All aboard the hype train! (toot toot)

The phrase "too big to fail" has embedded itself in our cultural lexicon lately.

And perhaps, for some things that's true.  Whether it can be applied to the financial sector or automotive industry remains to be seen.  In case this is your first time tuning in, this isn't the kind of blog to get into that kind of discussion.  In fact, it's a phrase I'd never have even typed if it weren't for one little fact: as I type this, Super Street Fighter IV is coming tomorrow.  And normally I'd be overjoyed.  I enjoyed Street Fighter IV about as much as anyone could realistically expect to enjoy a fighting game.  The gameplay was balanced, the cast was diverse and generally interesting, but...

Well, it felt... off.  Like if you spent your entire adult life dating supermodels, and suddenly this new girl clearly had a lot of plastic surgery and implants.  At first it might seem like everything's okay, but you can only overlook the scars and stretch marks for so long.

What can be said, with little fear of contradiction, is that it if there is one thing to which the maxim of "too big to fail" cannot ever be applied, it's mass entertainment.  Because if it's one thing that can be said of Hollywood and movie buffs, gamer geeks and developers alike, it's that we know how to ruin a good thing.

Man, do we ever

Maybe we just can't help ourselves.  Fingers can be pointed in any direction, from producers to directors, scriptwriters to editors, fans to fanservice.  A case can be made for any and all of the usual suspects, but for me, the blame can squarely be placed upon two things: hype and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Alternately, these two things

I'll address the less obvious one first:

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
In 1947, Jimmy Stewart starred in a little movie called Magic Town.  Jimmy Stewart stars as Rip Smith, an opinion pollster who stumbles upon the perfect town for his profession: a place that somehow perfectly reflects the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors of the entire United States, but things go awry when the town suddenly becomes aware of their position in Smith's polling business.  But when the town's citizens suddenly become aware of their status as guinea pigs, they lose their magic touch and the whole plan comes crashing down.

Have you ever done something awesome entirely on accident?  The kind of thing you spend hours trying to repeat in vain and the only thing you have to show for it is a severely sprained wrist and a lot of hard-to-explain stains on your Mouse Trap board?

Or have you ever been out with your friends and someone shouts "oh, that's a picture!" and everyone frantically tries to re-create the pose that they were just in for the camera but they just can't get it right?

It's just harder to do things that come naturally to us when we know we have to do them--and it gets even harder when we know a lot of people are watching.  It doesn't take a scientist to figure that out.  But it does help.  Fact of the matter is, no one knew just how big Star Wars was going to be when it first came out.  No one was putting George Lucas or the guys who actually knew what they were doing that the studio paid to follow him around under any real pressure besides "make the studio some money."

A rare photo of Irvin Kershner (left) and a young George Lucas (right) on the set between takes

But success hit, and suddenly there's all this pressure to make the next one bigger and better.  Doing so often results in those responsible at the production level to suddenly forget everything that made the original so amazing and beloved.  This is doubly true if they're suddenly working with a budget that puts the GDP of half the world's countries to shame.

This is also known as Final Fantasy VII syndrome 

The same can be said of my beloved Street Fighter series.  The original Street Fighter II was nothing less than a bonefide smash hit.  It single-handedly revived the flagging arcade scene in the US and spawned countless imitators throughout the 90s.  Maybe it's just that times were simpler then or maybe it's that expectations were just lower, but the subsequent releases of Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Street Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter II Dash, Super Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting were all generally well-received.  Despite being derivative, they still managed to gobble a fresh pocketful of quarters with each new release.

Then came the Street Fighter Alpha series, and again, we were pleasantly surprised to find our favorite characters back in action.  Sure, the shock value wasn't as high as the original Street Fighter II release, but the knuckle-draggers had just discovered Mortal Kombat II, so we'll gloss over that.  Street Fighter EX came out and damaged us all irreparably with its shittiness, but then came the diamond in the rough: Street Fighter III.  This one was different.

So different, in fact, many people hated it.  It was originally slated to have an entirely fresh cast of characters.  Not a one from any previous game would return.  And then came the outrage.  Fans demanded Ryu and Ken at least appear in Street Fighter III and they got their wish.  Street Fighter III: Third Strike came in '99 and--despite being considered a commercial failure--set the gold standard for fighting games for any serious fan of the genre.  It was so good that it was still the headline event of Evolution--the major fighting game tournament--eight years later.

When Street Fighter IV was announced back in 2008, wads were shot.  Millions, perhaps billions, of gallons of wads saturated underpants across the world because no one ever expected another Street Fighter game.  But there was still money to be made, so maybe we should have.

The man was Yoshinori Ono.  The legend goes that Capcom didn't want to make another Street Fighter game after the Street Fighter III series did so poorly, but Ono begged enough that he eventually got his way.  Dude was a fan all the way back from the Alpha days.  And Ono could have made the next great game in the series.  Instead, he made Street Fighter II.

But isn't that a good thing?  Well, arguably yes.  But Ono approached the game from the perspective of a man who had no intention of making a great game.  He wanted to re-capture lightning in a bottle.  All the elements were there.  Every character from Street Fighter II reprised their roles in Street Fighter IV, with four new additions.  And the additions are where the real design problems began to show.

Ono wanted to create a female character that Americans would love and want to use.  He bragged about the extensive market research he had done in creating C. Viper.  

Before you say "oh, that's not so bad," I will remind you that she's wearing rocket boots

Market research?  The fuck?  Did they do any market research in making Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile, Mega Man, Viewtiful Joe, Jill Valentine, or any of the other myriad of iconic characters from Capcom's golden age?  No.  They exercised good design, approached each character with a blank slate and a head full of fresh ideas.  They were having fun: that's something that just can't be quantified.


