Memories of Def Jam Fight for New York

It's 2004, I'm about 15 and in high school.  I have a friend at school who, for the sake of this story I'm going to call Mo.  Mo and I were two very different people who at first glance you probably would expect not to really get on.  He was a huge dude from the West Indies who played a ton of sports, liked to party and listened to hip hop, rap and all that stuff.  I on the other hand was a sheltered white kid from a suburb who spent almost 100% of his time playing video games and listening to the old cassettes of late 80s/90s pop music from my mothers old collection.  However at school I bonded with this guy over games like Megaman, anime like Dragon Ball Z and...Linkin Park of all weird things.

We would often go to each others houses to play video games, usually an overnight stay so we could just play into the wee hours of the morning.  I remember going to his place and spending a LARGE amount of a day just playing Wind Waker and REMake when those came out and he would come over and we'd play stuff like Megaman X, Dragonball games or one of the obscure RPGs from my collection.

There was one time though he brought a game round to my place, which was Def Jam Fight for New York.  I didn't know anything about Def Jam other than the fact it was a rap label and therefore didn't want anything to do with it.  I called him a piece of shit for having garbage taste in games and didn't want to play it.  However he was twice my size and a lot more assertive than me so we ended up playing it anyway.

The game fired up and I scoffed at him for all the features in the game that I perceived as pointless and stupid.  All this heavy bass and emphasis on buying bling for your custom fighter in a story mode that was some cliché garbage about thugs fighting over territory or something.  Then we started getting into fights and the game is essentially a wrestling game that plays sort of similar to the old WWF games or whatever.  You pick a fighting style and that fighting style dictates how you KO people in each level.  If your a street fighter then getting their health low and clocking them in the head with a powerful haymaker will win you the fight.  If you were into grappling you'd have to make your opponent submit by putting them in various holds.

The first thing that really caught my attention however was the games blazin' moves.  When you fill up a meter you can enter a "blazin" state.  In this state, if you grab the guy and push the right stick you'll do a special attack.  These attacks are INSANE, gravity defying, multi hit combo, earth shattering attacks that really make you feel like you REALLY just ruined a guys day.  There's one in particular that I think Ice T does where he punches you twice in the gut, and flips you over his shoulder so that you got your head down and your ass up.  He then winds and essentially rugby punts the opponent right into the goddamn Shadowrealm and everything about these attacks and the combat in general is incredibly satisfying.

What really got me into the game though is when you get to the 3rd fight venue or so and you get to fight Sean Paul. Sean Paul I don't particularly dislike, even back then, but I always perceived him in my teenage ignorance as just some fuck who rapped about doing drugs, fuckin' bitches and drinking copious amounts of alcohol so I really started paying attention when I found out one could beat the shit out of him with a custom character.  So we wailed on him and the grabbed him and slammed his face so hard into a jukebox that he lay defeated as a twitching mess on the floor and I fucking loved it.

I loved it so much in fact, that I ended up buying the game for myself, playing through the story mode multiple times and unlocking basically everything there was to get.  One thing that I also started to warm up to though was the soundtrack.  The soundtrack is comprised of different songs composed by people from the label and I actually found myself really enjoying them, thus broadening my horizons with my music tastes.  The solid gameplay, the bumpin' soundtrack and the performances from the rappers themselves, despite being in a corny gang war story, are actually quite entertaining and even pretty hilarious at times.

So not only is this is a long winded way of me saying that Def Jam Fight for NY is a fantastic game that you should try if you have not already but I also, in case he reads it, wanted to thank my dude Mo for not only introducing me to a great game but for also heavily broadening my music tastes.

Tl;dr; This game is sick and you should play it POST HASTE

2019 Vlog 3/3/2019

Battle Circuit

So today I had a massive 3 hour gap between my driving lessons so I went down to the arcade about 5 minutes from the school to play DDR.  To my dismay however, there were a couple of people already on it and with limited time before my next class I wasn't about to waste it waiting around for those guys to finish.  The place had the usual selection of rhythm and card games but nestled in the back of this place there was an older cabinet running a game called Battle Circuit. 

