While I am not always in favor of realism in games, I am looking forward to the fact that the new Legend of Zelda game uses the Wii Motion Plus to improve its swordplay (and a couple of other things).
The swordplay in The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess was fun, and that game did a good job of doing a lot of different sword and shield moves with the motion controls. The slingshot and bow and arrow seemed like much more useful weapons because you could point the Wiimote directly on the screen to aim them. So, it would seem that a natural extension of that would be to make the swordplay more direct.
From the official trailer, we see that some enemies are specifically tailored to be defeated by sword attacks at a specific angle. Also, we see the slingshot, bow and arrow, some awesome bomb bowling, a whip - new to the big versions but previously used in the DS game The Legend of Zelda:Spirit Tracks. Most crazy of all is the new remote control flying scarab beetle - check Link poised to fire it up at 1:06 in the video. My older son made some sort of squealy noise when he saw that for the first time.
The only things that I might not be looking forward to are:
The boomerang, and
playing lefty.
Depending on how they implement the boomerang, it may be fine or I may be throwing it backwards all the time, and I presume that partly because of being a lefty. Being a lefty will affect the swordplay as well. Even though Link has been a lefty for a long time, they changed it for Twilight Princess on Wii because they were worried about how it would feel to be swinging the Wiimote with your right hand and seeing the on-screen character swing the sword with his left hand. However, since the controls are indirect and not direct, I didn't find a problem the other way around. It remains to be seen whether it will screw me up on direct controls. I will definitely be looking to play this at a store kiosk before I buy it, as I doubt Nintendo will be giving people a choice between lefty and righty in the options menu. It's not like it's a bowling game, for crying out loud.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Spiderman hasn't shown up yet on the confirmed characters list for Marvel vs Capcom 3. I was only capable of expressing how I felt with action figures.
So I wake up Thursay morning, blearily stare at my computer screen, and see that they have announced more characters for MvC3!
Chun-Li is no surprise, as I had surmised before that she had been in too many of the other crossover games to not be present in this one.
Doctor Doom, the main enemy of the Fantastic Four, wasn't much of a surprise either since he was a interesting character to use in MvC2.
Super Skrull was not that much of a surprise, but only because I had heard talk of his inclusion when the original silhouette was posted on the MvC3 official page. It makes it easy to include the Fantastic Four, which were previously difficult to use because of licensing deals, because Super Skrull has all the same powers as the members of the Fantastic Four.
Trish is a little bit of a surprise to me, but a welcome helping of fan service in a cute leather outfit indeed. It would be even more awesome to have a Dante/Trish/Lady team, but I'm guessing that's overkill.
Trish's outfit in MvC3 looks more like the Devil May Cry 1 and 2 model than the one she's wearing in DMC4. That's fine by me, as I really learned to appreciate Trish more when I unlocked her as a playable character in DMC2. For some reason, I expected Capcom to take the macho route and include Vergil or Nero instead of Trish.
Included in the first video above - the word "Viewtiful" (Look after Doctor Doom lands that 36-hit combo - around 0:26). Decide amongst yourselves what the implications are. Not included in the MvC3 video above but otherwise announced - Thor and Ameratsu. There are some screenshots out there. I'm excited for the new characters, although I'd really like to see some footage of one of the larger characters against Ameratsu, just because I suspect that a lot of their standing regular attacks will just whiff over her fluffy white head and Ameratsu will be well suited to giving the big guys the rushdown and biting their kneecaps off.
In anticipation of all of the fighting game goodness to come, and also because I don't have SFIV, I dug through my box of fighting games and threw Tekken Tag Tournament, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Tekken 5 and Arcana Heart in the PS2 for a few minutes each last night. Tekken Tag looked a little dated, as the character models look a bit better in Tekken 5. Tekken 5 annoyed me only because I never finished that stupid "Devil Within" mode - I liked Tekken Force Mode in Tekken 3 and 4 so much better because they were straight-up brawlers that left the moveset of the Tekken characters intact. "Devil Within" is a different control scheme, and full of jumping puzzles. Also, there is a limit to how many times I will re-fight True Ogre before it starts feeling pointless. Neo Geo Battle Coliseum felt floaty and "off" a little. I keep trying to play SNK fighters because there are legions of dedicated KOF fans that swear by those games, but something never feels right. I even picked up a couple of the 3D King of the Fighters games, which I liked a little bit more, but I never really connected to. It's sad that I would rather play a deeply broken Mortal Kombat game with good characters than something with more critical acclaim that I just can't connect with.
