I'm going to talk a little bit about the 3D Street Fighter game that almost was. I'm also going to talk about the problems associated with adapting 2D fighters to 3D brawlers. I'll bring in some other Capcom titles as well as those from perennial rival, Namco. In 2006 Backbone Entertainment pitched a 3D Street Fighter game set between the events of SF II and III. This game was pitched before SF IV had come out but had an eerily similar name. Titled Street Fighter IV Flashback, the game was more of an adventure brawler than a fighting game, akin to Final Fight.

Would it have been a hit or a miss? Would a Western developer be able to create a satisfying brawler? What are the lessons that Capcom has learned since creating the groundbreaking Final Fight some 20 years ago? We'll explore these and other questions in this blog.

Capcom didn't invent the brawling genre. Most gamers would agree that 1987 Double Dragon by Taito was the first real brawler hit. The side-scroller adventure introduced us to the basic mechanics; a player would fight wave after wave of villains using an assortment of attacks and throws before taking on a boss character at the end of each stage. Double Dragon II inspired Capcom to create their own version of the brawler. Street Fighter 89 was supposed to be the sequel to the original Street Fighter. Vendors didn't like that a brawling adventure game had replaced the fighting format. Capcom renamed the game Final Fight and set about making a true successor to SF. Variations of the format have appeared over the past 20+ years. True sequels to Final Fight as well as knock-offs like Streets of Rage by Sega. Modern action titles like Devil May Cry, God of War and Bayonetta still hold some of the influences from Final Fight. Namely wave after wave of opponents, boss battles and the strategy required to hold out despite the odds.

True 3D brawlers are few and far between. The format seems cumbersome and is one of the genres that hasn't made the transition to 3D very well. Control is one of the major problems with 3D brawlers. Moving characters through stages in 3D space and combat are much more difficult to do in a 3D brawler than a 2D title. The camera part of the issue but more than that it is the ability to set up opponents, to find proper ranges and be able to attack enemies coming from multiple angles. In two-dimensions the player had to focus their attention left or right, making it much easier to exploit a solid strategy. Newer titles made it possible for opponents to sidestep attacks or for players to misjudge distances because of awkward angles, increasing the difficulty of the title and making the experience less enjoyable.

All of those issues didn't Capcom and a host of other developers from trying to keep the genre alive. Unfortunately everything they tried seemed to fall short in the eyes of players and critics. Capcom experiemented with putting the genre in a Japanese science fiction setting, using cel-shading and even alternate-costume nods to SF characters in the title Crimson Tears. Unfortunately the game didn't seem to register very well with Western audiences. Their following titles did even less to impress gamers. There were some parallels behind the titles that Capcom created, their success (or lack thereof) and their attempt to capture the Western market. The two biggest missteps from the company being Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance and Final Fight Streetwise.

These titles attempted to capture the look and feel of urban culture, similar to what EA was trying to accomplish in their Def Jam series of fighting games. Unfortunately for Capcom there was, and remains, a divide between what Western audiences are looking for and what the Capcom designers think will be a hit in the west. This is in regards to character and level design but more important to the storytelling devices in the games. The stylized characters and universe of Beat Down seemed cheezy and unrealistic, while Final Fight Streetwise tried to make the formerly bright and heavily anime-influenced universe dark and gritty, to the point of becoming obscene. Even before Streetwise had come out Capcom was moving the direction of the series into a brooding mess. Final Fight Seven Sons by Capcom Studio 8, had little of the charm of the original Final Fight and looked somewhere between Streetwise and Crimson Tears before the project was scrapped. The angry plots, the sub-par control and ugly worlds were hardly the experiences that made Capcom great. Would Street Fighter IV Flashback have been better than Capcom's 3D brawlers or would have been more of the same?

There is a distinction between 2D brawlers to 3D brawlers and 2D fighting games to 3D brawlers. The moves of a fighting game character are usually more robust than the typical brawler. They can make the transition to 3D more easily. Some fighting games, like Tekken and Soul Caliber by Capcom rival Namco, were created in 3D. Developers find it easier to create adventure experiences using the 3D assets from Namco that by trying to start from scratch. The animations, models and collision information were ready made. The developers could add these characters to levels set within the universe, each with stunning visuals, objectives, boss battles, etc. The hard part seemed to be ways in which to challenge the player in the traditional brawler format, wave after wave of generic thugs and fighters to challenge the player. An early fighting brawler experiment from Namco was Urban Reign. It used a modified version of the Tekken engine and applied many combo and control elements from the Tekken right into the game.

