Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics

Today saw the physical release of Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. The game debuted digitally in September, but now Capcom diehards can take seven arcade classics home in tangible form (with a bonus mini comic book to boot). The value of this collection is immediately obvious, as buying the six versus fighters alone in their PlayStation, Dreamcast, or Xbox iterations would cost something like $200 per disc. Moreover, The Punisher, the lone beat-em-up rounding out the collection, hadn't seen a home release to this point, rendering the value of the collection inestimable. But how do the fighting games hold up today, especially when compared against their prior home versions?

X-Men: Children of the Atom marks the first Marvel fighting game made by Capcom, and it is essentially a straight-up Street Fighter clone, albeit with super-jumps. Your correspondent played this game last night on PS1 on a CRT TV and must attest that the resolution is impressive on that game. In this current edition, Children of the Atom looks overly pixelated, no matter which of the eight available display filters you choose to run it with. Accordingly, the game looks better on PS1. Also like the PS1, this new edition of Children of the Atom does not spare on difficulty level, presumably putting it in fidelity with the arcade edition.

Marvel Super Heroes delivers as advertised in terms of roster, placing your standard Jack Kirby classics alongside a smattering of X-Men. Your correspondent also played this game last night on a PS1 connected to a CRT TV and must again report that the resolution is clearer and better-looking on that earlier version than on the present. Also, your correspondent was able to beat that PS1 version of Marvel Super Heroes using only a few continues on the default difficulty. That was not the case with the current version, which maintains an arcade-level difficulty. That said, the PS1 version of Marvel Super Heroes plays as if submerged in an ocean, demonstrating considerable lag and slowdown. This has been rectified in the current version, which runs as smooth as Silk Spectre (who is, unfortunately, not in the game).

Marvel Super Heroes sans filter.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter brings Ryu, Ken, and friends into the fray against the X-Men in tag-team crossover action. Arcade games were meant to swallow your quarters, and this game follows in that mold. You'll be facing a stiff challenge as soon as you advance to the second pair of computer-controlled opponents.

Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter brings the entire Marvel cast in to face the Street Fighter pantheon. In the present version of this game, you'll once again be in for a real fight against the second pair of CPU challengers.

Marvel vs. Capcom is really what the prior two games were building toward. Now you have a host of beloved Capcom licensed characters in the mix, such as Strider and Mega Man. Again, the action is far more pixelated than the smooth display on CRT TVs running the PS1 and Dreamcast versions of the game. Your correspondent played both of those earlier versions in the prior weeks, and he was able to get to the final boss on the PS1 version using no continues on the default difficulty (though he eventually gave up trying to beat the pesky Onslaught after double-digit losses). This was not the case with the present version of Marvel vs. Capcom, which displays an arcade-level difficulty early on. Of course, that PS1 version does not allow tagging but instead has a watered-down assist system. Thus, the present version presents a major upgrade for home console gamers.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 improves mightily upon its predecessor, which was already exceedingly good. The sequel boasts almost 60 selectable characters, pitting them against one another in screen-melting 3-on-3 battles. The graphics look fantastic in this present version, with filter and pixelation presenting no issues. The default difficulty, meanwhile, is challenging, but not nearly as prohibitive as the aforementioned games in the collection, meaning you'll be able to make it past the first two opposing trios with ease. One downside to the collection as a whole is that once you get into the swing of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, it's hard to go back to the earlier games. Nonetheless, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is worth the cost of the collection by itself. 

The Punisher stands as the highlight of this collection, your correspondent is truly surprised to say. Although it could be consigned to afterthought status, as the lone beat-em-up on this collection, The Punisher is anything but. The Punisher delivers a high-gear, nigh R-rated imagining of Final Fight. Playing as the lone vigilante or teaming with Nick Fury, you exact hard vengeance on Kingpin's assemblage of toughs and cyborgs via knives, pipes, axes, handguns, and AR-styled firearms, as well as your fists and feet. Dealing out this brand of rapid-fire retribution results in a deeply satisfying gaming experience, and so The Punisher prevails as one of the best beat-em-ups your correspondent has ever played.

The Punisher wields a hammer worthy of Thor

All told, The Punisher and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 make Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics a must-buy title. Though the other five games suffer a bit from inexorably pixelated graphics and uninviting difficulty levels, they still represent important nodes in the evolution of the creative partnership between Marvel and Capcom, and are worth trying out. There's limitless replay value for all these games in multiplayer, both local and online. And if you buy the Switch version, you can play online multiplayer wherever you can get Wi-Fi. All this is rather incredible, seeing how at the dawn of 2024, most of us had made peace with the presumption that the Marvel vs. Capcom games would forever be confined to unaffordability. Both of the eponymous companies deserve praise for realizing this marvelous capstone to their collaborations. 

Fighter Maker

At first blush, Fighter Maker might seem equivocal in name. Despite what its title might imply, Agetec’s 1999 PlayStation offering does not have a create-a-character mode where players can design the look of their fighter from the feet up; instead, one must choose from twenty-odd stock bodies. Moreover, you do not actually make a fighting game; instead, you design a single fighter's move-set and logic, the data filling up an entire memory card. But don't let the arguably false advertising of the title deter you—Fighter Maker is a landmark PS1 game.

