Sunday 11 May 2008

Rediscovering Street Fighter II


Today, I was wondering about how Steet Fighter IV might be coming along. With previous comments made that it was going to head back to the fighting style of Street Fighter II, I felt it best to go back to, once again, reopen the box of tricks that is SFII. Well, Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers on Wii's Virtual Console to be exact. And after playing it for a good couple of hours, I realise how long it's been since I last played it at depth.
SFII pretty much has the right to say that it has helped shape fighting games from over the past with his introduction of the combo system. Even after all this time, the core gameplay still feels as good to play as it ever did. The longer a round drags on, the more the tension builds.
Moves are pretty well defined, there's no weird grey area as in some games where you can get two outcomes for the same sequence on button presses but button mashing can be present none the less.
However, what made SFII brilliant was how it was balanced. I even dare to say some of the best balancing in videogames ever. The distinction between two characters was undenialbly apparent as a fight would develop. One of the most fustrating and tense battles I've had was against Sagat as Ryu.
He generally tends to be a weaker opponent at close range but he can do an energy range attack from both standing and crouching positions as well as his screen-crossing uppercut so getting close to him was going to be difficult. As the battle developed, I realised that if I stayed low to the ground and guarded for a few rounds of these range attacks, he would be open for me to attack with a well placed Hadoken to stun him and then be able to get in close to attack.
It took me 12 attempts to figure that out but it illustrates my point well. Battles could be won and lost by picking the right fighters and picking the right moves.
This has been refined and reworked in other franchises, most of note being Virtua Fighter which, in all fairness to it's hyper-defensive counter attack methods, is sort of like Streets Fighter (look at Akria, Pai and Jackie and tell me that they don't look like Ryu, Chun Li and Ken respectively).
Point being, Street Fighter has long since seen those days and we are yearning for more of the same action once more. With SFII HD Remix also in the works with SFIV, it will be interesting to see which game best recaptures or, better yet, improves upon it's ancestor's greatness.

HTG out!

Thursday 8 May 2008

Welcome to House-Trained Gamer


Welcome to this, my new blog, House-Trained Gamer.
A bit of basic information about myself: My name's Tom Nally aka Naz Dragonheart over the wires and tubes on the Internet.
I've been gaming for over 15 years, seriously gaming for about 12 of them. Over the coming weeks and months, you'll get to find out what games I love and my various passions about the games industry.
Hopefully, I'll try to refrain from the crappy side of it but, it's inevitable that it will come up in conversation but I will promise to ensure obssesive fanboyism is kicked right out of here.
Hopefully, I'll be supplementing these blog posts with some YouTube videos, it'll be a mixed bag of things at first and I'll see what sticks.
Alright, that's a good enough introduction, I hope to here you're thoughts and comments on what kinds of things you would like to see in the blog.

HTG Out