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Super Street Fighter 4 Review (Xbox 360)

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Super Street Fighter IV is one of the most addictive video games I’ve ever played. With a constant stream of opponents online, 35 characters to play, and tons of cool moves to use, I just want to keep playing one more match.

I’m not a hardcore fighting game fan so I couldn’t tell you the nuances in the changes Capcom made to the game’s balance, but I can say that the game feels very good and its very fun to play, and that’s what matters. At its core, Super Street Fighter IV is technical enough for pros and very easy to get into for new players with its 2-D gameplay and Street Fighter II basics. Expanding on the trials from the previous version, Super’s challenge mode seems tweaked more for beginners as it takes you through step by step for each character’s special moves and combos. However many of the combos require very specific timing and the ability to see the computer demonstrate the moves would have been nice.

The graphics seem touched up since the last version, and the new stages are lively with crowds cheering on in the background. The skyscraper level based on Final Fight is my favorite because of its music featuring a rocking guitar to pump up the intensity of the fight. There weren’t quite enough stages in the last game, so the addition of several new stages was needed, though I wish there were a few more. They weren’t able to add character specific stages but you can unlock an arranged music option that plays the character themes during multiplayer matches instead of the stage themes.

Super Street Fighter IV

Super adds 10 new characters, with 8 returning characters like Cody and Guy from the Alpha series, Ibuki and Dudley from Street Fighter III, and 2 newcomers with Juri, a sadistic tai kwon do fighter, and Hakan, a Turkish wrestler that uses cooking oil to enhance his attacks. Unlike the previous version, all 35 characters are available from the start, with the only things to unlock being the player titles, special options, and the character colors and taunts that are earned just by playing matches. Having all of the characters available from the start is a nice change as learning all of the characters becomes the heart of the game.

Each character now has two ultras to choose from which are just as flashy as the previous ones, and I may be mistaken but the animation time for them seems to have been trimmed down. The animated story cutscenes in arcade mode are higher quality than last time, though the intro prologue movies are just still art images with a panning camera, and I preferred the light hearted scenes from the original. While the single player arcade mode is there and brings back the classic bonus stages (Oh, my car!), competing against others is the game’s main appeal.

The online portion has been simplified down to just a few modes with the 1 on 1 ranked battle, team battle, tounament mode (with a recent update), and the much requested endless battle, where you can take turns with your friends in a queue to play the winner. Endless battle is also a good way to watch how other players play along with the new ability to save and view replays of your own matches and download others. The blind character selection and not seeing your opponent’s ranking until the match starts is a nice touch so that players won’t bow out before starting a match because of a player rank. As I’ve said, playing online is highly addictive, and turning fight request on during arcade mode still seems to be the fastest way to find opponents.

If there’s one thing I could complain about, it’s the transitions to start matches compared to the shorter downtime in the original Street Fighter IV. While the game moves quickly from each menu, the extra animation to load the map select screen adds some unnecessary time to starting a match when most people will choose random anyways. (Xbox 360 users can reduce load times before matches if both players have the game installed on their hard drive.)

The original Street Fighter IV brought the series back to its roots with the essential gameplay of Street Fighter II over the more technical Street Fighter III, making this fighting game more accessible for everyone while still having a lot of depth. With the addition 10 new characters, new stages, and refined online modes, Super Street Fighter IV is a substantial update to the original release that makes this a more complete version of the game, and at the lower price of $40 it’s a great deal.

Grade: A

Buy: Super Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360), Super Street Fighter IV (PS3)

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Retro Game Challenge review

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Retro Game Challenge for DS is like a nostalgic trip back to my childhood when video games were a wondrous new form of entertainment as I sat by the glowing TV in awe of the graphics displayed on the screen. Based on the Japanese TV show Game Center CX where comedian Shinya Arino spends each episode trying to beat retro video games, Retro Game Challenge is a collection of fake retro games with a series of challenges to beat like the TV show. Feeling terrible for not being as good at video games as his friends, an evil manifestation of Arino’s anguish develops, turns you into a kid and sends you back to the past to beat challenges in video games with a young Arino (who’s quickly filled in on the situation after being surprised to find another kid in his house) in order to return home.

You and young Arino hang out in his room sitting around his TV on the bottom screen of the DS with the video games displaying on the top screen, while Arino cheers you on with voice clips. Throughout the game young Arino will talk enthusiastically about all of the new games coming out, like how cool it is that the arcade game Cosmic Gate is available for a home console. A collection of fake magazines from “GameFan Magazine” slowly grows with gameplay tips and news on upcoming games you’ll eventually get to play. The localization by Xseed is charming with the dialogue of both the evil Game Master Arino and his young version referencing American game culture like the power glove and The Wizard movie. Fans of video game publications will get a kick out of the in game magazine that has English game journalists under pseudonyms like Johnny England, Milkman, and Dan “Sock”.