The depth of character design in Fighter Maker unequivocally boggles the mind. In building your fighter, you can choose from more than twenty fighting styles ranging from Taekwondo to Pit Fighting. Among these are two different types of Jujitsu, multiple varieties of Karate, and three different types of professional wrestling. It is your task to assign strikes, throws, poses, and counters by style, and the possible combinations are staggering. How about a guy who mixes kickboxing strikes and superhero throws? How about a gal who blends high-flying lucha-libre holds with annoying Eddy Gordo-styled Capoeira strikes? With Fighter Maker, you can make it happen. You can also designate the probability of a fighter using a particular move in any given situation, and the degree of detail here could potentially confound the neurotypical. Much of the fun of Fighter Maker involves mashing up fighting styles and then watching the logic take on all comers, seeing how far the strategies you've developed can advance your character against the in-built logics of the CPU. 

And if that's not deep enough, Fighter Maker allows you to actually animate moves. Players who are detail-driven and pathologically patient can go in and build moves and taunts frame-by-frame. This level of customization was almost unheard of at the time of the game's release. Indeed, such a robust move editor would not be found in a fighting game until the "Move Craft" add-on was introduced to Fire Pro Wrestling World in 2020. Fighter Maker was ahead of its time by more than two decades. In all honesty, the sheer time-sink of the frame-by-frame animation probably turned off more people than it drew in back in the late 90s. Admittedly, your present correspondent really only uses the move editor to make minimal changes to the pro wrestling moves such that they all have botched landings where the victim is dropped awkwardly on his/her/their head, neck, or face (see image). 

Sure, Fighter Maker likely would have been better if it gave you the ability to edit fighter attire. The available body options are themselves rather banal, the characters mostly looking like knock-offs from established fighting game franchises of the time. There's a kickboxer who looks like Joe Higashi from Fatal Fury. There's an army guy with a haircut reminiscent of Guile or Paul Phoenix from Street Fighter and Tekken, respectively. There's also an army lady who looks like Sonya Blade of Mortal Kombat. There's an African-American man in a natty 70s-style suit who channels Tiger, Eddy Gordo's alternative skin in Tekken. (Alas, there is no tiger-headed rip-off of King from Tekken.) There's also Street Fighter EX's Skullomania, licensed directly from Capcom. And the default body type is an Asian guy in Kung Fu gear who blends all the stereotypical traits of a Ryu or a Liu Kang or, for that matter, a Bruce Lee. It's all quite predictable. But as you delve deeper into the software, the generic who's-who becomes less of a deficiency. For in the process of assigning and editing moves, your character's personality starts to emerge. In time, this body you’ve animated with life starts to grow on you. For instance, your correspondent gave the Guile-like guy a bunch of botched piledrivers and powerbombs, and what emerged was a reckless, irresponsible hotshot whom your correspondent sort of fell in love with. What’s more, the fighting styles you create are not locked to one body, so you can apply the move-set saved on your memory card to any character. That means you can see Joe Higashi or Eddy Gordo or Bruce Lee botch piledrivers, if that interests you.

You can edit your fighter's profile in detail, 
but none of this shows up in actual gameplay.

The only real downside to Fighter Maker is the fact that, with just the two memory card slots, you can only have a pair of custom characters going at any one time. If you're playing through the one-player mode (which is just six straightforward fights sans story), it'll be your choice of those two saved fighting styles versus the default logic of the stock characters. And if you want your two custom characters to face off in a simulated fight, it's more than a little tricky. First, you'll have to have two controllers hooked up. Then you'll have to go into VS mode and use the separate controllers to pick the player 1 and player 2 characters and manually set each to "CPU." Even then, there are sometimes bugs: your correspondent tried the above method on his PS3 and, in several cases, the player 2 AI was unresponsive, as if no one was playing the character. Truth be told, the PS3 is the best way to experience this game at present. With the virtual memory card function, you can create dozens of memory cards, each of which contains one of your custom logics. It must have become very expensive for old-timers playing this game back in 1999 on PS1, having to buy physical memory cards every time inspiration struck regarding ideas for a new character. 

All told, Fighter Maker epitomizes ingenious software that was way ahead of the curve. And though the learning curve is steep, especially when developing logic and animating moves, the effort is worth it when you see your unique brainchild kicking ass against the CPU. Fighter Maker marks one of the best examples of the true power of the PlayStation 1 compared to its console contemporaries. Fighter Maker shows just how far down the rabbit hole a disc-based system could take a gamer—it may have even taken the average gamer too far down, at least for 1999. But now in 2022 (or whenever you are reading this), where neuroatypicality is celebrated, you should take the time to go down that rabbit hole and give Fighter Maker the appreciation it deserves.

Bushido Blade

Video games have been treated as ephemera more often than they have been treated as art. We use video games as entertainment, but then we are done with them, and then they are forgotten. Only a few video games have been contemplated as artworks.

Bushido Blade might be art, it might be history, and it might be something more. It is, conventionally speaking, a fighting game, centered upon realistic one-on-one weapons-based combat informed by the Bushido tradition. Bushido refers to the honor codes of the samurai, dating back to sixteenth-century CE Japan.

Bushido drew from many sources, including Zen Buddhism. As a Mahayana Buddhist tradition, Zen was an interpretation of the teachings of the ninth-century CE philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna articulated the doctrine of emptiness. This doctrine holds that everything and anything is empty of own-being. No conventional thing, from the human soul to the setting sun, has an essence independent from everything else. Everything, like any given video game, arises then passes away. Even emptiness is empty.

