Assassin's Creed Shadows First Impressions + Street Fighter II Documentary

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Guys, guys, guys, did you hear?

At 7-Eleven, they have one of those hacked Street Fighter arcade games?

Oh, no way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know we're 12 and 13 years old, and it is the height of the 1990s, but Street Fighter 2 is the biggest game of all time, and they've got a version of it where you can do stuff you can't do on other Street Fighter machines.

Is it cool if I come?

I'm only 11.

Yeah, of course it is, Nick.

You should come too.

All right.

I don't even have pubes.

All right, let's go check it out.

And you better not have any if I find out you got a single pub.

I don't have any.

You can't come.

I don't have any.

Why is that important to you?

I don't want to be hanging out with some pubed 11-year-old.

But we're 12 and 13.

I know.

Wait, why were we fixated on this?

Sometimes you got to just draw your lines in the sand where they are, okay?

Look, I hate to derail this because we clearly had a premise, but it sounds to me like you're overly fixated on this pube.

He just mentioned it, and I just was concerned that he was a liar, but that's all.

Let's just go play Street Fighter over.

Why would you consider him a liar?

Like, what does that have to do with anything?

I just, you know, we started reading Shakespeare in English class, and I thought maybe he doth protest too much.

Okay.

Okay, yeah.

That's a weird thing to mention.

Wow, you did bring in the lesson from this week, and you know what?

That's why you're the smartest kid in class.

Are we going or not?

All right, let's go.

I want to play Street Fighter.

I don't have any pubes, I swear.

I just keep saying.

You keep saying that.

Bet's not going to let me come if he thinks I have pubes.

Look, it doesn't matter who has pubes and who doesn't have pubes.

I just want to go play this weird Street Fighter.

No, hold on.

Now I'm worried about it because he keeps bringing it up.

And it seemed like we were going to move past it and go to the premise.

But it sounds like he just keeps talking about how he doesn't have pubes.

Look,

you have to just, we have, we're kids, okay?

Yeah, we're kids.

We're just kids.

We're 12, 13, and 11.

Yeah, we're 12, 13, and 11.

It makes sense that we'd all know each other and be friends.

We can't, at this point in our lives, be concerned with who has pubes and who doesn't have pubes.

All right, so let's stop talking about it.

Let's go play some Street Fighter 2.

I want to play this modded 2020.

Because no matter what, if you have pubes or you don't, we're still just people.

I don't want to keep talking about it.

I want to get to the premise.

They've got a modded Street Fighter machine that can do all kinds of crazy stuff.

You don't have pubes.

I only have three.

Let's go play Street Fighter.

Let's get on our bikes and go to 7-Eleven.

Yeah.

All right.

Oh, man.

There it is.

I got so sweaty.

My pubes are so.

I mean, I mean.

Oh, oh,

who wants to be Blanca?

I got dibs on Blanca, guys.

Oh, wait, I guess two guys can be Blanca because it's modded.

No, it doesn't matter.

We don't have time for it.

We don't have time for it.

I just want to play.

I just want to...

We're here to play Street Fighter, and I just want to play it.

I'm going to play it.

I'm playing again.

It's all LT.

Remember, we have to just remind, just to remind everybody, before we start playing it,

we know that this Street Fighter...

is modded.

Yeah, it's modded, so it's got a lot of modded.

It's got a bunch of different stuff it can do.

It has nothing to do with it.

It's completely sweaty you got all the way over here.

Okay, wait, guys, I see something weird about it before we even start.

Whoa, what's that?

This one doesn't take quarters.

It says it takes pupes, and don't worry, then we don't have enough.

Guys, we got plenty.

We can play all day.

Oh, I knew you were a liar.

Oh, my gosh!

Benny is there!

Okay, great.

Now let's play.

I don't want to play anymore.

Look, he needs bandages.

And I'm 11, it hurts.

I'm going to play it just for a second.

Oh, my God.

Vega has a boner.

I want to go home.

I don't want to know anything else about the machine.

I don't want to be here anymore.

Oh, my God.

We intercut talking heads with game footage and remember things as we discuss Street Fighter 2 documentary Here Comes a New Challenger this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Tiger Weiger.

That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello,

everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast.

Where this week we are talking about Street Fighter 2, the documentary, which I think was called Here Come.

Here comes a new challenger.

That's right.

That's the doc we're going to get into.

And I would take a second, real quick, because

we ran an ad for this, but thank you to everyone who filled out the surveys we sent out.

You got tricked.

Yes.

Thank you for that sweet, sweet data and information.

This week, 300 more games on Medicare.

No,

but we're like,

we got

a much bigger response rate than we asked for and that we expected.

And it really helps the show.

So we really appreciate everyone who responded to that survey.

And I think it's going to guide the show moving forward because it was a lot of really cool information.

We're really

grateful for your sincerity.

We, as you wished, this is the final episode of the show.

Out of 1,500 responses, 1,499

said, please stop.

Yeah, they were like, please stop, stop, please, please, stop, stop, stop, stop, please, et cetera.

We're taping.

So if there's a weird, if there's a weird energy on the show today for our listeners, we are filming clips for the first time ever.

And I am a troll that doesn't like to be looked at.

So this is,

I'm trying to figure out my energy here, but I think it's going to be okay.

I think we just got to do the show and not worry about the cameras that are pointed at us as we're generating these social media clips.

But as I was telling Rochelle earlier, I am really

just ready for the comment I used to get on Twitch.

That's what you look like.

Yeah, which is, no matter how you slice it, bad.

That sucks.

That's like bad information.

It's like, like, what did you think?

Was it worse?

You could say.

Also, with podcasting, it's different because you become so attached to a voice.

You know, like there's plenty of ways in which people can see us visually online, like doing improv or whatever.

Yes.

But like when you're listening to a podcast, it's just this disembodied parasocial presence in your life.

And the moment you see that connected to a physical body in action, it sucks.

No matter how much you like the person on the show.

What I like about podcasting and what I liked about it when I began doing it is that it's an audio medium.

But now the expectation is video and it sucks and I don't like it.

But whatever, my other fucking podcast is video too.

So what are you going to fucking do?

Did you ever, you remember Casey Kasem from like the American American top 40?

Have you ever seen what that guy looks like in person?

No, but I know that he's the voice of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

He is.

So I just assume he looks like that.

He looks like Splinter.

He's a rat.

He's like a human

rat with a.

Were you looking at his rats?

Were you looking at his corpse?

Yes.

Pretty mean about Casey Kasum.

He's probably a handsome guy.

He's dead, right?

Yeah, he's dead.

He's long dead.

He's a...

Yeah.

Yeah, I have no idea what he looked like.

He just had a different look.

I think it's the sort of thing of like, you look at him.

He's like, oh, he looks like a TV presenter.

Yeah, passed away in 2014.

Almost 10 years.

Almost?

Almost?

What year is it?

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

We're recording it was in 2023.

We're banking so many episodes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He looks like a TV presenter.

He looks like an old school sort of showbiz guy, but he's not necessarily what you would think of from hearing that voice in a vacuum.

And also

such an old reference.

I'm sure a lot of our listeners who were born in the

90s and 2000s have never heard of Casey Kaysom.

Wait, no, wasn't it on the radio?

He's like, hi, this is Casey Kayson.

Wasn't it that guy?

That was my dad and mom used to listen to that guy.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

He'd been on the radio.

I mean, he was on the radio for a long, long time.

For like 100 years.

Yes.

I wonder what the last song he tossed to before he retired.

I bet you can look that up.

Yeah.

It's like.

Now, listen.

Listen, this new track from Sir Mix a lot, put him on the glass.

Thanks for 50 50 years.

I just wanted to say, to defend myself real quick, even though

he took his own life on the radio,

11 is almost 10.

You're right, Matt.

You are correct.

Which more?

Yeah.

But it is almost 10.

Yeah.

I just want to say that.

It's almost for more and less.

Then I guess I'm almost 39.

You get like hell.

Now that people can see that.

Now we have like a case that we can present to a court of law.

And you know what?

We have a lot to talk about with the Street Fighter 2 documentary.

But before we get into that, before we go into 30 years in the past,

I think it's good to stay in the present for a second and talk about some video games we're currently playing by asking the question we always ask at the top of this episode.

What are you playing?

What are you playing?

Hi, it's me, the resident evil merchant.

And I'm here to ask my friends what they're playing.

So,

what are you playing?

What up, merch?

What's up?

Good to see you.

And good to see you, too.

I...

I've been drinking milk.

Okay, sure.

Does a body good?

Hopefully not raw milk.

I went to the doctor and my bones are wrong.

You do have a pretty distinct anatomy, so you know, that doesn't wrong, just generally

it may not be there's anything wrong with you.

It could just be that

your doctor looked at the X-Brain.

Okay, oh my God, this is wrong.

So he was like in distress.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he said, My pelvis and femurs look like I was run run over by a truck.

Oh.

Oh.

I mean, I just honestly say, like, this doctor does not seem like they have the best bedside manner.

I think there's a better way to communicate that to someone who's potentially in distress.

Well, the nurse said the same thing.

Oh, the nurse did as well.

Yeah, the nurse came in and she said, oh, God.

Oh, no.

Did you go to the Silent Hill Hospital?

Is that what happened?

No, I don't fuck with that.

Okay.

No,

yes.

Different, different than that.

It's fucking scary as shit.

Yeah, too scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You ever been in there?

You know what?

In my restless dream, I think of Silent Hill.

Stop dreaming.

Yeah, I don't fuck with that.

Silent Hill.

But yeah, Sony, where I'm drinking milk, eating yogurt, eating cheese.

No, that's this is.

Okay, you shouldn't be on an all-dairy diet.

I think I'd probably get some other food drinking.

I'm minimizing it.

I gotta get my bones right before it's too late.

Well, it sounds like

taking calcium.

You know, I would just look for other sources of calcium.

I know, like, sardines have calcium.

A broccoli, I believe, is a surprisingly good source.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know if I'd go straight to sardines.

Yeah,

weird choice.

Am I right?

Don't you have like a fucking black bass in your trench coat?

Like, this is what you just said.

Fair point.

A shelf-stable tinned fish, actually, not that weird.

I don't like it.

Why is this asshole targeting me?

Yeah, I carry a black mask in my direction.

You're talking about conversations incorrectly.

The person, the other person you're speaking to isn't targeting you.

That's just how conversations work.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay, okay.

So, we're all just

how do you know?

Wait, how do you know who to aim at?

Okay, well, that

you could you if you're talk if you're talking to someone, if someone's talking to you, Yeah you aim at them by facing them and conversing with them in in Congress

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Matt, what are you playing?

Well, I do have something to talk about, but we all have something to talk about.

Do you want to do that?

I think we should lead with a game that we've all been playing.

What are you all playing?

Okay.

Yeah, okay, that works.

What are we all playing?

Resident Evil Merchant.

We have all been playing a little bit of Assassin's Creed Shadows.

That's right.

We're recording this episode the day the game released, but we all got a few hours to put into this game.

Now, I want to hear each of your thoughts.

I'll just say for myself, I have not played an Assassin's Creed game in at least 10 years.

I looked it up, I think the black flag was the last one I messed around with.

That was 2013.

So, I am very out on this franchise, and I am also generally out on the Ubisoft open world design, which is one reason I skipped Star Wars Outlaw completely.

Outlaw or Outlaws?

Outlaws.

I skipped Outlaws completely.