As the name inplies, Retro Game Challenge revolves around beating 4 challenges for each of the 8 retro style games of various genres. The challenges range from being as simple as getting a boost at the start of a race, or as complex as beating a certain level. Ultimately, the challenges are practice for the final challenge of beating each and every game.

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20 Years of Game Boy With GameSpite Quarterly No. 1

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

Game Boy’s 20th anniversary has been honored with GameSpite Quarterly No.1 Game Boy x 20 Years = Retrospective, or a retrospective on 20 years of Game Boy. Following the collected writings on random games contained in GameSpite Year One, Vol 1., GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 begins GameSpite’s quarterly release as a professionally done fanzine-like publication with this Spring issue focusing on the specific topic of Game Boy.

Quarterly No. 1 is reminiscent of Game Over, a book detailing the early video game history of Nintendo, sectioned into different eras of Game Boy’s life. Beginning with a foreword on Nintendo’s success and how Game Boy kept Nintendo afloat, the introduction mentions how no one really noticed it was Game Boy’s 20th anniversary and sets the tone for the rest of the book at respecting the handheld as an important gaming platform. The book continues to preface every era’s section with a look at Game Boy’s competition including Lynx, Game Gear, WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket, and how it outlasted them all.

Each section of GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 contains articles on specific games like the previous GameSpite, but with much nicer formatting. Articles start with the title displayed in a pixeled font, followed by the boxart for the game, and two screenshots (printed in black and white like the rest of the book which is fitting for Game Boy) with a lightly brightened blown up screenshot serving as the background. At first I didn’t like the smaller text size over the first book, but prefer it now as it keeps the articles to a compact, Game Boy like size, that don’t take up that many pages to get through making for bit sized readings. The cover looks nice with multiple images of Game Boy layered on top of one another that reminds me of the advertisements Game Boy had early on.

The book touches on how Game Boy succeeded by using simple technology to create a handheld that had a long battery life thanks to having a non-color screen, and a variety of 3rd party support. The first section talks about the early games like Super Mario Land, and Tetris and how the blocks actually have names, and how early console conversions had varied results with a portable Gradius with easier difficulty to make it manageable to play on a handheld, and the shortcomings of The Castlevania Adventure. In the next part the articles talk about the second Game Boy Castlevania making up for it’s predecessor, Operation C adding many innovations to the Contra series that would go dormant until Contra 4, and Metroid II as R&D1′s ambitious sequel to the original NES game.

Towards the end its mentioned how the Game Boy was revitalized by and literally became Pokémon, and how Zelda: Link’s Awakening packed so much adventure into hardware inferior to the SNES. Throughout the book there are a few choice topics on the Game Boy Camera, Kirby’s Dreamland, a 4 page comic on Game Boy’s history, and the puzzle game Daedalian Opus that has a weird localized boxart and title. Rounding out the book are a few unrelated Game Boy topics on game length for an aging gamer, Fable II, and Castlevania: Order of Ecclessia for DS which seems appropriate enough as the Game Boy gave way to Nintendo’s dual screened handheld.

GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 can be purchased for $12 at the online Blurb store, as well as a hardcover version featuring bonus content, and articles from the issue can be read at GameSpite.net. Also available is the just released GameSpite Year One, Vol 2., available with the same content in both softcover and hardcover versions, containing the other half of writings from the first year of GameSpite.

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Time of Eve anime review

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

In the near future, robots in the form of human androids live with humans doing household chores like shopping and cooking. There is a human ethics group against the use of androids, advertising propaganda commercials in defiance to “android-holics”, people who treat their androids as human beings. Rikou is looking over the logs of his family’s robot when he notices its been going off on its own when out shopping. Investigating with his fellow classmate Masaki, they follow the coordinates down an alley to a café called “The Time of Eve”. Stepping into the café they first spot a sign with house rules that reads “No discrimation between humans and robots”. They’re greeted by the bartender, Nagi, and after some deliberation over the menu order tea? Thinking over the weird house rule and looking over the guests, there’s an uneasy feeling about the place. If there’s no discrimation between humans and robots here, then how does that affect the 3 laws that govern robots behavior? The 3 robot laws being: 1. Do not harm humans. 2. Obey human orders . 3. Protect themselves if it doesn’t interfer with the first two laws. Are they the only humans among the café’s customers? “Don’t break the rule, OK?” Nagi warns with a smile.

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GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 Review

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 contains the first half of the first year of writings about video games from GameSpite.net in a thick, novel sized book coming in at 352 pages with a normal Times New Roman font. Bursting with creative writing from an assortment of contributors on games ranging from Assassin’s Creed, to Final Fantasy XII, to the little known Little Samson, this book is an enjoyable read for anyone who likes great writing about video games. What makes GameSpite good is that it breaks from the mold of traditional reviews and instead takes a critical (and sometimes comical) look at games and the context of the time of their release or other aspects like how contrived the story may be. Each article is prefaced with a screenshot and some basic data on the games with release dates, platforms, and developer info, with a few screens sprinkled at the end of the most articles. Printed in black and white, it has a fanzine feel to it, but done in a professional manner.

