16- Okami (Clover Studio, Playstation 2, 2006)
Okami is squarely within the genre carved out by the Zelda games. It’s based on the Japanese story of how the sun goddess saved the world from darkness, and told via a beautiful cel-shaded landscape. You play the wolf goddess Ameratsu, guided by an insect-sized Poncle artist named Issun. Your first few missions involve healing trees and landscapes blighted by darkness while battling demons. As the story goes on, there are many cities, many dungeons, and many landscapes to be freed of the cursed darkness. Along the way, Ameratsu learns sacred brush techniques, which on the Wii version of the game can be executed through Wiimote gestures. The brush techniques can be used to solve puzzles, and can often also be used in battle.

Okami is the single best-looking Nintendo Wii game I’ve ever seen, and I’ve written an article about it entitled An Argument Against Photorealism. Cartoony games tend to age much better than games that attempt photorealism.

Okami was a very long game – perhaps longer than Zelda or even Final Fantasy 12. It’s hard to believe how much gameplay they can fit on a single DVD.

15- Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, Playstation 3, 2010)So far, Heavy Rain is my favorite game of 2010. The graphics were beautiful, the voice acting was excellent, and the soundtrack was so good that I often listen to it while writing code at work. But all these things, while they do add quite a bit to the game, are not what make Heavy Rain great.

Heavy Rain was a well-written murder mystery, and the fact that it was interactive made it better. It’s a big choose-your-own-path story where the choices are sometimes unintentional. The branches can come as a result of a conscious choice, as a penalty for a failed challenge (e.g. losing a fistfight or crashing your car) or because you simply didn’t react quickly enough. All these branches split and rejoin portions of the story to create a very complex piece of interactive fiction.

But my favorite part of Heavy Rain, at the risk of repeating myself, is the way it handles the permanence of consequences. It is impossible to get a Game Over screen in Heavy Rain before the final credits roll. You can fail challenges, characters can die, but the game does not end. The story goes on, and you witness the consequences. Quantic Dream’s use of this mechanic has many excellent results. First, you never find yourself dying, reloading, and replaying the same sequence over and over. Frustration from having had to do this has caused me to rage quit many games. Secondly, because your failures are immutable, you need to be certain to succeed the first time. Because the first time is the only time. This creates a lot of tension when you’re fighting for your life, because if you die the character is dead.

I can’t say enough good things about Heavy Rain. I love the game, and I find myself wanting to share that joy. Go out and buy it.

14- Street Fighter 2 (Capcom, Arcade, 1991)
Street Fighter 2 is probably my favorite arcade game of all time. I loved playing Point Blank and Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom, but I’ve probably put more time and more quarters into Street Fighter 2 machines than into all the others put together. Oddly, when I put together my list back in 2007, Street Fighter 2 was fourth on that list. Today, I can’t see placing it that highly, but I still love the game.

When it was first released, I remember thinking how weird all the characters were, and how E.Honda’s thousand hand slap was just way too powerful. I remember discovering my first combo: the jump kick/leg sweep with Ken and Ryu. I remember first learning how to throw a fireball on the Street Fighter 2 machine at a local bowling alley. I remember the first time I saw a Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition machine at Riverside Park in Agawam, Massachusetts. I remember the yells of protest from the local players when someone got cheap with the jab-jab-throw tactics. I remember thinking how the game must have subliminal messages, because I’d see Street Fighter 2 when I closed my eyes. For a time, I was honestly worried about what it might be doing to me. I remember working at an arcade where we ran a Street Fighter 2 tournament. That’s where I learned how to use every character in the game. It’s easy when you can play free. I’ve got lots of memories of Street Fighter 2. Some bad, but most very good.

Back in the mid-90s, Street Fighter 2 was more than a game – it was a culture. And I was immersed neck-deep in Street Fighter 2 culture. I knew all the people at the local arcades who were good at the game, and I always had my quarters lined up for the next game. In these days, a four hit combo not made entirely of jabs was amazing, and there were rumors that a six-hit combo existed with Fei Long, although I never saw it. Cross-ups and cancelling special moves were new and strange techniques used only by the best amongst us, and only when needed – it was never fun to mercilessly crush a lesser opponent. There was a kind of code amongst the better players – a sense of honor. If you had a sizable lead, you’d generally back off of a dizzied opponent and let him recover. And you’d never intentionally win a game by throwing a fireball at a near-dead opponent. Doing so would risk you being labeled as cheezy. Fight with cheap moves like that often enough and nobody would want to play you.

I know that I’m not talking about the game itself so much as my own experience with it, but this is what Street Fighter 2 is to me, and this is why I love it.

Be sure to come back next week when I’ll begin with my top ten games of all time.

It’s a tough call, but I’d probably have to say that my favorite game of 2009 is Dragon Age: Origins. The game’s difficulty has certainly been a struggle at times, but the setting, the story, and the characters are amazingly well done. More so than any other game I’ve played before, it’s easy to feel like the characters in Dragon Age are real people. I feel that my character has such a strong brotherlike kinship with Alistair. And when I see a conversation option to tell Leliana that she should leave the party, I shudder at the thought of how badly it would hurt her feelings.

