Capcom VS SNK

(This post does not necessarily represent the views of everyone at Arcade Perfect, it is merely my own opinion. ~hex)

I was at the flea market with my friend DoctorC yesterday and we came upon a Japanese kid selling all these import lanyards and keychains. He had a bunch of fighting game character keychains and I got stoked when I saw a Sakura keychain... until I saw a Nakoruru keychain. He said something to the effect of "You're picking Nakoruru over Sakura?" I casually replied that I've switched sides and am now a full blown SNK fan and that Capcom is almost dead to me. I thought everyone knew how I felt, but he seemed surprised (and outraged).

I'm going to try and explain what happened, but you may be able to guess the reasons.
NOTE - This post is entirely based on fighting games. Capcom has other non fighting games that are superb, I just don't care about them as much.

Back in the day I loved both companies quite a bit, but I always liked Capcom slightly better. Until recently.


Arcade VS Console
Capcom no longer cares about arcade players. With their new fighting game releases going straight to consoles and no arcade releases in sight it makes me very unhappy to say the least. SNK Playmore gives top priority to arcades, with console versions second. Look at this interview with Masaaki Kukino where the question is posed to him:  *translated from the French

"Contrary to did Capcom with Super Street Fighter IV you present a version of arcade, think that the market arcade is always priority?"  (and he answers)

"It is true that for the versus fighting the majority can be played on line on console, but we want to preserve this aspect of the versus fighting where the players can clash in truth on terminals. Before offering a version comforts we preferred privileged the players of arcade."

Style
Capcom has completely sold out in the style department when it comes to fighting games. Street Fighter 4 and Marvel VS Capcom 3 both look completely ridiculous in my opinion. Capcom is clearly moving all of their fighting game style to a 3D, polygon/cel shading based style that looks terrible. Street Fighter is their flagship and I'm ok with them doing whatever they want with it, even if it is disappointing, but then they went and did it AGAIN with Marvel VS Capcom 3 and I don't think there's any end in sight. I'll be amazed if Capcom ever releases a new 2D hand drawn sprite based fighting game again.

Consider this screenshot from the upcoming straight to console Street Fighter X Tekken.

Ryu's Hadoken looks suspiciously like Sailor Mercury doing her Mercury Bubbles Blast. Looks pretty silly.

Now look how amazing hand drawn sprite based characters can look with modern technology.





From an interview with SNK Playmore:

"Unfortunately I must say that in Europe there is no market actually, and in America
our small presence is relegated to maybe a few shopping centers / arcades.
On the other hand, in Japan, we are practically one of the few gaming brands still
making 2d games, (ie, ARC with BlazBlue on the same Taito Type X2 platform), so
we are putting great effort on being protagonists in the arcades, as we can count on
our unique content."

"We made a 2d game in this day and age, and even if we could be considered
"crazy", we are really proud of making games like we always did. We are sure our
fan base will agree with that, and that it will probably increase."

Gameplay
While SNK fighters still require a great level of skill to master, the games Capcom has been pumping out are ridiculously easy to play and don't require a lot of thought. The first time I played MvC3 at a friends house I button mashed my way through it and beat Galactus on the hardest difficulty setting on my very first attempt. The game has one button supers for cryin' out loud. Just sayin'.

Overall I just feel that SNK Playmore cares more about the fans that have cared about them for all these years than Capcom does. I'm just not feeling the love from Capcom as much anymore. I still like them, but I'm not liking the direction they are going. I'm probably just getting old and resisting change like people do when they get older, but it's how I feel.

If you want to learn more about SNK check out Neo-Geo.com.
Also listen to this wonderful episode of AllGenGamers Podcast about SNK. It's extremely good.

*I ended up buying a Nakoruru AND a Morrigan keychain :)

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BGM and Sound Effects Requests

If there is any particular background music or sound effects from a video game that you want, let us know and we'd be happy to try and rip it for you.
I'm putting all the filled requests in this post, which will be updated as needed.
If you have a request, tell us in the comments or on the Facebook page and we'll see what we can do!
Play it loud!