Now I've never heard of this thing before but Battle Circuit is a side scrolling beat em' up made by Capcom and released in 1997.  After having a quick glance at the wikipedia page to get that date it looks like the game could support 4 players but the cabinet I was playing on only had 2 sticks so that wasn't happening any time soon.

After you put in your money you get to pick 1 of 5 characters to play as.  These involve a strong guy, a tough guy, a speedy guy , "death blow" guy and one that I don't remember.  I went for the strong guy because I like to keep things as simple as possible.

From there is a pretty standard side scrolling beat em' up.  If you've ever played anything like Final Fight or Streets of Rage then you know what you're getting with this.  The screen fills up with dudes and you punch all the dudes until they fall down dead.  There was some kind of story going on about a disk or something but I was just skipping all of it so I don't have a fucking clue.

What I was kind of surprised with though was just how fair the game felt in comparison to a lot of other titles in the genre.  I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not exactly the best when it comes to games like this but it feels like in a lot of titles enemies, especially, bosses will have moves that come out of nowhere, are crazy hard to dodge and do tons of damage.  Also the further you get into these games the more getting hit feels like coin guzzling dogshit than actual challenge.  Battle Circuit however didn't really do this and there was only one instance where I thought I lost life because of the game cheating me.  It was a woman boss with big thighs who liked to kick things (not Chun-Li, called Barbara or something) who would break your combo to spinning bird kick you across the screen which felt a little shitty but, like I said, she was the only one with an attack like that.

The game also had this upgrade system where you could buy moves or improvements for your character by beating coins out of the enemies as you went.  The extra life however was like, 1000 coins and I was only getting like, 200 a level.  There's only 8 stages too so if you're buying extra health meter or the actual useful skills then you can kiss that extra life goodbye.  The only thing I really disliked about the game was that fact you only got 1 extra life but this was offset by the game only being 50 yen a play instead of the usual 100.  I think if I had to put 100 yen for every continue I probably would have quit after my first game over.

Anyway it's a pretty good game so if you can find a way to play it then you should absolutely give it a try.  I think if you live outside of Japan the chances of you finding a cabinet are pretty slim because even in Japan I've never seen this game before.  But you know, MAME is a thing.....

Pokken Demo Impressions

About 5 minutes from my house there's a department store that is home to the Nagoya Pokemon Centre.  In case anyone is unfamiliar, the Pokemon Centre is a shop where people can go and buy all sorts of Pokemon related merchandise.  There's other stuff you can do there with these weird arcade machines and people always have their 3DSs out too so I guess people can congregate around there for trading and whatnot. 

A while ago I commented on my outrage at the announcement of "Pokken".  A fighting game carrying half the Tekken name where two Pokemon get in an arena and beat the shit out of each other until one falls down.  Since me and my buddy tried it, we'll both be sharing our thoughts on the game.

Tau

I initially thought the game was going to be a complete waste of time.  Maybe this is because I hold a great dislike for the Pokemon franchise but upon getting a go with the thing I found myself pleasantly surprised. 

For almost everyone in the store it was their first time with the game and you weren't really given enough time with it to figure anything more advanced than just standard attacking and blocking but even on a surface level there is quite a lot going on.  Each Pokemon can attack, jump, grab and all that standard stuff as well as a special attack specific to each character.  Along side that you get a support pokemon who you can call in for an extra attack or some kind of support ability.  When you take too much damage you can "burst" which makes you stronger, faster, stops you from getting hit stunned and allows you to perform your "ultra".

The game itself is actually pretty fun and I can totally see myself popping into the arcades for a couple of rounds every now and again but I do have one major problem with it.  WHY THE FUCK IS IT AT ALL RELATED TO TEKKEN?!  There are NO elements from any of the Tekken games implemented into it AT ALL.  Everything down to the fucking perspective of play is completely different to a Tekken game so why make that reference at all? It's not even like the demographics of Tekken and Pokemon cross over all that much so I have no idea what the fuck is going on.

Anyway, not counting my rage towards bringing Pokemon into the Tekken series it's a pretty good game.  Let's say I'm pleasantly surprised.

Gibdo

To those of you coming from the Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire page, it's Polibro here! I'll keep it short and sweet considering Tau has covered most of the technical details above.

