Tatsunoko vs Capcom review (Wii, US version)

While other people may have reviewed Capcom's Wii fighting game "Tatsunoko vs Capcom:Ultimate All-Stars", I feel like they glossed over some things. So, you may see me nitpick about the controls a little. I may gloss over other things, though. I am not going to explain the Capcom or Tatsunoko characters very much since the characters and their respective movesets could take up tons of space on their own but I might mention a few notable ones. If you are not a Wii owner, you may be lost by some of the minute details that I pick over but I will try my best to make it understandable. I may abbreviate the game's giant title as TvC, also.

PRECONCEPTIONS

The things that I knew about coming into the game was that it was a fighting game using a 2 vs 2 system, where each person picks two characters to use, the characters can be switched at anytime, and the match is lost when both characters are defeated. The health gauge of the character off screen refills slightly, similar to the previous "vs" game, "Marvel vs Capcom 2".

In an effort to accommodate the Wii, the buttons have been reduced to 4. The four buttons are Light, Medium, Heavy, and Partner. Since I recently had been playing "Samurai Shodown Collection" on the Wii, I was OK with the idea that there would be four buttons to manage, since most of the SNK games are 4-button, and "Samurai Shodown" did not seem tough to control. They have you attach the Nunchuck peripheral, and the four attack buttons are mapped by default to A (on the face of the Wiimote), B (on the back of the Wiimote), C, and Z (both on the Nunchuck), and the character movement is controlled by the Nunchuck's analog stick. It was my assumption that Capcom would do something similar.

DAY ONE (Friday)

It is my intent to see if I can make this game go without reading the manual. I toss the game into the Wii, pick the giant robot PTX-40A from "Lost Planet" who's too big for a partner and has to play by himself, and I am mystified by the fact that only A and B seem to do anything attack-wise. The analog stick on the Nunchuck does move the character, though. I also figured out that the minus button taunts. That was what I expected, at least. I got as far as the second stage of some giant spherical boss-like character without continuing. I opt not to continue further, and go get the manual to figure out where the attack buttons are mapped. I read the manual and lose my mind a little. After months of defending Capcom's decision to make a different game for the Wii instead of porting Street Fighter 4 with simplified controls, it turns out that if you play the game with the Wiimote or the Wiimote+Nunchuck combinations, you get simplified controls, and whether you want them or not. I look at the next two pages of the manual, where they show the layouts for the Classic Controller and the Gamecube controller. This is what I expected here. There are more than enough buttons, and the default option is logically laid out.

For those of you new to Nintendo, the Gamecube was Nintendo's previous game machine. Despite its small size and awesomeness, it never sold as many units as the Playstation 2. The
controller, while quite responsive and well made, has an odball layout and is not cordless.

Nintendo designed the Wii so that Gamecube controllers are directly supported - there are four controller ports under the side panel on the Wii. I go to bed feeling a little annoyed, and drop the manual between my side of the bed and the dresser partly by accident and partly because I'm too sleepy to care.

DAY TWO (Saturday)

After getting some of the house cleaned and some laundry folded in the morning, I tell my older son that we're going to play in 'Versus' mode on TvC. I have grabbed a Gamecube controller for myself, and I let him play with the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination. The only thing I tell him about the controls are that A attacks, B is for special moves, and to change players you hold away on the analog stick and shake the Nunchuck. Even with me picking Ryu on my team every time (or maybe because of it) we are pretty evenly matched. It's very easy to dish out the super moves in the simplified control scheme. Once #1 son had a team that he feels OK with (Tekkaman and Karas), I set him loose on single player. He had to continue a couple of times, but he was able to get to the end.

DAY THREE (Sunday)

I am busy doing chores and herding #2 son - I suggest that #1 son finish TvC with a Capcom character so we can unlock Frank West. He manages to finish with PTX-40A. Frank West seems fun, but he seems like he'd be more fun with the real controls. He manages to finish with Frank by himself using the simplified controls.

We managed to play sporadically after that, and the game doesn't seem broken. The special moves, while different for each character if you're not using the simple controls, aren't too hard to pull off. It's still simpler than a regular Street Fighter game. So let's go back and talk about the game overall.

