Time To Talk Masturbation With Tecmo [Dead Or Alive Paradise]

Besides action and fighting games, Japanese developer Tecmo is known for its saucy bikini characters. It’s latest title, Dead or Alive: Paradise, has even been described as “creepy” by the ESRB and once features females with ridiculous proportions jiggling about. Leading website VideoGamer.com to ask questions about playing with more than this PSP game. Here is an exchange between the site and Paradise producer Yoshinori Ueda and art director Yasushi Nakakura: VideoGamer: Paradise features scantily-clad women and heavily sexualized content. Do you reckon some of your fans have masturbated to the game? Ueda: [Laughs] Everybody here is married now! Basically, if people can play the game however they want to play it, then that’s fine with us. VideoGamer: You must think that someone somewhere has been so turned on by the game that they bashed one out. Ueda: You think so? VideoGamer: I do, yeah. I reckon a few people will have had some fun with the last trailer you put out. Nakakura: [Laughs] Well maybe we could consider that a success. Some might consider success by shipping half a million or a million copies. Others might consider a success by releasing a critics’ favorite. At least one dude marks success by masturbation. Honesty, folks, honesty! DOA: Paradise Interview for PSP [VideoGamer.com]

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Time To Talk Masturbation With Tecmo [Dead Or Alive Paradise]

Project Natal’s Lag, As Judged By Stopwatch [Xbox 360]

Microsoft’s controller-free add-on Project Natal may be perfect for virtual painting and hyperactive ball-swatting, but is it responsive enough for something more intense? What does MTV’s stopwatch tell us? The MTV Multiplayer folks performed a little stopwatch-based survey of Project Natal’s real-life movement to on-screen movement interpretation capabilities, deeming that the average lag time was about one-tenth of a second. As MTV’s Russ Frushtick points out, that not-so-scientific survey is not out of line with expectations set by the Wii’s pre-MotionPlus remote and even high end motion capture cameras. Still, that lag would make Project Natal certainly less useful in twitch-based games (like first-person shooters or fighting games), the kind of genre I’m hoping Natal developers will avoid anyway. Still, that’s one more concern for the pile about motion control’s so-called ” kinetic dissonance .” Project Natal: Timing The Delay [MTV Multiplayer]

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Project Natal’s Lag, As Judged By Stopwatch [Xbox 360]

Evo 2K10 To Caesar’s Palace [Events]

Annual video game fighting tournament EVO 2K has announced its 2010 plans, touching down at Caesar’s Palace next July, bringing with it plenty of dudes who are really, really good at arcade and console fighting games . The tournament will run July 9th through the 11th in Las Vegas, Nevada, sure to be a sweltering good time. No announcements yet about the line-up that we can see, but last year bout featured Street Fighter III Third Strike, Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Guilty Gear XX, Soulcalibur IV and Super Street Fighter II HD Turbo Remix. We’d expect many of those to return, plus a new title or two. Evo, Caesars, Vegas, 2010, Hype! [EVO2K]

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Evo 2K10 To Caesar’s Palace [Events]

Behold The Single-Player Fighting Game [Ds]

Did you know people made single-player fighting games ? I played one last week. The Kotaku editorial database indicates that before Kamen Rider is released for the DS this year, Yie Ar Kung Fu may have been the only single-player fighting game ever made. After all, why would anyone make a single-player fighting game? Isn’t that just a brawler? Ah, but they do exist. After I checked out the new Matt Hazard game last week, a rep from that game’s publisher, D3, let me try the company’s Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight fighting games. There’s one coming to the Wii, one to the DS, both based on a several-decades-old Japanese series that has a Power Rangers aesthetic. The Wii one is two-player. Nothing too weird there. It’s made by Eighting, developers of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. It’s well-documented that I shouldn’t try to sound knowledgeable about fighting games, and it’s doubly sketchy that I actually beat the other reporter in attendance when we played the Wii version. What I can tell you authoritatively is that Dragon Knight uses a card-system for its fighting. You can strike, block, doge and jump with standard presses and waggles. But you also go into battle with a hand of cards that are associated with powers, including some Dragon Knight-specific summons attacks. The cards drain a meter that is refilled as you fight well. So.. the flow involves you using the card moves, then fighting enough to activate them again, with the added strategy of picking which card to play when. I was about to skip the DS version, figuring it was more of the same. But then the D3 rep said it had this unusual quality, not that he suggested it was a selling point. The DS game is made by Natsume. Both games have a single-player mode comprised of challenges that the player against one or more fighters from the show. But… the DS game only has single-player. I was befuddled as to why they’d leave out a second-player option. I was told it’s because the design of the game is more focused on leveling up your own character. The more you fight, the more powerful your character gets, in stat-progression ways that supposedly would make it hard to balance for multiplayer gaming. So the DS game may look like it’s simply another fighting game with another twist. But you’ll be playing this fighting game alone, if you play it. Which is kind of how I played Street Fighter II. Which is why I stank at Street Fighter II. This is different, yes?

