Why Street Fighter One sucks
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
With all the hype surrounding the upcoming release of Street Fighter 4, I thought it might be a good idea to look back on how the series began... and how god-awful it was to begin with.

Most people are aware of the meteoric success of Street Fighter 2. Released in 1991, it was an instant arcade smash, and went on to spawn countless sequels - most of which included the indistinguishable words "hyper", "turbo" and "super" in their titles.

But the Street Fighter brand wasn't always such a mega-success. The original Street Fighter, released back in 1987 was... well, it sucked. It sucked big time. Indeed, it sucked even more than Balrog sucked as a playable character in Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition.

This might come as a bit of a shock, but it's true. The first Street Fighter only featured two playable characters, Ryu and Ken. And both had an identical moveset of three moves. This gave the game a total moveset of, you guessed it, three moves.

To its credit, SF1 did have some pretty graphics. But the gameplay, unfortunately, was atrocious. The controls were clunky, the character movement was jagged, and the single player mode was so insanely difficult that it was hard to beat the first couple of opponents, let alone win the championship.

The original Street Fighter arcade board also shipped with buttons that reacted to different pressure (ie. a hard button press would equate to a hard punch). A good idea, but the boards were poorly built and the buttons broke. A lot.

To cap off all these problems, the Ryu of SF1 had red hair, and was therefore a whimp.

But, you may ask, if the game was really so terrible, why did it go on to spawn the biggest fighting game franchise in history?

This is the tough question. Looking at some of the other games released in 1987, many of them went on to spawn famous gaming series. Games like Zelda, Metal Gear, Double Dragon, Contra, Final Fantasy, Mega Man and Phantasy Star all had their humble beginnings in 1987. The difference between these games and SF1, however, was that for their time, they were pretty good games (except for Final Fantasy... which sucked as well).

So what happened? How did Street Fighter 2 ever get made? It's hard to imagine Capcom, buoyed by the failure of SF1, would have been keen to finance a sequel. But that's exactly what happened. It's like the following conversation transpired in the Capcom offices:

Mr Mushi (Head of Capcom Development): Mr Tanaka, I want to talk you about that game you created earlier this year. You know the one? Street Fighter.

Mr Tanaka (SF1 Developer): Uh, yes, Mr Mushi.

Mr Mushi: Now, let's not beat around the bush here. That game was a pile of shit. I mean, it wasn't fun. It wasn't playable. And from my understanding it only featured three moves. THREE MOVES. What were you thinking? Franklin Roosevelt had more moves than that, and he was in a wheelchair.

Mr Tanaka: Uh, I'm sorry Mr Mushi, I'm Japanese and I don't know who Franklin...

Mr Mushi: Everyone hated your game. Everyone. Reviewers, gamers, our shareholders. I'm surprised Capcom is still financially afloat after your retarded game, to be honest. I even heard gamers were bashing the shit out of our machines in arcades because they hit the buttons so hard. Literally bashing the shit out of the machines and breaking them. What does that tell you about the game?

Mr Tanaka: Uh... Well... that Street Fighter isn't very...

Mr Mushi: That Street Fighter deserves a sequel, that's what it should tell you. That's what it tells me. Good work Mr Tanaka. We're making a sequel. It'll be called Street Fighter 2.

And I guess that's how SF2 was created. Maybe game developers should follow this process with more crap games? Just like SF1, they could spawn awesome sequels.

Read more >>

Posted By: niczilla at 5:27 PM | 6 comments
Zhengtu Online: Video Game or Chinese Casino?
Saturday, May 17, 2008
The other day I stumbled upon a news item reporting that a Chinese MMORPG, Zhengtu Online, had become the first game in the world to have more than two million players logged on at the same time. Two million people.

The number of Chinese with internet access stands at only about 220 million. This means almost one per cent of people who can use the internet were logged onto Zhengtu Online at exactly the same time. That's insane.

What's even more insane is that the developer of Zhengtu Online, Giant Interactive, is now one of the richest IT companies in China. Giant founder, Shi Yuzhu, is the 24th richest man in China. And Zhengtu Online, or ZT Online for short, is Giant's only game.

So what's going on? Why is ZT Online getting so much attention? It wasn't until I found this article at danwei.com that it started to make sense. ZT Online isn't really a game. It's more of a dodgy slot machine parlour - with all the addictive and murky elements that comes with it..