I spent a lot of time playing Street Fighter 4 earlier in the year. According to Raptr, I only played for 34 hours, but it felt like a lot more. Based on my prowess in the arcades playing Street Fighter 2, I expected to play online and kick everyone’s ass. Sadly for me, that isn’t how it turned out. The level of online play is way higher than I’d have guessed. And while I was able to generally hold my own with Guile and Dhalsim, there were plenty of players online that stomped me into the ground. Mostly Ryu and Akuma players. Of course, the fights that were the most fun were the ones that were very close.

Another game that I’m absolutely loving is Trine. The Playstation 3 release was delayed to the point of absurdity, but it was worth it to get a 3-player game that I can play with my wife on our big TV. It’s fun single-player, but it’s much better multiplayer.

The game is a beautiful 2D sidescroller with a lot of depth. Your characters gain abilities as they go up levels, and the loot you can pick up along the way is really useful. I’m slowly getting more and more trophies. I’m going to try to get them all. I’m having a lot of trouble with the “Master Ninja” trophy, and I’m dreading the “Better Than Developers!” trophy, but I’m going to give it the old college try.

Plants vs Zombies is a game that I had not expected to love. I downloaded the demo, and ended up liking it so much that I purchased the game. The tower defense in Plants vs Zombies is done in lanes, like in a bowling alley. This is one of the things that had initially turned me off about the game, but in practice it ends up being far more fun than I’d expected. The game has three different screens, and each has a daytime and nighttime cycle. Each introduces a new gameplay element that complicates things: tombstones, the pool, the angled roof. To this day, Plants vs Zombies is the only game in which I’ve gotten 100% completion on achievements.

There are a number of games that I played this year that I’d like to add to this list but just can’t. Ghostbusters was good, but I don’t think it’s game of the year material. Ditto for Prototype. And I’d like to include Dead Space and Okami, which I finished playing this year, but I’m not because they weren’t 2009 games.

Make sure to come back later this week for Brandon and Frank’s take on the games of 2009.

I played a lot of games in 2009. I could manage to count 23 of them, since I’m only looking at games that I played for the first time. This means that I’m not counting Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Beyond Good and Evil, since I’ve played those all before.

That being said, I’m going to go through my list in alphabetical order and try to give some kind of brief rating and review to each of them.

Braid

Amongst downloadable XBox Live Arcade titles, Braid is a superstar. While it doesn’t quite fit in with the casual fare that permeates downloadable console catalogs, it’s a good game to play in small chunks. Many of the puzzles can be so maddeningly difficult as to break your brain, but there’s an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out.

I played the PC version, since I have no XBox, but while the Steam release had some issues, it was worth the wait. I played it, my wife played it, and I wrote a series of hints that ended up near the top of the google search results.

Braid’s story was a bit hard to follow, introduced as it was in small chunks at the beginning of each of the game’s six worlds, and it got really odd at the end. But the game was more about the puzzles than anything else, so all else is forgivable. I’ll give the game a B.

Crysis

Before its launch, and for a number of months afterwards, Crysis‘s big marketing line was that it would bring your $2000 gaming rig to its knees with its amazing graphics. That’s probably why it didn’t sell as well as the developers might have hoped. Crysis was good, although overall I’ll say that I preferred CryTek’s earlier title Far Cry.

Crysis was almost like two separate games, as the gameplay during the second half is drastically different from the first half. Personally, I prefer the first half, as it was much closer to the gameplay in Far Cry. I could sneak around to scout an area, snipe off a few men, then let the rest come to me. It felt strategic and fun. The zero-gravity segments in the second half of the game were disorienting and confusing. I found myself backtracking unintentionally, and the alien enemies weren’t nearly as interesting to fight as the human opponents. The segments in which you fly a fighter jet were even worse. More often than not, I’d crash and burn but never know exactly what killed me.

Towards the end of the game, during a battle on an aircraft carrier, the game froze. Every time. I was never actually able to see the end of the game, which I assume was well under an hour away. I must have tried twenty times to get through that battle, but the game froze every single time. Considering the non-fun segments and the bug at the end, I’ll have to give Crysis a C+.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

As far as Tower Defense games go, I found Defense Grid to be strictly average. It held my attention long enough to play through the entire game, but I found the aliens to be generic, the story to be uninteresting, and the computer narrator’s melodramatic dialogue to be unbelievable, as the computer got more emotional about a hinted-at past war than most humans would get. The computer’s odd fixation on raspberries was a bit funny, but that small bit of humor didn’t make up for the rest of the game. I’ll give this one a C+.

Dead Space

Being the best survival horror game I’ve played in years is no mean feat. That’s what puts Dead Space in the running for the best game that I played in 2009.

It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about Dead Space without comparing it to Resident Evil, as I believe that Dead Space has neatly filled in the survival horror niche once occupied by the earlier Resident Evil games. But Dead Space is certainly its own animal, and is an entirely new generation of survival horror title. For one thing, Dead Space is more of a shooter than any of the original survival horror games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower) ever were. It has the best collection of weapons I’ve seen in a shooter since Doom 3, a weapon upgrade system that I like even better than Resident Evil’s, and some excellent gameplay elements such as zero-gravity areas, vacuum areas, ship-mounted weaponry for firing at targets in space, and the kinesis and stasis modules.

Dead Space is certainly a game that I’ll return to and play again some day. I’m doubting that I’ll go for the trophy where you have to play the entire game with only a plasma cutter and no other weapons, but I’ll enjoy my replay nonetheless. Dead Space gets a solid A.

