Unlicenced Lawyer : Van Damme's Guile

There once was a time, then a Street Fighter movie did not exist. Not a single one. There were not enough cartoons and animes and comics about Street Fighter to fill a Wikia. There was no Alpha, no Ex, no "Assassin's Fist" and certainly no "VS Tekken". There was only "2", 12 characters whose lives as far as we knew revolved solely around hurting each other in.

Ok, there might have been some.

In that world, full of optimism and potential, the announcement of a Street Fighter movie did exist. Back then, we weren't "tired" of remakes and adaptations(I guess with the record breaking millions these adaptations are making now, you could argue our tiredness can only carry us so far.) A Street Fighter movie was not a horrible suggestion: it was the alternative to no Street Fighter movie.

So the movie was made in 1994. They made some...choices with it. Some of those choices do not sit well with the most hardcore fans, who's clinging to a "sola interactiva" philosophy is as commendable as it is ill advised.

"They ruined T. Hawk!" yelled no one.

There's plenty of deviations that I would not have done, should this have been MY Street Fighter movie. As many, the 20 years since have mellowed my views on it, perhaps nostalgia catching hold, but that doesn't mean we can't have a better version. However, I am here to speak on behalf of one of the movies most fought about elements, it's lead character  Guile, played by Jean Claude Van Damme.

It's easy to see why they would be angry. Of all the National charicatures in Street FIghter, Guile is easilly the harder to screw up: A big, American military man. Why they went with a guy with a heavy Brussels accent, we might never know. We do suspect it having to do with getting a big name in there. Yeah, they where obviously only thinking about only the almighty dollar. But what do we know about Guile? Well, he looks like this.

Wait a minute: American military, huge muscles...early 90s... things that were popular... people with jowls and pronounced chins...

If you think about it, it makes sense to think that, when trying to represent an "American" martial arts/stock character, Capcom's designers would look at what was popular in American Cinema, and nothing was more popular than Arnold at the time. You can accuse Capcom of being ripoff artists, and you'd be right about that. But not only where they not the only ones, but they where pretty good at it, too. They put John Matrix in the hair of some nazi guy from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and then boom! New character.

In this sense, Jean Claude Van Damme is the perfect choice for Guile:  a thickly accented action movie star. There's no way they would have gotten Arnold at the height of his career to play a big, cartoony setting like this, at a time where he was selling movies for himself. And besides, as far as having someone  doing stuff like this:

It makes sense to bring in a guy who can do stuff like this:

I say we have all been a bit unfair to Street Fighter: The Movie in this sense. Now, was giving Van Damme a moving speech a bad idea? Maybe. Was making his pants blue instead of Green a betrayal of SF cannon? Perhaps. Should The Boxer have been working for Bison and the Russian Guy have not been? Definitively.  Is the movie perfect? No. Is Van Damme the Worst Possible Guile? Not on your life, bud.

Now, who wants to hear about how I think Charlie should be played by Tom Cruise?

You know I'm right!

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5 things modern fighting games should not be doing.

I remember it like it was yesterday. My father and I walked into this place where he used to buy old issues of various magazines. And out in the corner, there she was. Street Fighter 2. I was intrigued. I had seen coin op games before, sporadically, but Street Fighter was  a new game to me. One that I'd never played before. I begged for money, as children are wont to do. I sacrificed that coin to watch an Hindu Stereotype beat my American soldier stereotype to a pulp.

Since then fighting games have come a long way. THey've evolved, developed intricate storylines and new, radical playstyles.  They've become an entirely different beast.

In some ways. In other ways they're stuck 2 decades ago. My love for fighting games calls me to request that these 5
things become better, so that our beloved genre can continue to flourish and grow. So yes, I am salty that some fighting games still have...


5 Slideshow endings

When the fighting game boom took place, the capacity for them to tell a story was fairly limited by memory and space. There just wasn't enought to put much audios or, god-forbid,  videos. Most of the storytelling was done via little pictures and words that told the story. Any full featured endings or such would have eaten into other parts of the game, basically forcing you to cut out characters and stages to make room for endings to the characters   you were going to have.