Rufus and Hakan are two more examples of this sort of approach to character design.  They're joke characters, but instead of being endearing, the attitude in the design seems to be from the Will Ferrell school of comedy.  That is, "bigger and louder is always funnier."  Creating lasting, memorable characters gets pushed aside in favor of a cheap, perfunctory joke.

This is also sometimes referred to as a game "having a case of the Tingles."

These characters were supposed to have an immediate, visceral payoff for the player.  Rufus (left) is a big fat guy who's actually really, really fast!  Man that's so wacky!  Never seen that before!

Nope.  Never.

Hakan, on the other hand, is pure ridiculousness distilled into a character.  Admittedly, it's pretty funny.  And if it were any other genre, it'd be okay.  It's funny the first time.  Hell, it's funny the dozenth time.  But Street Fighter 4 is a fighting game--a game that, by its very definition--implicitly states that it will replayed hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and once the novelty wears off, what's left?

They're just too fucking ridiculous to exist, and yet, here they are.  Hakan and Rufus just insist too much upon audience's suspension of disbelief.  And I know what you're saying: "but you can suspend your disbelief for Blanka, a green half-man, half-monster who shoots electricity!  Or a yogi who stretches his arms like a rubber band and breathes fire!  Why are Rufus and Hakan so hard to believe?"  The people who say shit like that are the same ones who defend the new Indiana Jones movie by saying aliens aren't fucking outlandish because the original trilogy featured a 700-year-old knight templar and a Box o' God, or "you believe the force could be caused by some sort of spiritual energy created by all living things, but midichloriens are too 'out there' for you?"

Well, yes.

Games and movies exist in a vacuum.  They are self-contained worlds.  But in order to have any sort of credibility, they have to have internal consistency.  That's why you can believe in Harry Potter's world, but if suddenly J. K. Rowling revealed in the final book that everyone was actually robots fighting against alien warlords in a parallel dimension, everyone would call bullshit.  It's not about suspending all disbelief.  It's about believing in another world.

And then there's the other new character, Juri.  She's a character purely designed around sex appeal.  Like, that's it.  That's her gimmick.  She's "the sexy one."  The female cast of Street Fighter has always been good-looking, but it's always been secondary to the fact that they're fighters.  But with Juri, that's it.  And far be it from me to sound like a prudish old man about this but was it really necessary?  There are so many other games based around sex appeal.  The old, jaded bastard in me has finally seen enough.  There comes a point where digital boobers just don't do it anymore.  If I want tits, I have the Internet.  I play games because I want to have fun.

Seriously, what else could be going on here?

It smacks of insincerity: "we're creating these new characters because these are the types of characters that fighting games are supposed to include/this is what our target demographic has been polled to like."  Don't give us what you think we want!  We're fucking idiots.  We have no idea what we want.  

And that brings me to my next point.

Hype
This one's gonna hurt.

Because this one is our fault.  As fans, I mean.

There is no force greater in the entire world, than the whining of fans.  We are a loud, whirling black cloud of ravenous feasting and destruction.  Allow me, for a moment, to stop talking about Street Fighter and stuff George Lucas fucked up and take you back to the summer of 2004 when Spider-Man 2 hit the box office.  The first movie was good, but holy shit, Spider-Man 2.  It was bigger, flashier, darker, funnier, more interesting--better in every single way.  It expanded the world and dove headfirst into the lives of the characters.  It was everything you could have asked for in a sequel and then some.

So when Spider-Man 3 was announced, you can bet your bottom ball that fans were pumped at the possibility of another great movie.  The greatest movie.  

So much so that no one was willing to accept what we got instead: a good movie.

Not great, just good.  Onward came the swarm, because by the time the movie came out, there was so much hype, expectations were so high, that there was simply no way Spider-Man 3 could ever be the movie it was built up to be.

And suddenly, we all became a little more like this guy

Getting back to Street Fighter, maybe the same thing happened there.  Capcom had shown willingness to compromise with Street Fighter III.  Remember how the outcry of fans was so loud and obnoxious that it was enough to get them to put Ryu and Ken (and later Chun-Li) in as well?  Well, with the announcement of Super Street Fighter 4, again came the shouting.  

About which characters should be added, who should be buffed, who should be nerfed.  Fans were given unprecedented access to the development of Super Street Fighter 4, all fueled by Capcom and Ono continuously proclaiming: "we hear you, we're listening."

For the love of God, don't do that!  Don't encourage us!  If we were all bursting with great ideas, we'd all be working in the game design industry.  But we're not.  We're a bunch of smelly man-children who can barely hold down our part-time jobs at Kinkos.  Jesus.  I understand taking suggestions from a small, hand-picked group of elite tournament players, but having access to the Internet and your own blog doesn't mean your opinion should mean shit to anyone.  

Your own blog, not mine.  Everyone should listen to me.

And there was another cost to that kind of access.  I and anyone else with even a passing interest in Street Fighter knew everything about this game two months ago.  We knew who the new characters were going to be, we knew the new moves and Ultra combos, we knew the new stages, the new music, the nerfs and buffs--everything.  So now, on the day before the launch, it's kind of hard to, you know...

...care.

Ever since the announcement of Super Street Fighter 4 last year, I'd been following the hype.  Every weekly update on the Capcom developer blog, every character trailer and discussion, the pre-launch tournaments, I was there, feasting my eyes on everything the next installment had to offer.  And now, I'm stuffed.

It's like coming downstairs on Christmas morning to find all your presents covered in saran wrap.

Last stop for the hype train.  Toot toot.