Desktop Tower Defense DS

I was a huge fan of the flash version of Desktop Tower Defense for a long time. I still believe it to be one of the best tower defense games ever made. As simple as it is, it’s got a lot of complexity and balance. Building new mazes for the creeps to traverse and arranging things perfectly can be quite a challenge, and if you start on advanced strategies like juggling, things get even more complex. The game begins simple, but has a lot of nuance.

For some reason, since I bought this game, I haven’t played my DS nearly as often as I used to. So I haven’t put a lot of time into the portable verion of Desktop Tower Defense. But they’ve added quite a lot of new modes, plus a number of achievements. Although not being able to share those achievements online somehow detracts from the experience, I’ll still enjoy trying to get them. Probably on an airplane at some point in the future. I’ll give Desktop Tower Defense DS a B-.

Dragon Quest 4 DS

Back in the day, when I played this game on a friend’s NES, I absolutely loved it. The charm and the fun are still there. I haven’t completed Dragon Quest 4 since beginning the NES version, but I’m easily halfway into the game. Once again, I just haven’t spent much time with the DS recently. I know that will change when Scribblenauts drops. But as far as RPGs for the DS, I haven’t seen many better. C+

Fairway Solitaire

While Fairway Solitaire is without doubt a casual game, it takes plain old solitaire and adds a golf theme to make it really interesting. Streaks where you don’t have to use cards from the deck become “long drives”, sandtraps and water hazards become cards that are inaccessible, and you can collect extra golf clubs that act as cards up your sleeve. While explaining these intracacies are beyond the scope of this mini-review, you should take my word that this game is amongst the better casual games that I’ve played this past year. B-

Fallout 3

While I didn’t go through all the expansions like Brandon did, I spent a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I played three characters, and maxxed out my levels on two of them. And even though it wasn’t entirely deserving of the “Oblivion-with-guns” moniker that it got in so many reviews, there was enough of that to detract from the game. All the things that I disliked about the Oblivion engine were still problems in Fallout 3, and none of the things that I’d loved so much about Oblivion were replaced with adequate substitutes. The charm of the first two Fallout titles was likewise lacking. As you can probably tell, I much preferred Oblivion to Fallout 3.Still, I did enjoy my time playing Fallout 3. GFW, while it does suck, gave me the ability to grab some achievements, and I got about 90% of the ones available, including every damn bobblehead in the game. I loved tearing up slavers with the shishkebab, I loved melting Combine troops with a plasma rifle, and that nuclear explosion was a thing of beauty. I’d just love to have seen more Wasteland in Fallout 3. You know, some snake squeezins, or perhaps a Scorpitron. Fallout 3 gets a B.

Far Cry 2
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Far Cry 2. I knew that it was an open-world game and that it was significantly different from both the original Far Cry and from Crysis. Far Cry removed a number of the elements that I’d liked so much about those two games: The science fiction elements, and lying prone for purposes of sneaking. I wish I’d been able to record achievements in the game. I went out of my way to grab every diamond in the northern section of the map – had I been able to get an achievement for it, I’d likely have done the same for the southern map. The game also has some really silly conventions.

Final Fantasy 12
The only other Final Fantasy games I’ve played are Final Fantasy 4 on the DS and Final Fantasy 9 back on the original Playstation. These are loong games. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 for years now. I tend to play for 4-6 months before getting burned out and shelving the game for a couple months. But then I go back to it. I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the game and I plan to go back to it soon, although I’m sure I’ll quickly shelve it again when Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins come out in October.

Final Fantasy is about story, but it’s also about level grinding. Lots and lots of level grinding. The game’s battles are simply too hard if you move from place to place battling only story-essential foes. Level grinding is absolutely essential. It harks back to old RPGS that I’d played on the Sega Master system. And in Final Fantasy 12, it’s actually a lot of fun to level grind. There’s a lot of inventory management and skill management to do – I’ve got a couple sheets of notebook paper where I’ve got notes sketched out on how my characters’ gear and skills are set up. It reminds me of mapping out Bards Tale or Wizardry dungeons on graph paper. Final Fantasy 12 gets a B. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to JRPGs.

Galactrix
I absolutely loved Puzzle Quest. And so I was very excited for Galactrix. I’m sad to say that I was seriously disappointed with the game. The touch screen controls are terrible. Selecting the item you want with the stylus is often more of a challenge than fighting battles. And the game’s loading screens are frequent and very long. The game’s minigames can be fun once you unlock them, and tricking out your ship with improved equipment is probably the best part of the game. Overall, Puzzle Quest was a far better game. Galactrix gets a D.

Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad. My biggest complaint about the game is the uneven difficulty. There are some moments that are just way too hard. This forced me to play through the game on “casual” difficulty. I also hit a number of bugs where certain plot triggers just wouldn’t fire, and I had to reload my last save, after which things worked fine.

If you’re going to play this game, play it for the story and the atomosphere, because those were great. The game totally nails the feel of the original movie, and having all four ghostbusters voiced by the actual actors is fantastic. The game is very well written. The plot is probably better than that of the Ghostbusters 2 movie, and there are some really funny one-liners in the game. I have to give this game a C+.