Soul Caliber Legends was one of the other experimental titles using the fighter-to-3D brawler experience. Namco created fantastic worlds in which to set the medieval / fantasy sword fighter. This game was moderately successful, but memorable because it showed that fighting game characters could make the transition to adventure brawlers. Those that were familiar with the control mechanics and combos from the fighter would make the transition to roaming levels smoothly. Others that had grown up on adventure platformers like Devil May Cry or God of War lamented the controls.

Namco was one of the early pioneers of 3D fighting game engines while Capcom was focused on 2D sprite-based technology. It stands to reason that they are able to do more with several generations of 3D technology than Capcom has been able to do with the SF IV engine... so far.

For example, Tekken 6 expands upon the lessons that Namco learned from Urban Reign and Soul Caliber Legends. The game offers a solid fighting experience with tons of customization for the main characters, as well as a large library of fighter to choose from. Some of the adventure portions feature wave after wave of minor character combat rather than 1-on-1 battles. Many of these enemies were throwaway designs, others were concept fighters that didn't make the cut and still others flesh out the universe as agents and soldiers from the warring Mishima factions. Do these elements make the fighting game better? Do they compliment the overall purpose of a fighting game or has Namco created a new genre of fighting game, one which makes the distinction between fighter and free roaming brawler, yet are part of the same title? Are these things that Capcom should consider implementing in future versions of Street Fighter, so long as the series stays in 3D?

I am very defensive when it comes to the SF series. I am defensive about the character design, the control and the balance of the game. I am skeptical of the direction the series has taken, the use of gimmicky costumes for DLC or that the title would even work as a 3D brawler . Capcom does not have a great track record when it comes to making 3D brawlers, if you don't believe me then try playing Beat Down and Final Fight Streetwise. I am even more skeptical of third-party developers, like Backbone Entertainment, trying to make a version of Street Fighter in an entirely different genre.

A lot of the original intent and spirit of the game could be lost in another genre, or if designed by people that did not understand all of the nuances that went into the universe. Creating a game that has characters with the same names, moves and abilities as the SF cast does not make it a SF game. Those that are doubters should really try playing the game based on the SF Movie. Many of the designers and artists working abroad undoubtedly have a soft spot for the franchise. They want to do the game right and make it memorable for gamers that did not grow up with SF. Take the case of the artists and writers at Udon are such people but even they view the universe with a skewed perspective. Udon and the animators of the horrid USA cartoon series, had one thing in common. They tried to invent plots and relationships which kept the cast tied together. Not unlike the GI Joe cast, all of the main characters had to return again and again no matter how absurd the story.

The version of the universe that westerners got was colored by the mistranslations of the game. The lack of a connection between the martial arts and Eastern philosophies and religions also prevented the characters from taking on deeper cultural significance with those writers and artists. Of course many western gamers also don't have a "big picture" take on the SF universe. To many gamers the SF cast were simply cool characters with cool moves. That cultural POV shaped the way western gamers perceived the canon and character relationships. It is possible that despite the best intentions, the universe and mechanics of SF were beyond the grasp of Backbone entertainment. Making a 3D adventure game that featured the cast, with familiar special moves and attacks like the Namco brawlers, would have been a strained fanservice experience.

Remakes of classic Capcom titles by western developers tend to miss the spark that made the original title so memorable. It was something I talked about on the importance of getting the Bionic Commando right blog. Many of the same rules apply for Street Fighter. It is up to the developers to meet the characters at their level, not to try to change them to meet a different vision and betray the intent of the game. It is absurd to imagine a scenario where we follow Ryu along a path fighting wave after wave of random goons. Okay, so maybe a scenario like that would appear in an Udon comic, but I digress. There was a reason why Capcom created Final Fight, so that somebody other than Ryu could explore the world with an entirely different play mechanic. So that a wrestler, a ninja and a brawler could beat the snot out of wave after wave of different characters. Developers that fail to make that distinction are destined to hurt the franchise in the future.

Are there characters SF characters that could work in a brawler or adventure title? Certainly! Are there ways to make an adventure story out of Ken and Ryu that do not betray the spirit of Street Fighter? Absolutely! Am I going to spell these things out? Not today my friends.

Have a great weekend.