Not being a particular fan of Tekken, I luckily don't hold the same problems with this mash-up as Tau. That being said, I do agree it is an odd combination of what would initially be thought of two completely disparate games. As many of the fans know, however, Pokemon is fundamentally a fighting game in as much as they do battle, albeit in a turn-based RPG style in the main series.

Fans of Pokemon have wanted a game where you could actually control your Pokemon utterly and slog it out against your opponent and this meets that need to a certain extent. Going back to Tau's point, it is an odd match but I think it is an interesting in its concept. If this game were released as a console release, I think it would be interesting to add the team element from the main Pokemon series, where you could build a team and battle it out akin to Marvel Vs Capcom. As an arcade game, however, the simple one-on-one style of fighting is perfect.

I'm not a big fan of traditional arcade fighting games, but I'd certainly give this a go now and again. But then again, I am slightly biased.

---

So there you have it, and just to top the whole thing off, here is some game play footage from the demo we played!

Is Mortal Kombat X too Violent?

Hooray!  A new Mortal Kombat has been released and with it a whole new bunch of people complaining about how violent it is! 

I can kind of see what they mean even if it is still complete stupidity.  Back in the day when Mortal Kombat was just digitised sprites it was kind of hilarious but those games are long gone.  Graphics are now super realistic and stuff so seeing a dude getting cut or ripped in half seems a bit more real than it did back in the games first iteration.

That said, that doesn't make the violence in MKX "problematic" or "too much" or whatever.  We are talking about a series built on its gruesome fatalities performed at the end of the fights so who are these people who play it KNOWING that's what its all about and then taking to the internet to complain?  The series has been around since 1995 or so and this is the tenth game in the series so there's no way most people aren't aware of what they are getting when they pick it up.

I don't want to hear any of that "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" argument either because that's total bullshit.  If you are a parent buying your child a copy of MKX then maybe you should hand that baby over to a different family because you sure as fuck aren't qualified for the job.  If teens get a hold of this game and they are the kind of people who can't differentiate this kind of violence with real world violence then again, that's not MKX's fault, that's more shitty parenting.

Don't these people who write these posts/articles get bored of being such joyless wankers?  If beating a dude to a bloody pulp before ripping out his heart with your bare hands isn't your thing then go play something else.  There are plenty of other, non violent games for you to be having fun with so why don't you go and play those instead of complaining about it on the internet. 

This controversy is as old as games itself and like most controversies with this medium it's a bunch of shit.  Games=Violence or Games=anything else are myths put forward by fucking idiots who don't play games and have no idea what they are on about.  Quit hatin' and just enjoy your own shit.

Pokken? Are you fucking Serious?

This is a joke right?  It's not serious, is it?  This is some sick joke being played by some cunt with bad taste?! RIGHT?!

Shit

I had a completely different topic planned for this evening, something positive where I was going to praise a game that I've been playing recently but then THIS shit fucking happened and I've swung right back into being an angry shithead on the internet.

Google the term "Pokken" and word going round is that this title has been officially announced.  Now just read that stupid fucking title, "Pokken", you guessed what it is yet?

A TEKKEN GAME WITH FUCKING POKEMON IN IT!

I have never heard anything so bullshit in my entire life.  Is there nothing sacred in this fucking industry.  Is there nothing I can enjoy so much without it turning into complete shit and betrayal?! 

Now why am I so angry?  Well Tekken is a great game and Pokemon is a shit game.  Tekken is a game made for people who enjoy competitive fighters and Pokemon is designed for people with brain damage.  All the depth that can be found in Tekken is going to be stripped out and the game dumbed down so that the title can cater to Pokemon's target audience.

So you might come back at me and say "well if you don't like Pokemon just ignore it and don't play it, it's not like it ruins Tekken as a whole or anything".  Well you may be right there but this game is getting a release in fucking ARCADES so I have every right to be pissed off.  All the space being clogged up by this fucking disgrace of a game is space that could be used for something that doesn't suck...or a vending machine.  Hell, I'd even take a giant 6 foot deep hole in the floor filled with shit than cabinets for this game.

First they come along and piss all over Nobunaga's Ambition with "Pokemon Conquest" which was a total failure as a monster breeding game and a total failure as a historical strategy game.  Not content with shitting over RPGs, Strategy, Dungeon Crawls and other genres they have now turned to fighting games to try and milk this crappy series for more Yen and Dollars.