But as I've talked about,

I love Sekiro.

I finished Sekiro,

an absolutely incredible game,

one of my favorite games ever.

I also absolutely adored Ghost of Tsushima, which was one of my favorite games of the previous console generation.

And I can't avoid the comparisons to these two games, even just from an aesthetic and story standpoint.

So, like,

if anything, like what got me playing Assassin's Creed Shadows, the Assassin's Creed and Ubisoft of it was a bit of a liability, but the comparisons to those two games is

why I'm in.

But I want to to hear what your relationships to the Assassin's Creed franchise is and also where you are in this game right now.

I'll say for me, I've played very few Assassin's Creed games and I've not ever finished one.

I always sort of try one when it seems interesting to me, right?

So

I played a little bit of the first one because that was sort of like the only game.

for the PS3 generation that seemed like a Prince of Persia.

And it was, in many ways, a successor to

the Prince of Persia and Sands of Time franchise.

But I wanted something that scratched that itch.

I wanted to run on walls.

I wanted to climb.

I wanted to use daggers and stuff.

Played that, hopped off that, never finished it.

And then I didn't check in again until, gosh, probably, yeah, I didn't check in again until Black Flag.

That

same generation just later on, of course.

And

I got into that one a little bit and liked it, but then was just like,

Pirates, I don't know.

I don't don't not really my favorite yeah favorite thing i like henry rollins but yeah i like i like henry rollins no this is what i was saying i it's so crazy that you were saying that because i was sort of like when are we gonna get to the henry rollins part of the game yeah when is he gonna get

i didn't i didn't finish it so i guess i don't know if he ever gives like a uh stand-up show that's just like a lecture or something right yeah sort of a spoken word period yeah i don't know if he does that

But I hope that he's.

There's other historical figures in the game.

You would imagine that hopefully he's in there.

Maybe in the DLC or something.

Rollins is in there.

Rollins is probably in there.

He's in Fortnite, right?

Maybe.

Jacked Henry Rollins running around with the submachine gun and fucking rule.

Give me back in.

Put him in.

Put him fucking in.

Put him in a bunch of video games, actually.

It'd be kind of funny.

I saw an old politically incorrect clip today, actually, of

Henry Rollins, of Bill Maher just being a fucking idiot and saying like the dumbest shit.

And Henry Rollins just very matter-of-factly saying, Well, I think you're wrong for these extremely right reasons.

Just like explaining what an idiot he was.

Yeah, it's very satisfying.

It's very funny to watch somebody

just own Bill Maher because it doesn't take much.

You just have to be like a little bit smart because he's

one of the most owned men in America.

Yes.

Consistently.

Yeah.

And he's a glutton for punishment because he does, he won't stop doing this fucking show that everybody hates.

Dolphins, we should just get rid of all of them.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Shut up.

We don't like you.

New rule, if you can't speak

other than,

you don't get to exist, okay?

He's doing a dolphin.

He's doing a dolphin thing there.

Right.

Some of the impression was actually kind of good.

And then that, you know, it was confusing, certainly.

But I don't,

his billboards always look like he pooped in his pants and he is asking if you're going to have a problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, I just shit myself.

Is that all right with you?

Yeah, like it's like always.

It's kind of gross, dude.

I hate it.

It's always like the eyebrows of that.

So I played Black Flag.

No Henry Rollins to be seen.

And then I got into, then my next one was Valhalla.

Yes.

And I played, I thought I played more of that game.

And I was looking at our, like, you know how when you're friends on PlayStation, you can see how much you've played a game versus how much your friend has played a game.

I was checking in on this literally yesterday.

I thought I had put like at least 30 hours into Valhalla.

I put in

like 11.

Oh.

Yeah, not nothing.

Respectable.

It's a good amount.

And I liked what I played of it.

And I kind of wasn't really sure why I fell off of it.

But I think you played by a factor of 100 times what I played.

But with this one, I was excited to check it out because the same thing.

I love Ghost of Tsushima.

And I was just like, maybe this is the one.

Maybe, and then just the fact that it has been delayed.

It was delayed and delayed kind of, that sort of weirdly made it interesting, kind of too, because I know that that's typically never good.

Yeah.

But

I thought, why not give this one a try?

And I will say, for me, I'm enjoying myself so far.

So my experience of of the Assassin's Creed franchise is played the first one, did not finish it.

Uh, was kind of like weirded out by the soupy combat.

There was like a lot of, like, it was like kind of liquidy, and I didn't really like that.

No crunch in it.

Yeah.

I, I, my memory of it is like hazy, but I, I have a similar recollection.

And then the next one I played was the French Revolution one.

And all I did in that one was purchase the game, climb to the top of the Notre Dame, never turn on the game again.

Like, I was so impressed with the crowd in front of the Notre Dame and this, like, being able to scale the Notre Dame.

And also,

Ubisoft's scans of Notre Dame were helpful in reconstructing Notre Dame because they took such intricate scans.

And I really love that, even though they're not, you know, exactly historically accurate.

I love that there is somebody there who's like, I really want to do a good job.

And the best way I can do that is to make sure that this building looks as close as the, as the real building does.

I didn't pick up the series again until Valhalla.

And then I think platinumed that game,

which was

one of the most addictive experiences I've ever had in games.

The like dopamine loop was so perfect for me and I really liked all the history.

I also really liked the mode in that where you just walk around learning.

And I think that was the first time that mode had ever ever been introduced to an Assassin's Creed game.

So when I loaded up this one, I was like, I haven't, because wasn't there another one in between Valhalla and this?

Yes, there was

not Odyssey.

Odyssey predated Valhalla.

Gosh.

Was there another one?

Mirage?

Mirage.

Oh, I forgot about Mirage.

Yeah, Mirage.

Mirage came out after that, and

I didn't pick it up.

No.

And then this one, I was like, you know, it's been a minute for an Assassin's Creed.

I love, uh, I love learning history through the games.

Uh, and so I'll, I'd love to learn more about Japanese history.

Yes.

Um, and again, so far, uh, I'm impressed with like there's already a button that you can press that's like learn about Japan.

Yeah.

And there's like a huge codex of like all of the stuff that you're like encountering or or passing through.

Um, and that's uh, I don't know, I'm a junkie for that sort of thing.

Yeah, I also really liked that the boot-up screen, and I didn't go into it because I only had limited amount of time today, but the boot-up screen, you can like go through the timeline of all the Assassin's Creed games.

Yes, I think that's a new thing that they're trying to do this like launcher where if you own or have the other games installed, you can open and

start them from any of them.

That's really cool.

I did not, so yeah, I hovered over Valhalla and I was like, wow, I wonder if this is like a truncated version of Valhalla or something.

But if it's just a launcher, then that's not great.

I also

had forgotten because I didn't do this in Valhalla, that there's like a store where you can buy like asinine things immediately to ruin the history of the game.

Like one of the bonuses I got for purchasing the game was a wolf to ride on.

And I'm like, man, I've just like spent all this like neat time like going through the mud and like sneaking through the grass.

The idea that I would whistle and a giant wolf would come out of the woods.

Domesticated wolf that he uses a mount completely ahistorical.

Yeah, kind of was like, I feel like that stuff is fun in end game.

But like right up at the beginning when you're like trying to get like the context for the history of where you are, it feels like it shouldn't, that you shouldn't be able to ride a glow-in-the-dark wolf.

It's a little goofy.

I agree.

I didn't get into any of that, but Speed of Launcher, so I'm playing on Steam, which led me to install or reinstall Ubisoft Connect, which I had it on at some point on my old PC.

Ubisoft Connect, I couldn't tell if it was mandated.

It sort of the prompts made me feel like I had to install it to play it, but I couldn't quite tell.

But I was like, I don't want to fuck it.

I'll just get this game up and running.

I'll put this, I'll log in, and I'll install this dumbass launcher.

The thing is, there is an overlay with Ubisoft Connect, even if I'm playing on Steam, and it has notifications and achievements that are even more intrusive than the epic notifications, which I already found super annoying.

And Ranch, I know you experienced some of those with Alan Wake.

It's just like, it's just like, why do I need something that takes up a fucking quarter of my screen saying that I got an achievement for completing a certain chapter?

It's like, get this fuck out of the bread.

Thankfully, I turned everything off, but it was just like one of those minor annoyances

where I'm just like, I wish all these companies would stop doing that.

Like, just let Steam be the platform and stop trying to,

but I guess they're whatever.

All these companies are just trying to establish their own platform.

The speed with which those achievements started coming also, I played on PS5

Pro

and the

like within the first few hours, it's just like ding in the corner, ding, sight unseen, ding,

ruthless kill.

And I was like,

I don't, these aren't achievements.

I'm not achieving anything.

It feels like they,

some sort of focus testing or analytics or market research they did or some combination of them told, said that like people want a bunch of achievements in the early hours and that makes them more likely to keep playing a game.

Maybe.

But it's, I agree.

It's, it's too much and it's annoying.

And if you're getting, the Steam ones are fine.

I do have the Steam notifications on those achievements.

Those don't bother me.

But the Ubisoft ones were just so intrusive.

But talking about the game itself.

I think we all kind of talked about this offline.

I do kind of wish I could play the game that I bought a little bit more in the early going.

Yeah.

Like,

I'm just over three hours in, and I feel like the game is really front-loaded with cutscenes.

And the gameplay sections are, for a game that's going to be primarily an open world experience, are pretty much on rails.

Yeah.

Like, just like, go from A to B.

Here's, here's a really clear objective.

Maybe not even with combat.

This is just like a sort of a walking stretch.

This is almost like, hey, here's a here's a little bit of interactivity just so you don't feel like you're watching a Kojima level of cutscenes before you play the game.

Yes.

And for me, like, even though I like the story and I find the story kind of interesting, I still just like, I wish there was a little bit more, I don't know, maybe, maybe that the cold open that they had or something could just be like a little bit more extended.

Well, what I found weird about the structure of these first few hours is that they launch you in the, they give you an introduction to the two main characters.

Yasuke and Naoe.

Yeah, and they

give you a tutorial in those levels of like how to do blocks, how to do sneaking, like how to do an assassination.

Like they, they, they load all that into you pretty rapidly.

Right.

And then after that,

you go backwards to earlier in her life where she doesn't know any of this stuff.

And they tutorial you it again.

And I was like,

this sucks.

I have literally already learned this in combat in the opening.

Why am I now having to do it four times to her father in order to like progress further?

Pacing wise, that I found very strange when you're, yeah, so you started as Yasuke, and then I have not gotten back to Yasuke.

I've kept playing her.

And just all Naoi from that point on for a while, I guess.

But

I like playing as Naoe, who's more of like, Yasuke is more of a brute, more of a bruiser, more of a samurai now, more of a ninja, a

traditional assassin, more stealth-focused, very nimble, very agile.

I think it's a very fun character to play.

Love the grappling hook.

Great grappling hook.

The hook is good.

The hook feels good.

Although I do like the second row hook better.

But I was going to say, like,

yeah, it's so strange that you have the fight, the, the, the, the here's how to fight with your dad before, even if that makes sense from a story standpoint, from a gameplay standpoint, it's just like, why am I relearning the same thing or an adjacent skill?

Also, oh, sorry.

I was going to say, you could just, you could have achieved the same thing by

having that flashback, you know, this flashback portion start at the end of the training sequence and be like, You're actually getting pretty good at this now, right?