Arcana Heart perked me right up after all of that, though. While it's slow compared to a lot of the other games and the arenas are large, the graphics are excellent for a PS2 game, and the fighting mechanics feel more solid than the SNK fighters. The idea of having separate sets of super moves and normal moves is interesting, it gives people a chance to build a character to their play style a little more. It only has three normal attack buttons and one special attack button - maybe it's the perfect game to get me warmed up for Marvel vs Capcom 3.
This weekend is a buy 2 get one on used games at Gamestop. Saturday's purchases were:
MadWorld for Wii Wall-E for Wii Scooby Doo: Night of 100 Frights for Gamecube (I always tell #1 son that if we can get a game for PS2 or Gamecube to get the Gamecube version.)
Two for the kids, one for me. At first, we were going to get No More Heroes 2 instead of Wall-E, but I felt like that No More Heroes 2 would be around for a while. My reasoning for getting MadWorld was that if I really want to experience what the Wii has to offer hardcore gamers, I should pick it up before it disappeared. Since No More Heroes 2 is a more recent release I wasn't worried about it going away any time soon. Also, I thought it was somewhat unfair to double up on UltraVoilence, since I'm not the only one that plays Wii in our house by a long shot. I had played the demo of the Wall-E game for PC, and it wasn't horrible, so I figured it was worth a try. It took us a while to decide what to get, and it took a little longer because #2 son kept bringing me cases for PSP games. "Bub, we don't have PSP. Leave 'em on the shelf". I would also like to thank Chrisitan at our local Gamestop for being a good sport while I did Rubik's cube demos in line at the store.
Eventually, we got home to play stuff. While it doesn't look as good as the PC version, the Wii version of Wall-E seems to play OK but we didn't delve very far into it. The controls showed a surprising amount of depth, even going so far as using the Wiimote to look around. As soon as we got home, #1 son fired up my Gamecube and got right to work on the Scooby-Doo game, and noticed that it was full of jumping and part-collecting. It also has a lot of well-arranged incidental music from the cartoons in it, so it definitely gave off the Scooby vibe. #2 son sensed the Scooby vibe and went in to watch him play, so I switched out discs and got started with MadWorld.
I have always been a big fan of brawlers, I think my favorite one in the arcades was The Combatribes, although I did play both Streets of Rage and several of the Final Fight games on the 16-bit consoles. I also played Double Dragon on a green screened Compaq portable at some point in the 80's, and I also remember getting my butt kicked by some stupid game on NES or SNES called "BattleToads". Stupid jetbike levels killed me every time. But, I digress.
The conceit of MadWorld is that you're an entrant in a city-wide televised combat spree called "DeathWatch". They play it up like it's a highly rated TV show and a terrorist plot all at the same time, especially since the island that the game takes place on had all of its bridges demolished all at the same time, right before the show starts. It implies that some big players are involved behind the scenes - it also implies that our protagonist might just be more than he appears.
Just because a game is rated for mature audiences is no guarantee that what you are experiencing is mature subject matter, or intellectually mature, or has mature gameplay. This is the most profanity laden and unapologetically violent game that I have played, but I hear that House of the Dead:Overkill (another game I haven't gotten to yet) actually has more profanity. Even Resident Evil 4 hides some of the decapitations with blurry cameras and slight cutaways, but Madworld includes a couple kinds of impalements, bisections, fire, getting run down by trains, getting thrown into saw blades, and being crushed with a two-ton metal ball - and that's just in the first level. Now while this sounds a bit gruesome, bear in mind that the entire world is rendered in a graphic novel styled black and white, full of deep shadows and punctuated with the occasional red and yellow. It is reminiscent of Frank Miller - perhaps the target audience for the game is people who enjoyed Sin City? Level two has a game called Man-Darts partway through, and while I can only explain it by saying that it involves a big baseball bat and a thirty foot high dartboard that you whack enemies into headfirst, it's a lot more fun than it might sound even though I had to fight the camera more than my opponents.
The voice actors that play the two play-by-play announcers in MadWorld are John Dimaggio, voice of my second favorite American English speaking robot, and Greg Proops, voice of my favorite non-alien speaking Podrace announcer.* In the first few minutes of the game alone, the two announcers drop F-bombs like it was February 1945 over Dresden. They start repeating jokes pretty early on, so you may just turn them down as soon as you're tired of them. I was very pleased to see that the announcers had their own volume slider. The enemies swear at you all the time too, so don't think turning down the announcers will help. After you turn down the announcers and the enemies, you will notice that the game's music is a flavor of hip-hop that includes at least a third as much swearing as the announcers. At this point, I was hoping for a button in the options that said "Instrumental & SFX Only". The violence I am used to but it probably doesn't annoy me because it's ridiculously over-the-top. The constant barrage of profanity annoys me, though. I'd like to be able to play the game without getting everyone within earshot annoyed. The music part of the music is well done, and the sound effects are meaty and solid.