Fuck Pokemon.

One Finger Death Punch

Well here was a pleasant surprise I got from the Steam store for exactly no money thanks to the power of selling Steam cards and DotA items!

On paper, the game sounds boring as fuck.  It's a fighting game with 2 buttons and you're not allowed to move or do anything but punch dudes.  Now if you were turned off by that description, I'd ask you to wait and stay a while because One Finger Death Punch is actually a really interesting game.

At it's core, it is exactly how I described it but when you actually start playing it the game manages to suck you in with really faced paced combat that has a little bit more depth that just clicking dudes one after the other.  Each level tasks you with murdering a certain number of guys and as the game goes on there are different types of guys that require certain combinations of clicks to dispatch.  On top of that you have to factor in things like weapon drops, your characters abilities and the ever increasing  game speed that comes with each victory and you end up with a unique but simple experience.

The game then goes to mix things up even further by adding different types of game modes to each level.  The standard mode is called a mob round which is the aforementioned punch the required number of dudes.  After that you get things such as sword and nunchaku rounds which are a bit faster, time trails, smash a certain number of level props and my personal favourite, the retro film round which makes everything black and white.  There's a few more than that but they escape me right now.

As you play through the games absolutely staggering number of levels you unlock a variety of skills that can be used for things such as extending the life of the dropped weapons or giving you a defensive manoeuvre or even healing.  These abilities become active on killing a certain number of dudes so the abilities add that little extra level of strategy to each stage, trying to get yourself in the best position to maximise the effectiveness of your abilities.

Apart from the games levels, you also have a survival mode that comes in 3 flavours that tasks you with killing and endless number of dudes until your life meter runs out.  Just so that doesn't feel like a total waste of time the game features some online leaderboards so you can compare just how much of a Kung Fu master you are with the rest of the world.

However the absolute best thing about this game for someone like me is the nostalgia value.  When I was a kid I was a big fan of these little stick figure animations on a site called Newgrounds that were known as Xiao Xiao.  One Finger Death Punch manages to bring all the awesomeness that was Xiao Xiao into a really fun and fast playable experience.  Some people may be turned off by the idea that the graphics are so simplistic they used stick figures, but for people my age who grew up with silly things like Stick Death and Xiao Xiao, One Finger Death Punch brings those happy memories flooding right back.

So I suggest that everyone goes and buys One Finger Death Punch.  It's super cheap and it's a great little game that is surprisingly addictive for something so simple in concept.  You can tell all the effort went into delivering something fast and enjoyable rather than something visually appealing or pandering to anything artsy which is something quite common with the indie scene.  Support this game, Silver Dollar have created a really fun game here and it needs some love.

Shaq-Fu 2!....and January Marathon!

Now I'm no fan of Basketball, I barely know anything about the pro scene but I am aware of who Shaq is.  You don't really have to be into Basketball at all to know who this guy is, he's a pretty well known guy both in and out of basketball.

If you're into video games and you have an interest in retro stuff or you have just been gaming as long as I have, you are probably aware of the above game.  If you're not, then let me reassure you that the picture at the top of this post isn't a terrible photoshop, it's a real game that was released for the Super Nintendo in 1994.

It's actually pretty famous, but not the good kind of famous.  It's a fighting game but it has an absolute ass backwards plot about Shaq where he gets sucked through a portal to another dimension and has to fight dudes to rescue someone or something.  But who cares about plot in fighting games right? well you're still out of luck because the gameplay is ATROCIOUS.  The sprites animate quite well but it's hard to control and the fighting just feels clunky and bad.

This game is SO hated that there is a website dedicated to buying every copy of it that exists and destroying it.  Well these guys might just have heart attacks after hearing what I'm about to tell you about.