Lost Planet
Seldom have I had a worse experience with a game that I had with the PC port of Lost Planet. Most of my complaints had to do with the fact that it’s the worst PC port of a console game that I’ve ever played, but the game engine is also terrible – I have a hard time imagining that I’d have enjoyed the 360 version much more. This is the only game in my list that gets a definite F.

Mad World
I understand that my negative take on Mad World is primarily opinion. I know that other people (such as Brandon) really enjoyed Mad World. But I didn’t like the game at all. At all. I played nearly halfway through it (I’m guessing) hoping that it would get better, but I eventually just got bored and frustrated.

I’d been expected a new-school brawler that felt like SmashTV or Double Dragon, but what I got was not nearly as fun. At all. I had many complaints about the game overall, but the bottom line is that I just didn’t find it to be fun. At all. Mad World gets a D.

Mass Effect
If Brandon doesn’t kill me for my take on Mad World, then he’ll probably kill me for my take on Mass Effect. In a word: meh. The game was fine, but I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as everyone else seemed to. The story was really interesting, I’ll give you that, and Bioware always does an amazing job with the dialogue. But to me, the gameplay’s the thing. And the engine that Mass Effect ran on (actually, the engine that a lot of Bioware games have run on) felt old and klunky to me.

I played through the whole game – start to finish – but it didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay wasn’t there, so I can’t classify it as a keeper. Mass Effect gets a C.

Okami
I’d heard about Okami for a long time before having picked up a copy. I got the Wii version, although Okami was originally a playstation 2 game. And I loved it.

The gameplay in Okami is a lot like the gameplay in the more recent Zelda games – action/adventure. Fetch quests and conversations with some minor platforming and a whole lot of fighting. Also, plenty of minigames. Add to that the innovative magic brush mechanic and you’ve got a winner. But what stood out most to me about Okami were the graphics. They don’t excel by being photorealistic – just the opposite – the stylized graphics in Okami are an excellent argument against photorealism. They look amazing in a far more cartoonish way. Okami gets a B.

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I’m a big fan of Penny-Arcade. I love their style of humor, and of course I love the bulk of their subject matter: video games, tabletop gaming, and general geekery. I’ve played and loved both their games. How can you not love a game where you’re battling hobos, mimes, barbershop quartets, insane asylum inmates, and robots with a perverse sexual attraction to fruit? I give this one a B. It’s inexpensive, and if you buy it on Steam, you can shoot for the Steam achievements.

Pixeljunk Monsters
I’ve certainly written enough here about my love for Pixeljunk Monsters. Although I didn’t start playing it in 2009, I likely won’t finish before the end of the year. Honestly, I’ll probably end up putting it aside again as I start playing Muramasa and Scribblenauts. Although I’ve only got two levels remaining in the expansion, there are still plenty of trophy challenges for me to tackle. The “Four Tree Rainbow” challenge is harder than it looked, and the “Rainbow Team” challenge looks to be incredibly difficult. In Pixeljunk Monsters lingo, to “rainbow” a level is to complete it perfectly – without losing a single villager. Pixeljunk Monsters gets an A from me simply because I can’t think of many other games I’ve ever gotten so much prolonged play out of.

Plants vs Zombies
While I’ve enjoyed many Popcap games in the past – Bookworm Adventures and Zuma come to mind – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any of them as much as Plants vs Zombies. I only played the game for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, I played it hard. My initial take on the game was a poor one – how could a tower defense game with only six linear lanes have the depth of something like Desktop Tower Defense? You know what? I grew out of that one quickly, and became a Plants vs Zombies addict. Steam offers achievements for the game, and PvZ became the first game on which I’d ever gotten 100% of the achievements. Plants vs Zombies gets an A. It’s all about the spikerocks, gloom shrooms and garlic.

Prototype

I can imagine Prototype being a far better game on a console. Firstly, it might not freeze as often as it did on my Vista machine, although I’m willing to concede that the freezing issue may be related to the import version of the game I’m playing. While the PC controls weren’t terrible, I had some issues with the dashing controls. Firstly, the double-tap on the ‘W’ key for an air dash wouldn’t always register – I’m sure that’s my own fault, but the double-keyboard-tap isn’t the easiest motion on which to get 100% accuracy. Similarly, I found that when dashing, you corner like a passenger jet. So often, I’d sprint past a waypoint or someone I’d intended to grab, then take at least 5 seconds to turn around and run back. And when you’re in a timed event and you’ve only got 60 seconds to do what you’ve got to do, that 5 seconds can make a huge difference.

Although I’m playing a weird Russian import version that I got on Ebay and I can’t actually register achievements, I managed to complete nearly every challenge. I got gold on all but one gliding challenge and managed to complete every infected consume event. The military consume events where you’ve got to consume the commander and then end the alert before getting in can be HARD. And although I found destroying hives and bases with a tank to be super-easy, helicopters are nearly worthless. Granted, they’re the best for fast travel, but they’re difficult to hijack and they get destroyed by one hit from anything.

Also, like Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine playing Prototype on any difficulty other than ‘Easy’. Prototype gets a C+, but it might be a B- on consoles.

Resident Evil 5

I played the Playstation 3 version of Resident Evil 5, and while it was inferior to its predecessors in different ways, it wasn’t a bad game. Resident Evil 5 tried to be Resident Evil 4. But it wasn’t different enough from Resident Evil 4 to really shine, and it didn’t have the charm of Resident Evil 4. There was no mine cart chase, no jetski sequence, and no chance to harpoon lake monsters. There was a nice sequence where you could shoot at enemies from machine guns mounted to the back of a jeep, but that alone didn’t measure up.