This was true of all games back then, and now only true in little cellphone games. And fighting games, apparently. How else can you explain that as far back as 2011 Mortal Kombat was still having the bulk of it's arcade endings be  slideshows with pictures, now merely updated with narration?

I know MK also had an expansive, movie like in-engine story mode, which it inherited form it's predecessor. This does not make it better...it makes it worse. Because you can clearly see they have better in-engine capacities, motion capture,  voice acting and overall storytelling capacity that they did the last time they tried individual  theatrical endings  25 years ago, and they still decided they wheren't going to bother with anything but a narrator telling you what happened.

"And life...had never been sweatier."

If this seems like I'm being petty, think about this: if another, non-fighting game franchise did this kind of ending, whether it was Final Fantasy, Halo or Assasins Creed... would people put up with it? Because Mortal Kombat is one of the most recognizable fighting game franchises in the world, now owned by one of the larges corporations in the world, and they still settled for the storybook bullshit. It's not some little indie  game made by 2 people, why should it's endings
suggest otherwise?

Fighitng game endings give you a goal to fight towards. Mortal Kombat's little movie was a fine endeavor, but you can't even play as every character in it.

But in the fighting game world, even that seems like being extremely generous, when others can sell you...



4 Bare bones packages  with nothing but fighting

Holy shit, a new Killer Instinct! After all these years, Microsoft finally got on that! Now I can see what's been up with B. Orchid and the gang since they time-traveled and fought a devil gargoyle!

Except  somehow they manage to ship a game more bereft of options than  getting mugged by a Pokemon. What? Oh, whatever, at least I have King of Fighters XII.

How does this happen? A fighitng game used to compete by being a package that they tried to pile value on. Story mode, and other modes other than "fight other dudes, until you get tired." Killer instinct Gold was shipped to the Nintendo 64 filled with as many things as they could fit in to offset the fact you where playing Killer Instinct 2 on a controller  designed by the Spanish Inquisition to tear your ligaments.

Why  would something made 11 of years after Soul Calibur from Dreamcast decide that features aren't important? Why is offering replay value optional in this genre?


3 A disturbing obsession with guest characters.

"Hey, a loud, organized fight is technically an assasination if you planned to murder the guy."

Everything was fine in fighting game-opolis. The birds where singing their chip-tunes and the flowers were swaying in repeated animation cycles, their beautiful palettes entirely dependant on the button you pressed to choose them.And then Soul Calibur 2 happened. The sequel to one of the most well revieved fighitng games of it's time, SC2 did something that would innexplicably become a trend in fighitng games till today: It added characters that had nothing to do with the Soul Calibur franchise, specifically undead emo-demon Spawn from the Image comic of the same name for the Xbox, Link from Soul Calibur for Gamecube, and Heihachi, from Bandai's other fighitng game series for Xbox.

Sure, the idea had been done before. Earth Worm Jim was in Battle Arena Toshiden,  and even Soul Calibur one had a guest character in Yoshimitsu. But those guys wheren't in the cover of their games. Putting them in was a cool thing to do.

Now it seems a fighting game can't be complete without some guests, DOA had a Halo Spartan and some Virtua Fighters, Mortal Kombat had Freddy Krueger, Soul Calibur had characters from Star Wars and Assasin's Creed. Even the frickin Street Fighter/Tekken crossover decided to add some weird manga cats and the guy from Infamous. Don't be surprised when Guilty Gear finally caves in and announcess Shrek.

Is there something inherently wrong with guests? No. But guests would be better if it didn't feel like there was some weird mandate that there has to be at least one guest character. On Kratos' case this might actually be the truth, since he's already been in Soul Calibur  and Mortal Kombat.

To be frank, it feels a little like cheating the fans to, instead of giving the spot to a character from the franchise people haven't seen in a while, or adding new characters to grow the roster, they go "No, you can't have Raibow Mika. Here's Sam Witwer in a robe. He'll not be seen after this, so enjoy."