You see, ZT Online is much like World of Warcraft - it's about heroes, monsters, and a lot of young male nerds pretending to have in-game "girlfriends" who are really just older male pedophiles. But there's one key difference: while WoW rewards players' skill, practice, and time spent playing, ZT Online rewards only one thing: money. Real-world money. This means you buy your experience points, buy your equipment, and buy your powers.

The best players in the game are therefore also the richest, while the worst players are the poorest. It's like a monetary "survival of the fittest", and is a massive cash-spinner for Giant Interactive. Gamers who want to perform well in the game need to spend tens of thousands of yuan just to keep step with the top players. You could call it Donald Trump's dream video game.

But, of course, the game has a fatal flaw: it doesn't really appeal to those without much money. Poor players just get their asses kicked all the time by rich players. But, realising this, Giant devised an interesting solution: gambling. Basically, poor players can buy treasure chests which have a small chance of containing expensive weaponry. Each treasure chest costs one yuan to open (about US$0.14), and operates similar to a slot machine. It's an addictive concept, as the danwei.com article illustrates:

Lu Yang recalls that during her craziest period she was like a gambler in a casino. She would shout at the screen the name of the item she wanted, like "ebony, ebony," or some high-class material, but ultimately she would obtain nothing but a pittance of experience.

These Casino-like elements of ZT Online not only make the game a thoroughly evil enterprise, praying on the weak and the vulnerable, but also make it turn a tidy profit. People get hooked. Poor players think they can compete with the rich players, only with a little luck.

So why would people even begin playing this dastardly game? The fact that the game is free to join probably has something to do with it. But it also has a lot to do with ZT Online's founder, Shi Yuzhu.

According to China Daily, Shi spends 10 to 15 hours a day gaming. He knows MMORPGs back-to-front, and knows how to attract gamers. He's hired a marketing team of 2500 people to promote the game in China's popular internet cafes - through word-of-mouth, advertising, and strange tactics involving beautiful women, like this:

Shi is also hiring a number of attractive female players to play in Internet cafes. "We are giving them virtual golden coins worth 6,000 yuan per year, which are equal to 500 yuan in the real world, to encourage them to play and stay in the games," he says. His ultimate goal is to make the game more fun and lure more male players, especially first time gamers. "In fact, in China's cyberspace many male players are very willing to pay the bills for their female counterparts", he says.

Hmmm........ good idea, but I still don't get why this game is so popular. It seems like Shi is the evil king, he oppresses millions of his subjects, and yet still more are flocking to his kingdom. Why? To me it looks like the most boring and repetitive game ever created:


But the more I think about it, I think I've got it. Gambling in China is illegal. But it has a long history in the country, and underground gambling is rife. Could ZT Online just be filling the void? Is this plausible?

How else do you explain two million gamers at once. Two million. And growing.
Read more >>

Posted By: niczilla at 2:42 PM | 0 comments
The Gayest Video Game Ever
Monday, May 12, 2008
It's a dark evening in inner-city New York. The alleyways are full of trash and graffiti. Criminals are lurking everywhere – junkies, gangsters, even murderers.

You take a wrong turn down a shadowy alleyway, and soon find yourself surrounded by a gang of thugs. They don't say anything, they just set upon you.

It's a frightening scenario, and sets the scene for just about every side-scrolling beat 'em up released in the early 1990s (think Final Fight, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage). In fact, the market was so flooded by these cliched fighters by 1991, it was difficult to tell them apart.

But Sega came up with an originnal concept for the genre. They decided their own New York-style beat 'em up, Riot City, would keep some of the cliches (dirty subways, knife-wielding thugs, etc.), but would also add something new to the mix: gayness. That's right, gayness.

Now, let's clear this up so nobody gets confused. I'm not describing Riot City as "gay" in the South Park sense of being "lame". No, I'm talking fully-fledged, black leather, glory hole, "there's nothing wrong with that", F'd-in-the-A, kind of gay.

Need proof? Just look at the two main characters, Paul and Bobby:

Just friends? I think Paul's gaze suggests otherwise. Here they are in action together:

I'll leave you to ponder what they're doing in that one. Suffice to say, the main characters of Riot City don't come across as the straightest knives in the kitchen. But Sega didn't just restrict the gayness to its main stars. No, they made everything gay. Just look at the bad guys:

The first guy kind of resembles the bikie from the Village People. The second looks like Freddie Mercury. And the third looks like a decrepit, overweight Heath Ledger from Brokeback Mountain (OK, so that's a bit of a stretch. But he actually does look identical to an Australian gay music icon, Molly Meldrum).