Today while browsing the net I came across this article.

http://gamerfitnation.com/2014/01/ces-2014-shaq-confirms-shaq-fu-2-coming-soon/

In that link there is a video of a guy talking to Shaq, and he jokingly asks a question about a Shaq-Fu 2.  The response is "yeah it's comin' out, the graphics is CRAZY"

Now at first I thought he was just messing with the guy, just playing along with the gag.  I mean c'mon, the idea of Shaq-Fu of all goddamn games getting a sequel can't be true.  But just for curiosities sake I googled it, and found this.

http://pixelenemy.com/shaq-fu-2-rumours-fly-after-trademark-filed/

That is a little post about how a trademark was filed for a "Shaq Fighter" video game.  Keep in mind that this was posted in May of last year, and now the man himself is saying its a thing, I don't know if I should take him seriously or not.

Well, this is all just rumours after all, but I'd LOVE to see a Shaq-Fu 2.  Can you imagine, if this thing actually gets made and it ends up being good?  Maybe even so good that it starts getting played at EVO and garners a huge competitive following?! Just think about that.

Still, it doesn't matter if it's true or not because a video of Shaq hyping a sequel to his game that may or may not exist put a big grin on my face this morning, the concept is just mind blowing.

So what does this news have to do with the January stream marathon?

It's not quite Shaq, but it's a game I've not played that's apparently really good despite how silly it sounds, and it's basketball themed so I think now is a good time to play it!  The provisional date for the marathon will be Monday 20th of January! I'll post something closer to the time to confirm!

More Xbox One Disappointment

Remember a while back I said next gen didn't work properly and it was a big disappointment?  Well yeah, time for more of that!

Although this time it's not really about things that work, we're going to be talking DRM again.  So today I came across an article (which I will link at the bottom) which describes an occurrence that happened during a Killer Instinct tournament.  Basically, during the matches, the Xbox One check in DRM kicked in and just ended the match then and there to make sure that they owned the game that they were playing.  It didn't warn anyone that this was going to take place, it just booted them right out of the game with no regard for what they were doing.

I thought that Microsoft had done away with the check in DRM thing, but it turns out I was wrong.  The way I now understand it is, if you have a disc and it is inserted into the Xbox, then this doesn't happen.  However if you are playing a game that does not have a disc (So anything off the marketplace then), then the Xbox will just boot you out of the game so you can do the little check-in procedure.

If you go click the link at the bottom of this thing and check out the YouTube video in the article, it LOOKS like they were between matches or something, I'm not sure I've not played the new KI, so it looks more inconvenient than anything else, but this might seriously have an impact on Killer Instinct making an appearance at something like EVO, because I'm sure both tournament organisers and players won't be happy if the Xbox decides that it wants to do it's little DRM check during a battle.  I'm sure someone would be pissed if they were winning a match that's stopped due to DRM, then they lose their mojo and get trounced in the re-match; that shit ain't fair.

But even if your not into fighting games or the competitive gaming scene, it's STILL a problem.  Imagine if a little way down the line something like an RPG comes out on the marketplace.  Imagine if this RPG doesn't have checkpoints or something bullshit like that, it just has good old fashioned save spots.  Then imagine if you're doing a dungeon, a long dungeon, maybe the final one, you're near the end and you're having a hard time making it through but just before you can go fight the final boss BAM! DRM check kicks in an you lose all that progress for fucking nothing.  I wouldn't be too happy about that if it was me.

This is even going to have an impact on people who enjoy speed running because during a good run you don't want to have all that effort killed because of something you can't control.  If there are multi platform digital distribution games that look good for a speed runner, they will more than likely go buy it on a system that doesn't threaten to kick you out if you don't confirm you own it every 24 hours or whatever it is.

So yeah, more next generation disappointment.  Microsoft need to sort their shit out, I thought this DRM check in stuff was done with, but now it's here just ruining fighting game tournaments and being a bit of a bastard.

Here's the link to the original article I heard this on.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Xbox-One-24-Hour-Check-DRM-Returns-During-Killer-Instinct-Tournament-61114.html

DLC Wars: Tekken Tag 2 Vs Skullgirls

Before we start, let me direct your attention to an old post of mine

http://identitygaming.blogspot.se/2013/08/skullgirls-dlc-is-disgusting.html

If you don't want to read it then it's basically a rant I made about how stupid the Skullgirls palette swap DLC is.  Basically, you have to may money for the artist to use the fucking fill tool in paint, it's stupid.

Anyway, today I was talking to my friend and he brought up an instance of DLC in a fighting game that didn't make me want to kick someone in the head.  If you own a copy of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 then there is a bunch of DLC you can get for that game completely free, including new characters of all fucking things!