Yeah, or move on, or you could have had her be like, you could have had her

about to do her first combat and she's running towards it, and there's like some kind of like smoky, like

you know, memory, and you hear your father's voice, and then you fade in on that training sequence, and then you come back fine.

Yeah, um, here's what bummed me out:

uh, as Yasuke, I fucking, I was so, I was so happy and I was cheering.

The dude is like lopping people's heads off.

Those, those animations are really satisfying.

All of his finishes and execution, he is just like a powerhouse, and you can run through doors, which is super fun.

You also get preloaded with like two of your rechargeable special moves that are dedicated to like the R2 button already.

What one of them is a kick that kicks people through like landscape and through furniture and stuff.

And I felt so awesome being this guy immediately and then to backpedal to the stealth stuff I was like okay some people are gonna some people are gonna be like oh I hope the whole game's not like this when you're Yasuke

I I

I have difficulty believing that that kind of person exists but I'm sure that they do and so when you get to uh to her her her portion of the game they're probably like oh cool I'm like sneaking through and I'm like stabbing people with my little knife and and maybe that's fun.

But none of the brutality of those kills matched the insanity of what we had just experienced.

Yeah.

Like I expected her to like leap off a building and jam her knife through somebody's eye hole, like something akin to what we'd seen.

Right.

And she doesn't do any of that shit.

Yeah.

I mean, the assassinations, I think they do look good.

I think they're cool.

The game looks good.

The game, a lot of very, from an animation standpoint in particular, there's a lot of really really distinct attack finisher and

assassination animations.

Hers are still quite violent, but you start with like a different level of

brutality.

Uh, that is, yeah, and then like it's it's really front-loaded with all this action, and then it just kind of goes to a little bit more patient cadence for a little bit.

And then from that patient cadence, goes back another step to a tutorial with a wooden sword, and from that tutorial with a wooden sword goes even farther back to you can't walk properly.

Right.

Like, it's crazy to

introduce all of the freedom of a game and then take strip it away from you step by step.

Yeah.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

I will say, though, like, so, so there were, there were certainly some frustrations with like how the game onboards you and just like kind of its slow pace.

And then me just wanting to, like, you know,

I'm installing the game.

It's like, okay, my game's ready to play.

Time to play.

And it still kind of feels like you're still installing the game because you're still trying to get to the point where you get to actually play it.

Whatever that, what is the, the, the, the count count that tracks that time to game play?

What is it?

Time to game.

I don't know.

Is it just a time to game?

I said it.

I wasn't sure if that's like a that's no, there's an account that tracks it that says how long.

Oh, interesting.

How much cinematic you have to get through before you actually play the game.

It's not how long to play.

That's total play time.

It's it's like how long until your first moment of control.

You do get to control Yasuke pretty early, but the first time you're controlling him is literally just a follow thing.

You're just walking behind somebody in a crowd, and then you have a little bit of an action sequence.

But I do think the combat

is fairly kinetic and fun.

It does kind of have a feel of like a dumbed-down Sekiro of just like, you know, there's really clear tells

for parries and very large windows.

Same thing for dodges,

you know, like a flashing red to indicate when something is unblockable.

So, you know, to dodge instead.

So it is like very spoon-fed to you, but I do think it's pretty fun.

And the other thing I like is

there is a mode, mode, I think it's called immersive mode, which I turned on,

which makes it so that the characters are all speaking the language they would be speaking by default.

Yeah, and everything.

And Portuguese or Japanese.

Portuguese or Japanese primarily.

And so that does make it feel like, oh, I am in a different world.

Like,

I really like, I mean, it's called immersive mode, and it is more immersive.

I don't think that immersive mode was in Valhalla, and it immediately made me bummed out.

Like, looking back on it, I was like, oh, man, I know we don't know what Vikings sounded like.

Yeah.

So it's, there's no way for us to, like, unless they were all speaking effectively Icelandic, which is the closest to Viking language that still exists.

I was like, but man, it would be awesome if these guys were all speaking

in Icelandic.

And then you went to Paris and they were all speaking French and you went to the UK and they were speaking old English.

It would be so fucking cool.

Yeah, I'd like this game like 5% to 10% less if everyone was just speaking English.

Yeah.

I hadn't turned that on.

There's also a canon mode, which I did not turn on.

And I kind of regret not turning it on because it's like, that just makes those decisions for you.

Like, like what it's, what it's like, you know, and decisions are all things like, like, I'm not sure, or I'll look into that.

You know, I mean, they don't feel like big,

pivotal RPG decisions, dialogue.

Yeah, but it'll be like the little kid will be like, will be like, do you want to do something with me?

And your options will be like, absolutely.

Or are you an enemy?

I know what I'm thinking.

I do like that little kid.

Going back to the look of it.

So I'm playing on PC.

I've got an RTX 4070 Ti Super, and it does look awesome.

And performance is great.

Like it's like, I was just like, I feel like I got 120 FPS.

I didn't, you know, it's just like, it's so silky smooth.

I was weirdly getting hitching and stuttering only in cutscenes, which I was baffled by because some of these were like pre-rendered.

And it seemed to go away when I turned off Ubisoft Connect, which was another thing.

It was like, was that the issue?

But that's also a thing of like,

I do love PC gaming, but it always kind of sucks when it's just like, I got to fucking debug something.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

I didn't mean to interrupt.

I just said, yeah.

Some of the stuttering is intentional.

Okay.

Like there is, there are, there are.

No, no, I don't mean that.

I mean, there was some other stuff that was like.

clearly not an artistic choice.

It felt like a technical issue.

Because there was like parts where like a bird would be flying and it would just like jump across the sky.

And I was was like oh yeah it's that it's that bullshit yes yeah yeah that that's the that's the part about a sasuscreen that I just really don't care about any of that lore like I've never been at all interested in any of the sci-fi stuff I'm always like

I always forget that's part of it and I'm always like, why do they keep fucking doing this?

This can't be anybody's favorite part.

Well, there, there, I mean, in Valhalla, there were modern day sequences.

Yes.

And I assume that there's going to be a part of this game where you suddenly hop forward to the, what's it, the Animus, whatever the fuck it's called, and like an like a fucking archaeological dig.

I like that stuff.

I like it because like

I don't know, there's a million, like Kingdom Come 2 is another fucking essentially Assassin's Creed simulator.

So I like that there is one additional flavor to these games that makes it like...

What if going back in time was something you could do by scanning your DNA?

I'm on board for that.

It's not like an uninteresting premise.

I'm just like, I guess, a little tired of

here's this thing that's going on and some evil companies behind it.

They're like, okay, like great.

Cool.

Yeah, it's called the Assassin's Creed franchise.

It's a,

but the other thing I like,

I do think the gameplay, the, you know, the, the, the limited amount you get to play in the opening hours is pretty fun.

And I do think the aesthetics are are really on point and i like the immersive mode a lot i also like i think there were some people were complaining about the the the game's protagonists yeah for for whatever reason i never really

racism and sexism okay got it i never really clocked any of that but like in context i was like this feels like a really interesting narrative choice that it's like it's like a uh a black character who's enslaved by the portuguese who is uh essentially like given his tribute to Nobunaga, but then becomes like this, you know, like is empowered to become this

samurai warrior in his own right.

Like, like, like, and the same thing, Naoi, like this, you know, this, this low-status woman who has to, like, you know, kind of like deal with this, this, this insular patriarchal society.

It's like, it's like, I, I, I just think it's like, it seems like it's set up to be dramatically interesting.

And at some point, these characters, I guess, are going to cross paths and we'll see what happens.

Yeah, aren't they on opposite sides?

On the opposite sides of the conflict?

Yeah, because he's with Nobunaga and she's with people being rated by Nobunaga.

Yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So, so seeing how that, like, I'm, I'm sure that it's not going to like, uh, you know,

at some point, they are going to end up being allies.

And I'm just interested to see how that's going to happen.

Really?

I was, I was hoping.

That's my expectation.

I was hoping it was like a pivotal decision where you're like, are you going to choose to side with Nobunaga?

Are you going to choose to side with the farm?

Well, maybe you do.

I don't know.

Interesting.

Look, I'm.

I guess there's probably no reason to speculate because people have already finished this game and you can just see what the ending is.

I don't fucking know.

Do you think people have finished it already?

Not by the time this episode is out?

Yeah, absolutely.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, for sure.

I can't wait to see what else is going on.

I just like, I really, really love the immersive mode.

I was wondering about that.

I think that was awesome.

I really like that.

Really, really cool touch.

And I just like, I just like kind of, one of my favorite things to do is climb on walls.

Climbing is great.

I love climbing.

Good climbing.

The parkour is great.

I like throwing.

I like throwing stuff.

And I love stealth.

Can I say something?

I do love stealth, too.

I know there doesn't like stealth.

Grumpy about it.

Good running around,

bad horse running around.

I don't like the horse.

The horse,

I don't know.

I haven't spent that much time on the horse.

You're not crazy about the horse.

When I did have to get on the horse, because it was like, call your horse.

Yeah.

And I did it.

I was sort of like,

I don't care about

this enough.

But I do like.

I think it's trying to make it a little bit more

like actual horseback riding.

But

as far as just controlling a video game, it just feels a little bit unwieldy in a bad way.

I wonder,

speaking to the narrative choice to make it two separate protagonists with different play styles, one of the things that was an interesting friction in Valhalla is the Assassin's Creed people come up to Ivor and they're like, so we want to indoctrinate you into this lineage of assassins.

And she was like, fuck you.

I am not going to go

kill somebody by secret.

Like, that is not how our culture works.

That is extremely disrespectful.

And they were like, oh,

well,

we're going to give you the little knife and you can choose to use it if you want.

But I liked that there was like an interesting conflict between what the series is and where they wanted to set it.

And with this, it feels like I hope that

in the same way that I hope that Yasuke does not have assassin abilities.

Right, because from what I learned in Ghost of Tsushima, you have to face an enemy face to face as a samurai because it's dishonorable to fight somebody from behind or sneakily.

That's that's the

two

realities.

Yeah.

The two identities in one character sort of choice.

And here they're splitting into two different characters.

I really hope that that's how they got around that ludo-narrative dissonance, which I think is what that that is, where it's like, oh, you're a samurai, but unlike all samurais in the history of the culture, you are an assassin.

Like, that would suck.

No, in Ghost of Tsujima, it's like a, it's like a, a moral choice, and you kind of become the, the, you know, like, if you embrace the shadow, it's like, oh, it's like, you know, it's, you're, you're care.

Like.

It's a thing that happens by necessity in the course of the game, but it's like, but you can lean into that and it's like, it's like the dark side of the force, basically.

Yeah.

I, you know, i i think i i'm going to keep playing this game me too i i have the thing you know the other game i'm playing right now the other big honker i'm playing right now is final fantasy 7 rebirth and so it's a kind of thing of like do i just budget 40 hours for assassin's creed shadows and then come back to final fantasy 7 rebirth or do i just mess around with this a little bit more until i get bored of it and then go back to rebirth i don't know what i'm going to do exactly but I'm having more fun with it than I expected.

And

I do like the setting quite a bit.

And that's a big part of why I decided to play play it in the first place.

I love, love, love Assassin's Creed, high vistas, looking out at the landscape and being like, I can go to literally anything I can see.

Like, what it's, we, you know, last week when we were doing these, um, I had two thoughts about this while playing.

Well, we were doing the like top 300 games on Metacritic, right?

And it was so front-loaded by these games that came out in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Right.

