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Hello, faithful readers… You may notice a bit of a lull over the next week or two. I’ll be working on a special project at my day job that requires some overtime. That means, I won’t be able to keep up with and comment on the monkey business of the web, nor indulge in much of my own.
Worry not! This will be temporary and I will post whenever I can!
SNK is giving Capcom a run for their money with their unveiling of King Of Fighters XII. While Street Fighter IV maintains 2D gameplay using 3D graphics, KoFXII promises to be 100% 2D, using a much-overdue upgrade to their character’s sprites.
One of SNK’s greatest strengths has been to produce beautifully animated 2D graphics. Now they’ve accepted the challenge of taking the step into higher-resolutions, much in the same fashion as the Guilty Gear games. In fact, the bar on detail has been raised to such a level that most people who caught the trailer at the latest AOU in Japan assumed that the graphics were 3D with an advanced cell shading engine. That alone would have been cool, but learning that the graphics are completely hand-drawn…”impressive” doesn’t cover it.
This suggests that instead of competing with Street Fighter IV, perhaps SNK hopes to out-shine Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It certainly puts them into the better light, since Capcom’s Udon team has been struggling to retro-fit SSF2T’s sprites with anime-style, high-definition animations. Though SNK has a different technique: Drawing the characters in 2D, rendering them into 3D models, then the smoother animations used from the 3D models are rendered back into 2D and colored. Meanwhile, Udon’s approach of tracing over the old animations, then following that with touch-ups sounds clumsy in comparison.
I don’t mean to trash talk my boys over at Capcom too much, but this is something worth taking a few notes on. Capcom tried their hand at high-resolution sprite animations with their CPS3 arcade game line (which included Street Fighter III and Red Earth), but never kept up the fight. In any case, I’m pleased to see three genres of games are far from kaput: Arcade games, fighting games, and 2D games all together.
Street Fighter elite, David Sirlin has posted the latest chapter in his series on the re-balancing of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. This installment covers my favorite Street Fighter character, Cammy. Now, I never got to play “Super-Turbo” much myself back in the day, so most of my experience with Cammy comes from later games, in her Shadaloo attire. To me, the best interpretation of Cammy as a character and in execution was Street Fighter Alpha 3.
According to the Street Fighter community, Cammy is one of the absolute worst characters in Super-Turbo. It was no surprise (except from my perspective) that my denial of that swiftly dissolved when I’d recently gotten the opportunity to dive into Super-Turbo myself. Unlike her Alpha 3 counterpart, ST Cammy’s attacks are hardly effective at all. The best ones are troublesome to execute and the ones that are easy are also fatally impractical.
Mr. Sirlin has made great effort to correct these terrible design flaws. First, Cammy’s control motions have been simplified so that the Hooligan Throw can be performed with ease, without risk of accidentally jumping. The Spinning Backfist has been slimmed down to a quarter-circle motion, though I never saw a problem with it’s original half-circle, especially with the added benefit of the move, which I’ll explain below.
Cammy’s moves have been tweaked to make them more effective. Previously, if a character blocked her Cannon Drill, that then had plenty of time to retaliate. Now, her Cannon Drills are safer to perform, if you understand how their ranges work. Her Spinning Backfist now has a feature that I learned to appreciate in Alpha 3 in that Cammy can use them to move through fireballs, using some “2.5D” ideas. With that and the increased probability to connect the second hit and knock-down, this is why I felt that the extended half-circle joystick motion made the move a bit more balanced.
This news has provided me with a huge sigh of relief in looking forward to play as Cammy in the HD Remix. Now I focus my finger-crossing toward including Cammy in Street Fighter IV.
I love fighting games. I cut my competitive video gaming teeth on fighters. My gaming ‘hobby’ became serious ‘competition’ with Friday afternoons, History Class, and Street Fighter 2 when Reggie would bring his Super NES to school and the teacher let us have the second half of the period to ourselves. That was 16 years ago. I am sure that many of you have similar stories. We can all pretty much agree that a fighting game is almost the perfect competitive game. Two players, one screen, one machine. For the arcades as long as the machine and screen are in good working order, there is no worrying about frame rate, whether ‘your’ hardware can run the game, or connection speed (for now).
A lot of the information here will not be new to the seasoned Fighting Game Enthusiast. For those others, I hope the information here is entertaining if not useful.
Ever wonder how cosplay girls get that wide-eyed, cheerful, “moe” look? It’s more than simply good genetics. It’s not even an illusion of eye shadow. No, it’s far more involved than that.
This mind-blowing video demonstrates a product that helps Asian women achieve that wide-eyed look, through the use of an eyelid adhesive and a two-pronged fork they shove into their skull. This is not for those who are squeamish about their eyes, since the device is used to push he eyelid back into the eye socket to the point to where you can see the top portion of the eyeball.
I will hand it to them, though, you can see from the “before” and “after” footage that the product does give visible results. I give a lot of respect to the girls who are willing to put themselves through that for their costumes. You have to have either a deep passion for cosplay or work in the field professionally in order to make the ordeal worth it.
Meanwhile, I’m saying, “Ow ow ow ow ow owowowowow!”