I don't own a copy of Tekken Tag 2 (I will do soon though) so I had to go do some googling to find out what the deal is.  Turns out that the producer, Katsuhiro Harada thinks that modern day DLC is a load of horse shit so he's trying to right the ills of the world by providing a load of awesome shit for free.

THIS, people, is a good developer right here.  He's no small fry in Namco Bandai, he's a guy who works as the producer for the fucking Tekken franchise, I'm pretty sure he's under quite a bit of pressure for his games to make some fucking money, probably more so than any indie developer is.  Yet despite this, he's providing all this shit for free, absolutely NO MONEY.  Costumes, characters, multi account usage, stages and god knows what else for £0, $0, ¥0!

Then you turn your head the other way and see Skullgirls charging for the use of the fucking fill tool, it's disgusting.  If you're going to charge people for something, fucking put some goddamn effort into it.  Hell, as long as it wasn't on disc, I'd be willing to pay for a new character or a new stage, some guy somewhere drew that shit, rendered it in 3D, made it work and all that jazz, some credit for the effort is deserved and yet Tekken just GIVES that shit away.  In this day and age of almost every company using DLC to just wring money out of you, this is a breath of fresh air.

Skullgirls looks like a good game, I'm willing to support it, but they can take their palette swap DLC and go shove it up their arse.  Finally, Katsuhiro Harada is a fucking beast and it's a shame that more developers don't follow in his footsteps.  Capcom could learn a thing or two here.....

Skullgirls DLC is Disgusting

Skullgirls is a game I've not played, but looks pretty good and I'll be getting it on Steam once it's released.

Quality of the game aside though, while looking at the Steam store page I found something pretty rage inducing that I would like to share my thoughts on.  A long time ago I made a blog post about how Palette swapped enemies and characters in games are a bunch of lazy bullshit, go read that here.

http://identitygaming.blogspot.se/2012/07/now-thats-some-bullshit-2-palette-swaps.html

Now unless your Mortal Kombat, where your passing off swaps as new characters, doing this in fighting games isn't so bad.  Like in Street Fighter, being able to change Ryu's clothes or Sakura's school uniform from their standard colours to something that you find more appealing or something funky is cool, it lets you personalise your character a bit.

So those features were kind of cool and you liked it right? Well now, at least in Skullgirls, if you want to personalise your character just a tiny bit you have to fucking pay for that shit now.  Something that was a standard feature in pretty much every fighting game I've ever played is now being passed off as fucking DLC.  Also before anyone wants to tell about how cheap it is, I don't give a fuck, no one should have to pay for fucking palette swaps.

I can't remember if it was Persona or Blazblue or whatever but I remember in one of those guys you could pick like a section of clothes or part of the character, and then choose from like 60 odd colours so that you could really make something that you liked.  Sure it's a small thing, but making that a paid add on is fucking arse.

But you know what, I don't blame the developers, I blame the people who buy it.  You can't fault a bunch of people who want to make money on their game, and sure, if people are willing to pay for stuff that has come standard for years, then why not?!  Their the fucking idiots eating it up and telling them it's OK to pull that shit.  What's worse is that I found a community website with this announcement on it and people were fucking loving it!  I couldn't believe it.

Well whatever, I suppose I'm getting overly annoyed about a small thing, but it shouldn't fucking be this way! Goddamnit!  You are being charged for the dev to use the fill tool, think about that.

Heaven or Hell! Let's Rock!

Back at university, me and my friends would have a couple of go-to fighting games when we wanted to get our competitive gaming going.  Tekken, Street Fighter Alpha and Guilty Gear X2 were those games.  Until Tekken 6 came out we sunk A LOT of time into good old X2.

So after a busy weekend of eating sushi and drinking far too much alcohol, I come home to find there is a trailer for a new Guilty Gear game!  Check it out!

I've not looked too deeply into it, so I don't know what the general consensus is on the trailer, but if you ask me, I'm fucking hyped.  That's all I really have to say about it for now to be honest, just another upcoming game to throw onto the cargo of the hype train.  Hopefully we'll get some more info on it soon and maybe I'll write a bit more about it when I'm not making posts at 2 in the morning...