And I was thinking about how

Soul Calibur 2 is the number two game on that list, right?

I think for Dreamcast.

And I was like, if you put

this game, if you dropped this game into the year 1999 as is, and you showed it to everyone, everyone on planet Earth at every game magazine would give it 100.

Like everybody everywhere would be like, there's so much to do.

The graphics are insane.

It has this like sci-fi history story that I've never even encountered before.

They would like fall over themselves.

But

Soul Calibur 2, you can play immediately.

Right.

And in perpetuity forever until today, you could still be having new rounds of Soul Calibur 2.

Yes.

And while I was in those first three hours, I was like, or would the game be like...

like demoted because there's so much fucking shit you can't play at the top of this game.

Would people be like, wow, it really looks pretty, but I don't have any ability to play this game because i'm just being told this stuff i think that it would be too much too fast for a 1999 video game audience is as someone who's playing video games in 1999 and had a sega dreamcast with soul caliber i i think i think it would be just like kind of like

you know

What I think you're speaking to is just like it's a still evolving medium and that that has made such enormous leaps in technology but i i yeah i don't know i think this game would be like considered like a like a

a technical like like just a you know a miracle at that in that time if you somehow got this running on like a playstation 2 or whatever the fuck but

i i like i i from a gameplay standpoint that if we're talking that this is coming out before grand theft auto 3 you know before people had really wrapped their heads around the idea of an open world or a sandbox game i think people would not really know what to do with it

Because like Shenbu was kind of an open world.

Yeah, 100%.

And people were like, what is this?

Yeah.

Why do I go up and talk to anybody I want to?

What the fuck am I doing with this forklift?

And why does he sound like this when he's talking?

I guess I'll play this game that's inside the game.

It's a

I was going to say one other thing on this.

Oh, the other thing I was going to say is like, I think people will be playing Soul Calibur

further in the future than they're going to be playing Assassin's Creed Shadows, too.

So that's the other thing.

Ranch, you ever messed around with the Assassin's Creed franchise?

No, never.

And I don't know what it is.

Great.

Perfect.

Hey,

does someone else have something to talk about?

I did have one quick thing I wanted to talk about.

I went to an article.

But we could get the Resident Evil Merchant Nask.

What are you playing?

Oh, yeah.

Do you think you get the Resident Evil Watcher back in?

The merch?

Do you think the merch?

I drank too much milk.

Oh, yeah.

Never mind.

Just go lay down.

Yeah.

I feel good.

Go lay down.

Go lay down on your side.

His free milk had come, and

I thought I would take advantage.

Yeah, I mean, people usually use that to like...

I drank too much milk.

People use that for like their coffee or whatever.

They don't usually just drink like a whole glass of milk.

Wait.

Wait,

I thought creamer was creamer different?

Creamer is different.

Did you drink creamer?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, you should lie down.

Yeah, go lay down.

Lay down on your side.

I will get it.

And just kind of like, just relax.

Okay, I went to...

I went to.

You're making my bones feel worse.

Yeah, no,

they're probably too dense.

You're drinking too much dairy.

It's adding too much to your bones.

You have to cough.

You have to cool it with calcium for a little while, I think.

Yeah, I'm going to lay down.

Go lay down.

It's okay.

Can you guys one more Assassin's Creed thing?

In Volhollow, did it also have the shoulder buttons for the from soft style combat?

Yes.

I really like the feel of that.

I do like it too.

Yeah.

I like holding it down, making it charge up.

Making it charge up.

Yeah, that's great.

Very sensitive.

This was something I didn't say about it.

I was surprised how different,

even though it's the exact same button combos, it feels different from Valhalla because the slicing is faster.

So like the combos feel faster.

Whereas with the axes and the heavy axe, it was like like a wind-up swing every time right

instead of these like big snappy movements and i was like oh i like that yeah there's something a little more like with the with the axes and stuff that's you get it's a little more animalistic it's a little more it's it's it's more violent yeah because you have to sort of throw your entire body behind it but with uh with like these blades yeah having wielded a katana previously in my life i've done this wait in real life yeah i did it for a dropout thing i had oh wait we talked about this i did I uh use a katana and sliced a watermelon in half.

The blade does all the work, you don't have to swing that thing hard at all, it's sharp as fuck, right?

Like, it's just the harder you swing it, the more likely you are gonna hurt yourself, probably.

Yeah, just kind of let it go like a hot knife through butter, basically.

Okay, um,

so you know, a little quick movement, that's all that's all I need with that.

But I went to so I went to an art gallery, uh, this um, this gallery in Alhambra, California called

Nucleus, And they were putting on, they were having a collaboration with Sony Santa Monica and the God of War franchise for the 20th anniversary of God of War.

And I went

to the game.

That's wild.

A wild thing.

Oh my God.

Because that's one of my games.

I was also, I would just say, like, I was an adult when God of War came out.

So that's like a big for, it was like, oh, yeah, when you, when you remember, there's one thing when you can like remember 20 years ago.

There's another thing when you remember 20 years ago and like you could drive a car and buy a beer.

And you're on the phone with your bank.

Yeah.

Could you just put some money in there, please?

Give me some.

But yeah, they were celebrating the 20th anniversary, and I went down just to go check it out.

And it was great.

It's a small little gallery.

So they had, but they had in one of the rooms, they had

like displays of all of the individual games.

So like a timeline of the game so they had like the box and the box art and like the disc

in like a frame basically and it was just interesting to be at like essentially a museum where there's a PSP game in a glass case

I was like that's so crazy yeah I love that

of all the games though yeah the PSP one is the one with the strangest form factor yes it's the kind of thing you would expect like seeing a CD in a glass case not very novel yeah but Bu-ray yeah, who cares.

But you're looking at like a triangular circle and you're like, what is that?

Yeah.

A UMD is like what the media of the future would be like in like a 1980s, like future sci-fi movie.

Yes.

It's so fucking weird.

It's awesome.

It rocks.

It's

bring them back.

I want to watch Oppenheimer on a UMD.

I wonder what the final UMD film released was.

I know that I had kick-ass on

UMD because it came with my PSP.

Cool.

And that was from 2010.

I had Reign of the Fire.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know.

I can't wait to find out how late in the game they were still releasing UMD films.

Yeah, they did like the Liam Neeson Rihanna battleship movie on UMD.

Anyone want to.

It is a sequel.

I'll give you that much.

Anyone want to guess what it was?

It kind of sounds like

funny one for it to be.

It's very funny that this is the final UMD.

Is it like the Hangover 2 or something?

It is Hangover Part 2.

That fucking sucks.

One, it sucks that that's what it is.

And two, it sucks that that's.

I guessed correctly in one guess.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah, Hangover Part 2 was the last one in

the US and AU.

But over in Asia, they were making porno UMDs until 2016.

So how about that?

Hey, wow.

You know what?

We were doing that still.

2016 wouldn't have gone that way, I think.

If there was physical porno being released in UMD,

I think it would have solved everything.

What a strange,

like, what

there, I can't wrap my head around the use case

of porno on a UMD beat.

I'm gonna put it on so you could watch it and jack off.

No, no,

I know what the use case is.

I mean, like,

why would you want a physical disc

of pornography?

Yeah.

Seven,

no,

no, no, no.

Nine years after the iPhone comes out.

Yeah.

Like, what is the use case of having it for a PSP?

You're just like a connoisseur of physical media.

Yeah.

I think there is some stuff you could, like, like any sort of enthusiast

you know if there's there's stuff that you could only get on as a physical release like whatever my particular

predilections are.

It's not like I'm just talking about myself.

Yeah.

Whatever my thing is.

Whatever, whatever, whatever weird shit I'm into, you can only get it on a UMD order from Taiwan.

Mommy stomp me.

Only available.

So, no, there's, there's like...

I'm sure they treat you like a trash can.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there's that, but I think there's also, it's like the old guys who still go to the adult bookstore or the porno theater.

It's just like you just get locked in a consumption habit.

And maybe I don't have a smartphone, but I still have my old PSP.

And that's just how I'm used to watching porno.

I always assumed that the guys at the porno theaters were exhibitionists.

There's some of that.

There's definitely some of that.

Like they wanted to see, or they wanted other people to see them jerking off or getting horny.

There is that.

There's all sorts of things going on in a porno theater.

But

like what, Nick?

Look.

Certainly they're screening porno.

Everyone has different agendas there.

But there are guys who just go there just to jack off by themselves because they're just like, that's why they're used to consuming pornography.

That's who he's on the big screen.

That's the guy facing the corner and looking over his shoulder at the film.

Doesn't want anybody looking at him.

I do want to make sure I'm following the story.

But there was another part of the gallery that had like

that had actual art in it, not just from the games, but like

art that like people made.

And it was just interesting to see

it was just really interesting to see so many people.

Like, there was a lot of people there, by the way.

And

it was wild to see just the different styles of art and the different like what was resonant to people like from the games.

There was like a, I mean, this was like certainly Sony Santa Monica like

gear.

They had, they had like Mimir's head in a case.

I was like, that's really cool.

But there was like a point of painting of Kratos doing, it was like, there was a big sort of like

thrown Kratos like in a painting that was like a massive, it was huge.

And I was, they, these had prices.

People were like bidding on these, wow, on these works of art, which was really, really cool.

I bought a print of something that I can't hang up in my home because I don't have room to

display it.

What was that?

From the sex scene?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, here's the thing.

It's panned away, and all you see is a candle rocking and a triangle icon above it.

But

I was inspired, and I booted up

God of War, Chains of Olympus on

my PlayStation Vita, running the PSP.

I love it.

It's beautiful.

The PSP emulator adrenaline on there.

And it's great.

I love it.

I own the game anyway.

And

that's it for me.

I know we have a big topic to get on to too.

Ranch,

I have to blow up Ranch's spot for one second.

Ranch

sat and played portal on stream and completed it in one sitting.

Wow.

How long did it take you?

Final time was five hours and 45 minutes.

Hey, nice.

Did you have, like, how was the chat helping you with any of the puzzles?

How did you get through it?

I needed a lot of help.

Okay.

Especially towards the end.

There were parts where I just kind of was like, I was getting grumpy.

I was angry.

But

it was so fun.

I never played a game like that before.

It's rad.

It's one of my favorite games of all time.

Yeah, it does get a little bit obtuse, but I think it like heightens in a way where, you know, if you're, if you're just playing it with,

I think, I think it, I think it earns it by the time it gets to those, those later, like more abstract puzzles.

Yeah.

Did you like, did you like the sensibility?

Did you like like GLaDOS?

Did you like to respond to all that?

The companion cube.

Yes.

I fell in love with the cube.

And then instead of incinerating it, I jumped into the incinerator.

Are you going to play Portal 2, you think?

I think so.

Oh, I love it.

They're saying that it's like even better.

I like Portal 1 more.

Me too.

But I, because I just think it's like a perfectly contained package.

But I think the consensus is that Portal 2, which is like two to three times as long and is a very funny, very well-written game with some really awesome uh puzzle designs.

Like,

I think the consensus is that people like Portal 2 more, but they're both great games, both all-timers.

Hell yeah, congrats!

I love it!

That's really cool!

Yeah, hell yeah.

I felt like I write a passage to play Portal.

Hell yeah!

There you go, yeah, there you go.

There you go, there you go.

Hey, there you go, there you go.

Are we stuck?

I don't know.

There you go.

Here comes a new challenger.