2 Unlockable Characters

A new character has been unlocked!

Unlockables where a part of a game's replay value. They'd slowly trickle new content to the player as he played, rewarding continued returns.

But this has no place in Fighting games anymore. A fighting game is not supposed to be have finite replayability, like a Campaign in a First Person Shooter. It's supposed  to keep inviting you in to try new things in it and to challenge yourself, like a puzzle game. Unlockable characters kind of limit that by saying, "even though you know and we know that there is a character called Jenny Cho in this game, because she's on the cover and everything and the Internet exists, you need to grind in story mode a bit to play as her."

It's a real kick in the pants too, especially since at least in the old days when something was locked, there was a good possibility for a cheat to be available to unlock it.

1 Not having  sufficient DLC characters

Ultra Street Fighter 4 is Capcom's way of saying "No matter how much Internet and 3D we have, we're still the same cheap bastards that reisued Street Fighter 2 for 4 years, and we'll die before we give up on our comprehensive asset recycling program". The game grabs a bunch of leftovers  from Street Fighter X Tekken, adds Cammy in a mask, and then expects everyone to jump into the 4rth or 5th Street Fighter 4 SKU.

It's arguably slightly less awful than the traditional practice of releasing  the same game with some slight changes and 3 new charactes, because at least this one only costs like half of a new game and you can download it into your Super Street Fighter Megamax Super Duper arcade edition, but it's arguably worse than what it would have been to, one by one, continue to add new characters to the game.

We're already in the DLC age, I don't know why most fighting games play it so coy with this. Street Fighter outright refuses to have stand alone DLC characters. Mortal Kombat only had a handful. Marvel vs Capcom 3 had 2, and then decided to jump back later in the year with a 60 dollar reissue with 6 more characters.

 What I haven't seen is a fighter that doubles it's roster with DLC.  Costumes are fine, but a character adds real value to the game. Are you gonna wait to be beaten to the punch by EF 12, developers? I'd like to see a fighting game franchise forgoe just hitting the reset button to make a new reiteration every couple of fiscal years and just make the one game they have continue to grow in it's roster and features. Some are better at this. DOA5, Injustice, and Skullgirls seem to have had comprehensive DLC schedjules, that don't just seem like they're doing it because their mommy forced them.  Killer Instinct seems to have gone too far into the forest with it's "make everything DLC" plan. Let's hope more games follow the good examples and continue to grow their games rather than ditch out the baby with the bathwater.

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Original characters: Do steal.

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The Fantasy Female Fighting game roster draft

More Breasts...

Before games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter  changed the landscape, making  a fighting game usually involved playing a game of chicken with how close a fighting game can come to Street Fighterwithout actually being Street Fighter. Even classics like KOF and Killer Instinct have easy lines of comparison.

This is Fighting Female July, so I wanted to know if I could pick up random female characters from different games and put them on  a roster, kind of like fantasy football, but without any possibility of it actually happening. Except, of course, M.U.G.E.N.

So I will pick and draw one female from one fighting game that fits the archetype of each Super Street Fighter character, and explain why the character fits the roster.

Ryu The Hero

  The hero is usually the character that gets selected if you just bang at the buttons on the select screen. Also, look for the hero to be in, usually at the center of, all the oficial artwork.  If that's not possible, it is usually a character that is well rounded, both morally and in terms of gameplay.

I choose, Raiya Mikazuki, Touki Densho (ENGEL EYYYES!)'s resident main character. Raiya fits the bill perfectly.

Ken The Rival

This character's story is irrevocably tied to another character. In fact, the character usually evokes the other character visually.

Mileena. Mileena, unlike my boy Scorpion, has not distracted herself from the vendetta that justified having her be a palette swap. As of late she's been presented particularly more provocative than her rival as overcompensation of the fact she's a disfigured version of a well respected, well liked member of the community. Kinda like Brandon Routh or Johnny Test.