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Behold The Single-Player Fighting Game [Ds]

Behold The Single-Player Fighting Game [Ds]

Did you know people made single-player fighting games ? I played one last week. The Kotaku editorial database indicates that before Kamen Rider is released for the DS this year, Yie Ar Kung Fu may have been the only single-player fighting game ever made. After all, why would anyone make a single-player fighting game? Isn’t that just a brawler? Ah, but they do exist. After I checked out the new Matt Hazard game last week, a rep from that game’s publisher, D3, let me try the company’s Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight fighting games. There’s one coming to the Wii, one to the DS, both based on a several-decades-old Japanese series that has a Power Rangers aesthetic. The Wii one is two-player. Nothing too weird there. It’s made by Eighting, developers of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. It’s well-documented that I shouldn’t try to sound knowledgeable about fighting games, and it’s doubly sketchy that I actually beat the other reporter in attendance when we played the Wii version. What I can tell you authoritatively is that Dragon Knight uses a card-system for its fighting. You can strike, block, doge and jump with standard presses and waggles. But you also go into battle with a hand of cards that are associated with powers, including some Dragon Knight-specific summons attacks. The cards drain a meter that is refilled as you fight well. So.. the flow involves you using the card moves, then fighting enough to activate them again, with the added strategy of picking which card to play when. I was about to skip the DS version, figuring it was more of the same. But then the D3 rep said it had this unusual quality, not that he suggested it was a selling point. The DS game is made by Natsume. Both games have a single-player mode comprised of challenges that the player against one or more fighters from the show. But… the DS game only has single-player. I was befuddled as to why they’d leave out a second-player option. I was told it’s because the design of the game is more focused on leveling up your own character. The more you fight, the more powerful your character gets, in stat-progression ways that supposedly would make it hard to balance for multiplayer gaming. So the DS game may look like it’s simply another fighting game with another twist. But you’ll be playing this fighting game alone, if you play it. Which is kind of how I played Street Fighter II. Which is why I stank at Street Fighter II. This is different, yes?

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Behold The Single-Player Fighting Game [Ds]

WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 Review: A Game For Smart People [Review]