Filled Requests:


Arcade

Altered Beast 獣王記
Sega

The BGM for Altered Beast is pretty dark and epic, it's good stuff.



Tracks: (.mp3) 320kbps           
1. Neff's Theme
2. Altered Beast
3. Centurion
4. Cystallomancy
5. Rise From Your Grave
6. Underworld
7. Cavern of Souls
8. Athena

Sound effects: (.wav)
Welcome to your Doom
Rise From Your Grave
Never Give up
Power Up

Download the whole thing as a .zip file HERE. (38 MB)



PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16

Ninja Spirit 最後の忍道
Irem

Games for the PC Engine have a rather unique sound.
The BGM for Ninja Spirit is like a cross between traditional Japanese music and 8bit techno.

Tracks: (.mp3) 320kbps      
1.   Moon
2.   Kizashi Part 2
3.   Iza
4.   Munen
5.   Dark Blue
6.   Kane
7.   Behind the Wind
8.   Theme From Shinobi
9.   Sasurai no Samurai
10. Kessen
11. Forest
12. Karakuri
13. Deep Blue
14. Death of Father
15. Kizashi Part 1
16. Izanai
17. Tugaru

 Download the whole thing as a .zip file HERE. (63 MB)

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Who Won the Kong Off?

Well the Kong Off has come and gone, here are the results.

1. Hank Chien – 994,400
2. Steve Wiebe – 986,900
3. Eric Howard – 941,800
4. Dean Saglio – 912,800
5. Vincent Lemay – 851,900
6. Ben Falls – 846,800
7. Billy Mitchell – 821,200
8. Ben Mazowita – 817,800
9. Mark Kiehl – 774,600
10. Ross Benziger – 765,200

It was pretty fun to watch, the sound of all those Donkey Kong games going at once was insane and the award ceremony they did after the contest was really nice.
There are a bunch of video's posted on Richie Knucklez' Justin.tv page. if you want to check it out.
Apparently Roy Shildt aka Mr. Awesome was banned from the Kong Off by Richie, which is hilarious somewhat. Richie did a little interview with him afterward, I'm going to post it here because it's quite funny :)


Watch live video from Richie Knucklez Arcade Games on Justin.tv

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Shadowrun BGM

I started playing Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis again.
It's a seriously dark game for a fun loving system like the Genesis, in fact it reminds me a little of a futuristic Grand Theft Auto.
The thing I like most about it though, other than the silly dialogue with everyone calling each other "chum" or "chummer" is the great background music in the game. Almost every song has like a dance music style beat to it and they are all pretty memorable.
I couldn't find any of it online so I ripped a bunch of it myself with Audacity.
Some of these would probably make cool ringtones or something, do whatever you like with it chummer.
These are all .wav files. (click to play/download)
(I realize I should have made these .mp3's instead of .wav's, they all have large file sizes, anywhere from 5-17 MB, but I'm not converting and re uploading these now, you'll just have to deal with it.)

Track list:
1.   Shadowrun
2.   Redmond Barrens
3.   Jackal's Lantern
4.   Puyallup Barrens
5.   Jump House
6.   Downtown
7.   Renraku Arcology
8.   Cyberspace
9.   Abandoned Warehouse
10. Council Island
11. Salishe Shide
12. Icarus Descending

If you want to download the whole thing as a .rar file, click HERE. (74 MB)

Random screenshots:

G'luck in your struggles!

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Aurcade and the Kong Off

My friends and I have always wanted a list of every arcade game in our town to see exactly what's out there.
Well someone made a website to do just that, on a worldwide scale!
The website is http://aurcade.com/ and as of this writing they have over 11,000 games in their database.
I've personally been going all over my little suburban city and finding quite a few games, with the help of a few friends we will have an accurate view of the arcade scene here very soon.
The Aurcade only documents pinball and video games, no redemption games! That's perfect because we all know that redemption games are a curse upon mankind.
I hope that at least some of our readers will help with the Aurcade project. It's pretty fun.

In other news...
The Kong Off is happening in a few days! March 20th - March 21st actually. It is going to be held at Richie Knucklez' Arcade in New Jersey.
The current world record holder Dr. Hank Chien will be there, as well as Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, plus the other top Donkey Kong players.