The UK documentary about Street Fighter 2 made in 2023, Here Comes a New Challenger, is now free to stream on Tubi in the U.S.

Tooby, Tubby, Tubi?

Tubby.

Tubby's my stream.

I did say stream it, Tubby.

Directed by Oliver Harper with a big honking two-hour, 21-minute runtime.

I guess

the place to start here is what was everyone's first encounter with Street Fighter in general and Street Fighter 2 specifically?

I think for me,

I got to Street Fighter 2.

I probably had interacted with it at some point, like an arcade or something.

But my very first Street Fighter that I absolutely loved was Street Fighter 4.

And it's still,

and maybe because it was my first Street Fighter is still like the gold standard to me, like the one that I liked the most.

Do you remember?

Do you have a memory of the first time you played Street Fighter or came across a Street Fighter, or is that not something that sticks in your brain?

I don't really remember the first iteration.

I had known about what it was, certainly.

So when 4 came around and my friends were super into it, I was like, oh yeah, Street Fighter.

I know what Street Fighter is.

Yes.

But it must have been at like a...

Gosh, maybe like a nickel nickel or something or like a, which is like a nickel arcade.

I don't know if they had that in Chicago.

Yeah, they did.

Okay.

And

I just know that like by the time I got to Street Fighter 2, it would have to.

I probably played Street Fighter 2 the most for this show, honestly.

Like,

if we had talked about it in the past, I know we did an episode on 3, but I got it for, I also had it on Switch.

That was like one of the first Switch games I got, which was Ultra Street Fighter 2, the Final Champions.

And I would play that a lot.

And I played that on an airplane.

There was somebody, I was playing with my girlfriend, or, you know, my wife,

my girlfriend at the time.

That's fine.

That's okay.

She was was my girlfriend then.

Now she's my wife.

We were playing on an airplane, and the person sitting next to us was like, can I play?

And we just like made a friend on the plane.

We just started playing with this street, like passing it back and forth with this person on the plane.

We had a great time.

It was great.

That's awesome.

And then, but yeah, I think that's probably the most I've played in the more recent years, Street Fighter 2.

That's cool.

Yeah.

I would say, Nick, to answer your question, Street Fighter has cast such an enormous shadow over my entire life that not only can I remember the exact first moment that I encountered it, which was I was at Pizza Hut with my grandma and they it was in the lobby, the sort of foyer area, and it was the biggest characters I have ever seen moving on the screen was like my introduction to it.

And I got, she gave us quarters.

It was me and my cousin and we played around and he picked Blanca and I picked Chunley.

And I can remember the very first round of Street Fighter I ever played as a kid.

From there,

Street Fighter was sort of ever present in my

entire gaming,

like my entire gaming life.

I was

playing at tournaments in Chicago in the very late 90s.

And there is raw footage of one of those tournaments that has been uploaded to YouTube where you can see me in the background with my mom and my dad.

At that, and I think I've talked about this on this podcast.

At that same

tournament is a future friend of mine, Seth Killian, who goes on to, so he's playing at a machine and the camera goes past because he also grew up in Chicago.

And then many years later, when I'm a video game journalist,

Seth is the community manager and the

sort of like play tester for Street Fighter 4.

And I meet him professionally.

And then we discover: holy shit, we were in the same room when we were young.

Seth is also one of the founding, or one of the first people to go play internationally

in the first international Street Fighter tournament in the late 90s

as a member of Team USA.

Team USA is covered in a documentary called Bang the Machine,

which

is

destroyed.

All of the raw footage is destroyed in 9-11.

Yes.

So the only copies that exist are ones with unlicensed music.

And once in a while, you'll find somebody screening it at like a film festival or South by Southwest.

Seth showed it to me from his copy.

And it's like an incredible moment in time.

Like it's an awesome

Street Fighter documentary that's also like, this was the apex of the Street Fighter 2 era.

It's the moment where, like, the team USA people are like, let's go to Japan and enter the tournament as like the official team USA.

Street Fighter 3 was an enormous part of my life.

Obviously, I did a game and tell about it.

And then Street Fighter 4, I was addicted to.

And I agree with you, Matt.

It is a really, really, really, really great game.

Fucking awesome.

And

it is as good as, in my opinion, 2-3, 2-3, and four are all perfect.

It was five's sort of lackluster intro that made me fall off of the series.

And the same reason why I bounced off of six was because

five

flopped so hard in my experience that an entire legacy of Street Fighter came to an end for me.

Yeah.

I'm not the fighting game enthusiast

or as knowledgeable about fighting games as you are, but I was very impressed by Street Fighter VI.

I thought it was really a cool game.

And for me, I was like, oh, this feels like the franchise has found its footing again.

Yeah, no, I'm sure it's a good game.

I just, I lost totally.

Yeah, totally get that.

But, but I know that Street Fighter has been like, like, you know, one of the most important video game franchises to you.

I mean, and, and to me, it's certainly,

it was an important one to me at a certain point in my life.

My, my first uh encounter with Street Fighter as as

the the the old man of the podcast was Street Fighter 1, which was at an arcade called Aladdin's Castle in my hometown of Lakewood, California at the Lakewood Ball.

And I remember looking at this game and like you were saying with Street Fighter 2, just being like, wow, these characters are big.

I'd played other games like Karate Champ, some of the games that get touched on in here, like I'd played either as cabinets or like on a friend's console.

But it was the first time I was like, oh, this is an actual, this feels like something new.

These are these big characters, these big sprites, and there's six buttons.

Like, what the hell is going on with this game?

What I didn't realize is that Street Fighter 1, and I was too young at the time to really,

like, I was just like, this game is hard, or this game is weird.

I do, it wasn't like this game sucks and isn't well done, but I do remember how hyped everyone was for Street Fighter 2, which Street Fighter 1 is just kind of like almost like a, you know, an artifact or a prototype or whatever.

You know, it's not really a playable game.

But Street Fighter 2 was a game I was reading about in like Game Pro and EGM, you know, before it came out.

Game Freak, which I was maybe around at the time, I don't remember.

But I remember just like reading

these magazines.

I remember we were on a road trip because my parents were

like, the only family vacations we would take is we would drive everywhere.

And so I had like an EGM on a road trip and I was just reading obsessively about Street Fighter 2, this game that I hadn't yet played.

We went to Vegas

as part of this road trip and there was an arcade in Vegas that had a Street Fighter 2 cabinet.

And it was the first time I got to play it.

And I was so, I was like the most excited I'd ever been to like play an arcade game.

I was like, holy shit, this game I've been reading about for months.

I can put a token in and

just absolutely get fucking my ass kicked by someone who knows how to play Guile.

But I was still just like, this is so, this is so, so cool.

And then from that point, it became like a game that we would go to the arcades to play, to play Street Fighter 2.

Everyone wanted to be Guile, like, like, that was a big thing that's touched on in the documentary.

So I, you know, like, like,

you'd learn how to play other characters because Guile was like the, you you know, was

at least in a pre-internet age, was considered like the S-tier character.

I'm not sure if that's still the case in Competitive Street Fighter, but like, you know,

in Vanilla Street Fighter 2, Vanilla's a Flavor, but like it is, in the fault Street Fighter 2, I feel like it was like Guile and Dalsum, right?

Am I wrong?

Were those like kind of the top tier characters?

I mean, I

thought it was Ryu.

Maybe it was Ryu, but Guile was easier to drive

because of his, you know, his charge moves are a lot simpler than

Ryuse.

But, like, I just remember at the time, everyone wanting to play that character.

And I remember thinking it was like the coolest fucking game.

I remember it looked so cool.

And I was so, so hyped for the Super Nintendo port, which was also absolutely delivered.

One of the best arcade ports at the time.

It was a really, really impressive port.

So, like, there was a lot of memory lane for me

on a documentary focus, not just on the Street Fighter franchise at large, but Street Fighter 2 specifically.

Rochelle, you ever spend any time with a Street Fighter?

I remember my brothers playing it when I was the kid.

Yeah.

Street Fighter 2, or do you remember which one?

I don't remember.

Chen Lee was in it.

Is she in all of them?

Mostly, yeah.

The 7-Eleven near my house had Street Fighter 2.

Wow.

And

they had an egg crate that they kept in the little game room for when I would come to play it because I was too short.

And so they would like pull out the egg crate and I would stand on the egg crate.

And usually it would be like, maybe there was like one other girl there, but like generally speaking, she was much older than me.

And the rest was like a group of like the local guys from Chicago.

And we would all just take turns playing the game.

And I became so obsessed with it that I would start cleaning the house ravenously, like cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, because I was like, there are quarters in the house.

Right.

If I clean the house enough, I will find the quarters.

So I would do all of the laundry and rehang all of my dad's shirts and pants and check all of the pockets.

I would like.

put my mom's purse away like the purses that she didn't use and i would check the like zipper pouches that like are on the sides that you know you forget are even in a purse until i had cleaned our house and like if I would find pennies I'd collect the pennies so that I would bring them to 7-Eleven and exchange them for a quarter so that I could play Street Fighter 2.

So

all that context from us

I don't want to be too critical about this documentary because I can tell it is a labor of love and there are some great interviews.

Yes.

I do feel

My issue with the doc is there's a lot of assumed knowledge of what Street Fighter is, a lot assumed knowledge about Street Fighter 2 specifically is, what game development workflow is, and also just knowing anything about how the arcade industry worked in the 90s and how arcade hardware worked in general.

And I do feel like, Ranch, did you watch this doc?

I feel like if I showed this to, I feel like if you watched this or I showed this to like my parents or my young nieces and nephews who are gamers, but like grew up with Minecraft and Fortnite, I think they'd just be lost because I think there's a lot of missing context that doesn't really explain this game's actual cultural import.

I think this is more of a, this is more functional as a nostalgia play for people who actually live through it, as opposed to, here's a documentary telling you about what a sensation this is.

Yeah, and it's got to be really hard to make a documentary about something you love, which is again, I'm not trying to be critical, but I think when you love something this much, and it really feels like the filmmaker does, then I think you sometimes can be a little bit too close to it and not recognize what you need to convey this to an outsider.

I say this affectionately.

Yeah.

This belongs

on a

game disc or cartridge.

This was supplementary material for the Street Fighter anniversary collection.

This is like the perfect place for it.

That would have been great.

That's a great place for it because you're already,

an enthusiast bought this already.

So it's just bonus content for them to sit back and

really sit down for a long time and

watch this.

I do think there are some things in the documentary that don't need to be there for as long as they are.

Namely,

I know that they touch on the movie to

the live-action movie to get to the broader point that the

anime movie is a more successful adaptation of Street Fighter 2.

I don't know if we needed to spend that much time on the debacle of the production of the movie.

There's like, you know, again, I mentioned it's a two-hour, 21-minute runtime, and you do feel it.

It feels long.

And I think that, you know, this is that the challenge of making a documentary is that a you talk to a bunch of interesting people, you get a bunch of great footage.

I'm sure they have hundreds more hours that aren't in this movie.

Um, but but at a certain point, it's just like, well, some of these people who are talking about the movie are compelling, yes.

But because we're spending so much time on the on the live-action movie, the Stephen D.

Sisouza, uh, a Stephen D.

D'Souza directed movie, it like feels like that becomes just a second half of the documentary.

Yes.

And the same thing, like, like, like they spend just as much time time on the anime, which is like, I like the anime.

We watch the anime on the podcast.

It's good.

I agree.