The character profiles are good, if all in Japanese, including tidbits of info such as first appearances and even birthdays. Did you know that Robert Garcia was born on Christmas Day, or that Mai Shiranui was a New Years baby? Of course the book also served to remind fighting game fans that Tae Kwon Do characters have been around before Juri was ever announced, in fact, the KOF series is saturated with TKD fighters that I'd rather see than Juri.

But I digress... The book is a little thin but very thorough. Don't expect to see multiple character profiles aside from the most recent version of the art for each character. This is not an art book but it does have some concept pieces dating back to the first KOF title in 1994. This art helps demonstrate my frustrations with fighting game character design. The SNK school of design seems to be based on the numbers game. Each generation of the KOF series mixes fighters from previous SNK titles (not always the fighting games) along with new characters. Since the game is a 3-on-3 tag based system then teams of three have to be created each generation. The "easy" characters to implement were three from the Art of Fighting and three from Fatal Fury, those being SNK's earliest fighting games. The concept designs for the other nation's fighters weren't as iconic. Some were very laughable in fact. Let's take a look at the Hip Hop theme placed on the concept characters for Team USA.

Although the game was released in the mid-90's the fashion of the characters did not accurately reflect the times. The spandex underneath jackets was decidedly late 80's USA pop fashion. These were looks that the USA did not idealize in fighters, yet SNK thought they would be strong candidates to represent the nation. Unfortunately these videos defined the USA to Japanese developers. Either SNK was ignorant of the cultures they were representing or they simply didn't care what "Americans" thought was cool at the time. The final designs for Team USA included a basketball player, a football player and a boxer, none of which were very well liked or even remembered by the majority of gamers.

The poor designs kept on coming through the years. Characters that would have been scrapped by other developers (like Capcom) or refined until they were solid were pitched at a high volume because each team needed three members. If SNK wanted to impress fans by introducing a new team made up of well-dressed gentlemen then surely they could have them stomping on the Fatal Fury poster boy Terry Bogard! This type of sketch was insulting to fans of FF and KOF by insinuating that a suit could have as much fighting prowess as, arguably, the most popular character in the universe.

Latter KOF designs began incorporating more Japanese pop culture trends and began ignoring the fads from the rest of the world. Characters inspired by anime and Harajuku fashion like the Gothic Lolita, were favored more and more than actual fighters. One page of the KOF Encyclopedia summed up this change of direction. The character K9999 is presented as a black silhouette and in no other part of the book is his likeness reproduced. SNK lost the rights of the character to Korean co-developer Eolith.

The homage / tribute to the character Tetsuo from the manga and film Akira probably rubbed a number of anime fans the wrong way as well.

After getting this book I realized that the future of KOF and Street Fighter designs are very intermingled.

Happy humpday amigos, I'll recap the Michael Lau show probably tomorrow. I'm still coming down from the buzz of the event. I did want to reply to a comment from my pal TruestStrike. He asked how I would have designed Juri, the new girl introduced into the SF series. I would like to reply to that and also point out the missteps that Capcom might be having with their character designs.

My pal Baberific made the obvious connection. Comparing the ponytails and coloring scheme of Juri to Jinx from Teen Titans. Many people on 1UP, Capcom-Unity and Shoryuken.com are comparing the character to Tae Kwon Do hero Kim Kaphwan (or his sons Kim Dong Hwan and Kim Jae Hoon) from the King of Fighters / Garou Mark of the Wolves. There are some good things going on with the character design and things which detract from her presence.

We'll begin with the good things.

Juri is based in part on the TKD school of fighting. Most of the classic SF characters are based on a particular fighting art. Hopefully Juri will bring a stylized version of the art into the universe, not unlike the way that Ken and Ryu introduce gamers to a fantastic version of karate. In the pics and video released so far Juri has long pants and padded feet. These mirror the aesthetic of TKD practitioners. The oversized pants also work well for animators as they can convey movement easier that form-fitting clothes. The lack of a TKD style has been an obvious shortcoming for the SF series. It's funny even that pro wrestling got into the series twice with Zangief and El Fuerte, three times if you include Darun Mister, while one of the most popular fighting arts from Korea was passed over again and again. I am glad that it finally got introduced into SF continuity, and even happier that it was introduced with a female character.

However not all of the designs behind Juri emphasize her history, work well when compared to the other SF characters or even acknowledge the importance of the fighting art she represents. Here is where the praise for the new character ends and the griping begins.