It was also nice to hear that the voice of our protagonist Jack is played by the same actor that played protagonist Brad Hawk in Namco's Urban Reign, Steven Blum. The opening narration for Urban Reign was a standout piece of the game, and he gave you the inspiration to kick butt just from his voice alone. He serves a similar purpose here, to let you know that Jack is not a dude to be messed with.
My biggest issue with the game is that while it has many similarities to No More Heroes with even more swearing and the swordplay and the beatings and the ranking system and the on-screen controller motions for finishing moves, it misses the mark on the controls a little. It's difficult to stay locked on to the bosses and mini-bosses, and when you're not using the lock-on feature, the game often whiffs a punch into the empty space right next to an enemy if it thinks you're actually trying to get some other farther away enemy that's at a different angle to you. If your character is such a bad motor scooter, how could he mess that up? After having played games like Rygar and Devil May Cry and God of War that get that right a lot more of the time, it's sad to see a good developer miss the mark on that.
I hope all you people out there playing Heavy Rain appreciate what you got - that may actually be a "Mature" game. For that matter, Shadow of the Colossus and Sly 3 show more emotional maturity than MadWorld does. Heavy Rain may have a more choose-your-own-adventure game interface, and isn't as much of an action game. From a gameplay standpoint, MadWorld has a lot of things that I like in it, but a lot of the game's overall tone looks like it was just there for shock value and not because it fit with the game's story.
Maybe what I really want is a cartoony Devil May Cry game on Wii, rendered like Under The Skin or Viewtiful Joe. Enemies explode into red orbs (Devil May Cry's currency) upon defeat. Nero, Lady, Vergil, Trish, Leon Kennedy, and a few others show up as drop-in-drop-out team mates. Lots of action, some difficult puzzles that don't require jumping, minimal swearing, music that you need a subwoofer for, and some extra multiplayer modes. Dante runs an "agency", so why not let him do some detective work? Of course, if Capcom made anything like that they would be berated for making "LEGO Batman meets Carmen Sandiego".
* John Dimaggio's Bender is my second favorite American English speaking robot because he loses out to Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet" - nothing against John DiMaggio, Robby has a cooler hardware configuration. Also I had to specify American English because Anthony Daniels just slays both of those guys, and R2-D2 doesn't even speak English. As far as Greg Proops (the English speaking half of the podrace announcer) goes, it's just sad that he's at the top of such a very short list.
...from someone who just got around to playing it.
Despite numerous attempts to stop me, I played through all of Sony developer Sucker Punch's three Sly Cooper games from Memorial Day to the 4th of July. I only played through the main game, I didn't complete any of the Master Thief challenges. I'm sure I could have completed them sooner, but I played some Street Fighter 3:Third Strike and a few other Capcom fighting games inbetween sessions, just to break it up a little.
I have played all of the PS2 Ratchet and Clank games (that's not true - I didn't play any of the PSP ones that got ported to PS2), and had played the first Jak & Daxter, so I felt like I had missed out by not having played the Sly Cooper games at all. Given the opportunity to pick them up cheap, I got all three of them - although in retrospect I should have picked up new copies of all three. Sly 3 I picked up from Gamestop as a used copy, and since the only thing I got was the disk for $10, I missed out a little. ( More on that later.)
The first Sly Cooper game comes off like Nintendo's early Mario games. Levels have a beginning and an end, and you're supposed to 1) go quick, 2) don't get hurt at all, and 3) get all the stuff. Similar to Mario, some boards allow you to go at your own pace, and some boards put time pressure on you. There's at least one board in every group of levels that has non-platformer gameplay, like one where you pilot an undersea sub and shoot crabs trying to take treasure chests. The controls for that are identical to the old school Robotron 2084 but these days that's referred to as a "twin stick shooter" since it seems like most of the people that Microsoft and Sony market to these days weren't alive in 1982 when that game came out. Some of the other non-platforming boards include racing levels and turret gun levels. Unlike the Ratchet and Clank's turret levels, where the object is to shoot down a lot of enemies, the Sly Cooper turret levels involve providing cover fire for a teammate so that they can proceed through a level. The only thing that I found odd about the game was that there was one powerup that was inaccesible until you had completed the main game, and it made the powerup completely pointless because it can't effectively be used in completing the Master Theif missions.
