling to retail stores, the titles won't be dubbed, and they will only ever be made available through Bandai Entertainment's online store.

On the one hand, the GL movies aren't a tremendous loss. The way I figure, just like with Eva, the TV series was the important thing. Everything that Gainax hawks for the next ten years is just going to be boring fanwank like "Gurren Lagann Goes To High School Comics!" and so on.

The movies have a lot of spectacular animation and a scene or two in Lagann-hen that should be spliced back into the TV series, but they're clip shows. The story becomes completely disjointed, suffering tremendously in both parts: really a "fans only" kind of deal. You definitely wouldn't want to use them as first exposures to the story. Of course, Gurren-Lagann is a pretty damn popular anime: it ran on TV here, and a lot of geeks are still discovering the show through the official channels. My brother saw it on Hulu a few months ago and he called to tell me he loved it.

Making the DVDs only available through a single online store means that they've completely been taken off the radar. Only fans will know these DVDs even exist, and if they want them they're going to have to go to an online store they almost certainly do not use. If you're going online-only, at least send it to a place like RightStuf or Amazon where people actually shop! For many people this is a deal-breaker by itself. I have a sweet Prime subscription at Amazon, guys: I feel wrong when I pay for shipping online.

Seeing as the show ran on TV, obviously a lot of people saw the show dubbed. This would make dubbing this particular title a no-brainer and perhaps an obligation... so of course Aniplex doesn't want to do it. The line given by the company rep here is that dubbing is costly and would delay release. The first point is well taken but as for the second... these movies have been out on DVD for a little while now, and they were in the Japanese theaters much longer ago. If there was a boat to miss, it's sailed. Those of us who watch fansubs (on the Internet, where you are selling your product, this is all of us) have already seen these movies. Those of us who liked them enough to buy will do so, and they're probably the only people who will.

I am not a huge fan of the G-L dub-- they just don't scream passionately enough-- but this is definitely a loss for a lot of people who have become fans of the show through that dub. This definitely isn't a matter of something too niche to cover its costs in the States, like a Key show. If Funi can afford to dub total shit like Dragonaut, I think it's fair for Aniplex to dub something that actually has a following.

Thankfully, they aren't so much like Bandai Visual as to imagine the movies will sell at $100: the movies are at least being sold at normal DVD prices with a $50 limited edition. However, the rep notes that "...we will have to carefully look into the release timing and the price since Japan and North America share the same region code." So either you're going to be waiting a long time for those Blu-Rays or you're going to be paying out the ass for them. As usual, when it comes to buying anime, you're better off waiting.

As a complete aside, buying anime has started to feel more like a charitable donation than an exciting purchase these days. I wonder how the companies could recapture the "I gotta have that!" feeling that nobody's felt in years? I sure wish they'd extend those Japanese theatrical releases of big anime titles like Kara no Kyoukai and Gundam UC to arthouse and film-fest runs around the country! Of course, anime is crassly commercial and all that...

Desktop Dungeons BROTIPS

The proper introduction post for Desktop Dungeons is here: read on for little helpful tips gleaned from my time in the hole. There's always the wiki, of course, if you want to know everything.

Desktop Dungeons IS GOING TO CONSUME YOUR LIFE

Seriously, you click this link, you download this game, and I'm just not responsible for what happens afterwards. This game is rather addictive.

Desktop Dungeons is a hyper-compressed roguelike. A lot of other dungeon RPGs in the genre are fairly long games with permanent death, and as such players' first reaction to this genre is disgust with the idea of dying permanently and losing all their stuff. Desktop Dungeons sidesteps this problem by being ten minutes long: the game might be best described as dungeon crawling meeting Minesweeper. Perhaps the problem wasn't that games like this are too small, but that they weren't small enough?

If you want a free copy of Nintendo Magic THEN TELL ME YOUR BEST STORY ABOUT SEGA

UPDATE 4.20.10: This contest is over. Joe Leonard, schoolyard Sega prophet, takes the book. Thanks to everybody who posted!

Yesterday at Mocca Festival, Vertical's devious marketing man Ed Chavez sold me a copy of Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic before its official release for a price I could not refuse. Today, a second copy of this business history of Nintendo arrived in my mailbox-- sent days ago by that same man! When confronted, the charlatan responded, "looks like it's contest time!!"

Ed is right. It is time for a contest. Nintendo Magic won't be available before the end of this month, and perhaps next week you can be reading one of my two copies. This is good, yes?

It would be boring if we did a contest directly having to do with the subject at hand, so let's do something fun instead. In the form of a comment on this post, I want you to tell me your best story about Sega. Visual storytelling will also be accepted, but I demand a story. A real story! No bullshit! A week from today, I will judge the winner. Now get on it!

Deadly Premonition impressions: I SAW EVERY SINGLE RICHARD DONNER MOVIE THE DAY IT CAME OUT

There is a little videogame sweeping the nation about now, and it's called Deadly Premonition. It is named for the fact that the hero's coffee tells the future. It costs 20 dollars, and consistent with that price, the quality of the gameplay itself is low. On a raw, mechanical level, Deadly Premonition isn't a well-made game. But Deadly Premonition is a great game. I don't mean that to say that the game is "so bad it's good", I mean that it's actually a ton of fun for every other reason. If you're willing to put up with short stretches of a bad videogame, the rest of the game is completely worth it.