Ultraman: Towards the Future

First of all, apologies for missing a post yesterday, I was rather sick and in no condition to be writing anything, but having made a speedy recovery I'm now back and ready to continue!

So, ever since beating that SNES Empire Strikes Back game, I've been wanting to go back and beat all the games that I never beat as a child, and Ultraman: Towards the Future was one of those games.

At this point I'd tell you what Ultraman is exactly, but to be honest I'm not entirely sure.  From what I can tell Ultraman is a popular kids series in Japan which has a similar vibe to the Power Rangers which used to be popular back in my day (which itself takes scenes cut for cut from Super Sentai, another similar kids TV show in Japan)

So the whole deal with the show is that big monsters come and attack and its up to Ultraman to give them a beatdown.  The game has the exact same premise, where each stage is a different monster, which I assume is from the show, and you have to give them a thrashing.

Whats strange is that despite the fact that Ultraman never made an appearance outside of Japan, his game was available in the UK and in America.  I got my copy when one of the staff members at my old primary school sold it to my mother for about £5 and it was then passed on to me as a present.

So Ultraman is a fighting game, but a really fucking bad one.  Basically, you fight the monster, but when you empty his bar, you don't win, it just says "FINISH".  To win the fight you have to let the meter in the middle charge all the way to L4 and hit him with that when the finish sign appears.  This makes some enemy's way harder than they should be since you end up dying before your thing can charge despite having beat them 2 minutes ago.

When you run out of lives, you go all the way back to stage one, but despite that I managed to beat the game on my third try.  Unless your a fan of something like Ultraman, don't bother trying to play this one, it's a piece of shit, I just had an axe to grind from my childhood.

Keyboard and Mouse Vs Controller

This is another one of those debates I see pop up on various forums and internet websites, and quite frankly it's a discussion I wish would just fuck off forever.

If you're going to have this discussion in a general sense, you should just shut up.  Both have advantages and disadvantages but you have to think about it based on what kind of game you're actually playing.  You can't just go and say that one is outright better than the other, because that would just be silly.

There are some genres of game where it doesn't matter if your using a controller of a keyboard and mouse.  Things like RPGs with turn based combat, or turn based strategy games (yeah, it would be a pain in the ass with something like Civ, but it would still get the job done) and things like that.

That said, a keyboard and mouse is about the only way to go for FPS and RTS games.  In FPS, the precision you get from aiming with your mouse is something you just can't quite get with a controller.  FPS controls on consoles are in fact, very good, but it just feels more natural on a keyboard and mouse, to me at least.  RTS games just require so many buttons to do so many different things, that trying to put an RTS on a console just seems a bit dumb really.  In order to have RTS on a console, you would need a keyboard peripheral or you would have to dumb down the gameplay quite significantly.

That said, I would not want to play platform games or fighting games on a keyboard and mouse.  I feel that when platforming, it feels way better to use a controller due to the fact I can make jumps a lot easier, and with fighting games, I'd hate to put quarter circle inputs in with a goddamn keyboard, it would be awkward as fuck.

But you know what, that's just me, I'm sure there's a guy who can beast FPS games with his pad, and another guy who can whoop my ass at Street Fighter with a keyboard.  At the end of the day it just comes down to what feels most comfortable to the player.  So while it makes sense to have certain control schemes for certain genres, the whole debate is rendered a bit pointless when it just comes down to personal preference.

Persona 4 Ultimate

Persona 4 Ultimate is the new 2D fighting game to hit Japanese game centres, and, according to wikipedia, came out yesterday for the PS3 and Xbox360 in Japan.  America and the EU are getting it in August.

For anyone who may not know, Persona is a spin-off series of games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.  Shin Megami Tensei is kinda like pokemon, but for real men.  SMT is an extremely challenging and unforgiving series and when you do eventually beat one of them it's one of the most satisfying things ever.

However, Persona 4 Ultimate isn't a RPG at all.  Like I said in the first sentence, P4U is a 2D fighting game and contains no RPG elements whatsoever.  That said, the game is actually a blast to play on 2 levels.  The first level of fun is what I like to call the fanwank level.