As the book contains games from A to L, you get writings for the entire Breath of Fire series, and several of the Final Fantasy games and their spinoffs, like Mystic Quest where the article explains that in Square’s attempt to appeal to American’s, they made the game so simple as to fall below the lowest common denominator that would play it. An article about Earthbound goes into the author’s first playing of it and how it stopped being wacky after a while and proved that video games did something that couldn’t be described in words. There are a few recommendations for Virtual Console like Ice Hockey as very balanced game for two players, and look at how wild Devil’s Crush is as a pinball video game that still plays well. The Zelda: Twilight Princess entry has a long look at the internet complaints filed against the game. A humorous 3 part article titled “The Cryptosafari Series” talks about mythical animals that supposedly appeared across several games with “interviews” with characters that encountered them and suggests that webpages in 1934 couldn’t be refreshed because they were printed on paper. Ending out the book is a lost issue of the Toastyfrog Zine, the predecessor fanzine to GameSpite, containing a long ranting look at the history of RPGs by GameSpite’s editor, Jeremy Parish.

As you may have noticed, I’ve linked to articles online, which can be read for free at GameSpite.net. So why purchase the book? For one you’ll be supporting the “dying” print medium and excellent writing about video games from GameSpite.net’s contributors. Second, getting all the interesting articles in portable book form is a great way to read all of it in one place without having to go to your computer. I actually just finished reading the entirety of volume 1 which came out 2 years ago, after jumping back and forth from article to article. Since then there’s been 4 quarterly GameSpites issues on the topics of Game Boy’s 20th anniversary, the greatest games of all time, an encyclopedia of 8-bit heroes, and the mechanics of gaming, with volume 2 of Year One’s content coming soon.

Gamespite Year One, Vol. 1 runs at $23 which is fair considering the amount of content packed into this thick book printed on demand by Blurb. The later books hover around $15 for the softcover version and about $36 for the hardcover versions which contain extra content to help justify the higher price. I got the softcover versions myself as I prefer them to hardcovers and the price was within my budget, though I wish I could get all of the content in the softcover versions for a few more dollars. You can begin reading GameSpite articles from the first year here, and you can find GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 and the rest of the GameSpite books at the Blurb store.

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The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade Review

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Can you believe that Penny Arcade has been around for nearly 12 years now? That’s a lot of jpegs! For the popular webcomic’s 11 ½ anniversary, Penny Arcade has put out a book titled “The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade” (with an alternate title under the cover) detailing for the first time their long and troubled history.

Produced with a nice hardcover at about 12 inches high and 9 inches wide and printed on thick, glossy paper, this is a nice collector’s item for fans of Penny Arcade to display on their bookshelf. Inside the book, the origins of co-creators Mike Krahulik (Gabe) and Jerry Holkins (Tycho) are laid out. Their collaboration on commenting about games showed early on, where in high school they both contributed to the school’s newspaper. Allowed to go anywhere off campus, they went to a family fun center and spent the day playing at the arcade, reported about it, and got away with skipping school to play games. The book goes on to talk about how they started the strip and eventually quit their day jobs, how they mistakenly sold away the book rights to the comic (and the comic itself), how the comic was supported off of donations for a while, and how Robert Khoo stepped in to manage their financial side after noticing they had no idea what they were doing businesswise, making less than they should from ads.

The book covers everything about Penny Arcade you would want to know about. A transcript of the writing process along with several drafts of the strip shows how Mike and Jerry banter back and forth, bouncing ideas and headlines off of each other to produce a strip 3 times a week. The book also details their other projects like how the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) got started, or almost didn’t get started, with the attendance greatly exceeding their expectations, and creating the Child’s Play charity to give a positive image for gamers in reaction to negative news about games and violence. Towards the back, a long Q & A with Mike and Jerry reads like a conversation, followed by several contributions by artists who were influenced by Penny Arcade in some way.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Penny Arcade book without the comics, which it has plenty of, with most of the Cardboard Tube Samurai, Twisp and Catsby, and a section with Mike and Jerry’s favorite strips in addition to the many scattered throughout the book on the high quality paper. There’s also a section with Mike commenting on his art as it improved over the years, and explains that his secret is to hate himself and think his work is trash so he’ll continually push himself to do better.

This book, The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade, while appealing to Penny Arcade fans also stands as a physical record of an inspirational story of what two good friends accomplished (along with their staff) by creating one of the web’s most popular web comics. Having gone to PAX East, the sheer enthusiasm for gaming that radiated from everyone in the building was gianormous, and attests to the large fandom surrounding Penny Arcade and their “niche” audience’s interest in gaming culture. Maybe someday a school kid will write a book report with this as their source, assuming they’re old enough to read Penny Arcade of course.

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