Thursday, December 18, 2014

The future of Street Fighter is here, and it is noodly.


Fans everywhere of Capcom's "Street Fighter" fighting game series rejoiced this week. Not only did a new patch for Ultra Street Fighter IV get released which included character re-balancing and the debut of the supremely wacky Omega Mode, but we also got our first glimpse at a live match of Street Fighter V which was announced for PC and Playstation 4.



While the Nerdist runs the headline as "Destructible Stages Revealed in First Ever Live Street Fighter V Match", I think they buried the lead here. The real headline should be "Chun-Li Kicks Butt, Even With A Bowl Of Noodles On Her Head."

If you fast forward to around 6:54, you will see series mainstay Ryu finish a round against Chun-Li with a devastating Denjin Hadoken, pushing her through the stage wall and into the kitchen where a bowl of noodles lands on her head. It's not just a cutscene tagged onto the end of the round - the noodles stay on her head for all of her victorious last round and the closing tag, despite her rather acrobatic Spinning Bird Kicks.

Certainly, there are more implications to be discussed, like why Street Fighter V isn't going to make it to XBox One or WiiU, or how on earth Charlie has made it back into the series despite being MIA since the Alpha series games, but those will have to wait for another time.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Infinitely lost in the toy aisle...

On the way back from doing a little bit of computer tech work this morning, I thought I would peek my head in the local ToysRUs. I thought that it might not be a total madhouse, since even though it was getting closer to Christmas I still had the advantage of it being both Sunday and lunchtime.

While they had a good special on games (buy one game $19.99 or under get the second 40% off), the majority of the games available on special were games that I had already purchased. The one game that stood out as something I might play (Midnight Club Los Angeles - Complete Edition) is tainted by the fact that I only got to the end one of the three versions of Midnight Club that were on the PS2, and I don't really think that I unlocked everything even in that one. As I might have mentioned before, I already have plenty of things to play.

ToysRUs has made most of their stores work in a loop fashion, similar to the layouts of Harmon Face Value Stores and Bed Bath & Beyond. At the beginning of the loop are usually seasonal and promotional items, so while you might have found Halloween costumes there two months ago, the front area is now filled with Christmas candy and new offerings from their featured vendors including LEGO, Skylanders, and a large (15' high by about 18' wide)  Disney Infinity 2.0 display.

I had previously mentioned to my children that the reason we didn't play Skylanders is that at the time (2011) was that it was the most expensive game at retail. ("Steel Battalion" by CAPCOM used to have that distinction because of the ridiculously expensive custom controller.) The basic game was similar to the Gauntlet series, where you got a bunch of characters together and tried to fight your way through a series of levels, using the power of the skills of the different characters. The reason I discouraged my kids from this game was that to be able to play every thing that was already on the game disk, it would cost over $300 (and this was just for the first Skylanders game), and you could buy five or six other new release games that didn't do that to you for that amount of money, and maybe ten or fifteen games if you picked them up used or waited for the price drop. Why so expensive? It's expensive because they sell you in-game characters a la carte as plastic toys with computer chips that stored your data in them that range in price from $8 to $15 each, and only certain characters types can unlock and play certain missions.

Now, Disney/Marvel has jumped on this bandwagon and created Disney Infinity, now on version 2.0. Taking elements from both their own and other "sandbox" style games, they have combined it with the same RFID/toy technology used in the Skylanders games and their own gigantic stable of Disney and Marvel characters. (The first Infinity game was only Disney/Pixar characters.) While it may be cool for an eight year old boy to play as a giant spore-shooting mushroom, or a big muscular brawler that looks like an eyeball, it's going to be really hard to compete with a game where you can play as Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Elsa,  Anna, Merida, Sully, Mike Wazowski, Buzz Lightyear, or Malificent (and dozens more). The same rule as Skylanders applies - if you want to play as a character, you need to buy the corresponding plastic toy for $14.

Maybe this would be easier if you could see it in action. This is from Disney Infinity's own Youtube channel.



Perhaps this is a hard concept to convey, because since you can do all sorts of things in the Toybox mode of Disney Infinity, it's almost easier to say what the game isn't than what it is.

So, back to the loop thing. The way the ToysRUs is set up puts the expensive "R" Zone items (electronics, most of the video games, tablets, headphones) at the end of your loop so you can't second-guess yourself as you go around the store, and also so the employee that has to take things out of a locked case for you can then just ring up your purchases at that point. The video displays that they have in the store include a setup for Infinity 2.0 and a setup for Skylanders so that parents and kids can get an idea of what the game is about. But, if you ran into Disney Infinity at the beginning of the loop and didn't know what it was, do you supposed that you could find out what that game is about? Probably not. Even though it should sell enough copies this year to make an amount of money for Disney/Marvel that would make Scrooge McDuck a little envious, most of the ToysRUs employees aren't in the right demographic to get any firsthand exposure to these games. I saw a couple over by the big display out front that were struggling with understanding even the most basic thing about the game. They were a little exasperated that the employees didn't know that much. I was happy to help them pick out the PS4 version today along with Anna and Elsa figures, and answer a few easy questions for them. Since the questions are relevant, perhaps they are worth including.

What is Disney Infinity 2.0? It's an open-world/sandbox game where you can explore, race, shoot stuff, build buildings, and all kinds of things. Some specific missions go with some spefic characters, and that unlocks more things that you can use in the Toybox mode.

What's the difference between the Marvel Super Heroes version of Disney Infinity 2.0 and the Toy Box Version? The biggest difference is the starting characters. The Marvel Super Heroes version comes with three of the Avengers (Iron Man, Black Widow, and Thor), and the Toybox version comes with Merida from "Brave" and Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch". The game disk is the same, the Infinity base is the same, and what happens from there depends entirely on what characters you have. The reason for the two versions is just that it makes more sense to start you with a few Disney characters or a few Marvel characters, and the things available to do in the game vary based on what you start with.

What platform should I get it for? Get it for the newest platform that you still intend to be playing a year from now or are comfortable with your kids hogging all the time. The PS4 is going to run a lot smoother than the PS3 version and be able to do a lot more visual effects at once even though the basic style of the graphics will be the same.

I learned later that the PS4 version will be capable of building much larger Toybox areas, since the machine has more RAM available to do that. The same is true of the XBox One version over the 360 version. Sadly, the WiiU version is more on par with the PS3/XBox360 versions in that regard.


If you want to learn even more about the game, you should probably check out more of the videos on the Disney Infinity Youtube channel. I don't think we'll be picking up the game here since I don't want to fall in the Skylanders trap, and I will have my own problems with amiibos on the WiiU by the time Christmas rolls around.

As part of my usual schtick, since I do identify myself as SuperMonkeyCube to people when I meet them in person in a situation like this, I did do a quick(ish) Rubik's cube demo for the couple that I helped. (Three unseen mistakes, still finished in 37 seconds.)