You can read here a wrestling game review, written by a lapsed wrestling fan (me!). But first, I challenge Flower fans and Ico lovers to find a better gaming subject for their college thesis than Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010. It was my reputation among team Kotaku that got me assigned to reviewing what has proven to be the best wrestling game I’ve played in a decade — Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010, which is also the only wrestling game I’ve played in a decade. I guess everyone thought I’d be perfect for it. Maybe they know that the only website that I pay to read daily is a pro-wrestling site, a site that allows me to read about the often-mediocre happenings on modern wrestling shows without having to watch them. Perhaps they know I imported Bret Hart’s autobiography from Canada and Ohio Valley Wrestling DVDs (when Paul Heyman was booking OVW shows) from Ohio. Or perhaps it’s that Hulk Hogan thing I did. Regardless, you’d think that someone who has loved video games and, I guess, loved pro wrestling, for much of his life, would love the melding of the two. But I started this new game, the latest in the annual releases of THQ-published, Yukes-developed modern wrestling games, with almost complete alienation from the genre. (I have some professional embarrassment about this, since I’ve been to Yukes’ studio in Yokohama and met the wrestling-obsessed people there. I even got a great tour that included a look at the back rooms that reek of body odor every summer as the team sleeps in the office while cramming to finish their game by fall). This new game brings to the series a revised Royal Rumble, an enhanced Create a Finisher option, a new training arena, revised rosters, new storylines and — the big feature — the ability for fans to create and share their own storylines. But it was all new to me. And, wouldn’t you know it, the game is fun and… intellectually stimulating? Yes. Loved The Basic Flow: WWE pro wrestling games, as fans would know, are 3D fighting games played from a quasi-overhead perspective and battled on the surfaces of wrestling ring and floor, with the walls of a steel cage or the top of a destructible announcers’ table sometimes also in play. You win not by eliminating an opponents’ health bar but by executing enough minor and major strikes, throws, dives, taunts and more, all of which either damage to the opponents’ body or build the momentum of your own wrestlers’ adrenaline, which enables a successful pinning (or submission or count-out) victory. In other words, the game treats wrestling as if it’s a hybrid of combat and performance, with the player driven by more competitive intent to maim than in the real thing. It’s a good system that demands the player learn how to smoothly chain their moves to build momentum. And it is a a rewarding one, as Yukes has managed to capture and animate hundreds of moves that transition from one to the next with, of all the rare qualities in games, grace. Winning a match in this game is a performing pleasure. The WWE Recreated: Even a lapsed fan of WWE such as myself stumbles across Smackdown on Friday nights or remembers older episodes of Raw well enough to see that Edge’s shoulder-twitch during his ring entrance is true to life, that Shawn Michaels’ super-kick should look as perfect as it does and that selecting Shelton Benjamin will grant the player access to a cool set of moves. The game’s venues, from the pay-per-view-specific entrance ramps to the backstage announce areas, look perfect. The tone of violence and sex — an endless parade of T&A and at least one storyline involving a female wrestler sleeping her way to the top — matches squarely with even today’s toned-down WWE. The announcing sounds right, issued by (mostly) the right people. This game is very WWE. The Thesis-Worthy Story-Editor: Of all the new features this year, conveniently marked “NEW” in the game’s menu for people like me, the best and most interesting is the storyline editor. In the past, wrestling game fans could create their own wrestlers, customize move-sets and even, more recently, chain pieces of animation to create new match-ending finishing moves. In the new game, players can craft a storyline, mixing matches that include player-defined outcomes with story-advancing sequences. The latter scenes are comprised of WWE-related locales (rings, locker rooms, offices) with wrestlers, a variety of conversational and confrontational emotions, adjustable camera angles, selectable music and crowd-noise background sounds and, most importantly, player-written dialogue. The system’s interface has some rough edges that players can work around but is nonetheless fascinating. This is what you’d write your thesis about: Pro wrestling is already an odd blend of fake sport and acted drama, something fans appreciate as real and unreal at the same time (We know that John Cena is a man really named John Cena, but we also know that the Undertaker is not really a man who has risen from the dead. We buy into the idea that the Stone Cold Stunner hurts, because it looks like it does; we laugh with The Rock that the People’s Elbow does not hurt, because we know that he knows that we know that his big elbow move is a love tap at worst). In a wrestling game, that reality/unreality gets twisted some more, as the action in the ring is made to seem both more real than it is in real life (The depicted action in a WWE game involves hurting an opponent thoroughly enough to win, not simply entertaining the crowd through fake-fighting) and less real (The moves in the game, animated without fear of causing bodily harm, are made to look more impactful, thereby exposing how deadly and illegal they ought to really be). The new game’s story editor knots these strands of truth and untruth even more. Maybe gamers have been able to re-arrange games through mods for years. Maybe they’ve been able to puppeteer fake lives through The Sims for over a decade. But now we can mangle and morph the pseudo-reality of real celebrities through the WWE. We could craft a storyline in which CM Punk demands to know John Cena’s favorite color and then wrestles the answer out of him (I did this. Search for it on Xbox Live using the keyword phrase “Favorite Color”). We could make a storyline in which WWE Diva “A” falls in love with WWE Wrestler “Z” but is seduced away by the Create-A-Wrestler character who you designed to look just like