This realization about everything's emptiness is essential to enlightenment. Part of the Buddhist project then, was about clearing the mind of conventional thinking so as to make way for this insight. In the Zen school, insight can happen suddenly. For that reason, Zen masters tried to disrupt conventional thinking to spur conceptual breakthroughs. This could involve sharp, sudden vocalizations, or even unexpected blows from sticks—a technique sometimes referred to as "Zen kindness." Less dramatically, the focus on clearing the mind also informed an aesthetic of minimalism in Zen. This aesthetic is embodied by the Zen garden—rocks and shrubs surrounded by “rivers” of raked sand—and Japanese line drawings—trees and mountains done entirely in black and white save for the vivid red cherry blossoms.

Bushido Blade's graphics and gameplay appear to be informed by these Zen sensibilities. With just the two combatants and a sparse background, be it a hall or courtyard or cherry blossom grove, and sparing soundtrack making room for little more than the duelists’ footsteps, the game's artistic style is minimalistic. (Likely, the original PlayStation's limited graphical capabilities informed this backdrop.) On the gameplay side, Bushido Blade is not about button-mashing; indeed, "mashing" is a gerund rarely connected to art. Rather, duels typically end after two or three well-placed blows. Sometimes, a single blow will end a contest via instant death; victory or defeat, like enlightenment, can happen suddenly. This does not necessarily mean that duels end quickly—rather, the contestants may circle for quite some time before attempting an attack. This makes playing Bushido Blade a strangely contemplative experience—almost a meditation in itself.

Each duel, then, carries the possibility of insight. The duel is non-dual. The defeated duelist passes away. In the end, there is only one combatant. The combatant is no longer a combatant, however, as he has eliminated the adversary that constituted him. He fights again, and if he loses, he too is proven empty. If he beats the game, the game is over, and it, too, proves to be empty. The player turns off the game, and it is empty, like everything else. In its capacity for spurring this insight, Bushido Blade endures.

Emptiness is empty, said Nagarjuna. What does this mean? Many interpretations have been offered through the centuries, spawning many Mahayana schools. For our immediate purposes in this review, your correspondent suggests it means there is hope. Indeed, a game like Bushido Blade gets turned off, only to get turned on again and again. If everything is empty, then the concept of "ephemera" is also empty. Some things have the potential to live anew and to in that way endure. And so there is hope for some video games as art. Turn on Bushido Blade again and realize as much.

Soul Calibur IV

Soul Calibur IV is an unparalleled aesthetic accomplishment, and, over a decade after its release, it endures as a digital apotheosis of beauty. Perhaps it is shallow to begin a review with a discussion of graphics, but, true to the Soul Calibur series, the fourth iteration is a truly stunning game, and the depth of its bright and glossy visuals abidingly occasions amazement. So many different materials are rendered convincingly here, ranging from metals to leathers to textiles. Future iterations of the series have not drastically overhauled the graphical style, and with good cause, as SCIV is among the most aesthetically satisfying games ever made.

SCIV had—and has—perhaps the best create-a-character in all of video games, another feature so stellar that it has only been slightly tweaked for sequels. The editing suite provided on SCIV is nothing short of a triumph—what can't be created here? The textural and sartorial variety are so vast, it is difficult not to create a character with personality. You can realize virtually any classical warrior archetype: samurais, knights errant, ninjas, barbarians, cowboys, nurses, Nazi werewolves—they're all here, vividly imagined and waiting to be drawn out from the creation suite. Beyond that, you are able to equip your creation with a wealth of classical weaponry drawn from across historical periods and civilizations. It would take multiple master's degrees and PhDs in the humanities to know if it's all historically accurate—indeed, the majority of it is probably not. But placed in a tapestry as beautiful as that of SCIV, it all feels accurate. And if we've learned anything from history, it's that the inaccurate take is usually the most entertaining and awesome one.

You come to love your creations. Indeed, their top-class rendering and texturing gives them a strangely alluring character. The zaftig and/or callipygian female form is particularly well-rendered in SCIV. "Women have always been a visual mystery to men," Hollywood director Brian De Palma once offered. "They don't have to say anything—they just look." In SCIV, the women look, but they do so much more. They brandish battleaxes and wield bullwhips and kick ass and quip at par with their male counterparts. The characters are comely no matter what gendering you prefer, and so alongside your buxom bombshells, their breasts bound up firm in metal bodices, you also get square-jawed, stubble-chinned Adonises, their packages snugly girded. And the editing suite is not limited to just the two genders or just the one species.

Soul Calibur IV's gameplay is as lovely as the visuals. The controls are smooth enough that you can button mash and still have success, even feeling graceful while doing so. It all comes together, historically and aesthetically, in Soul Calibur IV, which stands as the best weapons-based versus fighter in the chronicles of video gaming, hands down.

But it goes beyond history. Soul Calibur games from II onward have included guest warriors, usually famous licensed characters from other franchises, the most notable being Link from Legend of Zelda. For Soul Calibur IV, Namco managed to land the most prestigious of all licenses: that of Star Wars. And so, the capacious Soul Calibur universe welcomes Yoda to the Xbox 360 version of IV, and Darth Vader to the PS3 offering thereof. For a small fee, owners of either system could download whichever of the two Jedis they did not get with their version of the game. The incorporation of the rival Jedis rendered Soul Calibur IV an absolute must-buy at the time of its release, and certainly, the collector who does not own the game would be remiss not to seek it out.

