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tgaoe · 7 years ago

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“do you love me?” “only partly”

-a review of the Aubrey and the Three Amigos tour opener in Kansas City-

In the late 90s, in my early teens, I began attending concerts, almost exclusively Christian rock bands. Music, bands, and seeing bands play music, dominated my life. In the days, weeks, months leading up to an anticipated show, after school, before my parents got home, I would play a band’s CD—a live one if available—loud, and “perform” it in full alone in my room with a flashlight for a microphone, lip-synching, giving shout-outs to imagined fans, dancing around maniacally until pouring sweat. Last Sunday at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, for the 15,000 people attending the twice-postponed first date of a massive world tour, pop-rap superstar Drake Aubrey Graham—a grown man five months younger than me—did the exact same thing. Last Sunday night, I watched Drake do over an hour of Drake karaoke. It was adorable. It was Drake at his Drakiest, coasting on charm, giving minimal effort, getting away with it.

I love Drake. I love more Drake songs than I love songs by any other artist, by far. My meticulous Drake playlist, post-Scorpion, contains 96 tracks and lasts six hours and 32 minutes. If statistics equaled favoritism then Drake would be my all-time favorite artist. That said, Drake would likely not even make a list of my twenty favorite rappers, let alone general artists. But I love Drake still, and I think about him and enjoy his music disproportionately to how much the man and his work actually mean to me.

I love Drake because he, or rather the character he plays—who is not actually a character, but is really him—is simple, but in a complicated meta way that circles around and in on itself. See, Drake is dork. He presents as hard, cool, svelte, smooth, but he knows he is actually a dork, we know he is actually a dork, we know he knows he is actually a dork, and he knows we know he knows he is actually a dork, and all of us together have this tacit agreement to accept this false narrative, to enjoy it because doing so validates the way we sing along in our cars alone to songs to which we cannot relate at all. Drake’s existence as a pop star makes it okay, in theory, for me, a 32-year-old white man who teaches elementary school—the dorkiest of dorks, to rap along with Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” in my car on the way home from school, to pretend to be Cube, as long as I leave out certain words when I do it. Drake makes us feel like this is okay to do because it is what he does on the most massive scale. Drake is a theater kid playing a famous rapper, who also just happened to become the most famous rapper.

Drake’s show on Sunday manifested this idea. Tickets cost as much as $250. Mine cost $151.62 after convenience fees. This single performance netted Drake an estimated $2.25 million—I repeat, two million two hundred and fifty American dollars--and yet this man had the gall to perform without a band, without even a visible DJ. It was just Aubrey out there onstage—except during his three—THREE—extended breaks over the 100 minute set, one of which ate up a full 20 minutes while openers Migos sleepwalked through a surprise encore featuring several more of their dreary triplet trap tunes, sapping the energy from the arena until Drake finally, finally reemerged to begin “Blue Tint,” without Future of course. Well, Future’s voice was there, on recording, while Drake shouted over it.

Drake’s voice was also present on the backing recordings. In fact, earlier I posited the notion the evening was Drake doing Drake karaoke. That was not technically accurate. Karaoke tracks exclude missing lead vocals to make room for the amateurs’ interpretations. What Drake did on Sunday was more akin to what I used to do in my bedroom as a teenager, belting along with CDs. The backing tracks at this show were not backing tracks at all. No, they were the original album tracks, with all Drake’s original recorded rapping intact. Drake would rap over his recorded self roughly 40% of the time. The other 60% he would emphasize certain words, talk to the crowd, dance around the massive stage, generally act as a hypeman for himself.

I have seen dozens of large-scale touring rap shows, and I have developed certain guidelines for what makes a good one. First, and most importantly, an arena-touring rapper needs a solid live band, even if that band plays along with backing tracks. Organic instrumentation makes shows feel raw, real, vital in the moment, like something could go wrong. Last year I saw Chance the Rapper play for a crowd of 40,000, and even though his voice was shot due presumably to an asthmatic episode, the show was fun and good because his band played the music right there onstage.