Resident Evil 5 only really shines when played co-op. I played with my brother on his XBox over Christmas vacation, and having the game be a shared experience really changed it. For the better. The partner AI in Resident Evil 5 is laughably bad at times. The game gets a B.

Street Fighter 4

After having beaten Seth with every character in the game other than the three big bosses whom I have yet to unlock, I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 far less. I’ve gotten somewhat competent at online matches, although like so many other online games, the people still playing are the ones who play all the time, and are thus much better at the game than I am. But the game did bring back a good bit of my Street Fighter 2 nostalgia, and despite my hatred of Crimson Viper and Rufus, I really like the game. B+

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
This game totally fails, which is sad. It seemed like it had so much going for it. Great story, a very nice engine with good graphics, and the upgrade and combo system seemed like it was going to work out very nicely. If only it weren’t for all the bottomless pits. There is nothing as maddeningly frustrating as falling into the same pit for the fourth time when you have to wait for 5 minutes in between attempts. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed gets a D for bad platforming.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

I love HomeStarRunner. I really do. So I was super-excited to hear that there was going to be a StrongBad-themed WiiWare game, and I snatched it up as soon as it was available. Sadly, I’d forgotten that I don’t generally like point and click adventure games. And that I’m horribly bad at them. So while HomestarRunner.com gets an A, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People gets a C-.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad gaming year. Granted, there was nothing that stood out like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, or Shadow of the Colossus, but the year isn’t over yet, and I’ve still got to play Scribblenauts, Muramasa, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Then there are the storylines for the various characters in the game. Some are straightforward. Ken, Ryu, Guile, Chun Li, and Rose are after Shadaloo. M.Bison, Vega, Balrog, and Sagat are working for Shadaloo. Abel’s trying to find out who he is, and Sakura’s looking for Ryu. After that, it gets a little weird. Dhalsim is trying to get water for his village. Okay, not too weird. E.Honda wants to show the world how powerful Sumo is. A bit odder, but not bizarre. Zangief also has something to prove about professional wrestling, primarily to prove himself to a group of kids. At the end, he comes back with Seth’s head as a trophy to show the kids. Just a bit sick.

Then we’ve got Blanka, who left for the tournament out of concern that he was embarrassing his mama. At the end, she finds him in Hong Kong and tells him to come home to Brazil. Not exactly clear how that problem has been solved. And El Fuerte decides to travel the world collecting recipes. He’ll also fight in the tournament, fight the strongest fighters, and figure out what they eat – at the end, there’s a great scene where he disgusts E.Honda and Zangief with his cooking.

Here are some more instances of humor in the game’s various victory lines:

• Ken to Dhalsim: No matter how many times I see it, your limbs really freak me out, man!
• Dhalsim to Rufus: I am no alien!
• Zangief to Akuma: Once you get used to that face, you´re kinda cute. Like a pug. Or like me!
• Rufus to Honda: I hear that you sumo dudes eat nothing but sushi and stew and tofu and stuff like 24 hours a day, man. There´s this sushi place near my house, but there´s all these rumors goin´ around that they serve spoiled fish! One bite, an´ you´ll be on the toilet all day!
• Sakura to Dhalsim: I bet those arms come in handy when you run out of toilet paper in the washroom!
• Rufus to Vega: So, I finally found you, Ken Masters! How does it feel to lose to me, Masters? Are you filled with regret? Rage? How about rue? I bet you´re filled to the brim with rue, ain´t ya? What? You´re not Ken Masters? C´mon, man! It´ll take more than a mask to fool me!

…and my absolute favorite

• Blanka to Gen: You´re old, but you put up a fight. I hate you!

Lastly, I should mention my favorite cutscene in the game, where Rufus and Dhalsim meet up.

Rufus: What the-? Wha- wha- wha- wha-? Are you floating? How you doin’ that? What? ESP? Plasma? Magnets?
Dhalsim: This… is Yoga.
Rufus: What, are you an alien or somethin’? Because I’m not sure if you know this but there are all sorts of aliens, Martians for instance...

Gen can be really fun to play, because he’s got so damn many moves. But that also makes him really hard to play. A lot of his crane style moves border on useless because they’re so slow, do so little damage, and hit in such odd ways. Switching styles to quickly react to an attack is almost a non-option because it takes so long. I like Gen, but aside from Rufus, he’s probably the character in the game I’m worst with.

On the other hand, playing Fei Long again was like putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes. He plays pretty much just the same as he did in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, except his fwd-fierce kick has changed, and he’s gotten that weird chicken wing kick. As soon as I unlocked him, I picked up the character and started playing without much of any practice. I heart Fei Long. The flip-over-your-enemy setup is cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Sakura has never been one of my favorites. Her special moves – especially the EX versions – make her a force to be reckoned with when played by a player who knows what he’s doing. But personally, I don’t love her.

Dan can be very fun to play. He’s the weakest character in the game. His fireball only goes a couple inches, and it’s pretty amazing how much slower some of his basic moves are as compared to Ken and Ryu. But he’s Dan. He’s supposed to be this way. If you’re used to playing Ken or Ryu and you’re playing against someone who’s not as skilled at the game as you, consider playing Dan. That’s what he’s there for.