a muscular Bill O’Reilly. (I did not do this.) You’re playing with sort-of real lives. You’re creating officially-sanctioned slash-fiction. You’re kind of writing the next Indiana Jones adventure at the same time that you’re kind of writing the next thing for Harrison Ford to do. The layers of reality and unreality are dense. The Unintended Consequences: Maybe a simpler way to praise the interesting aspects of the Create A Storyline editor is to mention that I downloaded a storyline called something like “One Night After Raw,” and after meeting a condition to have Shawn Michaels win a match, and after sitting through a series of backstage vignette’s written with not the best user-generated spelling, my Shawn Michaels was then ambushed in the ring by three definitely-not-licensed wrestlers from rival company TNA. For years wrestling fans have wanted to book Raw themselves. Now they can do it virtually, for me to play through. Too bad the game’s canned announcers were still plugging the WWE website instead of reacting to what this one user created. The Royal Rumble: The game has a revised button-mashing mini-game for eliminating people in its Royal Rumble. The 30-man elimination match is often the most fun pro wrestling match of the year, so any improvements that more authentically let me, as Vince McMahon, team up with The Great Khali to flip some-user’s Street Fighter Sagat over the top rope is ok by me. The Sense Of Pain: WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 is one of those eye-catching games that other people in the room, who may be tired of the Bret Hart and Mankind books on the bookshelf, can’t help but be drawn into. Why? I believe it’s because the animations are so good that they look like they connect and that the moves hurt, which, given the combat that is supposed to be depicted here, is a victory. Hated Poor Counter-Attack Training: The game’s menu-screen training arena allows players to swiftly try and learn many of the basic single or double-input commands needed to execute the extraordinary variety of maneuvers available in the game. Consider, for example, that you may want to make your wrester who is standing next to the ropes in the ring either jump over the ropes, crawl under them, wind up on the apron of the ring or on the floor or not do any of that and climb the turnbuckle… or take the padding off the turnbuckle. And there’s a button combo for each of those. Offense is easily learned and joyfully executed. But the trick to mastering the game seems to be the execution of a single-input counter-move. The same button counters anything. Animated prompts appear during training and in the game’s matches to alert the player that a window to counter has opened. But those windows close so quickly that that game does a poor job teaching the player how to execute this key move well. The Online Limitations: The WWE game’s online competitive wrestling worked fine and minus the lag I saw some complaining about on message boards. But I found the skill-level-matching inadequate. I can breeze through normal difficulty but can’t find a player online who I can beat? I also can’t easily re-find my uploaded wrestling storyline to find out how people have rated it, nor can I select which ones to download with any filters other than most recent and most-highly-rated. Overall, the options for the game’s online modes are just not specific enough for the needs a player might have. The content and gameplay available through online, though, is solid. Immediately Outdated: I played a developer-scripted storyline that involved a rivalry between Edge and Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy doesn’t work for WWE anymore. Many of our matches were announced by Jim Ross and Tazz. But Tazz doesn’t work for WWE anymore, either. Both men left the company in 2009, and I understand the challenges of adapting to such changes. But this is one of those things that, as a potential consumer, I just want to have work right. This is an online-connected game. So let’s see it adapt to the present. Buried Info: What are my character’s finishing moves and what position does his opponent have to be in so I can execute them? How am I doing in career mode in terms of raising my wrestlers’ ability to connect with the crowd and raise his charisma stat? There are many pieces of information that are relevant to the gameplay of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 that seem to have been omitted from menu screens and the instruction manual, possibly being reserved for the official game guide. That leaves the player to stumble across or guess many important details. This is not a bad thing for those who don’t like a lot of tutorials and explanations, but gamer beware that you’ll have to figure a lot of this game out for yourself. I used to avoid pro wrestling games because of my disinterest in fighting games and my belief that the games treated pro wrestling as something different than what I enjoyed. I liked the acrobatics and the melodrama of real WWE. The games, I guessed, treated the whole affair as if it was straight-up sport. WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 still does treat pro wrestling a little more as sport than I’d want. Things like winning streaks are almost required in the game, even though they are rare in the real wrestling leagues. But the addition of configurable storylines provides that element of unpredictable, scripted entertainment that has made WWE programming, in some years, among the best and most enjoyably wild material on TV. Finally, I’m interested. The fact that the configurable narratives — the post-Sims, post-mods playing we can do with sort-of real lives — is a spectacular and mind-bending bonus. (WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 was developed by Yukes and published by THQ for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and Wii on October 20. Retails for $59.99 USD on the home consoles. An copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the 360 version. Won the Royal Rumble as Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Made it on the Road To Wrestlemania as Edge. Progressed Shelton Benjamin up a career ladder to ECW and Intercontinental title glory. Created, uploaded and downloaded storylines. Invented a new top-rope finishing move. Got pinned a lot online, including by a female version of MVP.) Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ .

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WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 Review: A Game For Smart People [Review]

I Can Kick Your Butt, Wanna Bet? [Feature]

Whether it was the local arcades or the family living room, there have been players — not all — who have thrown down extra scratch to see if being good pays off in more than bragging rights. Players putting their money wheretheir mouths are, betting that they are better, betting that they will win and betting with money. “Let’s face it,” says 30-something Scott Popular, “money makes everything interesting.” Popular is a regular on the fighting tournament circuit and self-described tourney “hype man.” His job, he says, is to “keep the hype” during tournaments, and he’s dead right: money may not make things better, it may not make things more fun. But, that twenty or that fifty will, without a doubt, make things more interesting. It doesn’t matter where the tournament is, but you can bet, there are players there picking up extra cash. You might be the eighth best Melty Blood player, but the eighth best Melty Blood doesn’t win anything besides the feeling of satisfaction. It’s not like the tournament is a front, that’s not the case at all. “You don’t want these money matches near a proper tournament,” says Popular. They get in the way, they’re a distraction. Money matches are not why people enroll in fighting game tournaments — most don’t even know about them. They’re often in an invite hotel room or off in some corner or banquet room somewhere. But search the boards, the forums, and there are people trying to set something up, make something happen. “While the large majority of players and spectators aren’t involved in money matches,” says Capcom’s Seth Killian , “they can still be quite common on some games. Especially as you get towards the finals, or during a marquee matchup, you’ll hear a lot of shouting about who likes which player, for how much money, and at what odds.” Before Seth Killian was a manager at Capcom USA and before he had a Street Fighter boss named after him, Killian was making his mark on the fighting game circuit. “It’s a friendly thing with no centralized system — just player to player bets,” he explains. Betting is done usually in “First to” sets: First to 7, first to 10, etc. The first player to win seven matches, or the first to win 10 matches, wins. “Common bets include: Who will win the set, an obvious bet, who will win the next match, or even who will land the first hit,” says Killian. Players may put up the money themselves or might pool money as is often the case in region rivalries — the top West Coast player vs. the top East Coast player. Side bets can round out the action. First hit bets are for those there to gamble, who want that instant rush. Bets can get complicated and interesting by using characters that are typically considered “weak” ( Gen , anyone?) to mix-mashing fighting styles (rushdown down attack player vs. run-away-run-down-the-clock player). If bets get too complex, then players and punters will divert their attention to a more straight-up match. As video game tournaments become bigger and bigger, there’s the inevitable push to legitimize tourneys as actual businesses. Gone are the days winners were handed paper bags with money symbols scrawled on them in fat, magic marker and stuffed with cold, hard cashola. Winners must fill out a myriad of sheets including tax forms for Uncle Sam. More reputable tournaments will pay up in a matter of weeks, while there are horror stories from the shadier events of it taking up to a year and a half to get the tournament winnings. Make a name for yourself as a world class fighting game player, and you’ll find yourself with players lining up to play you — for money. The challengers might think they can win, or they might view the experience of getting their ass kicked by a world class player as a postcard to themselves. It’s not always the top players who draw the big money matches, but the middle level players that might make the most interesting match-ups. “Some of the bets can get quite large,” says Killian. “At a tournament I was at just a few weeks ago, two players faced off in a ‘first to 10 wins’ match in MVC2 for $13,000.” But is this legal? “Federal law does not have much interest in gambling,” says I. Nelson Rose , an attorney and a senior professor at the Whittier Law School in California, “unless it is organized crime or the federal government has to get involved, as with interstate horse racing.” One of the leading experts on gaming (here, gambling) law, Professor Rose is the author of the upcoming Internet Gaming Law . “There’s too much social betting to begin with.” Whether it’s an office pool on the Oscars, a round of horse shoes or even Governors making friendly Super Bowl bets (which might even violate their state’s laws!), social betting is so pervasive in society, that eradicating it would be a fool’s errand on the part of the government. Instead, the federal government focuses its attention on those who can make money off of gambling, typically organized crime. “The enforcement of gambling laws,” says Prof. Rose, “is low on the list of priority’s of the federal government.” “If it is truly a game of skill,” says Prof. Rose, “it is not gambling. And if participants are merely betting on themselves — more of an entry fee than a wager — it would not fall under any federal law.” According to Prof. Rose, those “bets” players are putting on themselves could legally be considered “an entry fee.” Side bets would not fall under federal law either as federal gambling laws do not apply to patrons of bookies. In short: Federal gambling law applies to those who are making money off the act of gambling and not simple wagering on games of skill. It’s the state laws where things get sticky. In the United States, gambling laws differ by individual states. Some states have old and outdated gambling laws on the books. Take California, which says it is illegal to bet on contests of “skill, speed and endurance”. Other states, such as Arizona, are starting to even take measures to make wagering on games of skill difficult. States having measures on gambling is not unique. “All of the states have prohibitions on gambling,” Prof. Rose points out, “but again, most exempt games which are predominantly skill.” If video games are games of skill and not chance, then it could very well not fall under state law. Some states restrict even games of skill. The question is largely: Are fighting games in fact games of skill or chance? Play a couple rounds with guys like Daigo Umehara or Alex Valle and see how far luck gets you. “The appeal for money matches is simple,” says Popular. “It’s cash in hand, right away.” You play to win, bring your best game and “not some experimental bullshit tactics” says Popular. Once that is cash on the table — or more often than not, television set — it starts. And it ends when the fight is over. “You’re not going to rage quit in a room with a people betting money,” says Popular. “No way.” Rage quitting and the arcade tradition of fighting games are driving forces for the perceived needs for players to hash things out in person. “Money matches can also be a way to settle scores between players who have online drama,” says Killian. Web start-up BringIt.com is offering an online matchmaking service that using a ranking-type system to match players of similar skill levels in money matches. Players pay beforehand via PayPal to reduce the risk of sudden quits or “connection problems”. The federal Wire Act prohibits anyone in the gambling business, Prof. Rose explains, from using interstate wire infrastructure to transmit info that can be used in placing bets on sporting events. BringIt.com side-steps that as competing in video games is, as previously defined, a game of skill. Players are not “betting”, but rather putting money as an entry fee. BringIt.com makes its money on the match-making service it offers, by taking a 14 percent service fee on each match players accept or enter. “However, there are nine states within the U.S. where the participation in skill-based video game tournaments for cash prizes is not allowed,” notes BringIt.com. “At this time, if you live in the following states, you may not play for cash prizes on BringIt: Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Tennessee, and Vermont.” But for some, the appeal of money matches isn’t the money and isn’t even the winning, but the millisecond before a decision is made, the gut reaction. Many of the top fighting game players do gamble on cards, craps and slots. Some of them are as good at gambling as gaming, good enough to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. “To play fighting games is to gamble,” says Killian. “These guys gamble with every move they make — the gambling sensibility is aligned perfectly with fighting games.” And those thinking of playing money matches at the next big fighting tourney, Killian offers this advice: “Capcom’s position would certainly be to check your federal, state, and local laws regarding gambling, and to follow them.” [ Pic ]