Visuals

The characters and backgrounds are all 3D models, like the current Street Fighter 4. All of the previous Street Fighter and VS games were all 2D characters with either parallax scrolling multi-layer 2D backgrounds (SFA, SF2, SF3) or 2D characters against 3D backgrounds (CvS2, MvC2). The 3D character models aren't quite as detailed as their SF4 counterparts, but they still do a good job of looking enough like the 2D characters that they came from to know which previous game a particular character was taken from. The visual effects are done quite well
and don't seem to cause much slowdown except possibly during a couple of the super moves, but at the point that the slowdown might occur it doesn't affect gameplay. The character icon art(the 2D graphic art that displays the characters while the match loads) seems very similar in style to Capcom Fighting Evolution, and looks very sharp and clean on the TV.

Sound

I hate to say this, but other than breifly noticing that some of the background music seemed to be remixed versions of existing Street Fighter stage music, I didn't notice the music much. I don't think that it was because it was bad, I suspect that it was because we were too busy trying to play the game. The announcer voice over is better enunciated and a little more Western-sounding than the Capcom Fighting Evolution. The character voices seemed like a lot of them were different actors than usual, but everything was a lot more cleanly enunciated here as well. Even the Japanese dialogue was easier to understand, even though that's not much of a priority for a Western audience.

Gameplay

Despite my initial negative reaction to how the controls were done, the simple controls were easy enough for someone familiar with the simple controls of Super Smash Bros., and the more precise control scheme with the Gamecube controller was well implemented for seasoned "Vs" players. Even the wacky Tatsunoko characters were fun to play with. The boss is beatable, but not a pushover on regular difficulty.

In closing, I felt that this game did a great job of representing Capcom fighing games. If you are new to fighting games and are looking for somewhere to start, this is a great place to do it.

Two Quick things...

I am working on a review of Capcom and Eighting's "Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM" fighting game for Wii, expect to see that posted sometime over the weekend. The short version - game is good, get your Gamecube controller out of storage to play it.

The other thing that I need to mention now is that all users of the Open Office productivity suite should update to version 3.2 at their earliest convenience, and if you haven't tried Open Office yet, it's a good time to do it.

People just don't understand English.

...And I don't mean American English, in this case - I mean that American English speakers don't understand other-side-of-the-Atlantic English as spoken by regular people.

In support of my position, I give as examples:

1) The 1968 movie "Yellow Submarine" had non-Beatles playing the Beatles so their spoken dialogue would be understood by the audience.

2) Guy Ritchie's 1998 film "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" needs subtitles in at least one scene when shown to an American audience.

3) In the Dreamworks animated feature Monsters vs Aliens, dozens of people on the internet have to misquote Gallaxhar's best fake swear word as "Flagnog" or "Flagnnon" because they don't correct for the slightly upper-class fake English accent and spell it "Flagnard" like they should.

OK, so I checked the subtitles. I'm like that.

Now that I think of it, maybe Americans don't even understand regular American English. On the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, after you hit "play" but before the feature starts, there is a screen where they have two different stills of the movie that you pick one of. There's no explanation, just the two pictures that you choose one of. If you're watching the DVD on an old standard TV, you will probably think that you're choosing between full frame and widescreen. If you're watching the DVD on a widescreen TV, it looks like you're choosing between 1.78:1 and 2.35:1. As it turns out, it's the second one. Are we really there yet? Is everybody watching movies on widescreen TV's now? Are movie watchers afraid of math? Would have killed them to put a little bit of explanatory text on the screen, or does every interface have to be only pictures now? Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Am I Trying to Ruin Christmas?

I overheard a presumably uninvolved mom in the video game aisle at Walmart this morning, asking one of the older, more seasoned employees about the various video game systems. I heard the employee giving vague, noncommittal answers - but really what he should be trying to do (in my opinion) is to ask some questions that will allow her to make a clear choice so she can get what she wants and be on her way.

For a moment, let's forget the fact that Mom should have done her homework before she ever set foot in Walmart. Wait! The peanut gallery argues. Mom can't know what to get their kids, that's why they're asking the Walmart employee! That Walmart employee isn't any more of a gamer than that Mom is, even if he does work in the electronics section. He knows what he's been told, but he doesn't know much firsthand - or he'd been able to give more compelling, specific answers and guide her to a solution.

After I got involved, and came over to explain about friend codes for Nintendo multiplayer games, and how she shouldn't worry about her kid(s?) playing against random people on the internet, she expressed her concern about "Is it going to be fast enough? My son is always complaining about that on the computer."