The second Sly Cooper game, Band of Theives, takes place in a series of cities around the world. While many of the missions take you into building interiors that are otherwise inaccessible, a fair portion of each city's missions are in the city itself. I liked that the cities had some purpose instead of being a glorified level select screen. The game added a currency system, stealing treasures and returning them to the safe house in a limited amount of time, added pickpocketing as both a side way to make money and a feature of getting through some of the levels, and purchaseable powerups. Sly's teammates Bentley and Murray get more of their own missions now, where you're controlling them directly. The conceit of the driving missions in Sly 1 was that Murray was driving - when Murray actually gets out of the car, it's already a cutscene by then. Now you get to use the might of "The Murray" directly to pound foes too tough for Sly, and Bentley goes through small spaces that Sly can't get into so we can hack the enemies' computers. Bentley also has very effective sleep darts and bombs. The game is a lot more fun than the first one for me because the locations seem a little more "real" - I enjoy a game that has a sense of place. It's nice to get to know where you're going after a while. In the name of variety, this game also has some turret missions but they're more like the Ratchet and Clank ones this time, and Bentley's hacking games play a little like old-school Omega Race. Other non-traditional levels include attacking foes using an RC chopper or an RC car. The best thing was having a regular health bar instead of the 'one hit and you're out' system from the first game.
By the time the third game (Honor Among Theives) rolls around, Sucker Punch has figured a few things out. None of the loot that you find has any impact on the game other than how much money you have, so making you go through the extra step of cashing it in was unneccesary. Now, loot instantly adds to your currency total. All of the powerups become purchaseable. The missions are a little more streamlined, but not as much as Sly 1. The endless looking around for clue bottles has gone, though. (I kinda missed them.) On the other hand, some new things got thrown in for reasons I can't fathom. Four more playable characters, inclusion of 3D in some levels, and a rather involved pirate boat combat simulator. I did like the storyline of 3, but I didn't like switching to characters with rather different control schemes. At the risk of it being a little spoilerish, Carmelita's controls were the ones that really bugged me. The plane levels were fun - the demo disk for Sly 3 included a version of one of the aerial battles - although I had to pass on the 3D version of the last dogfight since it's harder to tell a red plane from a black plane with anaglyph glasses on. In general, I used the 3D glasses that I had laying around the house for the platforming levels, and passed on it for the boss battles. Had I purchased a new copy of Sly 3, perhaps I would have the exact 3D glasses that I needed, but the ones I had were close enough. I would have liked some sort of calibration screen for the 3D, or a displayable test pattern so I could check that the 3D was set up correctly without having to do it in the middle of a level while perched on a spire someplace. One new thing that they added that was somewhat fun was some cutscenes had a dialogue tree to do - I wouldn't want them to make a whole game of it, it was just fun when they threw it in a few times.
Those of you that have still missed out on these games and have a PS3 can take advantage of the The Sly Collection coming out. I'm sure that it will be easy to render at higher resolution, but I wonder if they're going to keep the 3D the same.
And, for the record, I liked the voice actress for Carmelita Fox in the second game (Alesia Glidewell) the best. And that was without realizing that she plays the protagonist Chell in Valve's Portal!
I would have posted this sooner, but between playing the Sly Cooper games and my older son's discovery of websites like ninjakiwi.com, I haven't been on the computer as much. I will talk about my impressions of the Sly games pretty soon.
Marvel vs Capcom 3 has been announced, and they've been showing some gameplay footage already.
Overall, I seem to like it. I'm glad that they listened to the fans and included Dante from 'Devil May Cry', Capcom's stylish action series. I'm glad that they managed to keep the 3-on-3 format from 'Marvel vs Capcom 2'. I was surprised to see Marvel's 'Merc with a Mouth' Deadpool included at first, but I was reminded by the guys at the comic book store that everything seems to get Deadpool added to it these days.