Honda  The Overtly Japanese character

Okay, most notable fighting games are made in Japan. So, there usually is more than one Japanese character. However, sometimes you get a character representing things so particularly Japanese, that the character becomes "the Japanese Guy".

What's more Japanese than a Geisha? How about a Ninja Geisha? Following the advise of Sutefani, Namco added such a character(sort of) in the form of Setsuna, a pretty lady with a parasol-sword that  conveniently covers her beautiful kimono from all the arterial spray she's bound to cause.

 blanka  The Monster

You know, when you need a character to represent 3 things, like, say, a country, a play style, and a character archetype, things can get a little messy. Everyone wants to be represented by the hero, not the nymphomaniac. Still, you gotta have a monster character. And he's probably from a country  that will really love your game, why not?

Mantazz, from Time Killers. Female in a very technical sense, as she's an insectoid queen from another planet. Mantazz represents giant monsters from space can be ladies too just fine.

 guile The Gringo

America's history with Japan, as well as being  a world superpower, has made this an archetype in several medias of the Island nation. The American is usually pretty easy to spot. Look for military ranks,  strokes of Red, White and Blue, and engrish.

And here's another chance to say how much I love Tiffany Lords from Rival Schools. She's a completely silly, sexy, energetic character. She has a move called EXCITING KICK! That's s fucking exciting!

 balrog  The Specialist

Here's a fighter that screws up your button scheme. The style is usually a real martial art that doesn't conform to a button style presented.

Gonna go with Ryoko  from World Heroes. She's a judeka, and she's not gonna not Judo throw just because  you say it's a "punch button'.

Or How about Ryoko from Fighter's History?

 Look...I never got them done, awwight?

chun li The Chun Li

Chun Li is the first lady of fighting games. There is only one Chun Li. Her name is Chun Li.

T.Hawk the Horrible stereotype

Allright, look: Most of the Street Fighter cast is some sort of stereotype. It would just take a huuuuge, huuuge kind of stereotype for people to get actually offended at this point. This character is that. However,  that's not to say said controversial character won't be liked.  Just...not a lot.

I'm going with Voodooh, from the legendarilly shitty Shaq Fu. I mean, they put the name of  the thing into the character. Not the last time it would happen, but this is the one time it's a lady.

 zangief The Grappler

Grapplers as usually deadly in the hands of experts, but shit to newcomers who rely on their reflexes and mashing over memorization and  stats. They tend to be slow and rangeless to compensate for their damage output.

Tina Armstrong, my favorite Dead or Alive character. Sure, in DOA there's not any great amount of projectiles, and Tina's pretty great in it. And sure, she's kinda the gringo in that one, too. Still...she's a grappler, whatayawant?

dhalsim The contortionist

The contortionist is a weird character with far reaching or visually confusing moves that make for good mental games.

For this slot a slut: Rana, from Strip Fighter. She's pretty much my favorite character of that game. And it's not just because she's graphically naked and gives blowjobs to losers.

 sagat The Frustrating Subboss

Usually coming before the frustrating boss, the frustrating subboss is annoyingly difficult when the CPU uses it. That's not to say that it's not frustrating to fight against in multiplayer.

Chizuru from King of Fighters. I have no observations on Chizuru, except that she was a subboss in KOF 98. I'm a couple of years behind in this franchise.

Vega  The Psycho

There's always a psycho in these games. Watch the anime adaptation and he'll be there, licking blood of his blade, laughing maniacally, and talking about how killing is fun.

I'm putting up Sekka, from the game adaptation of the Double Dragon cartoon. I don't know much about Sekka, but she has blades coming out her arms. that counts for something, right?

Fei Long The Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee is a worldwide icon...whose name and likeness is registered by his estate. Otherwise, every fighting game would have old Brucie in it. Instead, they all have some kind of Chinese, Jeet Kune Do, doing, "whooooaaaa" yelping  warriory warrior that isn't actually Bruce Lee.