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I Can Kick Your Butt, Wanna Bet? [Feature]

How About A Spore Fighting Game? [Fighting Games]

The newest Spore game is a bit of a platformer and a bit of a Spore game. But it has just enough Tekken to it that it could hint at something else: Could the world use a Spore fighting game? The game that actually exists isn’t exactly a Spore fighting game. It’s Spore Hero , which is more of a 3D adventure-platformer. Released for the Wii last week, it puts players in control of a malleable beast who can walk, dance and fight through a heavily modified version of the second, creature stage of Will Wright’s 2008 Spore. The fighting part of the action caught my attention when one of the game’s producers was demonstrating it in New York last week. It is also the part I delved into with the most curiosity in my own copy of the game this weekend. I was told not to expect Soulcalibur. The developers had no illusions that they were making an advanced fighter. Spore Hero is no fully-featured fighting game. It may have a lot of one-on-one arena combat. But it is simpler and streamlined, because, among other reasons, it is targeted to a young audience. While exploring the game’s lush and loopy outdoors, a player can have their creature kick one of the other creatures in the game world, warping the two into a circular fighting zone that resembles the arena of a 3D fighting game. Once in the arena, basic button presses and shakes of the Wii remote and nunchuk produce jumps, bites, charge attacks, blocks and a few other moves. The producer who showed me Spore Hero said that the development team put enough effort into the system to at least make it likely that a skilled player can beat a button masher. Then he beat me. The potential for a full-fledged Spore fighter is teased by the customizability in the game. Your Spore Hero creature’s fighting move-set is determined by the parts you have applied to your creature’s body. By adding a newly discovered mouth part, you might be able to have your beast execute a stronger bite. Discover a special tusk, and you might be able to do a stronger charge move. That concept of attribute-adding alone might not evolve Spore Hero’s take on customizable combat beyond the training-based, move-learning system in Pokemon games. But there is a more interesting set of parameters you can edit on your creature: Its dimensions. Spore Hero includes a simplified version of Spore’s celebrated creature editor. It allows limbs to be stuck to torsos, facial features to be pushed onto faces, body parts to be resized and hides to be painted. All of this is then convincingly animated in real-time to bring your controllable creature alive. The Spore Hero editor allows for less manipulation of torso shape but its virtual putty is malleable enough to allow creatures to be tall or short, rangy and multi-limbed or skinny as a twig. Imagine if that all mattered in combat. This is where I saw the potential. I asked the Spore Hero producer if the size of my creature affected his ability to get hit in a fight. Maybe a smaller creature would have a smaller hit box and a larger one would be an easier target. Not really, I was told. A genuine Spore fighting game, if EA were to ever make one, would do that, I think. It would advance the work of EA’s Fight Night team, which added a system in this year’s Fight Night Round 4 to accommodate the reach and arm movements of taller and shorter fighters. Muhammad Ali can beat Mike Tyson to the punch in that game, for example, because the former has a greater reach (and speed) than the latter. A true Spore fighting game would show us what a three-armed Tyson could do in response or reveal the physical advantages and disadvantages of boxing on six giraffe-tall legs. Whether there is a market for a Spore fighting game or a system that can run it is another matter. Even Spore itself did not aggressively explore the consequences of varied body types. Its Cell stage showed the benefits of having a moth in the direction you swim. Its Creature stage showed why short-armed beasts incapable of climbing trees or reaching for high-hanging fruit might become carnivores. But that was about it. The consequences of physiology have been under-explored. So the reality might not be coming, but Spore Hero, at least, suggest what the birth of a Spore fighting game could produce.

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How About A Spore Fighting Game? [Fighting Games]

Play Super Street Fighter IV Before Us [Capcom]

Capcom is putting community first (and Crecente last, where he belongs) this week. Our editor-in-chief was able to only gawk at Super Street Fighter IV in New York today. But you could play it here later this week. You’ll need to be a Capcom Unity member to attend. And you’ll need to RSVP. And maybe you’ll need to win a real street fight, too. I’m not sure. Details are on Capcom’s official blog. Play the games. Crecente and I might attend too, but we’re not 100% sure. NYC Capcom Fight Club: Sign Up Now!

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Play Super Street Fighter IV Before Us [Capcom]

The Hotness That Is Females From Fighting Games [Art]

To make up for the lack of boobs, ridiculous costumes and Tekken 6 characters in that trailer I just posted , get a look at these works of art — brought to you by the folks over at The Design Inspiration . These are the guys who brought us amazing Mario art and a lot of Links to consider. Now they’re onto the theme of “most attractive female fighters from popular games.” Long-winded, I know, but how else are you going to encourage artists to look at all fighting games for inspiration instead of the heavy titters—er, hitters. Yes. Check it out: Most Attractive Female Fighters From Popular Games [The Design Inspiration] Image by artist Li Biao

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The Hotness That Is Females From Fighting Games [Art]

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