The question remains, then: if you are a retro gamer with both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, and you don't want to mess around with downloads for an outdated system, which version do you buy? The simplest response is that you buy both. But for the sake of argument, let's say you can only have one. So which is it?

The answer is PS3. Darth Vader, your correspondent submits, fits the Soul Calibur aesthetic impeccably, as he is multi-textured, with cloth cape, abdominal dials, and spit-shined headwear. Moreover, Vader helps SCIV fully realize its aspiration to present a trans-historical menagerie of warriors. Darth Vader is the future,* but he is also the past with his Samurai-inspired, glans-shaped helmet. Yoda, though he is formidable, will always feel like a bit of a novelty character on account of his diminutive stature and croupy, mangled elocution.

But this Star Wars debate is immaterial. Buy Soul Calibur IV and every other iteration of the series. Of course, for the truly discerning gamer, such an imperative is redundant.

NOTES:

* I realize it all happened "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" but, nonetheless, Star Wars still looks futuristic from the perspective of our own time.

Capcom Classics Collection

Compilation discs may evoke skepticism in the shrewd game-buyer, and with good cause. Such retrospectives are a dime a dozen and, in essence, rehashes, advertising a plurality of games from bygone eras, many of which are sheer rubbish. And with the Capcom Classics Collection (the first of two volumes for the PS2) there is indeed dross—top-down shooters like Vulgus, for instance, that have not aged favorably. But with that being said, the first of the Capcom Classics Collections is still eminently purchasable. In this essay, your correspondent will argue as much on account of Final Fight, Forgotten Worlds, and the plurality Street Fighter II iterations appearing on the disc.

We begin with the Street Fighters. Capcom Classics Collection (vol. 1) contains Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991) and its updates Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (1992), and Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992). There is, as one would expect with the Street Fighter titles, only a hair's breadth difference between the games, particularly the latter two. And indeed, we’ve seen these versions re-released before. However, on this compilation, the PS2's analog stick is a blessing, ensuring that the games play with high fidelity vis-a-vis their arcade versions, and certainly much better than the SNES and Genesis console versions of the 1990s. This disc's Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, in fact, is a much better translation than the stiff and pixelated port that appears on the SNES Classic, the control of which suffers from the comparably rigid Super Nintendo D-Pad. As a bonus, beating all three Street Fighter II games on Capcom Classics Collection opens up a fourth, of sorts, entitled "Deluxe Versus Mode". This mode allows two human opponents to compete against each other with a sampling of characters from all three installments of Street Fighter II series included on the disc. Essentially, Deluxe Versus Mode allows for matchups of fighting styles and costumes that couldn't otherwise be done on any previous game, which should be enough to warrant a purchase for Street Fighter diehards.

The inclusion of 1989's Final Fight, the famed arcade and multiplatform beat-em-up, renders the Capcom Classics Collection even more buyable. The game is, fundamentally, a side-scrolling Street Fighter, allowing the gamer to choose from a street brawler (Cody), karate guy (Guy) or pro wrestler/civic politician (Haggar) and then embark upon a series of hundreds of mini one-on-one (or one-on-two or one-on-three) showdowns; indeed, the boss battles are more formalized fights in the Capcom style. In fact, the first takes place in a wrestling ring against the unfortunately named Sodom—soon-to-be Street Fighter Alpha Samurai—for a no-holds-barred weapons match. The next takes place in a cage against “Andore”, a none-too-subtle Andre the Giant clone. In short, Final Fight's sensibilities are as much pro-wrestling as they are Street Fighter. You can turn these showdowns into handicap matches by enlisting friends, as Final Fight is of course, in the style of the Double Dragon which it was cloning, best enjoyed as a multiplayer game. Certainly, teaming up with a  friend makes dispatching the waves of antagonists much easier. In terms of difficulty, Capcom was gracious enough to afford the player(s) infinite continues in this version, a luxury one did not have on the arcade and Super NES releases. With this merciful concession, now everyone is able to enjoy the game from start to finish—even the not-so-quick of thumb—and so proceeding through Final Fight becomes akin to watching a movie or playing a vinyl, albeit one with which players can actually interact. And while Final Fight may not have the artistry of even a mediocre movie or album, its conclusion is not altogether non-compelling. After button-mashing your way through six levels of cityscapes and subways infested with hoods, hookers and transgender delinquents, the eponymous finishing battle puts you up against a crime-boss named Belger, who weaves all about the screen in his motorized wheelchair, leggy blond in tow. If there had ever been a Final Fight movie, Belger would have been played by Sid Haig. In that way, among others, beating Final Fight is kind of like playing through a B-movie. And, true to the (mean) spirit of most B-movies, you'll feel a certain satisfaction when you reach the game's climax—kicking the wheelchair-bound villain out of a top-floor window.