The Kong Off will be streamed live on Justin.tv.

Recently The All Gen Gamers Podcast did an interview with Hank Chien, he's totally hilarious and seems like a really nice guy, the podcast is worth checking out, All Gen Gamers does a good show anyways.

If you're wondering why anyone would care about a bunch of people playing Donkey Kong, then you must not have seen the film King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.
If that's the case, stop what you're doing and get a hold of that movie. you can buy it from Amazon for like $6.00 USD, Netflix has it, or you can be a dirty pirate and grab it on bittorrent.
But seriously, watch that film, you won't be disappointed.

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Spriter Kredits

Recently I've been teaching myself to make little animated banners for affiliation and fun. I've become slightly obsessed with them, they are really fun to make!
I can already tell that I'll be making more and more of these, so I wanted to have a post giving credit to the original spriters that ripped the sprites I'm using for my banners and other projects.
Spriting is a lot harder than making silly little animations and I want to thank all of you out there doing it!

This post will be updated as necessary ^.^

The Nam Pooh sprite for this banner was ripped by Nemu.


The Magical Drop 3 sprites I used in this banner were ripped by GregarLink10


For this little Sailor V banner I modified a blank template from The Oracle.


For this 460 x 60 banner the Demitri sprites were ripped by Spenser Crippen.
The Cody stage background from SFA3 was ripped by Nashrakh.
The sprites for the Arcade Perfect logo were made with the NFG's Arcade Font Tool.
(Click to view.)

The sprites for this Donkey Kong Banner were ripped by Zeon. I used the almighty NFG Arcade Font Tool again here also.

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How to Convert MAME .inp Files to .avi Files

This is a question that comes up a lot, so I'm going to show you the method that works for me with Windows 7.
There are more ways to do this, and if anyone has a better method, I'd very much like to hear about it, please let us know in the comments :)
Just a quick overview: Some versions of MAME let you record the keystrokes of your game while you are playing, so you can watch it later or share it with other people who may want to watch, these are recorded in an .inp file. The only drawback is that in order to watch a replay, you must have MAME, it must be a compatible version, and you must have the ROM of the game you are trying to watch. This makes it hard to share your games with most people.

So what we're going to do is take the .inp file you have made and convert it to an .avi file for uploading to a video hosting service like Youtube, Veoh, etc.

Things you will need:
Xvid Codec
Grolwer Guncam 

These will both require installing.
Once you have Growler Guncam running there are some settings you will want to change.
First you need to set a Trigger key. in Setup\Trigger. Try to use a key that will not be pressed during the game you are recording, I use the backslash key \
The trigger key tells the software when to start recording and when to stop. If you are recording a MAME game, the recording automatically stops when you exit the game.

I had to tweak a few setting in order to get everything to work right. I'm just going to show you screen captures of some of my settings now. (Click these to make them bigger if you want.)

Capture Setup

 

Advanced Setup

Video Export Setup

With Growler and MAME both running, start your MAME replay and then hit the Trigger key you assigned earlier to start recording. When you are done recording, hit the Trigger key again or just press escape to leave the game and it will stop recording.
After you've made your movie, it will be saved in a .gcf file format, which will probably be a gigantic file.

Select your video by clicking it and then click Export Video as GIF, JPG, AVI.

At first you will only see a picture in the left frame, click the Append Selected Film arrow in the center and then when you're ready, click the as AVI button in the Export Destination Film.
Now you should have a nice little .avi video of your game. Unfortunately the quality of the video isn't going to look as good as watching in MAME, because of compression, and when you upload to a video hosting site it will be compressed yet again, so you may want to consider not using compression.
That's pretty much all there is to it, here are some videos I made with Growler. They don't look super good, but they get the point across.
(These are all me playing :)

Samurai Shodown III Level 8 One Credit Completion MAME



Samurai Shodown V Special Level 8 One Credit Completion MAME



Street Fighter Alpha 2 Expert Level High Score MAME



Samurai Shodown Level 8 High Score MAME





Good luck with your videos and don't forget to delete yor .gcf files after you're done with them, as they tend to take up lots of space!

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