Street Fighter - The Later Years

Street Fighter the Later Years…Sonic Prunes

A legacy of video games that shaped the arcade world from a dying out culture to that of a one on one battle of game play that would spawn other video games to follow suit. As well the legacy of Street Fighter spawned multiple video game sequels, comic books, cartoons and even a feature film. I remember playing street fighter in the arcade shop till my fingers bled and reciting the words and phrases such as “Sonic Boom” “Tiger Uppercut” & “Yoga Flame” to my friends in many conversations.

Now we all age, except those fortunate enough to have fountain the fountain of youth located in the Florida everglades…which will be another topic for another time. So as I said, we all age, we all get old and at some point we won’t be as “agile” as we once used to be. So should it be any different that our favorite characters of long ago should not be susceptible to the same aspect of life that we face??? My vote is no for a number of reasons, one reason being that we can’t live in the past as much as we would like to and the other reason that it is comedy gold. That’s right, watching our heroes/legend of long ago grow old and fumble about life is pure comedy, except in the case of Steven Segal running around as a make believe cop…now that was just plain sad, there’s a reason why they didn’t want him in The Expendables.

Ok, back to my point to old people, heroes and comic gold…I stumbled across a website about a year ago called CollegeHumor.com and it’s basically a sketch comedy website. If you have never been there to check out their stuff or you have only seen a couple of vides from them I highly recommend you go there or go back and look at everything they have to offer. They have a number of sketch comedies and even a few web series, all comedic and all well filmed, edited and presented. Sometimes I like to go to the site and click around at some of the things I have seen before when I am feeling a bit down…the stuff is just that funny/entertaining.

So in my most recent of returning to the site I discovered a 9 part mini-series called “Street Fighter The Later Years”, which presents the classically famous and original Street Fighters aged and put out to Pasteur by Capcom, the creator of the video game series. You see all your favorite characters and their current life status like Dhalsim being a Taxi driver, Blanka being an electrician, Guile pushing a hot dog cart and Chun Lee as a dry cleaner. So yeah, when you look at it, it is a bit stereotypical, but it’s done in a funny way.

Its starts with Zangief and Dhalsim meeting up by accident and talking about their old times and having one last tournament. They meet up with M Bison, who is completely aged and in a wheel chair, and convince him to help them train and hold one last tournament. Oh and for the record they are not only old, but they are way out of shape, on a number of levels and in some aspects they have lost their powers and spend some time getting them back. They spend a good chunk of time trying to hunt down the other members and it comes out that Capcom has pretty much cut off any royalties to them and wants them all dead.

The story line is very solid and entertains you at every twist and turn so it makes the mini episodes seem go fast and leaves you wanting more and more. There are a few twists and turns in the sub plots and while some were obvious there was one at the end that was not and that right there was well worth watching all of the episodes. The only bad thing I can say about the overall series is that they didn’t make more than 9 of them, I wish they had made more. I would love to see what they could do with other series like Street Fighter, maybe something in the line of Mortal Kombat the Later Years.

Again though I can’t stress enough how funny it is and how much you should check it out, so what are you waiting for???

Be safe and remember that the thousand hand slap is the cheapest and easiest move to kill someone with,
John Cannon

P.S. This past EVO a guy won the whole tournament with Zangief, the worst player next to Balrog, go figure.

Harry Potter LEGO review - John shows he's a Gamer!!

Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (A guide to witchcraft with legos.)

Lego Harry Potter has been out now for a number of weeks and I am not afraid to say it, I had the game reserved since I first found out about it. So for me that would mean I reserved my copy of it back in November 2009 at my local video game dealer, yeah go ahead and laugh I don’t care. I am a huge lego video game and have every single one they have come out with except lego rock band because that’s not really a game like the other lego games are. I own all the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Batman games and was uber excited when the Harry Potter one was announced. Of course I have found out they are going to make a Spiderman and Transformers one too, so again the uber excitement has set in.

When I first heard about it and that you could do spells and fly on the brooms I initially was concerned for the game play and the intensity they might have put into it. I thought they may over think it and take away from the enjoyment that the other lego games provided to players. The other thing I was worried about was do I go with the deluxe edition that I would have to pay a little bit more for, but get the collectables they give with the game. I researched and talk to my video game dealer guru and he informed me it that the items you received with the game were crappy little pins and that it wasn’t the extra money, unlike the cool lego Indy key chain I got with the latest lego Indian Jones game. So with that Sofie’s choice of a decision out of the way I focused my concern on the game itself.

Now I will admit that I generally pick up the strategy guide book for all my lego games just to have should I get stuck in that one spot that annoys me to no end and need a little “guidance” with. Now as I talked with my non-regular video game dealer guru and asked when they would release the strategy guide he informed me they probably wouldn’t put one out because they don’t really do that for the lego games. Now once I was finished screaming and skinning him alive for being stupid in my mind I politely said, oh ok no big deal, but it was to me…oh well.

I got the game home and began to play it and I was bothered by it initially as you have to learn different spells and button functions that didn’t quite stay true to previous lego games. Some of the characters are a bit hard to control in general and you have to go through the game quite a number of times in order to find everything in order to get that beloved 100% complete status. Now I know every lego game you need to go through a number of times to complete, but this one was a bit excessive. As well the overall layout is a bit confusing as you traverse around the castle of Hogwarts and then the outside and courtyards, you tend to get lost rather quickly. I think that’s why I would have liked the strategy guide the most to reference some sort of map, but in the end I ended up making my own. There were a couple of glitches in the game and I had to restart the system because of them, but I guess that’s par for the course.

Now while I have said less than positive things about the game I do want to go on record and say once I got the controls and button functions down I did have a pretty good time playing it. I enjoy all the lego games and the motto is if it aint broke don’t fix it, and that’s how I felt the other games were until we got to Harry Potter. If I could say one thing to the designers of the game that would be to not over complicate a good thing, don’t put so much time into public area screens and just make the levels a bit longer instead.

I have only seen the first three films of the Harry Potter series and the game stayed pretty true to the films with the lego twist of comedy as they do in any of their games. I was glad to see that, but since I had never seen the fourth film in the series I was confused by the story line and was let down a bit by the final boss as he was rather simple to defeat while Myrtle was a bit more challenging to defeat.

All in all I would say if you’re a fan of the lego games and you have played them all then you will enjoy it and you might as well feed the addiction. If you have never played the games before then I would recommend playing one of the earlier lego games like the first Indiana Jones rather than the one with the Crystal Skull movie in it which is the second coming of Indy for lego.

Be Safe & pick up your toys when you’re done,
John Cannon