The third reason for buying the Capcom Classics Collection is 1988's Forgotten Worlds, a game that, contra the modifier in its title, should not be disremembered. This side-scrolling shooter casts you (or you and a friend) into the role of airborne super-soldier with a punk rock haircut and a massive weapon. The screen scrolls slowly, and you can move anywhere on it, all the while shooting in 360 degrees. This feature was quite revolutionary for the time, and affords the player a sense of freedom not found in the majority of elderly games. Kudos to Capcom for delegating this ability to the right analog stick, making rotational shooting silky smooth. As you proceed through wave after wave of flying lizard men and other idiosyncratic baddies, you can collect "zenny" (Capcom's early in-house currency) to periodically purchase weapon upgrades from a shopkeep named Sylphie (whose name says it all, as the gamin blonde is certainly sylphlike.) What makes Forgotten Worlds so unforgettable is its hard-to-place aesthetic. The titular worlds consigned to oblivion seem to have been drawn with reference to the visual cultures of cyberpunk and orientalism, making for an art style that is a bricolage of sci-fi and fantasy, the latter both apocalyptic and intercultural. With the preponderance of Ancient Egyptian motifs, we might venture to label the visual style as "Scarab punk". The villains include dragons and mechanical arthropods, as well as an Egyptian-themed Galactus clone, and even an icicle man who looks like the original PlayStation mascot (and eventual PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale boss). The player will also face-off with a giant zombie head—not unlike Bub from Day of the Dead—half-submerged at screen's bottom. In short, the aesthetic is eclectic. And sonically speaking, the soundtrack crawls on tarantula legs, technocratic and febrile, tinny and tinctured with downbeat valor. In sum, Forgotten Worlds is an action-packed, incomparably surreal tour through an uncannily memorable fantasy hellscape.

On account of the Street Fighters, Final Fight, and Forgotten Worlds, Capcom Classics Collection is a solid purchase that won't be regretted. If the aforementioned games aren't enough to convince the reader, consider that the disc also contains Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, the inclusion of which would most certainly justify a purchase for those masochist fans who like their games ultra-hard. Also, the WWII shooters 1942 and 1943 are on there, too, if that's your mise-en-scene. In sum, if you've felt any inkling for any Capcom game at any point in time, there's probably something on the Capcom Classics Collection disc warranting a purchase.

Deadly Arts

It's easy to pass off Konami's 1998 release Deadly Arts (referred to in Japan and Europe by the more convoluted title G.A.S.P!! Fighters' NEXTream) as just another lackluster N64 3D fighting game, to be filed away in the dustbin of gaming history with forgotten titles like Dual Heroes, Dark Rift, Flying Dragon, and many, many more. Indeed, in terms of game play, Deadly Arts does little to stand out, and suffers from the same floaty controls that plagued many of the aforementioned titles. Deadly Arts does, however, distinguish itself by way of its aesthetic. It is, for instance, very Japanese, which is perhaps best indexed by the fact that its default female create-a-character is a school girl.

This create-a-character mode was truly revolutionary for a fighting game made in 1998, and it singlehandedly prevents the retro gamer from giving Deadly Arts a summary dismissal. Even at present, create-a-character modes are few and far between in fighting games, and compared to those found in later versus brawlers, Deadly Arts' costuming options are not lacking. Although the much-vaunted Fighter Maker (1999) is far more robust in terms of maneuvers (and the ability to animate moves), there is no customization of the character models themselves. In 2006's Mortal Kombat Armageddon, most of the costumes and parts thereof have to be unlocked. This is not the case in Deadly Arts, as all apparel is available from the outset. Relative to create-a-character modes in other genres—RPGs and wrestling games, to name a few—the outfit options are limited, but there's still enough to forge a copacetic character. I was able to quickly fashion a sassy dominatrix with a pert black-licorice bob-cut and alabaster skin who looked like she could kick some serious ass, and sexily at that. Her ass-kicking capabilities were much easier imagined than actualized, though, as one has to slog through an inordinate number of tedious tilts in order to earn moves for a newly-minted character. Due to the created character's initially limited moveset, Deadly Arts proves to be more enjoyable with non-created characters—and by "more enjoyable" I mean as fun as any other cookie-cutter N64 3D fighter.

Deadly Arts also deserves some praise for its presentation, which adequately speaks to the "art" referenced in its title. The game manages to capture an urban, punky sensibility due in large part to its youthful, rave-ready characters who, on the whole, give off a bit of a Fighting Vipers vibe. While the graphics aren't anything to rave about, Deadly Arts manages to set its scenes swimmingly with some nifty backgrounds: apart from the inner cityscapes of brick and graffiti, we get pastoral countryside as well, with one stage depicting snow falling among bamboo shoots in proximity to a Shinto temple gate. Characters can interact with these backgrounds, and an adroit suplex can cause cages to fall and brick walls to collapse. All of this is captured from astute, adaptive camera angles that shift with the action, for the most part non-annoyingly. The piece-de-resistance of the Deadly Arts atmosphere is the soundtrack, with dance, dubstep and breakbeat offerings sizzling on spider legs throughout the action, turning the combat into a rough and rivalrous sort of dance. The music brims with percussive tintinnabulations, thorough and well-wrought, with even the venerable, ubiquitous break from the Winstons' "Amen Brother" garnering a cursory interpolation in one of the mixes.

Alas, an enduring soundtrack is not enough to save a mediocre game. Aside from its soundscape and its creation mode, Deadly Arts has little to offer beyond any other N64 versus fighter. For the old-school gamer desperate to create-a-fighter, playing through Mortal Kombat Armageddon is a much better use of time. And if time isn't an issue, then making the painstaking efforts to actually animate moves frame-by-frame in Fighter Maker is a far more satisfying endeavor than blindly learning them in Deadly Arts.

Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi

In the wake of 2017's The Last Jedi, there arose among devotees of the series a grassroots internet movement to ban the film from the Star Wars canon. Efforts of these noble neckbeards aside, the movie still does the Star Wars universe justice, furthering (and finishing) a few vital character arcs. Thus, The Last Jedi must be respected. There are, however, several Star Wars offerings that do not further any arc or furnish any sort of earnest entertainment, and as such do not deserve respect. If anything, they deserve to be stricken from any and all canons to which they may pertain. One is the notorious Life Day special, which can only be enjoyed by those in whom the force of irony is particularly strong. Another is Masters of Teräs Käsi for PlayStation, which can't be enjoyed by anyone of sound mind.

A pivotal element of this blog's journalistic philosophy is what your correspondent lovingly likes to think of as "turd-polishing"—that is, taking a game widely considered bad and then showing the reader perspectives from which it might in some sense be appreciated. That approach is not foolproof, though, largely on account of games like Masters of Teräs Käsi. Teräs Käsi is the worst Star Wars video game of all time, and it also ranks among the most terrible fighting games of its none-too-hallowed era.

The thought of a Star Wars fighting game sounds intriguing, no? In the mid- to late-90s, generic fighting games were a dime a dozen, and so you might assume that a game benefitting from a Star Wars license would, if nothing else, stand out. After all, most fighting games, no matter their era, are at least somewhat playable by virtue of their simple, Manichean objectives and manageably-sized environs. Apparently, the bona fide marketing mavens at LucasArts intuited as much, and so they shoehorned Star Wars into the tournament fighting milieu by inventing an ancient martial art known as “Teräs Käsi.” In playing the game, however, the distinguishing principles of Teräs Käsi are unclear, as the move-sets are so boilerplate that you can easily convince yourself you're playing any other uninspired fighting game of the era. In effect, the Star Wars license only makes Teräs Käsi’s fundamental lack of imagination that much more obvious.

Masters of Teräs Käsi’s graphics are not atrocious, but beyond the visuals, key canonical cues are unconvincingly executed. Star Wars games—and the movies, for that matter—succeed principally on how well they deliver the basal sensory aggregates of the series: that is, the sounds and images that have come to condition the average fan’s experience of the brand. The Last Jedi had these crucial perceptual adjuncts, as did the unequivocal stinker that was the Phantom Menace. After the usual horn-blaring clarion call-to-prayer and the familiar yellow text crawling up the screen, though, Masters of Teräs Käsi does little to reassure the player that they are participating in the larger Star Wars cosmos. Sure, we see an AT-AT in the background of one stage, but where are the squalls from its massive leg joints? And sure, Boba Fett's roguish Kiwi accent is sufficiently muffled by his helmet, but it's hard to persuade yourself you're playing as the galaxy's most bad-ass bounty hunter when you fire up his jetpack only to fly straight out of the ring and then lose via ring-out.

Beating Teräs Käsi is no simple feat, and it's hard to make much progress through the various stages even on the easiest setting. It's one of those games where you find yourself asking: is it really that challenging or is the control just that bad? But even in terms of difficulty there are inconsistencies. If you play as Chewbacca, for instance, whose rangy limbs afford him excellent reach, you can beat opponents by pretty much just spamming kicks. Even Darth Vader, light saber and all, eventually falls to the mighty front-kicks from Chewie's long, hirsute dancer's legs. Evidently, the lost art of Teräs Käsi is built on a foundation of cheap, repetitive kicking.

Only the most hardcore Star Wars packrats should consider picking up Masters of Teräs Käsi—we're talking people who meet the DSM-V's diagnostic criteria for hoarding. This unpolishable turd will surely match the overall decor of the cluttered, festering hovels in which such people dwell. If you absolutely must play a Star Wars fighting game, check out Star Gladiator for PS1. It's a Capcom 3D-fighter that rips off Star Wars so shamelessly it's almost artful, featuring an obvious Wookiee-styled space Sasquatch and even a Darth Vader lookalike as the final boss. And if using the real Darth Vader and Yoda to kick the midi-chlorians out of Soul Calibur characters is fighting enough for you, then fire up Soul Calibur 4. Now if only we could kick the midi-chlorians out of the actual Star Wars canon...

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

Your correspondent wants to be upfront from the outset: he knows nothing about Dragon Ball Z, other than the fact it's patently Japanese and exceedingly popular with children, man-children, and other fans of bright colors and loud sounds. That said, a lack of any prior knowledge of the series or where the game Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 fits within its canon will not unfairly bias the appraisal that follows. Even when reviewing Budokai Tenkaichi 3 not as the spawn of a monumental marketing force but rather as a generic fighting game, it still emerges as a must-purchase for versus-fighter fans. Even if you know nothing about the series, the game's specs speak for themselves. Most notably, there 150 playable characters in the game, a record for a fighting game that has yet to be broken, and probably never will be. Seventy-two of these beautifully drawn characters are available right out of the package, ranging from jagged-haired anime brats to viridescent aliens to boldfaced MegaMan clones, their sheer variety enough to make even the Milestone Comics lineup look like it has diversity issues. On top of that epic roster add twenty-odd stages, all of which are lush, sprawling and ecologically diverse. You can fight in forests, in deserts, in outer space, and even underwater. In essence, the available permutations and combinations of scenarios are endless, making BT3 nothing short of candy for the imagination of the fighting-game fan. The gameplay isn't that bad either, as it consists of a little bit of hand-to-hand combat and a lot more throwing of various projectiles (could these be the eponymous dragon testes?) from near or far, more often the latter given the size of the confines. Heedless of gravity, you traverse the nooks and crannies of these massive environments from a dramatic, behind-the-back view, making the game feel like the magisterial Power Stone but in a tight third-person. Anyone who fancies themselves a fan of fighters should track down BT3 without hesitation and bask in its inexhaustible potentialities. But for god's sake, if you're aged thirty or above, don't start watching the show!