Like, I agree with what you're saying, but a lot of it is just, you know, guys who look like me sitting in front of a wall of Funko Pops going, like, man, when Ken was in there, it was awesome.

It's just like, all right, cool.

Yeah.

There's a moment where

there's like enough time spent that you learn that in the Street Fighter Alpha game, which is not what the documentary is about, they reference the scene from the Street Fighter 2 movie where Ken has a ribbon in his hair and gives it to Ryu.

And they're like, and that's in like Street Fighter Alpha.

And so is the

scene where you're fighting against Sagat in the dark thunderstorm on that like grassy plain.

And it's like, oh yeah, yeah, no, I know all of this.

Yeah.

But I don't know that it needs to take up such even like a spoken footprint in a, in a, in a documentary about Street Fighter 2 specifically.

I think if you're, if you're a person who knows Street Fighter 2 well, it's, it's information you already know.

And if it's some, if you're someone who's just like, what is Street Fighter 2?

What was that all about?

I know that was a, that was a big game, right?

You're, you're like, wait, what's Street Fighter Alpha?

Because like some of the stuff isn't spelled out for you.

Right.

They'll just casually talk about like, oh, the hitboxes didn't work as well on Super Street Fighter or whatever.

And it's just like, man, if you're not a pretty, you know, avid gamer, you've not heard of the term hitbox or understand what it refers to.

Yeah, I do think it's, it's kind of funny to think about somebody who has no idea what any of it is sitting down and watching, being like, what the fuck are you talking about?

And again, I mean, maybe that's an unfair criticism because that doesn't, it clearly doesn't feel like that's who the audience for this is.

But I'm also just like watching this as a documentary, as a movie.

It kind of in a very different way, but it was like the Kojima doc, I had a similar sort of reaction to.

It's like, I don't know if this helps you understand who this is much unless you already

have a baseline reference.

When you contrast this to the King of Kong, which is a

pretty robust explainer of what Donkey Kong is, how the game works, what a board is, what it would mean to hack a board.

Yes, what competitive gaming is, even, which a lot of people didn't know existed when that document came.

All of that is loaded into a shorter documentary with more emotional, emotionally narrative, narratively, emotionally successful storytelling

than this much longer documentary did.

I front-loaded how much Street Fighter means to me because it does.

I was a little bored in this documentary.

And like, if anybody is the target audience, it's me.

And there wasn't enough crazy niche shit.

Like when I sent you guys the article about bang the machine being destroyed in 9-11, I I was like, I wonder if they're going to bring that up.

And as this documentary started, I was like, oh, this feels like a documentary for enthusiasts.

So clearly they are going to talk about things like...

that documentary being destroyed or evo moment number 37 and like the transformation because they do touch on street fighter 3 also or or even just like you know the uh the vega mbison ballrog renaming yeah and because there's a guy in it one of the talking heads just calls ballrog slash M Bison boxer.

Yeah.

But like, that's like,

okay, well, yes.

So you're that level of like, you're someone who plays competitive Street Fighter.

So you understand the generic term that is used for these characters

to make sense across culture.

But like none of this is being conveyed to the audience.

And also, I don't know, like, I know that those names were changed.

I've never actually gotten the full story of what happened there.

And that would have kind of been an interesting bit of information.

Well, I can tell you what happened there.

It's that M.

Bison was boxer.

Yes.

And they did not want to get sued by the Mike Tyson

estate.

And so they had to shift M Bison to dictator.

And then all of the names of the bosses had to be shifted around to accommodate that.

And that much I've heard, but like I would be interested to hear a Capcom representative talking about that.

And that's the kind of thing that even though there are interviews with

Capcom figures here, there's nothing on topic like that.

I have

a little interview with Mike Tyson.

He's like, I wouldn't have suit them.

There are interviews with Yoshika Okamoto, which I really like.

That's some of my favorite stuff in the documentary.

Yeah.

Is talking with the producer.

And although Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, who are

the chief designers behind this game, lead designers behind this game, are not present.

But the other interview is with Yoko Shimomura, who's the composer who rocks.

And I think her interviews are really good.

I wish there's more time with her.

I wish there's more time with each of them because those are the two actual developers from Street Fighter 2 that we hear from.

Yeah.

Also, I want to point out, I know that this is a UK documentary.

And when I'm going on about things like Team USA or whatever, I'm not saying that it like

antagonizing the rest of the world as Americans' like preeminent spot.

Yeah.

But it is remarkable that.

the first international tournament was a USA team and a Japanese team.

And I felt like that was worth remark.

I'm not saying like, oh, you know, USA guys should be in a documentary.

I'm shaking an American flag right now, but yeah, I agree.

I guess I can't say stuff like that now that there's video.

Well, we were with the whole thing up.

I guess that's true.

There's also like plenty of American presence in it already.

Like, there's a lot of interviews with Americans, there's a lot of talking about it.

It's not, it's not like a documentary that's micro-targeted on the UK Street Fighter scene, although that sounds really interesting.

I'd be interested in what that is.

Boy, bruv, why don't we say Street Fighter, eh?

Nick on down to Cheeky Nando's after some Street Fighter.

You know, God damn, that sounds like a perfect day.

That sounds great.

That sounds awesome.

The other thing is, Yoko Shimomura,

I believe, is the only woman who's interviewed.

Yes.

And there's, you know, like, whatever.

But it's like, there's like two dozen talking heads in here.

And there is a point later on in the documentary when a, a, as someone, one of the, the talking heads says, I transcribed the quote roughly, Street Fighter 2 brought in more female players than any game before.

And it's like, okay, yeah, hey, maybe that's an important point to make in the documentary, but like it does kind of underline how there aren't any female gamers speaking for themselves in the documentary.

And I'd be kind of interested in that.

I don't know.

Put Heather Ann Campbell in that documentary.

Put Heather in the dock.

Heather in the crunch in the dock.

I, you know,

I've spoken about this sort of

lightly in this podcast because I don't like thinking of myself and

my relationship to games in terms of gender.

But, you know, when I was watching it, I did text you guys because, like, at the 30-minute mark, a guy is like, women don't care about Street Fighter.

And I was so fucking bummed.

Like, I was like, I really hope that that's not the only time we talk about women who aren't Chun Lee in this entire fucking documentary, who aren't the composer or Chun Lee.

And

again, at the end of the documentary, they do make the point of like, oh, there's a lot of women who play Street Fighter too.

But boy, oh boy, did it suck for the other two hours of this documentary where that was the footprint of women in in the street fighter scene

like shitty as shit yeah needed more room for guys who look like wigger saying man

guile he was the guy

it's just so interesting because i don't really think about as like i mean i this is gonna sound insane probably yeah i don't think about guile as like one of the like main guys to me neither like he's obviously the star of the movie, which they highlight.

What I will say is, again, I'm thinking back to I'm 12 years old.

I'm playing Street Fighter 2.

I'm talking about it at middle school.

Guile was because he was like the flash kick and the sonic boom that you could turtle up with that, and those moves were both very easy to pull off.

He became kind of the default character everyone wanted to play.

Man, and so it was, like, I think there was a lot of the scene that was, you know, centered on that character.

In Chicago, I never, ever saw people playing Guile.

It was always Ken versus Ryu.

And if one of those fucking dudes got knocked off the machine,

then somebody would try with fucking Zangief or something.

They'd get immediately eviscerated, and it would be back to Ken versus Ryu all the fucking time.

I heard that there was a board mod too that in Chicago, you could play as Mike Ditka.

Was there like words that you knew about Chicago?

The bears.

Yeah, right.

And then he like he hits you with a freaking Italian beef.

We got a clip.

Yeah, that's our first successful clip.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the clip.

The the

that is a thing that the documentary touches on that I do think is interesting is that like this was all happening in a people weren't like getting on forums.

Like I'm sure there was news groups that existed for you know for people who were like on the early early internet on prodigy.com yeah if they were on like a 2800 baud modem like you know in in the the dark days of the internet but like there there was not a lot of crosstalk between territories and so i think maybe what was happening in the southern california street fighter scene was vastly different from what was happening in the chicago street fighter scene or maybe just what was happening at the arcades I was going to was different than what was happening into the country at large.

But like

basically like like like micro communities ended up developing their own metas.

And it was just kind of like that that's just not a thing that exists anymore.

Everything is min-maxed immediately and completely global, but it was an interesting time when just like people would develop different play styles based on what arcade they were gaming in.

I do like that the documentary highlighted the

because people were sort of making bootleg versions of Street Fighter with mods and stuff.

And to compete with that, they had to like sort of make other iterations of the same game and to me that was absolutely fascinating that's the most successful historical part of the the when it was explaining the the you know how the ratchet effect that led to you know they had street fighter 2 then people started having their hacked versions of street fighter 2 their own boards I remember there was a donut shop in my town that had a hacked Street Fighter II that I did not think was particularly fun to play, but it drew a lot of action because of the novelty of it, that you you could go and that you could, you could, you know, throw fireballs as Chun Lee, um, and you could like just hit the player one button to switch you to a different character in the middle of a fight.

Wow.

You know, like they, it was like a completely broken game, but there were all these sort of different versions of you know, quote-unquote Rainbow Street Fighter, and that led to them making you know, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, uh, which did.

I mean, I don't know if that's influenced the pace of play.

Does Street Fighter 3 play more like Turbo?

Is it a little bit of a oh no, no, no, no.

So, what was the just like

cool contextually, right?

The tournament I'm at was a Street Fighter 2 turbo

tournament.

It was also the North American premiere of Super Street Fighter 2.

Yeah.

It was the first time that machine was in the United States was it at the Chicago tournament.

And everybody was like, holy shit, it plays slow.

Yeah, I remember when Super Street Fighter 2 came out, how slow it felt versus like Street Fighter 2 turbo hyperfighting.

And

as you've mentioned, the most successful historical document document in this documentary is that they make Turbo, they make Super Turbo, or no, they make Turbo as a response to Rainbow Street Fighter hacked machines, which then derails the Japanese development of Super Street Fighter, which was supposed to be the next iteration of the game.

So when it comes out, it is a iteration of Championship Edition and should have been like paced similarly, but because it was paced, because it came out after Turbo, it felt lethargic.

Right.

The craziest thing about street fighter 3 is it what the original vanilla vanilla's a flavor

the original vanilla version of street fighter 3 was slower than vanilla street fighter 2 it was so fucking slow One of the weirdest things I remember, the weirdest sights I remember was a new Street Fighter 3 cabinet in the arcade.

I think it was the boardwalk in Lakewood,

right next to Cowbowl, and that was just sitting there unoccupied.

Like, it was just like they, like, Street Fighter 3 is out, and people just have no interest in playing it.

They're playing other fighting games.

And it was, it was not until Second Impact and Third Strike that Street Fighter 3 becomes its own private scale, smaller scale than Street Fighter 2, but still a scaled phenomenon.

And that's because the first one, in order to make those blows as meaty as possible, they slowed down that game so fucking much.

And as this documentary points out, they stripped out the roster.

And the only returning characters are Ken and Ryu.

So you've raised an entire generation of players on this

roster of familiar faces.

And then you boot them all out for like Dudley the boxer.

And it's like, what the fuck is happening here?

It's interesting because it's the kind of thing if you look at it, it's like.

That's kind of an awesome creative choice that they did that.

And I understand part of why they did that is because the thing that is only barely touched on is they were making all the, you know, the Street Fighter EX, the 3D or 2.5D version.