There are a few camps of haters -
"OMG BlazBlue is so much better why don't they make it 2D" I do realize that other companies are still making sprite-based fighters, and my hat is off to companies that are still making that work. Capcom has a variety of series going on now besides the Street Fighter games, most (all?) of which are done with 3D modeled characters because the game environments are 3D. The skill set of their employees and the design of their development tools probably totally slanted towards 3D. We've already heard this complaint directed towards Street Fighter IV, and I have to say that Street Fighter IV's use of a moving camera during special attacks has added a measure of excitement to matches that you can't get from a 2D fighter. And when I say that you can't get it from a 2D fighter, I mean that if you do move the camera around in a 2D fighter, it's like you're watching cardboard cutouts fight. I realize that it's not substantive and doesn't affect the actual fighting mechanics, but I like it. Capcom's old tendency to re-use sprites between games had gotten them in a bad place with Street Fighter fans, especially by the time 'Capcom vs SNK 2' made it to consoles in 2001. There were brand-new SNK characters right next to sprites of Darkstalkers' Morrigan that they hadn't updated since 1994, and it looked terrible. I hope that their use of 3D character models helps them keep up graphically without looking dated.
"I hate this cartoony looking junk." I can think of at least two significant reasons to do a cartoony art style. Marvel characters are from the comics after all, but that's not why. With characters from both comics and a multitude of games, each with its own art style, it's probably more visually consistent to make everybody look more like they just stepped out of a comic book. That way, the game has a unifying visual style that people will associate with the game. Also, if you're going to have six characters on the screen, I presume that the simpler rendering style helps keep the framerate consistently high.
"Why did they simplify the controls? Street Fighter is supposed to be six buttons." I hate to tell you that MvC2 had somewhat simplified controls. While it was still six buttons, the MvC2 layout has two buttons specifically assigned to tagging out to your two partners. The punch buttons and kick buttons were reduced to two each. Not being able to simply have three different speeds of projectile attacks seemed to be the most annoying feature of this change to me. According to the preliminary information, the buttons are three attacks and one exchange button, similar to Tatsunoko vs Capcom. Having played TvC, and being satisfied with how the controls work, I have to say that I like this better than MvC2's controls in this regard. The other major reason to simplify the controls is to help maintain a broader audience.
For years, fighting games had relatively simple controls until Street Fighter. While people were largely unaware of the original Street Fighter, these special moves carried over to the very popular Street Fighter II. These, in turn, influenced Mortal Kombat and other some games in the genre, but not all of them. For whatever reason, the Street Fighter Alpha series started more and different controller techniques, taking its lead from the last Street Fighter II game, Super Street Fighter II Turbo. The Street Fighter Alpha included Alpha counters and multi-level Super moves, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 included the Variable Combo attack. As more and different kinds of special attacks were added to the game, it became more of a barrier to entry for new players. By the time Capcom finally made Street Fighter 3 (1997) and added the Parry system, it was no longer enough to know all of your character's moves. To be proficient at Street Fighter 3, you had to know the precise hit timing of all of your opponent's moves. This was made worse by Street Fighter 3 only having a home version on the Dreamcast for the first few years and was not released to the more widely popular home systems (PS2, Xbox) until 2004. Another setback was removal of a lot of fan favorites from Street Fighter II and too many new characters. This narrowing of focus made Street Fighter 3:Third Strike a technically great game, but not played by a wide audience, and not easy to get into for new players. Capcom had explicitly stated during development of Street Fighter 4 that they wanted to bring their fighting games back to a wider audience, and they have done a great job with that – and it's even more important in a game like Marvel vs Capcom 3, because they need to bring in new Marvel fans into the fold and make it easy to get into the game.
I'm sure that some of you can come up with more objections, and feel free to comment away – I'm going to get on with the roster analysis, though.
The characters that have already been announced are: (Game Series in parenthesis)
Chris Redfield (Resident Evil)
Dante (Devil May Cry)
Felicia (Darkstalkers)
Morrigan (Darkstalkers)
Ryu (Street Fighter)
And on the Marvel side:
Captain America
Deadpool
Dormammu (villan from Dr. Strange)
Hulk
Iron Man
Wolverine
Based on the rosters of past games, there are some reasonable assumptions, and some not-so-reasonable assumptions.
Looking at "Marvel vs Capcom" and "Marvel vs Capcom 2" only, a presumption might be that anyone that was in both of the other games would be in this one. If that turns out to be true, then we could expect to see Gambit, Spiderman, War Machine, and Venom on the Marvel side - although Gambit's somewhat of a longshot (and personally I'd rather see Longshot although I have no idea how you could implement his powers in a fighting game). On the Capcom side, that would put Captain Commando, Chun-Li, Jin, Mega Man, Roll, Strider Hiryu, and Zangief in the lineup. Even though he was sort of the Capcom mascot, since Captain Commando has a bunch of other teammates to model, I'm going to say unlikely to him. Chun-Li and Zangief are already modeled in SF4 (and Chun-Li has also been modeled in TvC) so they would be easy enough to do. Mega Man seems likely, but I'm going to say maybe not Roll since I'm hoping they have enough sense to keep super-short characters out this time. Jin and Strider Hiryu have not been featured in any modern games, so they may be out too.