A real, talented DJ can also suffice as long as the rapper(s) also meet the second guideline I will get to. A DJ that visibly flips records and scratches and mixes in real time can fill the void of a live band. Run the Jewels did this both times I saw them, and they are a titanic live act. Many others have made this work for me as well; Eminem, Wiz Khalifa, and, to an extent, Kendrick Lamar, whose monumental roadshow last summer deserves its own multi-thousand-word writeup.

Second guideline: rappers need to rap live with minimal backing vocal tracks, and along with that they need to be the only vocalists onstage and also know how to use a microphone. I have seen so many rappers scream into their mics with no regard for how torturous doing so sounds to the audience, and have three anonymous buddies onstage doing the same thing. I saw Odd Future twice and they were absolutely disastrous, a cacophony so intolerable that I left their Coachella set before they allowed Frank Ocean his allotted two songs. In hindsight I regret this given what and who Frank became, but that is a digression.

Third, live rappers need to be consummate, energetic entertainers, need to at least seem like they are happy to be there rapping for you. The Migos, who opened for Drake, were the antithesis of this. They had a live DJ(✓), but they moped around the stage oblivious of the audience, like they were at the supermarket perusing tv dinners. I am happy to report, however, that Drake met this third expectation, that, by sheer force of Drakery, because of Drake’s inherent Drakeness, the absence of a live band and the extensive use of backing tracks did not much matter. Drake’s show by its very nature was an exception that proved those first two rules.

Drake live is dork supreme, the epitome of his metacharacter. He triumphs as the sole presence on a huge stage in the center of a hockey arena in front of 30,000 eyes, fully living out the teenage bedroom fantasy of performing on a huge stage in the center of a hockey arena in front of 30,000 eyes. That he barely bothered to actually rap is rendered charming by the fact that the Drake we know on record is absolutely the kind of person who would do that, and it is why we love him. Walking out of the show, rushing back to my car to beat the throngs so I could commence the three-hour night drive home, I had the most bizarre feeling: I was satisfied by a total lack of satisfaction.

An early highlight of Drake’s set was a surprising rendition of If You’re Reading This relative deep cut “Know Yourself.” When the beat cut out before the chorus, the tension hung in the air, and then that massive EDM-like drop hit and the pit crowd went wild, as did Drake, galloping across the stage like a madman. The feeling was electric, screaming along with thousands of other people, RUNNIN. THROUGH THE. SIX. WITH MY WOES.

I wish Drake had done more songs from that era. He played 40 songs, but only one or two each from his first four LPs. He sounded best on hard rap tracks—“Free Smoke,” “Energy,” “Gyalchester,” new classic “Nonstop”—and worst on anything that required him to sing, because apparently Drake cannot sing live, even with autotune, to nobody’s surprise. The only time he audibly sung came during an anemic cover of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” tacked onto the end of “Don’t Matter to Me,” naturally, and he sang it in a bizarre whisper. Drake cannot sing! Who knew!

Watching the crowd lose it for the hits was lovely, as was how Drake absorbed the love and fed it back to the crowd. He may have been acting—he was a professional actor first, after all—but Drake seemed genuinely surprised, or relieved perhaps, that the crowed enjoyed the show. He saved the monster radio jams for the backhalf of the show, the finale lead-up a suite of unimpeachable chart-toppers; “One Dance,” “Hotline Bling”—including the video’s doofy dancing, which wasn’t that different than the rest of Drake’s dancing, “Fake Love,” “Nice For What”—which may go down as Drake’s greatest pop song, and “In My Feelings.” Arranging those five songs in succession is such a vaunt, a reminder why we all paid so much to be there, why we stuck it out through an interminable hour of Migos.

And then came the fake closer, “I’m Upset.” Look, I love “I’m Upset.” It is hilarious, unintentionally—but maybe not? —and that makes it great. But “I’m Upset” is not a closer, even if everyone present assumes an encore or three is inevitable. Drake mugged his way through the grievance anthem, left the stage, and came back out a minute later to bid us goodnight with what I assume would be a couple more tracks.