Rose is another character that I absolutely love. She’s stronger than I remember from Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and she’s got incredible range. I’m still finding reflecting fireballs to be very tricky, but some of her combos are very easy and her ultra does tons of damage. It’s safe to say that I’ll be using Rose quite a lot in online matches in the future.

Cammy is another character I couldn’t care much less about. That cannon drill pisses me off when I’m fighting against her, but I have a lot of trouble using it well when I’m playing her. I guess I just don’t care enough to practice with Cammy. She seems largely geared towards adolescent males who enjoy crotch-angle bathing suit shots.

And that wraps up my reviews of the major characters in Street Fighter. Not sure if I’ll ever unlock Akuma, Gouken, or Seth, but if I do, you’ll hear about it here.

Abel isn’t a bad character, and he isn’t half as cheap as I’d first surmised. Sure – the computer loves to roll in and throw you, but once you realize that Abel can be thrown out of his roll, it becomes easy to win against a computer Abel by just moving back until he rolls forward and then moving in to throw him before his roll is complete. I really like the idea of a MMA fighter in Street Fighter who’s focused on grappling, but some of Abel’s moves come off a bit stupid. Grabbing you and swirling you around twice? Kind of lame. Instead, his special throw should take you down and have a 2-second animation of a ground move. The move isn’t cheap though – it’s very much like E.Honda’s buttslam throw. Not nearly as cheap as Zangief’s throws. I like Abel’s move that grabs opponents out of the air while he’s still on the ground, and I like his multistep rush attack that ends in a throw. It reminds me of Fei Long’s triple punch. I don’t use Abel often, but I would. He’s not a bad character.

Crimson Viper is the last character (besides Cammy) with whom I tried to beat the game. I was wise to wait, because as soon as I tried her, she officially became my least favorite character in Street Fighter 4. Not only did I have trouble beating the game with her, I had trouble even getting up to her rival character. Crimson Viper is a bad, bad character. Me no likey.

El Fuerte isn’t an overpowered character, but playing against an opponent who knows how to play El Fuerte well can be really frustrating. His dash can end in a (low attack) slide, a (high attack) jumping tackle, or a jumping throw. If the El Fuerte player is good at rock-paper-scissors, he can pull this move over and over and win using nothing else. Plus, his ultra is the easiest to execute of any character in the game, and it does a good bit of damage. if it weren’t for the fact that most of El Fuerte’s other attacks don’t do tons of damage, he might be a seriously overpowered character.

Lastly, Rufus. I hate Rufus. He looks stupid, he’s difficult to play, and when the computer plays him he can be very hard to beat. Finishing the game with Rufus was a serious challenge, because I didn’t find his special moves very useful. I mostly used his standing fierce punch, his leg sweep, and a throw. Rufus’s only real redeeming quality is that he’s humorously written. His cutscene with Dhalsim is hilarious, and his victory text after many battles has him mistaking just about everyone for Ken Masters. He thinks Guile is Ken, he thinks Ryu is Ken, and he even thinks that Cammy is Ken.

Next time, I’ll be looking at the unlockable characters, which will include my favorite two in the game.

Overall, the characters in Street Fighter are balanced. If you’re having trouble beating a specific character, it’s likely either because you’re not familiar enough with that character’s moves and capabilities, or else because the other player is too good. Conversely, if you’re having trouble winning when playing a specific character, it’s likely because you’re not good enough with that character, or once again because the opponent you’re currently playing is too good. That being said, there are definitely characters in the game who are overpowered, and other characters who are underpowered.

After the original Starcraft was released, Blizzard released a number of required updates – without them, you were unable to play on Battle.net, which is the only way to play online. These patches made minor tweaks to the abilities of the various races in the game, eliminating loopholes in the game’s tactics so that all three races were balanced. I think that Street Fighter 4 needs a similar patch.

Sagat is the character who first comes to mind. Sagat combines normal attacks that have range second only to Dhalsim with quickness and high damage output. His two different fireballs, his very fast Tiger Knee, and that killer Tiger Uppercut make for one badass mofo. It’s very easy for sagat players to sit in the corner and spam fireballs. They come off quickly enough that it’s very hard to jump in over them without catching a Tiger Uppercut. Back in Street Fighter 2 days, Sagat was a poor man’s Ryu/Ken. Now, he’s better than either of them. Capcom needs to slow down his recovery after Tiger Shot fireballs just a bit and perhaps lessen the priority on his Tiger Uppercut. He’d still be badass, but not quite as ridiculous as he is now.

Zangief is difficult to gauge. Overpowered? Maybe. From my current perspective, his game is all about setting up throws. From my arcade experience with Street Fighter 2, this wasn’t always the case. But now that I’ve gone through the Zangief training and completed the game with him, I’ve decided that I no longer like to play Zangief as much as I used to in Street Fighter 2. At first, I’d have added Abel to the “overpowered” list along with Zangief, but after having played as Abel, I understand the character better. Most of my complaints have more to do with the computer’s nanosecond timing than anything else. His roll-throw pattern seemed nearly invincible until I realized that Abel can be thrown while rolling. And his Sky Fall air grab is very cool – grabbing a foe out of the air while Abel’s on the ground. Abel needs no changes.