NHL Hockey

The 1977 film Slap Shot is, without the hyperbole often mistaken for wit by millennial writers, a period piece of extraordinary genius. Over the course of the late sixties and seventies, with the NHL's expansion from six to twenty-one teams alongside the formation of the rival World Hockey Association, the employment opportunities for minor league hockey players substantially burgeoned. The corollary, however, was that the talent level of "major league" hockey dropped considerably. Skill and finesse were no longer the definitive capacities of an effective hockey player. By the mid-seventies players could participate in the bigs by virtue of sheer physical presence alone. The Philadelphia Flyers are a case in point. Their lineup consisted almost entirely of goons, and they became the first of the expansion teams to win the Stanley Cup, doing so largely on the grounds of intimidation, which earned them their "Broad Street Bullies" nickname with good cause. Faced with so many new and unusual hockey markets, the increase in fighting, stick-swinging and bench-clearing brawls served another crucial purpose: it kept people from places like Birmingham, Alabama and Oakland, California coming to the rinks, even if rudimentary skills like skating and passing were lacking. Slap Shot, then, impeccably captured hockey of its time—a brutally violent roller-derby on ice, its characters as fit for a professional wrestling ring as they were for a rink.

Few if any video games have accurately simulated hockey’s Crimson Age, and perhaps never will (though the 2K series has come close). That said, if you'd like to partake in something comparable to the perfect entertainment that is Slap Shot, then the original NHL Hockey by Electronic Arts is your ticket. To be certain, NHL Hockey’s sequel NHL 94 is the best game in the decades-old series due to its breezy gameplay and full license, but it lacks one crucial element that its predecessor has in spades: full-bore fistic fracases. While NHL 94 took the moral high ground and eliminated fighting entirely (by diktat of the NHL itself), the primordial game in the series was not nearly as virtuous, placing no limit upon fisticuffs. Occasionally, these fights break out during the course of gameplay, but the real goonery happens after the whistle. Body-check a few members of the opposition when play is stopped, and eventually one of them will drop the gloves. In due time, the penalty boxes will look like player's benches. NHL Hockey is, unfortunately, not up to the standard of NHL 94 in terms of pace, nor does it contain the all-important one-time shot, but again, like a hockey fan in Birmingham, Alabama, you're not at the rink for the ice capades. You're there to go to war.

Though the endless stream of fights may temporarily stave our bloodlust, NHL Hockey still leaves us wanting more. With all these post-whistle cheap shots, why aren't other players skating in to save their fallen line-mates? Why aren't the designated fighters spilling off the bench? What your correspondent really wants to know is: where are line-brawls? Where are the bench-clearing brouhahas? The 16-bit NHL Hockey obviously lacked the technology to simulate such multi-man free-for-alls, and certainly the National Hockey League would never approve of such gratuitous violence—at least not involving more than two players. But nowadays, we have systems capable of putting 12 or even 40 players on the ice. Why can't an intrepid little developer make a game that is one part non-licensed 70's hockey simulation, another part real-time strategy? When brawls break out, the controlling player could then set match-ups between various forwards, defensemen and goalies, methodically taking out the other team's marquee players en route to gooning their way to victory. And it doesn't even have to be unlicensed: get the Slap Shot rights from Universal Pictures and let the Charlestown Chiefs and Syracuse Bulldogs settle things once and for all, without (spoiler alert!) having to rely on a male striptease as the deciding factor.

Punch-Out!!

In any iteration, Punch-Out!! is pure prizefighting genius, a verdict that should come as no surprise to even the most casual gamer. Considering it was first released in 1987, the cinematic feel of its presentation is staggering. Drawing on Rocky-esque tropes—most notably the training cut-scene with a cityscape in the background, not Philadelphia but even better Manhattan, complete with the Statue of Liberty—Punch-Out!! evokes a fundamentally American aesthetic and narrative arc.

Apart from the presentation, Punch-Out!! remains noteworthy on account of its characters. While Little Mac, the Caucasian-American protagonist under the player's control, is underwhelming and diminutive, virtually faceless with his back to the player for most of the game, the antagonists he faces are the stuff of legend. What is most fascinating about the pixelated pugilists is that they are, from the perspective of the American consumer, almost entirely composed of foreigners, and each of these internationally-flavored opponents is depicted in an aggressively stereotypical fashion. There is, for example, a fairly obvious Orientalism informing the look and comportment of several characters, such as Piston Hondo, a Japanese fighter complete with logographic headband and easily agitated eyebrows above his epicanthic gaze. The Orientalism is even more egregious in the case of Great Tiger, a turbaned Sikh who is, quite impressively, capable of a fakir-like flickering in and out of visibility whilst floating about the ring. Curiously enough, the game was developed by an all-Japanese crew headed by Nintendo standout Genyo Takeda, suggesting that some of the East Asian stereotypes may have been self-deprecating in-jokes.