The opening synth lines of “God’s Plan” kicked it. The crowd roared. Drake opened his arms in full Jesus Christ/Scott Stapp pose. I could see the finale in my mind. We would all sing along with this jubilant new classic—she say do you love me I tell her only partly I only love my bed and my momma I'm sorry, hahahaha so funny and perfect and petty, so Drake—and then that four-to-the-floor kick/snare would start, each and every one of us suddenly awash in a wave of euphoria as Drake sent us out the doors with “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” quite possibly the greatest pop song of the last decade, an ecstatic moment we would all remember forever, a story to share with our progeny when Drake wins his third Oscar twenty years from now.

But no.

That did not happen.

We got silly to “God’s Plan”—see Drake=God in this equation, and I guess this was church?—and then… the show ended.

Drake and/or his keepers made the confounding, inexcusable decision not to play “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” Of the $151.62 I spent on the ticket, I would say roughly $102. 35 was to see that one song. I do not understand this choice, even a little, especially during a set that featured 16 songs from Scorpion, a record with but four great songs—well, five if we ironically include “I’m Upset.” Okay, six because “Mob Ties” is stupid but a grower. Yet, Drake subbed any of 10 mediocre Scorpion cuts in place of “Hold On.” Come to think of it, he also did not play “Marvins Room.” Or “Passionfruit.” Or “Best I Ever Had,” “Shot For Me,” “Take Care,” “Furthest Thing,” “Legend,” “No Tellin’,” “Back to Back,” “Right Hand,” “Portland,” or “Blem.” Drake had the audacity to karaoke 40 of his own songs and not one of those songs was the song “Feel No Ways.” Hey, Drake, guess what. I’m upset. With you. About this. But not really. But kind of. Eh.

The truth. The truth is that I knew how this show would go, that Drake would lip-sync or not even bother to lip-sync. I knew I would not be satisfied, because satisfaction is not what Drake is for. I knew that Drake could not possibly play all 96 songs of his that I enjoy. I knew he would favor the more recent material because that material is what is getting him paid right now. I knew the cheapest t-shirts would cost $45. I knew that the Migos would suck. I knew all this, but I still chose to pay to be there. I almost always go to shows to be present during them, enjoy them as they’re happening. But with Drake it was different. I paid to be there, not so much to see Drake, but to have seen Drake, to have actively participated in the summer of the year 2018.

A couple nights ago my girlfriend and I were chatting with some her neighbors on their porch, enjoying chilly mason jar margaritas after a long day of oppressive humidity. The conversation inevitably drifted to the topic of recent concerts, as most conversations which include me tend to do since I am unable to speak with a modicum of clarity about much else. The neighbors’ seventh-grade daughter heard me mention that I had recently seen Drake. “Drake… the rapper?” she said, giving me an incredulous look. Rather than dispute this child’s narrow genre classification, I said something like yep, that’s the one. This is all to say, I am now a person who has seen Drake, envy of middle school girls everywhere.

#drake #aubrey and the three amigos tour

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Street Fighter 2 is one of the only games that truly deserve to be called "genre-defining" -- today, 25 years after SF2's release, we can see that practically every fighting game out there has adopted its core game design principles as industry-standard gospel, with only a few tweaks here and there to stand out from the crowd.

If you're the average consumer or dev, or even if you're an experienced fighting game competitor, you probably aren't all that familiar with all the games that have tried to make major changes to the fighting game template.

So, in celebration of SF2's 25th anniversary, I'm going to walk through some of the fascinating deviations and beautiful experiments that fighting game devs took to try and change SF2's fighting game formula. Studying these games may inspire you in your own designs, or may suggest ways to tinker with the paradigm you're currently wokring within.

I'm going to try to avoid the other well-known franchises (if you know Street Fighter, you probably also know Mortal Kombat and Tekken) and focus on the weird stuff... for education's sake!

A quick note about me: I've written a (free) book that teaches fighting game fundamentals using Street Fighter, as well as educational fighting game streams and videos, and I'm the community manager for a free-to-play PC fighting game currently in public technical alpha called Rising Thunder. You might also like my previous Gamasutra article, Street Fighter for Designers: Top 8 Lessons from Evo 2015.

Asuka 120% Burning Fest (Fill-in Cafe, 1994): Clash system and simplified inputs

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SF2 may have set the foundations for the 2D fighter genre, but there are several notable games that have poked and prodded at some of the genre's conventions while keeping a similar format.

