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Indestructible_Tidus My
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Ok..
Start out with a kung fu movie.
The hero of the story might be good at kung fu. Or, the complete opposite, the movie might be about learning kung fu. Looking to different martial arts. The Karate Kid was/is about a kid learning a martial art.
So it is impossible to say, the hero of a kung fu movie knows kung fu.
I think I can say that the hero will use kung fu at some point in the movie.
Now, how does this fit in with a video game? Games like Diablo 2 involve learning battle skills throughout the game. So it’s a proven concept.
In games like streetfighter 3, the game commences with everyone already knowing how to fight.
So in games and movies, the topic can be fighting, or learning how to fight then fighting. If theres no fighting, then I don’t think it can be a Kung Fu Movie or Game.
Ok. Why Kung Fu of all the martial arts. For some reason, Ninjutsu and Kung Fu make the best martial arts movies. And there is the occasional Samurai, or Boxing.
What happened to Karate, Sumo wrestling, Tae Kwon Doe,
Jujutsu?
They may appear occasionally, but, kung-fu and ninjutsu are entire genre’s.
Ok Ok.. Bruce Lee. He is why Kung Fu is a movie genre. But, whats the fascination with Ninjutsu? Where did that genre come from?
I think that more japanese movies about samurais reach Australia, than japanese movies about ninjas. I think mabye it’s a hollywood thing. America and the phillipines are masters of the ninjutsu film genre.
Now back to games.
There was a game called KungFu early in the days of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). And speaking of NES, I must recall Technos Japan who were responsible for the Double Dragon phenomenon.
As well as Double Dragon, Technos did the not-so-well known Kunio Kun games about Nekketsu High School. From the Nekketsu High series of games, emerged the ingenious Dodgeball game genre.
As well as fire dodgeball, even the battle-mech’s have had a game of it in Gundam Dodgeball. This idea of taking a high-school sport and making a cool game.
The creators of South Park obviously see how cool it is. There is the episode focusing on an international dodgeball competition. I think the China team were really good from memory.
Anyway, Technos made this game which was released in the west as Street Gangs or River City Ransom. It had a different name when released locally in Japan of course.
The graphics were the same type of characters found in dodgeball games. Basically these little characters appeared in all sorts of games.
Somehow these games were really fun, played well.. didn’t have issues with flicker or anything, good game mechanics, responded quickly to player input. So in the midst of games that struggled occasionally with some issues. Most people who played River City Ransom (Street Gangs) look back on it with a sense of awe.
Screenshots do the game harm rather than any justice. It was 8 bit graphics.. I don’t think screenshots alone could sell any games from the 8bit era. At least not these days.
Ok.. so this suggests that graphics aren’t critical/pivotal to a “good” game.
Super mario brothers on NES, admiteddly not the first appearance of mario. But it was a real milestone for the character. The NES performed the scrolling perfectly, worth mentioning here that Id Software offered their PC mario engine to nintendo, who declined for some reason.
Back then, I wonder if Nintendo knew that Id was to become one of the most influential game developers ever. Certainly Id released Wolfenstein and Doom on the SNES, but there was never any trace of a 2d game like commander keen. Different type of game. Heh heh.
Yes, Nintendo liked the real action Id had to offer. Not the , mario clone?, commander keen. Oh yeah, he had a pogo stick. A feature to crop up in DuckTales on the NES. Only the designers of the time could comment on these issues, whether it’s a coincedence.
Streetfighter 1 didn’t attract much attention. Streetfighter 2, however, landed everywhere in arcade machine form. The sprites were HUGE. Compared with the other things on offer. But noone has found a better use for large sprites since then. Kinda odd really.
I reckon that it took some hard technical work to get those suckers to work on the SNES. The price was extortionate.. $150 for the SNES Streetfighter 2 turbo cartridge.. Indeed, despite inflation game prices are dropping a lot. You can’t pat that much for a Playstation 2 Game, no matter how hard you try.
Fighter-maker, software for creating a fighting game emerged, possibly around 1995.
Elecbyte, using Allegro and DJGPP created a freeware shooting game engine, which evolved into a fighting game engine, named mysteriously as MUGEN. If you search for just this term, of course, you can find sports car stuff of the same name.
Anyway.. Elecbyte came and went. They made a linux version of MUGEN, but ultimately they have dissapeared from existence. Where are they now? What are they doing?
Who can say? Who cares? Well I think a lot of people are wondering. They did leave their imprint on the web. Lots and lots of characters have been created for MUGEN.
Or.. using some insight here, mabye, someone sent them a serious email warning to stop supplying software tools for taking characters from video games, and putting them in mugen. That aspect is kindof a shame. But, people don’t really have the energy to make lots of wonderful original fighting game characters, especially in a fighting game engine, modelled on existing fighting game engines.
Now I’m being somewhat hypocritical here. The fighting game I’m working on has a character editor that you can take some existing pictures and add the logic. I guess that’s the idea, and I guess I got the idea from MUGEN. Anyway, I removed my kenshin and megaman characters from the beta version of the game, in an attempt to avoid some of the copyright flack.
So eventually it comes to.. if people wanted to be game developers they would have their heads deep into books, and hacking away at all this stuff.
Joe Bloggs doesn’t want to sit down and spend months slaving away at a game character for some stupid game making software. Perhaps its safe to make sprites. I’ll concede that. Bitmap files with appropriate background colours, are a portable resource that won’t rely on a single game engine to be useful.
Character logic however, is dependant from game engine to game engine.
It might be nice if the way a game character behaved could be stored in a portable format that could be understood by different game engines.
Seems like a nice idea for a computer language. My fighting game takes a few steps in that direction, but its hardly a “portable computer language.” Hopefully it gets closer to the goal.
Modelling things like a kick or a punch, involves the frames of animation, as well as the movement of the character, and changes in its state. I think that sums it up.
Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Streetfighter EX, Rival Schools…
The 3d fighting games. Theres been a lot of cool stuff in some of these games.
Tekken takes the graphics to a really high place.
Rival Schools has some great general moves, like side stepping and recovering from falls and all sorts of things.
Personally, I like 2d. 3d add’s so many complications and in the end its just visual appeal. No, 3d can allow for exploration of much more compelling virtual worlds.
I still think that there is a lot of potential left in 2d.
Macromedia Flash has provided a highly efficient format for interactive animated 2d media. Flash isnt designed to deal with full motion video. But it is great for moving a single image around to do various crazy things. You could have a tiny file in .swf format of a ball bouncing all around.