The feckless French stereotype (right)

But the caricatures go beyond Orientalism, for all cultures portrayed in Punch-Out!! are painted in gaudy, monochromatic tones. Don Flamenco is a Spanish romantic who dances pompously with a rose-stem between his teeth; far more flair than substance, he mounts minimal offense, making for an easy knock out. The Frenchman Glass Joe is even more hapless, victim of perhaps the archest stereotyping: gutless and ineffectual, he goes down easiest of any character. These stereotypes are not just aesthetical, but are literally coded right into the fabric of the gameplay. Punch-Out!!'s characters are as notorious among NES enthusiasts for their logic patterns as they are for their looks and personalities. Thus, it is unanimously known that corpulent Pacific Islander King Hippo will jab mercilessly before inevitably jumping in the air and unhinging his massive craw, opening himself up to a fistic assault which will cause him to drop his drawers and expose his vulnerable spheroid gut for further damage. Moreover, everyone knows that when the gem in the middle of Great Tiger's turban begins to sparkle, it’s due time to block his attacks. Punch-Out!! essentially reduces the cultural Other to a sort of automaton, limited to a narrow range of behaviors and gestures, and altogether incapable of change. By contrast, Little Mac has the ability to move left and right, and punch in any sequence the player deems fitting. The American subject(ivity), then, fully realized in the player/consumer holding the controller, is possessed with expansive agency relative to the Other. To be American is to fully actualize this agency, and most markedly so through sport—if not the physical act itself, then the spectation thereof or the participation in spectation via video game simulation. In any event, the Other is to be conquered en route to glory.

Punch-Out!! proffers further sociopolitical commentary vis-à-vis the most obvious Other of its era. Given that the Berlin wall was edging towards a fall and the Cold War was approaching absolute zero during the development of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (the game’s original North American home release in 1987), a character like Soda Popinski can be read in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitics. The pinkish hue of his skin signifies quite plainly his socialist background—that is, the "pinko commie". Moreover, Popinski minces his well-muscled frame around the ring in a skimpy Speedo, definitely not standard boxing attire, indexing a certain degree of effeminacy for the political Other. Correspondingly, he is given to dancing mid-match. More damningly, Popinski is characterized by an obvious fixation for quaffing the soda pop for which he is named, an act of obsessive consumption that would seem to forsake his inborn Marxist orientation. Thus, the hypocrisy of Popinski's collectivist, Communist values and the individual restraint they would ideally embody is conveyed via his irrepressible pattern of consumption centering upon a beverage commercially popularized in America. This makes for a more rigorous (and less juvenile) critique of Russo-Soviet culture than the character's original conceptualization earlier on in the game’s development—that is, "Vodka Drunkenski", a moniker that was eventually modified when it was adjudged potentially offensive, for whatever reason.

Punch-Out!!'s American adversaries do not appear until the end of the game, and they provide the toughest competition. They also have the least personality, amounting to little more than generic strong men who are hyper-competent in the sweet science. The message seems to be clear: the world is the rest, but America is the best; we're not dancing around anymore. Evidently, the Japanese programmers were enamored of America. Oddly enough, the incumbent champ Super Macho Man fights in the same pattern as Popinski, perhaps conjecturing the dialectal ideological mirror that Americans and Soviets, Capitalists and Communists, provided for one another. This may be a subtle critique from the Japanese developers, though it is more likely lazy programming. The final boss in 1990's Punch-Out!! is another American, Mr. Dream by name, and he has the least character of all, square-headed and box-cut with an inexorable winning smile. This is America, an exceptional force cutting through the layers of dross that constitute all the other ethnicities of the world and their cultural overlays, and giving you, in the end, pure sinew with a grin.

As its title indicates, the original home version of Punch-Out!! featured Mike Tyson until Nintendo's license to use the likeness of the Baddest Man on the Planet expired. Mr. Dream, then, was a re-skinning of Tyson for the 1990 re-release of the game. This proved to be a fortuitous move, as family-friendly Nintendo certainly wouldn't want anything to do with the embattled Iron Mike who would soon after be convicted of rape charges. Mr. Dream, then, can be interpreted as a white-bread gentrification or domestication of Mike Tyson; that is, a more palatable—and entirely fictional—realization of the American dream. Perhaps behind the unfaltering smile, though, there still lurks the predatory animal heart of America, moving in Mike Tyson’s predetermined pattern.

In sum, Punch-Out!! is nothing short of timeless, in much the same way Orientalists presumed the colonial Other to be, what with their inherent ahistorical torpor. This sense of civilizational stagnancy is readily visible in the game’s non-American characters, who collectively evidence a particular lack of imagination—or rather a commitment to a particular constellation of troublesome cross-cultural imaginings—on the part of the programmers. While Punch-Out!! is undeniably problematic politically speaking, its gameplay holds up even today, and for that reason, among others, the odious stereotypes it perpetuates will live on in the annals of Boxiana and beyond.