Shoutouts to ex-Game Developer magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield for introducing me to Asuka 120% Burning Fest, a Japanese 2D fighter from the post-SF2 boom. Not only did it swap the standard martial-artists-from-around-the-world fighter cast with high school girls representing their various club activities (including the chemistry and biology clubs), but it also made two notable system changes.

One was the "clash system": in SF2, if two attacks collide simultaneously, both players take damage and go into hitstun, but in Asuka 120%, both characters will just go on into the next hit-phase of the move. The second was a significantly simplified input system -- pretty much everyone has the same special move codes, meaning that if you could perform one character's moves, you could perform all of them.

Combined, both systems made for a fascinating permutation of the SF2 standard. With the clash system, the number of hits in a move are relevant for determining who wins a clash -- and since the window to cancel a move into another move is fairly lax, players can clash across entire combo routes before one of them wins out and takes damage. All told, Asuka 120% does a lot with these relatively simple system tweaks to make a traditional 2D fighting game more accessible and less intimidating without feeling like a lesser SF2. The developers of Asuka 120% Burning Fest eventually went to Treasure, where they reused some of the core concepts in their fighting games.

Weaponlord (Visual Concepts, 1995): An online fighting game in '95

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Others have done good work unearthing Weaponlord's history as an interesting-but-ill-timed attempt by early American fighting game devs to challenge SF2's success, so if you want to know the whole story, check out the GameSpy interview with James Goddard and Dave Winstead, GameSpot's Forging Weaponlord, and the Hardcore Gaming 101 writeup.

From a modern game design perspective, the most notable contribution Weaponlord made to fighting games the active defense system called the "thrust block" -- a versatile parry that served as a high-risk, high-reward defensive option. This a relatively new innovation for the time, but more interesting to contemporary devs is this tidbit from the GameSpot interview with James Goddard, where he mentions that the thrust block was designed with zero-frame startup specifically as a concession to online play via the XBAND dialup peripheral.

That's right: A Super Nintendo game in 1995 was designed around internet play. Personally, as someone currently working on a fighting game built around online multiplayer over broadband, I can't imagine designing a 2D fighting game for ~250ms travel times, yet there they were, handling sync timing and tweaking frame data to make the game playable over a modem. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that Goddard is currently design director on Killer Instinct for Microsoft, a game which has been lauded in core fighting game circles for having better-than-average netcode.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (Capcom, 2000): The best team fighter

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Capcom had found plenty of success doing crossover fighting games during the late '90s, as their concurrent work on Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, and various licensed Marvel fighting games gave them plenty of readily reusable assets to keep the games coming. This peaked with Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, a three-on-three tag match slugfest so chaotic that even genre veterans could barely parse what is happening on screen at any given time.

Capcom's earlier crossover games (X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel vs. Capcom) had treated tag-team two-on-twos much like a similar pro wrestling match: You had one character on the field responding to your controls, and certain moves would allow you to tag them in, summon them for a brief assist attack, or perform a joint hyper combo together. MvC2 largely kept the same basic structure, but the addition of a third team member shifted the emphasis toward developing teams that synergized effectively between the three.

The ideal MvC2 team must take into account how well any given character can use the other two assists; how much super meter the team needs to build for each character to do its job, and how long it'll take to generate that meter before the opponent does; how well the team can recover from opponent-inflicted forced tag-outs (called "snapbacks"); and several other factors before even considering how effective the player is at controlling any of their characters individually.

It's a strange testament to MvC2's design that even though competitive play revolves around roughly 1/5th of the 56-character cast, the dozens of permutations available with just those characters are enough to have kept the game interesting for over a decade. The net effect is that MvC2, by virtue of its three-on-three format, has gotten the closest out of any fighting game to a compelling competitive 'build-your-own-character' mode.