Most of these baddies also feature names like Hans, Rod or Hung. Seriously. But the gayness doesn't stop there. The ultimate homo-awards go to the bosses who wait at the end of each level:

And that's still not all. These are the "power ups" your characters go around collecting:

No baseball bats or semi-automatic rifles for these "tough guys". Just beauty products and fashion accessories. I ask you, what kind of self-respecting, underworld bad-ass patrols the streets of New York picking up pink mirrors? Clearly a guy who also gets into situations like this:

I could go on forever here, but I think you get the point: Riot City, like the Teletubbies, is a little bit on the gay side. The only question that remains is why Sega ever thought melding a side-scrolling beat 'em up with a Village People film clip would be a good idea. Surely the homosexual side-scrolling market wasn't that lucrative back in 1991. Or existent.

It all remains a baffling mystery. It's also very hard to find much information on this most bizarre of games. As far as I can tell, Riot City was largely unsuccessful. It didn't get a release outside of Japan, it didn't make it to any consoles, and, unlike every other sidescroller ever created in the 1990s, it didn't spawn a sequel.

One thing we do know, however, is that one year after releasing Riot City, Sega followed up with two new games: Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racer. Neither of them featured Freddie Mercury, and both were far more successful.
Read more >>

Posted By: niczilla at 6:40 PM | 0 comments
Portal Exposed
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Portal was considered one of the videogames of 2007. Reviewers and gamers alike just couldn't get enough of Valve Software's strange take on the FPS genre. Many reviewers called it the most original game of the year. Some said it was the most original game of the decade.

But Killscreen Poetry is here to tell you otherwise: Portal is a massive rip-off. And not just any old rip-off either. We're talking Thailand-scale copyright infringement here.

Let me explain. The game involves a very basic idea. You have a gun. It fires two types of portals. One is blue and the other is orange. You walk through one of these portals and come out the other, like so:


An "original" idea? Never been done before? Well, prepare to be shocked.

After scouring the history of videogames, I stumbled upon a little Atari 2600 gem called Adventure. Released in 1979, Adventure not only features the most original title ever created for a video game, according to Wikipedia it was also "the first action-adventure game" in history.

If that doesn't impress you, this screenshot should:


In case you're wondering, the bright green square towards the left of the screen represents your character. The other brown and grey squares, and that strange black line, represent your "adventure". It is, quite literally, 4096 bytes of pure gaming fun... meaning this highlighted text takes up more hard drive space than the entire game.

Admittedly, on first impressions, it might not seem like Portal and Adventure have much in common, apart from the fact they both feature a colour palette of more than two different colours.

But there is one small aspect of Adventure that seems to have made its way into Valve Software's blockbuster. Examine the following screenshots closely:

Screen 1: As you can see, the hero of Adventure (now a fuzzy blue square) clutches a black key (well, more accurately, a key hovers near him). He needs to get past the blue wall in front of him so he can "adventure". How can he do this?

Screen 2: Easy. The hero, using the strange purple contraption hovering above the blue wall, enters into the wall.

Screen 3: The hero then emerges safe on the other side.

What you have just witnessed is the hero using a portal. That's right: a portal. In Adventure, the portal is a strange and unimaginative purple contraption that doesn't really make sense. In Valve's Portal, it's a gun.

What's the difference? Absolutely nothing.

Valve has completely ripped off the very idea of a "portal" from Adventure. They have copied the "portal", removed the charm of fuzzy squares and unnecessary black lines, and then tried to pass it off as their own idea. Sure, Valve may have added a few "bells and whistles" like an extra one-hundred thousands colours and real world physics, but in the end, it's still a portal.

And what's more, the world fell for it. Including you.

I can only assume that the makers of Adventure are right now considering legal action. This type of gross plagiarism could result in the quality 1979 Atari game becoming unprofitable. Indeed, Adventure could potentially lose its entire market share of portal games, which, until Portal was released, probably stood at 100% of all portal consumers.

Shame on you Valve. Shame.
Read more >>

Posted By: niczilla at 10:13 PM | 0 comments
Screen of the Week Archive
Thursday, May 1, 2008

Click through to see Killscreen Poetry's famous screenshots of the week....

August:





Read more >>

Posted By: niczilla at 1:08 PM |