Balrog, on the other hand, needs to be fixed. I’ve never been a good Balrog player, but even I can tell that Balrog is overpowered. When a good player unleashes a Balrog barrage, it sometimes seems like the entire game is one big long combo. He seriously needs some recovery time added to a few of his moves so that they become somewhat punishable if blocked.

Gen is another mixed bag. Hard to analyze. He’s the only two-in-one character in the game. He’s got two complete sets of moves in his crane style/mantis style. He’s even got two super combos and two ultra combos. For such a difficult character to play, I’d like to have seen him a bit higher in the character rankings. His slow crane attacks should do more damage, and his mantis attacks should have a bit higher priority. I wouldn’t want to see Gen be stronger than Ryu or even Guile, but seeing such a difficult-to-play character at the bottom of the rankings just feels wrong.

Vega should be a force to be reckoned with. He’s super-fast, and he’s got a great reach. The problem is that he can’t take a hit, and when he loses his mask, he takes even more damage. He does a bit more damage when his mask is off, but he also takes 25% more damage. The special move that makes him drop his claw is just stupid, as there is absolutely no benefit to dropping it, as he loses both range and damage. If they wanted to handicap Vega by making him lose his mask or claw after having taken some hits, he shouldn’t be so weak to start with. His claw should do more damage. Getting his claw off him and keeping him away from it should become a priority for his foes.

Lastly, Dan. Dan is the weakest character, and I’m okay with that. Dan is intended to be a joke. He’s an intentionally handicapped character, and he is hilarious. His animation for a throw has him stumbling, and his ex-Haduken attack has him screaming with exaggerated effort as his fireball travels less than halfway across the screen. Dan needs no adjustment, despite being obviously underpowered.

I have no expectations of a balance-adjusting update from Capcom, but I can always dream.

Firstly, Balrog. Balrog is rated very highly in character rankings, and people who know how to play him well are very hard to beat. But he’s one of two or three characters in the game that I find myself unable to play. I’m just terrible with Balrog. I hate holding the three buttons to charge his punches, I have trouble pulling off his headbut while continuing to charge backwards, and I have a hard time getting him within punching range of anyone throwing fireballs. Still, I know he’s a good character because even though I suck with him, I nearly beat Seth the first time I fought him. Completing the game with Balrog was nearly as easy as completing the game with Sagat.

Also, an interesting bit of trivia about Balrog that you may or may not already know: originally, the Japanese boxer character was going to be called “M.Bison”, while the dictator was going to be “Vega”, and the narcissist was going to be “Balrog”. But when they realized that they stood to be sued for naming a Mike Tyson-looking character “M.Bison”, they played musical names and the boxer ended up being called “Balrog”.

Sagat is a monster. He’s come a long way from that guy in Street Fighter 2 who’d spend all day throwing tiger shots, yelling “Tiger!” in a wimpy-sounding high-pitched voice, just waiting for you to jump over them and deliver a boot to the head. Sagat’s speed and reach, along with his high damage output, make him arguably the best character in the game. The first time I played him in arcade mode, I beat the game without continuing and got the “Save Your Quarters” achievement. I don’t play Sagat much anymore.

Vega is a difficult character to play well. He’s got great mobility and reach, but El Fuerte could throw a plastic spatula at him and knock him out cold. I really like his back handspring dodge maneuvers and his new flip (flash) kick, but I have a lot of trouble timing his dive-bomb moves, and the moves that make him intentionally drop his claw and mask are just stupid. I might try to start playing him more, because I really like the underdogs, but I doubt I’ll do well.

Lastly, M.Bison. Bison is actually a really good character. His scissor kick goes right over a lot of low attacks, and is especially good for thwarting Crimson Viper’s Seismic Hammer. Like Vega’s dive bomb moves, I’m still having trouble aiming Bison’s. I also still have a big mental aversion to M.Bison because he was originally a final boss, and therefore was a bit overpowered when he made his first appearance back in Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition. As it stands though, I wouldn’t fault anyone for making him their main character.

I’ve been trying to limit my posts about Street Fighter to one per week, but I’ve been playing the crap out of the game, so it occupies a good bit of the video game namespace in my mind. And although I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, I do have some complaints I feel obliged to voice.

Firstly, since my post full of complaints about Games For Windows Live, I’ve come up with another complaint – a big one. Suddenly, every time I log in, I’m required to manually sign in and enter my password. And the “save my password” checkbox is disabled. Incredibly annoying.

Street Fighter also has the ability to accept challenges from online players while playing in Arcade Mode against the computer. I’ve done it on occasion. But the option can only be set from the game’s menu, not from within an actual battle. The other day, when I started playing against the computer, I found that I’d accidentally left that setting on. I was interrupted mid-game by an online challenger. My mistake. No big deal. But the thing that really pissed me off is that there’s no way to change your status and make your game private without totally exiting that game, which means that I had to start the game all over after having beat some fairly difficult opponents. That’s just bad design.

My remaining complaints are about the actual mechanics of the game. As a long-time Street Fighter 2 arcade junkie, the game mechanics of Street Fighter are in me bone-deep. You can’t block while in mid-air. You can only attack once during a jump. You block high attacks standing and low attacks crouching. The basic physics of the Street Fighter universe.

Some have changed.