Guilty Gear (Arc System Works, 1998): The 2D fighter for people who love 2D fighters

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As Guilty Gear is still very much alive and kicking, I'll keep this brief. With GG and its sister series BlazBlue, Arc System Works has forgotten more about traditional 2D fighting games than most studios will ever begin to explore. Each GG character is practically its own fighting game at this point, often with resources and mechanics that exist only for that specific character -- and they're bound together by a set of core shared systems and mechanics that would be enough to populate five Street Fighters. If you're ever trying to design a character for pretty much anything, it's worth your time to dig through the GG library, because ASW probably did something like that way before you did.

Highlights include: Bridget, a young boy dressed as a nun who fights with a yo-yo that must be carefully placed and moved across the screen; Zato-1, a blind assassin who fights by summoning his shadow (which responds to the player's joystick inputs and button releases, meaning the player must simultaneously handle two characters with one controller, and time their button presses and releases appropriately); Venom, another assassin who lays pool balls across the screen to create intricate setups off their chain collisions; and most recently, Jack-O, whose minion-summoning mechanics draw more from a MOBA than a fighting game.

Bushido Blade (Light Weight, 1997): Real-enough samurai duels

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One frequent criticism of traditional fighting games is that they don't look or feel like a real fight does, leading a handful of developers to build games aiming for a more realistic experience without getting into the sporty nature of a Fight Night or UFC game.

When I put the call out on Twitter for suggestions for this list, Bushido Blade was hands-down the most frequent response. Instead of street fighting, Bushido Blade aimed to recreate the thrill of a samurai duel by breaking out from the 2D plane into free-roaming 3D environments and designing a realistic damage system; you could block or parry, but if you ate a clean hit it was either going to injure a limb or kill you outright.

When most fighting games were going for more systems, more characters, more stylized graphics, more combos, and generally digging itself deeper in a hole of genre esoterica, Bushido Blade felt simple and clean. Interestingly enough, its legacy is best felt not in any major triple-A fighting game, but in indie games Nidhogg and Divekick.

Fighters Destiny (Genki, 1998): Point-sparring in a fighting game

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Of all the core design elements to mess with, Fighters Destiny arguably picked the most-core element to change. Rather than determine a victor using health bars, Fighters Destiny implemented a point system inspired somewhat by competitive karate, where players would fight until one scored a point by inflicting a ring out, knockdown, or other specific conditions, at which point the action would reset and the fight would resume.

Fighters Destiny certainly didn't leave any lasting impacts on the genre overall, but it's certainly an experiment worth considering further. Contemporary fighting games built around life meters and the best-two-of-three rounds system make it easy to snowball early advantages into a victory, because players have to earn a mid-round reset by doing something to get the opponent off their back and into a neutral state, at which point the defending player is forced to play aggressively and make bigger bets to win the round from a life deficit. With the point sparring model, you get to emphasize the players' jousting for superiority from a neutral state over their ability to snowball a small advantage into a bigger one, leading to more exciting matches for competitors and spectators alike.

Buriki One: World Grapple Tournament '99 in Tokyo (SNK, 1999): 2D MMA

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Buriki One is a curious one. Where SNK's core lay in their 2D fighter pantheon (King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, among others), Buriki One was an attempt to tie the outlandish characters of a typical fighting game into a game that felt more like Pride, the Japanese mixed martial arts event promotion that swept the country in the late '90s and early 2000s. (Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting actually shows up as a playable character!)

What we end up with in Buriki One is a game that looks like a sports-fighting game, like any pro wrestling, boxing, or MMA game, but plays on a 2D plane. Part of this change entailed swapping the attack controls to the joystick (up for a heavy, slow attack, down for a quick, light attack, and toward for a medium attack) and the movement controls to two buttons that move your fighter left or right.

Given the realistic setting, this actually makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you think of Buriki One as an attempt to convert Pride fans to fighting games. If your goal is to simplify a core fighting game experience, it makes sense to try focusing less on the importance of positioning in a 2D plane, which is often hard for new players to learn and understand, and more on interactions between the different attacks.

Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993): Welcome to the third dimension...kind of

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Bringing fighting games to the third dimension is not a trivial task, particularly because the established genre conventions call for the arcade-standard eight-way joystick and buttons to be used for both inputting move codes and navigating space. Once you've solved those problems, though, you still kind of need to figure out how to use the third dimension to, well, add depth to the actual fighting experience.