After asking if they had other console gaming systems at home, I tried to reassure her that there was less of that to worry about on a console because he couldn't fill up a Nintendo DS with random programs like he had presumably done to the computer at home. After Mom explains that no, his computer is clean, but he screwed up our computer once, et cetera, then she mentions the other thing that she wants to get him. Xbox. (Which, at this point, is the XBox 360 - the second iteration of Microsoft's console.)

I almost never go much farther with anybody in this conversation without the following:

1) How old is the child in question?
2) What games do they want to play?

and sometimes a third followup question that's based around the answers to the first two. In this case, the answers were "twelve" and "Modern Warfare 2 and Halo". So, based on that, I asked

3) Would you let your kid watch "Saving Private Ryan"?

but not before I had said "Grossly Inappropriate" at least once. If the answers had been "twelve" and "Forza and Burnout", I might have been more encouraging. Perhaps if her child was older, or she said something about he did a big report on WWII for school and was really into the tactics of the eastern theater, I might have been more encouraging.

So, I discouraged her from Xbox360 , touted Nintendo's kid-friendly lineup, and ran away knowing that I was just going to keep saying "Grossly Inappropriate".

Don't get me wrong - the Xbox360 is a very capable piece of hardware, and there are a lot of family friendly titles for it - but if "Modern Warfare 2" is where you're headed, "Lego Indiana Jones" and "Rock Band 2" are just going to be little bumps on the road on the way to the M-Rated titles.

Don't you play a lot of M-Rated games? Aren't you afraid that your kids will be desensitized to violence?

Yes, I play a lot of M-Rated games. I also play a lot of other games, too. What does #2 son want to watch the most? "Pikmin". #2 son can say "zombies", and he is scared of scary music. When he wants to watch me play something, it's pretty pastoral by comparison to what he's aware of. On top of that - Pikmin is a really great game with lots of depth.

#1 son has been playing "Lego Batman", "Wii Play", and "Billy Hatcher". Sure, sometimes #1 son watches me play violent games, but not for very long. If he thinks that he is scared, he doesn't watch anymore and goes to do something else. We also talk about the scary stuff, and I feel that he has a good handle on what is real and what isn't - especially when we've talked about it. Inexplicably, he takes great delight in watching me play Wii Fit - maybe it's fun to watch someone else struggle foolishly with the pushup/side plank exercise.

So, now that I'm done rambling, and ranting, I can't help thinking that I might have ruined Christmas for some kid even though I tried to play by the guidelines and encourage industry sanctioned age-appropriate games. Alternately, I might have gotten his mother to be more involved in what he's doing.

Yep, ruined.

Tips for salesmen

Here's some pointers for people new to sales or purchasing.

1) If you walk into the front door, asking about what used vehicles we might have for sale, and you portray yourself as being in that line of work, maybe you should know things like 'blown head gasket' + 'no compression' = 'not driveable' instead of asking the same question three times. Correspondingly, whatever it is that you sell, try to learn your product, and not get schooled on it by the person you're trying to sell to.

2) If you walk in the front door asking about one thing, and then feeling like you can't get what you want from that, start asking about seven other unrelated things, be prepared to be treated like a) an idiot b) a miscreant or c) both. If you don't like the vehicle we might be able to sell you, and you start asking about pallets and breakers and scrap wire - I might think that you're a junk dealer instead of a vehicle broker. If you pursue the issue further, I might think you're just a criminal casing the place instead of a junk dealer.

3) If you want people to think you're sincere, dress the part. I'm not saying business suits and ties are mandatory, because I wouldn't wish that on other people. A shirt with a collar goes a long way towards sincerety. A business card with real contact information wouldn't hurt, either.

4) Be straightforward. Saying you're in "the export business" in a vague manner may sound impressive to the guys at the bar, but it sounds like "I'm trying to be a tax dodger" to someone with some accounting knowledge.

5) Drive a sensible car to a business call. If you roll up in a luxury SUV with gold trim and fancy wheels it says "I milk everyone for so much money that I can drive an empty land yacht and don't care about gas mileage."

In the interest of disclosure - this is basically me ranting about someone who showed up where I work and proceeded to waste my time. I don't know if he really was a broker, or he was just a hoodlum, but now I don't care and will be letting less of them rob any time from me at all.