They were making all the Street Fighter Alpha/slash Street Fighter Zero games.

Like,

there was a point where these rosters had just kind of gotten a little stale, which is maybe why they did their reset.

But it's like...

It's kind of an awesome creative choice to be like, we're going to come up with a whole new roster for Street Fighter 3, but disastrous commercially, obviously.

Well, none of them were.

And this is another thing that's touched on in the documentary: is that

all of the characters in Street Fighter II are like stereotypes, right?

Like, they're like, they're like really broad.

They're almost so broad that they're barely racist.

Yeah, because it's like puppets.

They're like super fucking broad.

And then in Street Fighter 3, none of those guys are from an identifiable country.

Yes.

It's just like, who is the electric guy?

And why is he look like,

why is he look like a goth?

Yeah.

Is this man named Urin?

Yeah.

I am, yeah,

it's the

roster, I mean, the character designs of Street Fighter 2 are just so incredible and they're so distinct.

And, you know,

I mean, that's a big part of its appeal.

It's just so easy to wrap your head around just like at a glance.

A thing I liked about, like, a couple of things I liked about this, Doc, or another thing I liked about it was

there's an artist who's talking about how he did the North American box art.

Yeah.

And he's like, you know, this is an era before anime was ubiquitous.

And so he's like, well, I got to do this with a Western aesthetic.

And so he's just applying his own art style.

I think there's some people who've criticized the North American box art of Street Fighter 2.

I think it looks cool.

I like it.

I always thought it was a,

and it's just like, oh, it's just kind of, that's an interesting source I'd want to hear from for some context.

I liked that he was kind of like, not quite like defensive.

He was a little defensive, yeah.

But understandably so.

He was kind of like, I just kind of did it like how I would do it.

yeah like yeah i was like that's completely fair i will say that you know having stared at the street fighter 2 art my like on all the way up until super nes comes out uh like i'm like oh man i can't wait until i i see this game or the genesis version uh and then when uh when i see the box i was like

Why do they look like this?

I also liked hearing that Winner Stays was not a part of Japanese arcade culture.

And that came from the U.S.

That came from cross-border.

That was interesting.

Yeah, that was interesting.

Have I told you guys about the time, like the first time I go to Tokyo is in 2005.

And I'm still, it's only six years after Street Fighter 3 comes out.

There's still like enough of a...

I don't know, arcade seed for the game that I've been going to arcades, playing in arcades, holding my own for Street Fighter 3.

I go to Tokyo, I go to Akihabara, and I'm like, I'm going to fucking play Street Fighter 3.

I can't wait to walk in and like fucking play Street Fighter 3.

And you'd sit on the opposite side of whoever you're playing.

Right.

And I sit down at the machine and I put in my money and I immediately get perfected, like double perfected against me, like could not even get in a hit.

And I was like, oh my God.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Wow.

Totally different.

totally different level of play here.

I got to be a little bit more careful.

I came in cocky.

I played $20, $20 worth of fights at 100 yen per round.

So $1 per round.

So 20 rounds.

Didn't win.

So 40 rounds total.

Didn't win a single fucking round.

Wow.

Playing with the same opponent the whole time?

Playing against the same opponent the entire time.

And then when I walked around the like the console to see who it was and say good game, it was like a man in his 40s smoking a cigarette while playing.

And he was so visibly annoyed that I had been playing the game.

That's so great.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

But, like, and like mirror matches being a hardware limitation, like, they couldn't do Ryu versus Ryu until Champion Edition because they just didn't have enough RAM.

I was like, oh, I didn't know that.

And it honestly doesn't even make intuitive sense to me, but all right.

Yeah, yeah.

I was confused by that part too.

I was like, why couldn't they just fucking do it?

Who cares?

Yeah, I don't know.

There's, I mean, that's the sort of thing, but maybe just like a little bit more explanation, technical side, but it was just interesting to learn that that was a thing, that was the reason that was not in there.

I thought it was because of the size of the characters.

Is that what it was?

Yeah, I thought it was that they couldn't have two of the largest characters on screen at the same time.

Honestly, they couldn't have Zangie versus Zangie.

Yeah, you couldn't have Zangie versus Zangief.

So that was what prevented them from doing championship edition.

And I did like when, you know, and this comes from the Okamoto stuff, when he's, when he's talking about his thought process behind Street Fighters, this goes back to a thing that caught your eye and caught my eye as a kid, Heather.

He's talking about Street Fighter, and he's just like, I wanted the characters to be big.

Other games, the characters were small.

And I was like, What if they were big?

That rocks.

That is such a like, it's it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, but it's but it's great, though.

It's like, it's like that.

It's great to have something that base and that simple.

And he's also, another thing he says, and I love this because this is the thing, this is the thing about Miyamoto and Hidetaka Miyazaki as well, is that they're notoriously bad at games.

And he's just like, he's just like, yeah, I'm bad at games and I lack skill.

I liked when they asked him about what he thought about the movie, and he's like, For me personally, I don't think it's very good.

Yeah, he was the most polite about it, he was just so funny.

He was great.

There's also another because there's like, there's like cocky Americans who are looking back, and the issue with documentaries, there's always going to be self-document, self-mythologizing.

Yes, like a person's a part of something, they're always going to like exaggerate their own role, and like the documentary needs to kind of like figure out

how do I convey what, what maybe what is true, and maybe is when someone is exaggerating?

But like,

there's like Americans just flat out saying, like, yeah, champion edition was my idea.

I went over to Capcom Japan and told him to do it.

And I had to talk him into it, but they did it.

And then, and just saying stuff like that is like, I was like, I'm sure that's not what happened.

I'm sure an arcade operator did not go to Capcom Japan and tell them to do Champion Edition.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you, guy from America.

Wait, wait, he was an arcade operator?

I thought he was like...

There was a Capcom USA guy, but then there was also another guy who owned an arcade

distribution company.

So there were a couple of those guys.

And it may be conflating a couple of characters, but there were a lot of guys saying things like that.

But then Okamoto later on, just talking about impoliteness, was just, he says something that's just like, yeah, even the Americans sometimes chimed in.

He's just like clearly minimizing their roles, and probably that's closer to the truth.

Can I tell you who my favorite guy was in the documentary?

The guy who like...

It's from the movie section, which I don't think should be in there, but the guy who like trained the people?

Yeah, martial arts coordinator.

favorite guy.

I would have watched him for another two and a half hours because he was just like,

that person was so nice.

This person was so.

I was like, I want to hear who he thinks is nice.

I love it.

He's like, Kylie Minogue is such a professional.

She's a beautiful soul.

And she would just do anything.

She could do anything.

And I was like, I love this guy.

He was amazing to me.

Peter guy who looks like me.

When I saw Cammy was Kylie Minogue, I was like, wow.

It's a, that that guy, so that's the kind of thing I think that I think that's that guy, who is very compelling, is part of the reason that stretch of the movie is so long.

Yes.

Because it's like, okay, this guy's fascinating.

I want to hear him talk, but I can't do a section of

my documentary about Street Fighter 2 focusing on the movie that's just the stunt coordinator talking about it.

So I've got to get like, you know, the director's got to be in here, the producer's got to be in here.

And now all of a sudden, it's this big meteor thing that kind of overtakes

the overall work.

For a documentary that is about Street Fighter II,

I would say upwards of 15 to maybe 20% of the documentary is not about Street Fighter II.

It's about the movie.

It's about making the game of the movie.

It's about the anime.

It's about Street Fighter Alpha.

It's about Street Fighter 3.

And it also starts talking about other franchises, which I actually would have liked more context about that.

Yes.

Because this is my big thing I'm going to say.

And I overall did enjoy this doc.

And if you're like, you're old like me and you remember what Street fighter 2 was like when it came out 30 years ago it is a fun nostalgia watch yes but uh the thing that i find interesting about street fighter 2 is

it comes out in 1991 right um uh or 1993 what year is it i think it's 91

and uh doom comes out around the same time i think i think maybe street fighter 2 is 91 doom comes out in in 1993 these are both games that effectively like invented a genre.

Like, I know there were other fighting games before Street Fighter 2.

They're talked about in the documentary.

I know there were other FPS before Doom.

There were games like Ultima Underworld.

There were games like Wolfenstein, yeah,

which was another id game, but

they were not what Street Fighter II was to fighting games.

They were not what Doom was to FPS.

They were not like the Ur text that led to

this becoming a genre.

They were not the Grand Theft Auto III.

Exactly, yes.

Then these two genres, which became probably the biggest genres of the 90s, two of the biggest, at least FPS, at least on PC, and

fighting games, you know, like in arcades when arcades were a thing, were like, holy shit, these two genres are now everywhere.

There's so many imitators.

There's so many Doom clones.

There's so many fighting games that are akin to Street Fighter 2, either ones that are like direct rip-offs or ones that are trying something new and taking the genre in a new direction.

But then after the turn of the century, FPS explodes in popularity because multiplayer gaming goes from in-person to online and gaming in general goes from the arcades to the home.

Whereas fighting game ends up becoming this niche sort of genre that has a huge enthusiast, you know, like

a huge group of enthusiasts behind it.

And from what I can tell, a very welcoming,

you know, like community.

But

it's like it's it's it's also just kind of like a like a it's not on the same level.

And like I just kind of wanted to hear more about like what Street Fighter 2 meant for gaming and what it meant for fighting gaming specifically.

And I feel like that kind of gets buried

in terms of where it lands.

I wonder how much of that was twofold.

That

FPS gaming is something that you can do.

Like they talk about like all of these Street Fighter ports to computers, to PCs suck.

Yeah, they have this the Amiga port like

Doom, you can play on your PC and you can land that PC.

And so you get this like build this this community is building and building and building because you can go someplace bring your pc and play doom in a tournament where the only way and this is still the case we were talking about this earlier today the way to play street fighter perfectly i like and have the um

the the frame drops not or or the lag not matter to the actual tournament play is to use the fucking cabinets.

And that is not something that can expand and build a larger audience when that's the only way that you can have those tournaments.

You're limited by the number of machines that can physically be carried into the arena.

Yeah, I think it's a good point.

I think there's also just that, you know, rollback netcode is a relatively recent thing.

For a long time, fighting games

like didn't have online modes or their online modes were really bad, really bad matchmaking, really bad lag, which is, you know, for a game when,

you know, frames are so, so important, like that just can make these games unplayable.

And also, like, it was a genre that was more arcades and more consoles, and those didn't have an online infrastructure until, you know, for like a decade after PCs had already had these robust online multiplayer communities.

But I also just feel like FPS just plays better on like as an online experience than a fighting game does, right?

Isn't it?

It's just, it's just, I don't know.

It almost feels like more like a singular experience.

And just in general, like the dominant multiplayer games of genres have become like what?

Like FPS, RTS, MOBAs, and I guess now Battle Royale games, you want to think of those separately.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I do think this is one that at one point someone says this is like a top five game in

of all time.

And I think it's probably two.

True.

I think if you're making a top 10 list of like the most important games in history, I think Street Fighter 2 is probably somewhere in the top five.

It's just, it was such an incredibly impactful game, such a cultural moment.

And I think this documentary gets like halfway there in terms of landing that point.

At like arcades today,

at like barcades and stuff where they have a Street Fighter 2 cabinet, there's a healthy line of people still waiting to get on and play.

Like it's not like a, like you go to a lot of arcades and stuff.

Some of the games untouched.