Street Fighter is popular among gamers for many reasons, including control, move selection, animation and balance. One of the title's biggest strengths was the character design. The SF series excelled at creating characters that were exaggerated practitioners of the fighting arts. Even though most of these characters were given fantastic abilities, the majority of their look and move selections were grounded in reality. I spent a lot of time this summer talking about the real-world fighters and arts that influenced the evolution of the Street Fighters. Unfortunately latter SF games began incorporating character designs from animé and film rather than actual fighters. This lack of respect for the legacy Capcom had established is one of the things I take exception with.

The first strong female character introduced into the SF universe was Chun-Li. She was a woman wearing a psuedo-traditional Chinese dress, with a dragon motif on her belt and her hair in buns. However her fighting cues were obvious and also understated. Chun-Li's arms were toned and she held massive weighted, spiked, bracelets on her wrists to give her powerful punches. Rather than heels or ballerina slippers she wore wrestling boots and kicked with powerful legs. She was anything but dainty and certainly not a girl. She became the strong woman archetype that few fighters have been able to equal. Instead developers began to introduce girls as fighters, most scantily clad, or with big boobs, but rarely strong females.

Cammy was the beginning of the younger, sexier trend in Street Fighter. However her fighting design features were obvious. Her color scheme, beret, metal gauntlets and combat boots all held military overtones. She was not placed in the universe simply to add sex appeal. She, like Chun-Li was placed in the game to fight and had to look like a fighter. Her extreme strength, even for a girl, was explained in SF canon. Cammy was the result of genetic experimentation and developed tremendous strength from steroids. Juri is shown to have several moves that defy logic and her diminutive size. Are these moves based on strength or something else? From the waist down Juri looks like a fighter, from the waist up she looks like an anime character.

Does this mean that I am against girls in SF? Or girls that do not look strictly like fighters? Absolutely not, provided that they have a purpose and aesthetic connection to the fighting arts.

Sakura might seem non-traditional and not at all dressed like a fighter. But upon further inspection she serves as a great balance and even contemporary for the "traditional" fighter Ryu. I bring up her purpose and the subtle cues behind her look on my the Frightful Symmetry of Street Fighterblog. Is says that not all SF characters had to look like fighters in order to be in the game. Yet, it also doesn't mean that any contemporary character design would work. The character of Makoto was a very powerful and traditional design. The producers of the SF games have always wanted to give Ryu a little sister character, or introduce Gouken's daughter into canon, yet were never able to do that. Makoto is the sort of end-result of that concept and her non-traditional karate style balances the style of Ken and Ryu, while not becoming redundant like Sakura's. Makotos discolored gi and the flowing yellow ribbon around her neck are aesthetic choices which work well on the character and remind us that she is a (strong) female.

There has to be a certain level of consistency between the overall theme of the character. None of the other SF characters has ever been designed as a half-fighter, half something else. Even the oddball characters like Dhalsim, Blanka, Birdie, Sodom, or even Skullomania, were one consistent and uniform design. Juri is split down the middle with half of her influence proudly Korean and half elsewhere. The energy that could have been used from a solid TKD design was dissipated from the "psycho powers" placed on the character. In a similar way the morbid obesity took away the kung-fu style of Rufus, and the silly cooking theme weakened El Fuerte's lucha libre.

Those that had psycho powers in the previous games did not look like fighters at all. The mad general Vega and the gypsy Rose balanced each other out, similar to Ryu and Sakura, and showed there was more than one way to fight in the SF universe, without the game becoming too immersed in nonsensical powers, ala King of Fighters. I am not sure how Juri could have worked as a younger person using psycho powers unless her design choices were consistent with the Vega / Rose theme. If her look was too extreme, as with the use of skin, colors or powers, then she would have been more like a KOF design than a SF one. I wrote a great deal about the problem with fighting game character designs in another blog, specifically the problems with fighters that do not look like fighters. Juri is skirting the line of acceptability within the universe. These were the problems with Remy and C. Viper. They are good designs, but not necessarily right for Street Fighter.

The further a character moves from human abilities, or fighting style, within the SF universe the less likely they are to have an impact with gamers. Seth and Gill were on the extreme end of the power scale and fighting them was a test in patience or dumb luck. Good character design always should incorporate fighting cues rather than fantastic powers. This goes for regular characters as much as for bosses. The closer the boss is to an actual art, the more likely they will be remembered and used by gamers.