I gather this character Chie from Persona is the closest any videogame has come to a female Bruce Lee. Since the character is confirmed for the Persona fighting game, I think I will favor this once. If I decide to do this feature again I will be in big fucking trouble.

Deejay The Islander

 The islander doesn't have to actually come from an island.  He just needs more pigment on his skin than most of the other fighters and  fight in Capoeira or other fluid, dance-like moves and  be overly energetic and rhythm obsessed. 

Christie Monteiro, of Tekken fame, is the only Tekken character I've taken up that I haven't felt like a complete noob playing.  So, here's Christie.

Cammy The eye candy

Capcom, seeing the sucess a fully dressed woman fighting had, quickly realized  that Sex drops quarters, and for the Super version introduced a lady in a thong leotard that grabs people with her legs.

 We could sit here all day talking about sexy fighting game females and a lot of the other ones could probably apply, but I would have to go with Ivy. There's no denying that Soul Edge's Taki and Sophitia where meant to arouse,  but Ivy was both added  later in the series, and meant to take up the sex appeal up to eleven. She'd only gotten more blatant over the years. But let's be fair: hasn't every SC woman?

Akuma: The Hype

This character is so tough, you guys. He can, like kill whatever he wants by looking at it. He just doesn't because you're playing wrong he, like enjoys the thrill of the fight and stuff.

In that context, Athena Asimiya seems most fit. An import from an older SNK non fighting game, Athena Asimiya is a Japanese schoolgirl that is somehow related to the Greek Goddess Athena. That's kind of a big deal. She's even played the role of Boss.

Bison The Boss

It's the final threat: the meanest fighter.  He will fuck your shit up.

Or she. She will fuck your shit up. Sadly, there isn't a great history of female final fiends in fighting games, so I will have to look for the licensed one: Karai. Final Boss of 2 TMNT:  Tournament Fighters, despite the logic supporting Shredder for the role. Sure enough, Karai is frustrating to defeat, overtly evil, and not the sportest fighter in the world. So just throw her like a ragdoll.

So here's my roster. What's yours? You think I should use another game as base next year. Lemme know!

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5 Fighting game characters that should have retired already

There is life after round 3.

Fighting game tournaments are not like real life tournaments. Whereas in real life most of the people who compete do so for sport and train for it yearly, character stories in videogames need to be outlandish things full of good vs evil, revenge, and sometimes runaway brides. Those who say that fighting games have no stories really do a disservice to how committed the makers are for giving Mark Joe a reason to be in Mark of Punches 5.

 But in giving characters a motivation, sometimes it clashes with the fact that regardless of the ending, the character will probably come back at some point. If you stick with a fighting game franchise long enough, you will see every character come back at least once, regardless of how resolved their plot arcs are or how dead they where last time. But some of these characters fullfilled their reason to join the tournament years ago. And yet, here they are, still trading blows. Who are this guys?

Tina Armstrong(Dead or Alive)

Tina is one of my favorite characters from this franchise, with her lighthearted personality and enormous breasts. However, her motivation has been weird from the start. And this is from a series that has a character that is trying to defeat a guy who saved her once.

See, Tina is a wrestler, but she doesn't want to be a wrestler. She wants to be in show business. So she gets into the tournament to get enough money to do so.

Can you two let me talk?

Now, let's pretend in this world wrestling isn't staged.  But  the tricky thing is, at the end of each game, Tina succeeds into  getting  into different aspects of show business, while not winning the tournament at all. Which makes no sense. If she breaks into modeling in game 1, why would she need to fight in another tournament to break into acting? If Dwayne"The Rock" Johnson wanted to become a singer, would he have to participate in a tournament, too? No, silly, he's already in!

And if winning was key to her goal, why can she still achieve it even though canonically, she lost?

This is why the movie changed her motivation to the less stupid "I want out of fake wrestling."  And it's always sad when fighting game movies actually make sense of the games.