For starters, they now allow limited juggling. While juggling was one of the things I hated most about Mortal Kombat, I can mostly tolerate the way it’s handled in Street Fighter 4. Aside from the “crumpling” effects provided by level 2 or 3 focus attacks, juggling can only be done with an ultra combo. This isn’t too bad, and doesn’t break the game. No problem.

The thing that really pisses me off is the change to throwing. It used to be canon that anyone in the process of standing up after having been knocked down was immune to throws for a split second. This meant that you’d never stand right next to someone as they were standing up, cause you’d always be thrown by a player who knew what he was doing. This was a big equalizer to help someone who was totally getting his ass handed to him. This has changed – the immunity is gone. You can now be thrown the instant you stand up. What this leads to, especially when playing against the computer (which has perfect split-second timing) is being thrown as you’re standing up before you have a chance to do anything. This can be repeated infinitely. This actually looks like you’re being picked up off the ground and thrown. It’s ridiculously cheap, and I’m a bit upset at Capcom for removing the throw immunity. When you’re fighting a computer-controlled Abel or Zangief, it’s ridiculous.

Lastly, the change to the Dragon Punch motion. It’s been made “easier”, which I imagine will piss off all veteran Street Fighter players who’ve had the forward-down-downforward motion ingrained into long term muscle memory. I have no issue with other players being able to execute the motion more easily – my issue is with the fact that the newly created shortcut motion is downforward-downforward. How many times do you move the joystick in that direction twice when you’re not looking to do a dragon punch? The net result of the newly created shortcut is that dragon punches come off all the time when you’re trying to do something else. It sucks.

Despite these complaints, I’ll likely continue to play Street Fighter far too often over the coming weeks and months. I’ll just bitch about it a lot.

When I speak of the “original eight” characters, I’m talking about Ken, Ryu, E.Honda, Chun Li, Blanka, Guile, Zangief, and Dhalsim. In the original Street Fighter 2 game, they were the only playable characters. I still remember visiting Riverside Park in Agawam, Massachusetts where I first saw a Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition machine. “You can play as Sagat? Whoa!”

I think I’ve made my opinions on Ken and Ryu known by now. They were my go-to guys for years in the game when I couldn’t beat someone, but I’ve begun playing them less and less, mostly as a reaction to how many people play those damn characters. Mainstream equals uncool. I will say that whereas I used to think Ryu was cooler, it now seems that Ken is a more fun character to play.

Guile is probably overall my favorite character in the game, despite the fact that he talks like a robot in Street Fighter 4 and has serious posture problems. I just feel very comfortable playing Guile for some reason. And it seems that he’s kept his air throw. I really need to use that more.

I’ve just started to get better with Chun Li. I’m having a much harder time using her head stomp than I used to – maybe that’s because the people I’m fighting now have gotten better at anti-air. But Chun Li has gotten a lot of really fun new attacks. She has a double punch that she can use in the air or on the ground, she’s got a fairly easy single-button kick combo that ends with her vertical anti-air kick from Super Street Fighter 2. You can’t really use it as anti-air anymore, but fans of Chun Li should recognise the animation. She also has a forward-flipping split kick attack that’s very fast and has good range. They’ve taken out the split-second immunity she used to have when starting a spinning bird kick, but I think the other new moves make up for that.

Blanka is insane. I think I’d forgotten that until I started playing him recently. He rolls into a ball and flies all over the screen like a superball on crack. He has a move that lets him jump through you and attack from behind, he can duck or slide under fireballs, and you can change up the timing on his super and ultra attacks. Blanka is rated surprisingly high on the eventhubs character ranking page. I’m surprised that I don’t see more Blankas out there. Back in my arcade days, Blanka was considered “cheap”, and I made a habit of never playing him. But at least in my own mind, that characterization has faded. The dragon punch characters are the cheap ones now.

Zangief is ranked way higher than I’d have guessed, but he’s also the only one of the original eight characters I haven’t used at all yet. One of my favorite things about him back in Street Fighter 2 was that he had at least seven or eight throws – I’m not sure whether he still does. I’d love it if they left in the chest grab move. That one was hilarious when used against Chun Li.

Honda is another character I’ve found to be far more badass than in Street Fighter 2. His flying headbutt is amazingly effective, and his new buttslam throw does a lot of damage. He’s easy to trap with fireballs, but you don’t want to let Honda get you cornered. I beat the game with Honda practically on one virtual quarter.

I saved Dhalsim for last because I’ve had so much fun playing him. Dhalsim is slow and can be really difficult to play well. To me, the key to playing Dhalsim is knowing exactly where each of his punches and kicks go, and using them. His jumping fierce punch and medium kick go at a downward angle, and are very useful when used just before he lands, when most players think themselves safe. His standing hard kick has really good range and can knock characters out of the air when they’re still very far away. And his standing fierce punch has amazing range and does tons of damage. His jab fireballs move slowly enough so that you can throw one and then do other things, like walk up behind them. And his two-hit headbut is great for comboing into a yoga flame. The new Yoga Pillar move is awesome for avoiding low attacks, but I don’t use it nearly enough. That combined with his slides can get you past any fireball in the game. And for mobility, there’s nothing like his teleport. The fact that Dhalsim can now teleport from mid-air makes it a fantastic move for escape or surprise attack.

If you’re still reading, you’re likely a Street Fighter fan. If you’re playing Street Fighter 4 on the PC, look me up. My GFW Gamertag is ghowley.