Bang The Machine

riiv writes "I saw the premiere of Bang The Machine tonight at SXSW 2002. The film is a documentary of the Street Fighter tournament scene. There's another screening March 15 so if you are near the Austin area, it is your moral obligation to watch it. I asked director Tamara Katepoo if they had a distributor lined up, unfortunely they don't. If you're looking for a film to distribute please get in touch with the film creators. The movie rocked and validated my wasted life ever since the purchase of Street Fighter 2 Japanese for SNES."

Comments

The SF scene

[infiniti99]

Check out Shoryuken.com, for the latest information (tournaments/ranking) on the SF scene, as well as combo videos and recorded tournament matches.

Currently, the most popular games are Capcom vs SNK 2 and Marvel vs Capcom 2. I am a big fan of the latter, and I often play at Southern Hills Golfland. The players there are incredible, and on the weekends the place is completely packed (15 minute wait for a game sometimes). I played in the MvC2 tourney last month, but lost first round. :)

Another good movie at SXSW

[gazuga]

If you're gonna be around Austin, check out "Prizewhores" -- it's a documentary about all those people who go around to radio promos just for all the free stuff. It's pretty interesting. Made in Austin too.

Disclaimer: I'm not at all involved with the film, I just find it kind of funny. I guess it's a more profitable way to waste one's time rather than playing SF ;)

--gaz

Re:Can'tt beat the original

[Tofuhead]

I wouldn't worry about 2-D fighters going anywhere. Guilty Gear and Capcom vs. SNK are VERY popular, as are the Marvel line of games (though they're not my cup of tea). CvS2 is coming to GameCube from Dreamcast and PS2, and CvS3 is in the works. SNK's KOF franchise is alive, and in the hands of new developers in Korea. And if you ever get nostalgic for the gameplay, you can always seek out older games for Sega Saturn, NeoGeo, and Capcom arcade boards that weren't in wide release here in the U.S., like Warzard/Red Earth. You only really got 2-D goodness from Capcom and SNK anyway, though smaller challengers like Sammy have come up with interesting efforts.

MK is a stereotypically gauche American game series. I played it with friends, but that's it. I'd never knock anyone who played it, but I didn't like it.

< tofuhead >

movie trailer

[Pondy]

For those who are interested, there's a short trailer for the movie on File Planet. There's also an interviewwith Peter Kang,one of the producers, on Shoryuken.com. We got a press DVD this weekend which has 4 more teaser video clips. We'll planning on capturing them and putting them up on SRK in the next few days.

ShoRyuKen.com's upcoming Evolution2002 Internation

[*BBC*PipTigger]

SRK is putting on an International Tournament! Check out http://evolution.shoryuken.com/

The best fighters from every continent are coming to LA this summer to battle. My friend (Sirlin) did a lot of the narration for Bang The Machine && we're working to make Evol2k2 great this year (it was called B5 last year). Please show up to compete or spectate. TTFN.

e v o l u t i o n
International Fighting Game Championships

August 9 - 11 :: UCLA Ackerman Union

This year, SRK's national leaves the warm nest of Folsom, CA., to take the action downtown. It's Los Angeles, CA, and the going has never been rougher. Last year's event showed that the only guarantee is that there ARE no guarantees in these events. With a powered-up Japanese contingent and new faces from around the world, this will be the premier event of the North American calendar. From rickshaw to junk, from the junk to a trunk, from your moped to MOPAR, find a way to get there. Start planning NOW to catch all the action and take your place alongside the true world warriors.

This is where the legends are born. Old-school? New-school? Doesn't t matter. It's time to put the hype down, and your fists up. Because Evolution is all about the basics: Fight. Survive. Win.

SF2 in EGM and a Bit of SF2 History

[Rahoule]

Does anyone remember all the fuss Electronic Gaming Monthly (or EGM) made over the game? They had nonstop coverage of SF2 in all their issues (and even in their spinoff, EGM^2) from 1992 to 1995!

I've got a box with a whole load of EGMs from that era right beside me now. SF2 was featured prominently in a lot of the issues, and whenever any version of the game was review, it always got high marks (with an exception, below). Granted, it deserved them at first (until it was obvious that Capcom was trying to milk the game too hard).