I am not warming up to Juri based on the footage shown of her so far. She seems to be another odd character added to the SF IV universe, with moves and powers that beguile her purpose like her contemporaries. Her inclusion padded by marginally remembered Super SF II characters. Do I think there was a better example of a Korean female Tae Kwon Do fighter from a videogame? Of course! Panda from Capoeira Fighter 3 was a solid design that respected the art yet still left room for originality.

Hello friends, today brings us the video coverage of PAX. Below is the booth crawl. Sorry but I didn't spend much time covering any one game I wanted to make sure you would get a sense as to all the possible things there was to see and do at the convention, at least expo-hall-wise. There were many things that I missed or failed to record. So imagine that all of this video represents only 25% of what was at the show.

PAX 2009 Booth Crawl from Noe V. on Vimeo.

At a convention you have to pick and choose what you want to see, that is if you are only there for one day. On three days you have the luxury to see all of the titles, videogame and tabletop, as well as get some free play time in for the older consoles and tabletop titles. Not to mention all the panels on the multiple floors of the convention center and the concerts at night. When you are done being a conventioneer there are plenty of good places to eat around the center as well as other things to do. Below is the slideshow of my trip to Seattle, there are the sights of PAX and Seatle in general, some cameos of 1UP peeps, friends and Capcom employees. Good times were had by all, even when some of them were working!

Saturday was probably the highlight of the trip for me. I got some breakfast of a subway breakfast sam'mich while waiting for Jinpei to get some crepes, for which I joined him for second breakfast of smoked salmon and lox crepes. A few minutes later I ran into my pal Cesar and his friends Gordon and Jeff who were visiting from Frisco. We decided it was time for lunch and ate some ramen at the local Japanese market. The meal was quite hearty and I wish I had taken pictures of the awesomeness. After stuffing ourselves silly we tried to get back to the convention center. Unfortunately we took a wrong turn and ended up getting on the freeway headed towards the border and Vancouver B.C.

We pulled off at the nearest exit and began backtracking. As we were making turns through the city we saw something really random.

Somebody was advertising a Zombie Carwash. I took a few pics as we passed by. What a gimmick we all thought and kept right on driving. We took another wrong turn and ended up in the shadow of the Space Needle. I passed the camera over to Jeff and he obliged me with this epic photograph.

We finally made it back to PAX to continue our adventure. Since there were four of us we decided to take a crack at the open mic and do our best imitation of Rush...

Afterward the guys were eager to drop in to the Pitch Your Game Idea panel and I decided to make a game out of the Zombie Carwash. The judges were Jeff Kalles, Greg "Porkfry" Hjertagner and Wil Wheaton. When they said the mic was open for submissions everybody jumped in line quickly. You had 45 seconds or so to pitch your idea and make the first round of cuts. Some people only said a few words before being shot down or passed onto the finals. There were some awesome ideas and one guy even brought in a portfolio of illustrations to accompany his game. I believe it was a fighting title based on the Edgar Allen Poe poems.

One guy had an interesting premise where the game was a FPS but the story didn't end when you died, instead it followed the life of whomever was in possession of the gun. The stand-out moment was the guy that pitched a Native American game that worked its way east during the colonization of the USA. He titled it "Oregon Trail of Tears" for which the crowd erupted in applause. The fan-favorite was from a young man that opened with "you begin by growing a thin mustache" and instantly went through to the next round. The person that followed didn't do so well with the judges or audience. You only had a few seconds to sell your idea and think on your toes when they asked you a question or you would get cut down. The judges didn't mess around and wanted to make sure that the budding designers could entertain the audience. I didn't know if I could make the cut with Zombie Carwash but I took a chance and these were the results...

My friends were happy for me and I was besides myself with joy. I thanked the judges and claimed my prizes. The back of the medal reads "We saw you do something worth of this medal." Not really sure what some of these things do but I could use the $100 gift card...

We celebrated afterward by headed down to the Top Pot Doughnuts. Voted the best doughnuts on the West Coast and even in the USA in some polls. They lived up to their title as we soon slipped into a sugar coma from our respective samplings. My plate was the triple stack.

I bought a Top Pot hat and compared wild hairstyles to the cool lady that worked there. Holla back if you're ever in the LA area! Cesar noticed that the milk logo looked eerily familiar. Maybe it was the sugar talking. What do you think?

And that was the highlight of my PAX experience. Hope your weekend was just as awesome!