Above is a picture of the character select screen, and I swear the version I played in the game centre had more characters available.  But my point is, if you're a fan of the Persona games, you're probably gonna get your rocks off to kicking the shit out of the Persona 3 and 4 cast as your favourite character. 

The other level of fun to be found here is in the gameplay itself.  The game is developed by Arc System Works, who gave us amazing fighters such as Blazblue and Guilty Gear, so you know this shits going to be good.  As a result of this however, the characters all feel like characters straight out of Blazblue and there is a little sense of this being an excuse to reskin that game and make a shitton of money off the Persona series popularity.  But you know what?  I'm not going to get angry about that! Arc System Works have done a good job of providing and solid fighting game that doubles up as fanwank, and even though it is very similar to Blazblue, it does seem to be just different enough to qualify as its own thing rather than a cheap Blazblue knockoff.

So warm up those arcade sticks because you're in for a treat with this one.  It doesn't matter if you like Persona or not, if you like fighting games then you'll like this I'm sure.

OK Tekken...What the hell are you doing?

I love me some Tekken, with the punching and the kicking and the boom boom POW! It's great!  The amount of hours me and my buddies at university spent kicking the shit out of each other, the amount of assignments left unfinished due to the online mode of Tekken 6, it was a good time, and then Tekken Tag Tournament 2 got announced and I was excited as all hell.

I've seen it running in the Japanese game centres near me, but I've yet to have a go as I was more intrigued by all the rhythm games and that Persona fighter that just came out recently, but Tekken Tag 2 looks like more of what we love.  But then we have a problem, not a huge problem that will stop me from playing the game, but a problem none the less.  I was browsing Gametrailers late last night when I came across this video


http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/17bpoj/tekken-tag-tournament-2-big-bikini-bundle-trailer

This is a video for some pre order bonus you get, that involves putting the entire cast into swimwear.  Now you may be asking why is this a problem?  Well first of all, I don't mind the concept, it's not like the women in Tekken have ugly designs, and putting them in swimwear just makes it even easier on the eye.  It's also not some feminist view that doing this demeans women in video games, because it ain't that either, the men are just as scantily clad as the women here, so take your "boo hoo women in games" bullshit elsewhere.

No, my problem is that this kind of thing just doesn't really belong in a Tekken game in this form.  Sure, sex sells, I get that, everything will use sex appeal to push copies but Tekken was one of my go-to games when trying to explain to non-gamers that fighting games aren't all about just mindlessly punching the shit out of people.  Tekken is a game that does require some semblance of skill to be able to play well with learning combos, juggles and making sure your timing is right so you don't get your head kicked in by the other guy.  But now it feels to me that it's starting to slip into that stupid Dead or Alive mindset, where the only way to push sales isn't to have a good fighting system, but to just put lots of pixiliated women in swimsuits and if I'm trying to use this as an example of gaming being a good thing to any naysayers, this isn't helping!  Leave the bikini fan service shit to Dead or Alive and keep the focus on the fighting here in Tekken, thank you very much.

Maybe I'm over reacting here, I mean the game is still really good and the fighting engine is as solid as it ever was, but if this new direction does start to bring in new players, then I have a fear that future games will be dumbed down to accommodate the newer audience, and that would be a shame.  We don't want Tekken turning into DOA basically.

But that's not my only problem here, right at the end of the trailer there is this!

So let's look carefully here.  4 playable fighters, sure that's fine.  Big Bikini Bundle...don't like the direction your taking Tekken here but OK, I'm sure there are many people who will like it. Snoop Dog Stage?  FUCK. OFF. with your Snoop Dog stage, now you're literally pulling anything you can out of your ass to make this game sell.  Is Namco Bandai so worried about sells of Tekken Tag 2 that they start having to pander to people who like rap music?!  What place does Snoop Dog have in a Tekken Game?  Also, if he has a stage, does that mean the game is going to have Snoop Dog's shitty rap music in there too?! Fuck THAT!  I'm not anti-rap, but Snoop Dog is just garbage.  Why don't they focus on making the home version of the game even better for all the loyal fans that have been buying this shit for years by giving us more features to make it seriously competitive or something?  We suffered through Tekken 4, we don't deserve this shit now! 

The arcade version looks really good, but I have concerns for whats to come...