Sega's Virtua Fighter was the first fighting game to try 3D -- though when it comes to the actual gameplay, the devs kept it to fighting in a 2D plane until Virtua Fighter 3 introduced the sidestep mechanic to the series. VF's biggest contribution to the genre was arguably designing movesets around three buttons (punch, kick, and block) and a simpler set of motions -- usually combinations of single-direction inputs and button presses, often used in preset chains.

This made learning a character's moveset less about complicated joystick execution and more about memorizing a wider set of context-specific moves, which later turned out to be useful for freeing up the joystick so players could use it to more easily navigate a 3D space. Also, Virtua Fighter added ring-outs as another win condition; knocking your opponent off the platform immediately wins you the round.

Battle Arena Toshinden (Tamsoft, 1995): Sidestepping

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Battle Arena Toshinden was another one of the early 3D fighting games -- and that's usually the main thing people remember it for. However, it is generally recognized as the first fighting game to work in all three dimensions via the sidestep mechanic, where players can use the L and R shoulder buttons to dodge projectiles without sacrificing position. Most 3D fighting games now use different permutations of a sidestep, though DreamFactory's Tobal No. 1 was notable for using more of a free-roam style navigation system.

Soul Calibur (Namco, 1999): Full movement with eight-way run

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Namco had made a splash in 3D fighting games with both Tekken and Soul Edge, but the difference between the two games was mostly thematic (contemporary martial arts vs. fantasy weapon fighting) until its sequel Soul Calibur. Soul Calibur was arguably one of the first games to truly embrace all three dimensions; in addition to the simple sidestep, many attacks often included Z-axis movement as part of the animation, and players could actually shift into an eight-way-run movement stance that gave you access to a different subset of moves. The end result was that Soul Calibur felt like an excellent compromise between the samurai fantasy of Bushido Blade's free-roaming duels and a traditional fighting game.

Cyber Troopers Virtual-On (Sega, 1995): Mobility in sustained projectile fights

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When we look back at the fighting game canon, one thing stands out about SF2 and its numerous sequels: Projectile attacks are very, very important. Indeed, most of the subsequent Street Fighter series are largely defined by the systems they implement in order to avoid non-stop douken-fests. However, many later games decided to double down on projectiles, space control, and precision movement as the focal point of a one-on-one duel while feeling closer in spirit to a classic fighting game than, say, a first-person shooter.

At first glance, Virtual-On doesn't look like it has much in common with a classic fighting game; yes, it is one-on-one and uses health meters, but it's about robots dashing around in an arena blowing each other up, not people punching each other in the face. Spend some time with any of the Virtual-On games, though, and you'll find that it fits in far better with fighting games than any other genre. It doesn't emphasize aiming or weapon selection enough to feel like a shooter, nor is it about tactical positioning and attrition like a typical mech or tank sim.

Instead, the game is about attacking to force your opponent to dodge by dashing or jumping, then punishing your opponent for dashing or jumping while they're trying to counter attack and force you to move. When it comes down to it, Virtual-On is basically the Ryu fireball/Dragon Punch trap expanded into a 3D robot dueling game.

Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (Tasogare Frontier / Team Shanghai Alice, 2004): Bullet hell 2D fighter

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In 2004, Japanese doujin devs took bullet hell series Touhou into 2D fighter-land with Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (commonly abbreviated as IaMP). While the game appears to resemble any other anime-styled fighting game, it's actually built largely around projectile attacks (hence the bullet hell roots) and the "graze" mechanic, where most projectiles can be dashed through -- meaning that the traditional attack-block-throw triangle in fighting games is instead largely replaced by ranged attacks, mobility, and physical attacks.

Senko no Ronde (G.rev, 2005): Even more bullet-hell than IaMP

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If IaMP and Virtual-On gently push projectile combat to the center of the game, Senko no Ronde goes full-on bullet hell, complete with a change in perspective to a flat top-down 2D plane and the ability to temporarily transform your robot fighter into a giant boss form. The combat mechanics draw from a similar pool as Virtual-On, as well -- it's largely about using projectiles to force movement to open up more opportunities for damage.