If we sell anything used direct to the public, we'll use craigslist like everybody else.

You're a nerd, go to Gamestop.

I was going to dish out a giant rant about Batman: Arkham Asylum and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 each having their own Gamestop preorder exclusives and how I thought it was a horrible trend of having exclusives tied to stores, yadda, yadda.

I'm not going to bother, though for several reasons - for one, both games are quite good on their own, and the exclusives aren't going to make them or break them. The second reason, glaringly obvious, it that it's way too late to complain about this sort of marketing. If Namco didn't get a beatdown from fans two years ago for selling people game levels that may have been already on the retail disk of Beatiful Katamari but not unlockable until paid for, then I can hardly see how complaining would do any good in this case - and the Gamestop exclusive idea isn't nearly as evil as my example. I guess the third reason is that there are a lot of Gamestops out there. Gamestop does bill themselves as "the world's largest video game and entertainment software retailer" so I presume most people that can read this on the internet can either find a Gamestop at their local mall or preorder games from their website. Gamestop is certainly more nerd-friendly in general than my local Walmart. I had it in my mind that Walmart actually sold more video games than Gamestop does, but it hardly matters to Walmart if a game company tries to drag a few people across town to Gamestop, since a lot of those people are still going to Walmart for sundries and food anyway.

From a marketing standpoint, I would assume that game companies would rather have a Gamestop exclusive than a Walmart exclusive for action titles, since the perception is that Gamestop is closer to the true "hardcore gamer" demographic. What's Walmart ever had as a game exclusive? Chibi-Robo Park Patrol for Nintendo DS? (What's that about?)

Troubleshooting Windows... or is it?

I had an interesting time this morning, working on a problem with Remote Web Workplace. For those of you who don't know, Remote Web Workplace is a feature in Windows XP and later where a desktop connected to a internet-connected server can be accessed via a web interface, and then turns into a standard Remote Desktop situation - so a home user could access their work PC, for example. The only way this works is through some fancy pants ActiveX controls, so Internet Explorer is the only reliable way to do it (and yes, I know some people have made ActiveX plugins for FireFox).

The problem becomes a little trickier, when the problem is on an Apple.

As it turns out, Apple has been turning out nice-looking hardware these days, and the nicer part is that the old excuse of "There's no programs for Apple that do X" is greatly diminished. Thanks to programs like Boot Camp and Parallels and the fact that Apple uses Intel processors these days, Windows can be run on a Mac either from a separate partition (Boot Camp) or as a virtual machine (Parallels).

The problem the user was having was that he was unable to do Remote Web Workplace through his Mac through Parallels. His purchase of a Mac and Parallels was somewhat predicated on the idea that he'd be able to do this. We were able to get to the portal on the server, but when it was time to actually log into his desktop, it always told us that the username/password combination was incorrect.

I spent a bit of time on Google seeing if there was a known problem with this, and tried to make sure that neither Windows nor OSX were blocking some port that I needed to make the computers communicate correctly. It didn't take me very long to find out where the Apple firewall was, and I'm glad I didn't need to adjust anything there because I felt like I would have left the machine vulnerable had I done so.

I even tried logging into my own desktop, and failed several times, adjusted some settings, and then I got it to work once. Happy that I had solved the problem, I brought it back to the user only to have it fail for him and then me when I brought it to his office. Maybe the WiFi signal isn't strong enough, I think. I bring the Macbook Pro to where the router is, prop an equipment rack door open, and then try again.

Same problem again.

I painstakingly check my typing, only to discover the oddest thing.

The Shift Key, it fails me. If I were to hold shift and start typing the letter 'a', I get 'aAAAAAA'.

If I pressed shift once, held it and pressed 'a', released both keys and repeated, I only get 'aaaaaaa'.

The only sure way to get a capital letter the first time was to temporarily engage CapsLock. Since Windows obscures the password as it's typed, there was no way to know that the password was wrong other than the error message. This was not a problem with the whole computer - the shift key worked perfectly fine for regular programs, and even the first login. Somehow, during the second login at the remote desktop, there were too many layers of computers there and some info was not passed. Once I discovered the CapsLock workaround, there were no more rejected logins.

This seemed like the computing equivalent of a Turducken. Bon Appetit!