As a quick sidenote, there were five SF2 games:

1. the original (subtitled The World Warrior), released in early 1991. Play as one of eight fighters, beat the other seven, then fight the "mysterious Grand Masters", as the manual called them (the boss characters). You could play against another player, but the two of you couldn't pick the same character.
2. the Champion Edition, an upgrade released in March 1992 which allowed you to play as the four boss ("Grand Master") characters previously reserved only for computer use (Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison), allowed both characters to select the same character, and added various minor tweaks to the characters' abilities
3. the Turbo Hyper Fighting edition, released in December 1992, which was basically a patch for the Champion Edition which sped up the game by about 20% and attempted to even out the fighters' abilities. This was released partially in response to the number of unauthorized ("pirate") hacks circulating for the Champion Edition which allowed midair fireballs, etc.
4. Super Street Fighter II, released in September 1993, which featured improved backgrounds, reorchestrated stereophonic music (previous versions were mono), and added four new characters ("the New Challengers"): Fei Long, Cammy, Dee Jay, and Thunder Hawk (T. Hawk). This version was criticized because the faster gameplay from Turbo Hyper Fighting was eliminated (to "allow for more technique"), and there was very little in the new technique added. This also marked the transition for the game from the Capcom's CPS1 arcade system to the newer CPS2 system. Capcom also released some sort of networking kit which allowed an arcade owner to link four of the machines together for eight-player "tournament battles".
5. Super Street Fighter II Turbo, released in early- to mid-1994, the final upgrade and probably the best. This version introduced vast amounts of new technique and new moves to the game, such as ability to "juggle" your opponent by hitting them multiple times in the air before they fall (like in Mortal Kombat), the ability to "soften" throws, and "Super" moves, which were extremely powerful special attacks which could be executed only after filling one's super power meter (separate from the life meters at the top of the screen). True to its "Turbo" name, this version restored the faster gameplay from Turbo Hyper Fighting, but its most celebrated addition was the addition of a hidden boss character named "Akuma" in the English version, or "Gouki" (pronounced "Goki") in the Japanese version. This character may appear to fight you at the end of the game if you played well enough. The exact method to reach Akuma was never clearly documented and apparently was different between the various home versions (PC, 3DO, etc.).

I guess that wasn't a "quick" sidenote. Anyway, as you can see, except for perhaps the last version, each upgrade was only incremental in nature. This was probably done to keep the game fresh (apparently) and keep in the pages of game magazines and on the minds of game players. Capcom also released home versions of the games for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (Megadrive in Europe and Japan). They first released a port of the original World Warrior game for the Super Nintendo in July 1992. In September and October 1993, they released a combination Turbo Hyper Fighting/Champion Edition for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. And in July 1994 (I think), they released Super Street Fighter II for both systems.

The first two releases of the game (World Warrior and Turbo) got high marks in all game magazines, but with Super, EGM broke ranks. EGM had been one of the biggest cheerleaders of SF2, as I mentioned above, but by this point, they finally started to see the continuous upgrades for what they were, and gave the home versions of Super marks like 6/10 and 7/10. This greatly upset Capcom, and EGM's editors had some interesting things to say about this, but I don't have time to retype their interesting editorials or drag out my scanner and OCR program.

If you didn't quite understand that, let me clarify here, since it's late at night and I can't be bothered to edit. Capcom released three home versions of the game -- now if you're a kid who got your parents to buy the original, and even the second version, could you get them to buy the third? And why bother, because, when you look at the release dates, the port of Super (the 4th arcade version) was release around the same time as the arcade release of Super Turbo (the 5th arcade version). Furthermore, Super Turbo added loads more technique not present in Super! Anyway, Capcom got into some financial trouble for this and had a lot of unsold Super cartridges for the Super NES and Genesis. Yes, there were home versions of Super Turbo for the PC and 3DO, but not the Super NES and Genesis, and this is where most of the money in home versions of arcade games was at the time.

I thought all the incremental upgrading was silly, myself, but I did plunk quarters into all five versions, and I played all three home console versions (in rental form), so Capcom made money off me with the game in some form. I left the video game scene in 1995, so I missed out on Alpha, Alpha 2, Alpha 2 Gold, Alpha 3, etc. I did recall seeing a Street Fighter 3 machine once, I think around 1997 or 1998. It was just labelled "THREE" which was pretty funny, because once it was clear what Capcom was up to with all the incremental upgrades of SF2, people would make jokes that Capcom couldn't count to three.

Anyway, despite that criticism of it, I still must say that Street Fighter II was truly a landmark game, not only because it was incredibly fun to play, but also because it revived a slumping arcade industry (at the time) and gave game companies everywhere a whole new format to copy! Remember all the SNK Neo-Geo fighting games?

If I ever see a "Top 20 Games of All Time" list with Street Fighter II not in the top five or (gasp!) not listed, in my eyes, the purveyor of said list has instantly lost all credibility!

I'm sorry if all of that was poorly written or didn't make much sense, but I'm tired and want to go to bed now. Thank you for reading.

Oh, and by the way, I never thought much of Chun Li. She never seemed very cute or very strong, and Cammy, the second female character who appeared in Super, was fucking ugly. Blecch.