It's worth noting that lots of other games have played in this space, to varying degrees: Taito's Psychic Force, Sunsoft's Astra Superstars, the Dragon Ball Z games by Dimps, and the Naruto: Clash of Ninja games by Eighting are some of the more notable examples.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen (Treasure, 1994): Four players, two layers

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One-on-one is great, but what happens when we try to add more players to the party? These games open up the action to more players, which introduces control challenges, since you no longer can rely on the opponent-relative movement scheme that traditional fighting games use.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen was another one of those Treasure games that was way better than anyone ever expects from licensed anime games -- unfortunately, since Yuu Yuu Hakusho didn't have a whole lot of clout in the U.S. at the time, we never got it here. The game was built around two-to-four-player combat, which they pulled off by borrowing Fatal Fury's two-layer stage design -- players can hop between a foreground plane and a background plane. Of course, this gets a bit tricky if you're working in the SF2 template.

Since Yuu Yuu Hakusho was designed for the Genesis, Treasure had to build a compelling fighting game around a three-button controller (which was more than Capcom was able to do; the Street Fighter II: Championship Edition release on the Genesis was meant to use a special six-button controller, and if you had a three-button controller you had to press the Start button to alternate between punches and kicks). They started by opening up the movement system so you could freely look in either direction, and simplified the input codes to only use down and forward in special moves, meaning that players didn't have to worry about facing the wrong direction in the process of executing a special move. Also, the three buttons were mapped to Light Attack, Heavy Attack, and Guard -- after all, SF2's hold-back-to-block system doesn't really make sense if you have an opponent on both sides of you.

The end result is a game that feels much better than you'd expect a four-player SF2 to feel. Fortunately, it wasn't just a one-off; the core design work was later recalled in Treasure's Bleach DS games, which are also excellent and worth checking out.

Super Smash Brothers (HAL Laboratory, 1999): A platforming fighting game

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In 2016, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournaments are routinely topping the Twitch stream charts, so it can be easy to forget that Smash's status as a fighting game was contested for a long, long time. After all, changing the static 2D box arena out for levels that feel more like the original Mario Bros. and losing the health bars for the damage percentage mechanic essentially pull out two design elements so core to fighting games most players never even thought to question them.

It's fair to say that the standard four-player party mode, with items aplenty and stages that kill you rather often, don't really feel consistent or rigorous enough to encourage players to play it competitively. That's why the truly defining innovation in Smash isn't the levels, or the movement, or the simplified controls -- it's the way the team created a play space that is rich enough to sustain both party play and serious competition, and made the options available for the players to determine for themselves what they want out of it. Honestly, Smash wasn't a fighting game until the players made it a fighting game.

Power Stone (Capcom, 1999): Like Smash in 3D

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I'd be remiss in including Smash in this list and not also giving Capcom's Power Stone a shoutout; it was another party fighting game with items, engaging levels, and simplified inputs, but unlike Smash, it featured a free-roaming 3D arena. While it's certainly fun to hop around the various levels beating up your buddies, the tradeoff to free-roaming 3D in a party fighter is that the devs relied on a rather high level of auto-targeting in the attacks, which kind of diluted the player's feeling of mastery after a certain point.

Rakugaki Showtime (Treasure, 1999): If dodgeball was a fighting game

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Shoutouts to Ian Adams for pointing me in the direction of an interesting, obscure contender for the party fighter throne: Rakugaki Showtime, by Treasure. Like Power Stone, it takes place in an open 3D arena, but the combat is built more around projectiles, leading to a game that feels like dodgeball without the center dividing line. Play it to admire the scribbly, sketchy aesthetic and see how Treasure used targeting lines to visualize aiming projectiles in a 3D space.

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Patrick Miller is a writer, fighter, and community manager for Rising Thunder. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. Or just sign up for his monthly mailing list.

Special thanks to Brandon Sheffield, Ian Adams, Andres Velasco y Coll, Bellreisa, Chris Pruett, Luis Garcia, and everyone else who suggested not-SF2 fighting games. Also, shoutouts to the poverty FGC for keeping this knowledge alive and kicking.

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