Sentinel(MVC3)

Sentinel, buddy: come here a minute. I know you started in  a game that was mostly mutants. You hunt those. It's your job. And then you came back in Marvel vs Capcom 2. You where a little broken, but I guess all the mutants where there, so it made sense. If you had to fight Strider and Megaman, well, that's just fine.

If he wasn't a mutant, he probably heard about them.

But why are you in Marvel vs Capcom 3? No, DON'T tell me about your fruit palette shenanigans. In this game there's like 3 X-Gene mutants and arguably two more technical mutants.

And no wonder, man! Last I  heard, Mutants without ongoing comic appearances where extinct. Even Jubilee's a vampire now. Maybe you should hunt vampires and quit this "fighitng game" business. You're not good at it anyway.



Balrog(Street Fighter)

Unlike everyone else in the Street Fighter universe, Balrog is in it for the money. He works for a terrorist in  a military uniform and punches people to death. For the money. But is this paying off?

See, everytime a Street Fighter game ends, Bison is defeated. Well, except if he wins I guess.

I would also guess that Balrog probably goes to jail, or escapes somehow. But why? Does Bison pay ahead, and  is the money that good? And how much money does one  really need that going back to fight Foodtown Bruce Lee and Pink Ryu is worth it?

It's time to retire, Balrog.  If you must fight, then fight. You don't need Shadaloo. And Shadaloo sure as hell doen't need you.

Seung Mina(Soul Calibur)

Seung Mina is a young Korean woman who wants Soul Edge because she doesn't want to get married off by her family and also to defend her country. So she runs away to search for the sword.

Am I missing something, here, lady? YOU RAN AWAY FROM HOME! You don't need to  depend on your parents anymore. Sure, you can't join the Korean Army because you're a gurl, but you could always just join the battle or pull a Mulan.

As for the marriage...well, problem solved. You ran away from home! Just stay away from home and that's it.
You don't need a magic sword, you just need some follow through. It's obvious you're self sufficient if you're traveling to some other country and fighting Ivy.

I think she'll do just fine.

 The thing about Mina is, we don't know if she's back in the series newest, decades after the fact timejump. But I'm guessing she'll be back.


Scorpion(Mortal Kombat)

You could argue that Scorpion is probably Mortal Kombat's most known character. Yet the demonic undead Ninja hasn't had a real reason to fight in years.


See, at first it was revenge for the death of his family as well as himself. And he got it. He killed the guy. Then the guy's brother showed up, dressed the same. This lead to a hilarious misunderstanding that lasted  several games and a spinoff. Finally, in Mortal Kombat 4, he finally caught up with the guy, but He wasn't the killer, this other magic motherfucker was to blame. So he dragged that guy to Hell.

GET OVER IIIIIIIIT!

After that, Scorpion's motivation started to get muddy. He chased the guy out of hell, became a conduit for the Elder Gods, then decided to get revenge against the Gods. Come on, Scorpion, kill the guy and rest in fucking peace already!


Oh, wait, time got reversed?  Well, back to hunting the brother of the guy who killed you then, I guess?

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And now, nature's greatest spectacle....Girl-on-Girl!

Well, set up a number system, dammit!

Honor where honor is due...

C-c-c-c-c-cuntbo breaker!

But wouldn't she already know?

Don't chew that! It's expensive!

Dhim Lives for this moments.

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Leaked in Early Secrets: MVC3 CASt

This is an exciting edition of L.I.E.S. Oh my god, my cousin knows Flash, and got him to check out the leaked Marvel VS Capcom 3 !



On Capcom side

 the ones we don't know are, whose silhouettes we've yet to see arrrrrre...

Chill Penguin

Ken from Street Fighter 2010

Lancelot from Knight of the round!

R.Mika

The Bison Troopers from the Street Fighter Movie

Okay! Marvel's side.

Spidercide






















White Rabbit

Angel Punisher

 

Galacta

ANd the Kingpin

 

It's not fake: It's L.I.E.S! You can trust me and  my unnamed sources!

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