Looking deeper into the previous Capcom superhero fighting games (X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs Street Fighter, and Marvel vs Street Fighter), a few more characters may get considered. Blackheart has been in three previous games , although perhaps he's not relevant as a bad guy any more. The same thing could be said for Omega Red. Juggernaut has been in a few times before, is a fun character to use, and still manages to be relevant in the comic books. I would say that he's got a good chance to make the cut unless there's some storyline related reason for him not to be there. Shuma-Gorath has made some previous appearances but is another Dr. Strange villan. (He looks like an octopus with a giant eyeball as a head.) Unless they're willing to put Dr. Strange in, I think Dormammu's appearance will keep Shuma-Gorath out. If they go for more X-Men involvement, Cyclops, Magneto, and Storm, could end up in the game. On the Capcom side, Akuma, Cammy, Charlie, Dhalsim, Ken, and M. Bison have all been in their fair share of the crossover games. Should they go in again, or is it time to let some more new characters in? Blanka hasn't made it into any of the crossover games yet and I would like to see him make it in one. Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 2 and 4? Maybe he's redundant with Chris Redfield already there. Samanosuke Akechi from Onimusha? It's not like he'd be the only one with a sword. Zack & Wiki? The little devil dude from Bombastic? The white wolf Ameratsu from Okami? No, no, and probably not. It's not like Capcom has a shortage of characters, but a lot of them are too short. I realize that the Vs series games has had more of an emphasis on having fun and wacky characters than having a well balanced roster, but I tire of playing against short opponents. Based on my past experience with the Vs games, I'd rather fight against the Hulk than Servbot.
I also wouldn't be surprised to see some appearances by newer characters from Lost Planet or Monster Hunter, or perhaps some more Darkstalkers characters to try and stir up interest for a new Darkstalkers game using the new game engine.
At this point, I would encourage anybody interested in Marvel vs Capcom 3 to keep checking Capcom's website at www.marvelvscapcom3.com for new characters as they're announced. And, after all this typing, I may post an abbreviations guide for Capcom fighting game titles so that I'm not retyping them constantly.
Last weekend, I used the Memorial Day holiday to take my two kids and a musician friend of mine on a routine shopping expedition. I was hoping to get another swing for the yard, and the one I wanted was a likely candidate at the big regional ToysRUs. Success! Swing obtained! The down side was, they also had Sly Cooper 1 and 2. I really wanted to pick up a Wii classic controller, but for the same money I could get two more games! A few minutes later, we were down the street having lunch at the local mall food court. After we ate, I figured that we should locate the Gamestop in the mall because I'm always hoping that I'll accidentally find the Gamecube version of Killer 7 or some other treasure like that. But, since my older son has that tendency towards completion, he spotted Sly 3 and was pretty much adamant that we get it. After all, the easiest way to annoy some people is to take something that there are n of and have or obtain n-1 of them.
My reasoning behind the classic controller (which I still did not get) mostly has to do with Samurai Shodown Anthology for Wii. While Tatsunoko vs Capcom allows for a Gamecube controller, and controls OK that way, SSC does not. While it's adequate for Samurai Shodown 1-5 to use a Wiimote plus Nunchuck, it's less than ideal. As a lefty who has always played fighting games with a gamepad, I've gotten quite used to character control with my left hand. My stupid right hand doesn't always get combo timing perfect, but I can usually pull off the controller motions on a regular basis, even on an unfamiliar controller. On the Wii, I am used to Wiimote in my left hand and Nunchuck in my right - perhaps I should switch but it feels creepy. (I even get mad about some of the Wii Fit games that use the Nunchuck not letting you swap the controls.) Of course, right handed people have had to put up with having the D-pad on their non-dominant had for years, but maybe this is why the fight stick is so popular. So, my theory is this. If you're a lefty that didn't play fighting games much in the arcade but a lot at home, you're more likely to prefer a gamepad. If you're a righty in the same boat, you're OK with a gamepad but you would rather have a fight stick.
Of course, the other reason I want a Classic Controller for Samurai Shodown is that Samurai Shodown 6 needs more buttons, and the easiest way to annoy me is to take a fighting game that needs 5 buttons and make it so I can only reach 4 of them - or put six games on a disc and make it so I can only play 5 of them.
