The Street Fighter Joke is old and 16th of Thrimidge '14

Street Fighter Syndrome

(Original Posting on my Gaming Blog)

The world of video game journalism thrives on the ability for the "journalists" to be snarky and inject humor into their journalism, that's just the state of things.  One of the ongoing and longest running jokes is about Street Fighter and its numerous editions over the years.  Its an easy joke, and somehow gives the journalist "cred" to say it, with bonus points if they actually think they are the first to make the joke(it is a 20 year old joke).  I feel like I have to explain why it makes sense to have updates and iterations to Street Fighter, and indeed other fighting games.

Looking at the select screen in Street Fighter IV's later iterations can be daunting, look at the pure number of fighters.  Old players like me had the benefit of learning new characters as they were created.  Instead of learning 50 characters, we got to learn the first 8 in 1991.  Then every couple of years 4 new characters came.  While technique, timing and game change, the way to play each of these characters have stayed consistent.  Still, this is unfair for new players to be expected to know how they all work.  The #1 way to be better at fighting games is to know your opponent, know what to expect from the character.  Because Street Fighter IV came out in 2008, we have had 6+ years to get better at it.  If you spent a few months getting better at it in 2008, it'll only take a little time in 2014 to get your bearings.

Small iterations are genius in another way; there's no reason to not upgrade.  Besides being cheap(less than $5 a month after release sometimes), the updates tweak and add only a handful of characters.  Since it is the same game, people don't reject it as if their old favorite game was abandoned.  They move in, feel comfortable and suddenly there's zero reason to stick back in the old version.  You do not want to split your player base, you want that arcade(online or off) filled with players.  You don't want to bring out a sequel if the older one is still king, you'll just eat your own profit.  Its just a simple truth that creating a brand new fighting experience every year, or even every other year, just is not good business for fighting game developers.  It would also suck pretty badly for the players as well.  So yea, its an easy jab to make, being snarky and "clever" making the "I'll wait for Street Fighter Omega Awesome Dash update 12", but you're really just showing idiocy, a small mind, and the lack of knowledge in your field to create original and even topical humor.

16th of Thrimidge, 2014

I listened to ACDC's Flick of the Switch a few times now and actually found it "not bad".    Lots of in band troubles came along.  Brian Johnson had big family problems, Malcolm and Phil had lots of drug and alcohol problems, it was the era of the band trying to cope with super stardom.  They lost having Mutt Lange produce albums and so decided to do it all themselves and try and recapture their early days.  There are problems, don't get me wrong... the lyrics are... you get a sentence or two and then 3 minutes of repeating the chorus... rather short choruses that repeat, but the music is solid.  Stand outs?  Well there's not much to really stand out, but different sounding songs include Power Rising, Landslide, and Bedlam in Belgium.  Landslide is ALMOST amazing. The album is well produced, and I just don't see how people hound on it so much.  It still very much fits into the era no matter how the band intended it to turn out, its hard arena rock, not classic rockabilly like their first albums.

Smacked a wasp yesterday that was on my ceiling, but I never found the body.  Well, I found it, or rather it explored out the morning after.  I was watching Dogs 101 because I'm a dog person, and of course it made me think "I should probably give my dog some attention".  She was asleep and lying on the floor so I moved over to make sure she was warm and about 2 inches from her head was the wasp.  Apparently it no longer could fly but it was crawling and looking spry.  I grabbed a near by shirt(my dog likes sleeping on the shirts I wore the day before) and pinched it up.  This wasp already proved it was resilient, so I went outside and wiggled the shirt until it fell out,  Sure enough it was alive and beating its wings trying to fly.

Gerard Butler seems to have come to his senses and backed out of the horrible Point Break re-make that is trying to get made.  When he signed a contract to participate it gave the project wings that it should not have gotten.  I can't believe people do not see this as a bad idea.  The director all but said "we take the name of the film, we take the name of the characters, and we make our own film" and so he's no stranger to leveraging bullshit reasons to getting things press.  He's got a movie he wants to make and no one will fund it, so he's trying every underhanded technique to get that movie made.  I'm hoping even more people see through the bullshit and don't let this happen.  I'm no fanboy of Point Break, but I'm strongly against people using other people's work to leverage their own.