Like maybe they'll be touched for like a second out of curiosity.

Like, oh, nobody's playing this one.

Let's see what this one is.

But there's not like a, I don't know.

Moonwalker.

Yeah.

Moonwalker or what's what's the what's the drink one i like that

i like tapper but like there's never a line for tapper right yeah but there will always be a line of of people wanting to play street fighter 2 and then there will always be spectators of people wanting to just watch people yeah play street fighter 2 very well i think that's incredible one of my first barcade experiences they had a project a projector going over the bar yeah so that you could sit at the bar and watch the street fighter 2 game that was being played on a box behind you.

Is this at 82?

Yeah.

In downtown?

Yeah.

That's a great.

I love to see it.

Because you just walk in.

It's the first thing you see.

Yeah.

Protected on the wall above everything else that's going on.

It's just people just...

M.

Bison doing a fucking psycho crusher at Ryu.

It rules.

Do you think bar rescue host John Taffer has ever come across, gone into a barcade and seen Tapper?

Been like,

this bar doesn't need Tapper.

It needs Taffer.

Do you think that's happening?

That's the second clip.

Yeah, you know what?

You know what he says?

Yeah.

When he sees the tapper machine, he's famous for saying, shut it down.

Like, wants to shut the bar down.

But when he sees the taffer, he says, turn it on.

It's like my name, kind of.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

You've never been in a hotel and forced to watch whatever was on the television and watched Bar Rescue?

Forced to watch

this is a tv show

bar rescue oh my god you gotta watch bar rescue that's a hotel room show for me it's a great hotel show i'll watch i'll watch that i'll watch guy fiery and i'll watch

family guy until i'm laughing so hard hard i have to watch something else

yeah i'm watching bar rescue and then i'm watching hangover part two on um

just to go back to um d's for one second

i know this comes up every time they we talk about them probably

They're the single loudest disc possible.

Yeah.

Because they're encased in plastic.

So the disc is spinning, but it's also like rattling the plastic a little bit.

So it's just like,

they're working so hard.

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

Rochelle, you ever watch Bar Rescue?

I love Bar Rescue.

Hell yeah.

A lot of fun.

I've never heard of this show.

I think you'd like it.

There's one episode worth watching that like in isolation they still plays.

So it's like there's a pirates bar, and it's the owners clearly just want to LARP as pirates.

And so, they have, you've seen this episode?

Yeah, and so the owners want to LARP as pirates.

They have a guy there who has like he, you know, he wears an eye patch in real life, but he, like, as a pirate, he gets to be like, you know, like the, he, it seems like he comes to life in that role.

He likes to be a salty dog.

He likes to be a salty dog.

And so, the whole thing is, you go there, they're everyone's in character and they're serving rum drinks or whatever, but they're not doing good business.

They're like, they're like losing money.

Um, John Taffer goes in there.

He's like, shut it down.

And then he

like, like, like, he's talking to the people and they're talking about like, well, this is really the reason we have the bar is so we can like LARP as pirates, basically saying that.

But he's like,

this bar is in a corporate area.

You need to lean into the people coming for happy hour after their jobs.

And so he takes the pirate bar, he takes out all of the pirate theming, like completely rips it out, makes it the most generic looking bar you've ever seen.

It feels like out of spite, and renames it corporate.

And so, all these people who are like dressed up, like

you know, dressed up as like Captain Jack Sparrow or whatever, and they're wearing suits and ties and just like had to shave their dreadlocks, exactly.

Of course, they were a white guy.

No, like, then there's just like the bar closed three months later.

If you look at all the bar rescues, they all like closed within six months.

It's the funniest show.

Whoever goes in there and ruins someone's business.

It's a show where a loud guy just gets to be wrong.

The thing about it, it's so great because he's just like a fucking dunce.

There's the things that he's correct about, like when it's like a dirty place or like they're serving shitty food or they don't know how to make the drinks right.

That's obviously correctable.

But when it comes to like aesthetic in general, he's just, he's just wrong.

It's so great.

A corporate bar.

That fucking sucks.

Good show.

Any other thoughts?

And here comes a new challenger?

No, but I did bring a Champion Edition Street Fighter 2 machine for you guys to play.

Is this functional?

This is like a tiny scale guy.

I feel like this is clippable, right?

Look, so you turn it on, and while it is heating up, while it's warming up, I'll also pull out.

Did it have to get hot?

Oh, no.

You got to have a cord for this, maybe?

So it's a one-player experience, maybe.

Yeah, it just looks like it has a one-set of sticks.

Well, no, there is an additional stick.

Oh, you can.

Okay, okay.

But it requires a very specific.

No, maybe I have.

Oh, boy, hold on.

Oh.

I have one of these for

the hamburger game.

What's it called?

Burger time.

I bought it for my wife as a Valentine's gift because she liked Burger Time.

And when she opened it, she cried because she loved it.

What is this

oh my god, it's got super

yeah, let's play super turbo

God if I could just pull off a dragon punch it would be kind of amazing

It's so hard to use this fucking controller, it's ridiculous.

The screen's pretty nice, actually.

There was a whole section about the challenge of porting this to the Super Nintendo.

And here's an arcade-perfect version in a tiny, tiny fucking cabinet.

Oh, I did a combo.

I like this also.

It lights up.

Yeah.

It's a really nice machine.

That's a fun novelty.

Tiny Street Fighter 2.

Shall we do a segment?

Yeah, let's do a segment.

All right.

It's the return of our video game chart segment, Pixel Chart.

Wow.

Metacritic.

I've got the top 300 fighting games.

No, what I have today is the top 10 biggest selling fighting game franchises.

So these are franchises in total.

Also, I should note, this is software sales, not arcade revenue.

So this is for, you know,

this is for

basically for ports or for games that are made for

consoles or PC.

As a side note, I did like the section about Mortal Kombat.

I agree.

The Mortal Kombat section was interesting.

I'm glad they acknowledged that.

And that was the kind of stuff I wanted more of just like, how did Street Fighter 2 inform the larger, you know, fighting game genre?

All right.

And the first thing I will say is

the first one I will just give you for Pixel Chart.

Street Fighter is only number five as a franchise.

So we're looking for the 10 other ones.

First one.

uh is probably the other franchise you think about when you think about fighting game franchises I mean, then Mortal Kombat is a game.

It is Mortal Kombat as number with 85 million.

Wow.

Next up is

this is a first-party fighting game.

No, this is one that some people would maybe not consider a fighting game.

Maybe someone who's in this room.

It's Smash Brothers.

Super Smash Brothers, the next with 75 million.

I can't believe Mortal Kombat's outsold Smash Brothers.

Isn't that kind of wild?

And Street Fighter.

But the thing is, Mortal Kombat has been made continuously since, like, what, 1994?

Yeah.

And then they've come out.

Those are almost annual releases, it feels like.

Those just come out constantly.

That's something that I actually appreciated about something that they mentioned in the documentary.

They're like talking about how there's so many versions of Street Fighter 2.

But they were like, but now that's like just buying the next year's FIFA.

Right, right.

It's like not, we were like kind of like the first thing to do that, which I thought was an interesting point.

Number three is a licensed game.

This is a very large franchise, like outside of games.

It's not

the

video game adaptation of Celebrity Deathmatch, is it?

It's not Celebrity Deathmatch.

A game that I completed 100% in one hour.

Does it consider wrestling as a fighting game?

No, wrestling is not on.

Good question.

But it's licensed.

A licensed fighting game.

This is an IP fighting game.

Above Street Fighter?

Is it Marvel vs.

Capcom 2?

Marvel vs.

Capcom is on the list as number eight.

But this one is not that.

This is a...

Matt, I think you have some familiarity with this franchise.

Interesting.

Sonic the Fighters.

It's not Sonic the Fighters.

Is it PlayStation All-Stars?

No, no, no, no, no.

This is an anime.

Give another question.

Oh, Dragon Ball!

Dragon Ball.

The Dragon Ball fighting game, 65 million combined.

Oh my God, Dragon Ball has outpaced Street Fighter?

That's just like a...

I mean, isn't that wild?

It's a global, like, I mean, so so Street Fighter.

But Street Fighter's been around for 30 years.

I know, but Dragon Ball has Goku.

That's true.

Was Street Fighter 3 only on Dreamcast or did that get other ports?

It's on all sorts of stuff.

You got to listen to it.

No, I mean, but when it came out.

Oh, when it came out?

Because I feel like they, they, I don't feel it, maybe there was a PS2 port, like, but I feel like Street Fighter 3 was like not a big sales success on the on the home front.

Yeah, no, I don't think it was either, but that's because they couldn't pull it off on home consoles until the Dreamcast came out.

And then there are only six fighting games, like there are only six in the series.

So it's like, I feel like some of these other ones are just releasing so many different iterations.

Isn't there like 12 Mortal Kombat games?

Yeah, there's, I mean, there's, I think there's 20 Mortal Kombat.

Holy shit, right?

They just keep coming out with it.

Well, there's there's 11, right?

There's certainly 11.

And then they just did Mortal Kombat 1, which is sort of like a reboot of sorts.

There was too much cannon.

They were like, I can't fucking track what happened to Baraka.

That's something I guess we didn't even really touch on.

One of my favorite things about these games is that they have unnecessary lore, kind of scrap.

Like, it's all

interesting.

Yeah.

But it's like, it's not, it's not, you don't really need it if you're just going to an arcade and just, oh, there's two people fighting.

I understand what the plight is here.

All right.

Mortal Kombat, Super Smash Bros.

Dragon Ball.

Number four has already been mentioned.

It's a 3D 3D fighting game franchise.

Tekken.

It is Tekken.

Street Fighter is number five.

Number six, another anime, another franchise.

Yep, you are correct.

Wow.

Those fighting games fucking rule.

Oh, interesting.

Number seven, another game that was mentioned earlier today.

Assassin's Creed.

This is, I will say, this is another 3D fighting game.

Soul Calibur is correct.

That franchise is number seven.

Number eight, another one that was mentioned earlier, Marvel vs.

Capcom.

Number nine, this is another 3D fighting franchise.

This was something that was big.

Virtua Fighter?

Virtua Fighter is number 10.

Number nine is

like Virtua Fighter.

Dead or Alive.

You are correct.

Yes.

Dead or Alive is number 10.

Clay Fighter.

Wow.

I wonder where Clay Fighter is, but I cut it off at 10.

Dead or Alive with 10 million and Virtua Fighter with 5.5 million, which I expected there to be more of.

Yeah.

Hey, that's this week's Get Play at our producer is Rochelle Chen.

Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.

You streaming streaming anything else lately?

Um, I'm gonna be playing Resident Evil 7 next.

Awesome.

People check that out over on Twitch.

Our music is by Ben Prenti, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

And hey, you can find our merch, including apparel, hats, and stickers at kinshipgoods.com.

Link in the show description.

Also, check out our Patreon, patreon.com/slash get played, where you can find our entire pre-head gum back catalog, plus ad-free main feed episodes, and our Patreon exclusive show, Get Animated.

Matt, what are we watching this week?

We're watching Gur and Lagon, baby, and boy, oh boy, we love it.

We're loving it so far.

We're having a great time.

It's a fun time.

I'm having a good time.

It's a good time.

It's just good stuff.

It's a good time over at patreon.com/slash get played.

Well, there you go.

Well, there you go.

I guess we got clipped.

Maybe, unless there was nothing clippable from the episode.

That was a hit gum podcast.