sonic hurricane dot com

Over the past year, the fighting game community has seen several promising independent game projects revealed by its own members. These extremely talented groups have invested their own time and resources into developing games that draw upon the FGC’s language and culture, with core gameplay mechanics heavily inspired by classic fighting game conventions. I want to highlight a few of these titles, because i think this is a very interesting trend.

Super Comboman is a side-scrolling beat-’em-up featuring a customizable combat system based on unlocking and arranging special abilities, in the form of colorful stickers. The story follows an energetic islander named Struggles, as he takes on odd jobs to support his little brother. (Un)fortunately he tends to get carried away with practicing his spectacular combos, and usually ends up destroying everything in sight! Apparently this project has been in development at Interabang Entertainment for over 1½ years. They’re currently putting the finishing touches on the game, so it’s already available for pre-order through their website.

Señor Footsies is a simplified 2D fighting game by Luke Esquivel, featuring two identical characters with very limited movesets. They can walk back and forth, perform a quick low kick, commit to a longer range sweep with more recovery, or build meter to use a pistol. Whoever lands the first kick wins the round, so the entire match revolves around cautious mobility, space control, and – you guessed it, footsies. What began with hand-drawn sprites has evolved into 3D models and a complete visual overhaul, but no release date has been set.

Street Sweeper is another minimalist fighting game built around a streamlined version of traditional footsies, developed by Robin Ramirez. The goal of the match is to connect a low roundhouse sweep, by using a quick high kick as bait, performing a well-timed parry, or simply outmaneuvering the opponent. There’s a free playable PC version available for download, including a second character recently added to the mix – and many more on the way. The character sprites and backgrounds are adapted from SNK’s various Neo Geo Pocket fighters.

Lastly, i’m sure everyone in the FGC has heard of Divekick since it was featured at MWC2012 and Evo2k12. The combat system revolves around the somewhat polarizing fighting game concept of divekicks, recently popularized by SF4′s Rufus and MvC3′s Doctor Doom. It was developed by One True Game Studios and successfully funded via Kickstarter, before picking up a publisher and refunding everyone’s donations. A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but i’m sure we’ll be hearing more details soon!

Well, i guess the cat is officially out of the bag. I finally get to show you guys the game i’ve quietly been working on for the past eight months!

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a new four-player fighting game developed by SuperBot Entertainment, studio presidented by Chan Park and game directored by Omar Kendall. I’ve been working in the combat design department under lead combat designer Paul Edwards.

Read more…

What is Skullgirls? If you haven’t heard, Skullgirls is a brand new 2D fighting game developed by Reverge Labs – a small but talented team in Marina Del Rey, California. The full game is available for download on both PSN and XBLA today.

Skullgirls is also Mike Z’s love letter to Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. I’ll skip over the game’s charming aesthetics and storyline because they’ve been covered plenty. This is more about the remarkably elegant system mechanics you’ll discover as you learn to play.

Skullgirls is a truly hardcore fighting game which pulls no punches when it comes to offering challenging gameplay. Yet beneath the surface, it’s extremely clever about staying accessible and streamlining basics to minimize drudgery.

As you delve into exploring Skullgirls, you’ll notice that the smallest details feel like someone put genuine thought and effort into improving conventional designs. Air dashing, throw teching, input buffering, infinite avoidance, assist selection, and even 360 commands have been brilliantly implemented – with subtle innovations that you’ll be delighted to uncover.

In this day and age of developers dumbing down the genre to conceal that steep learning curve from new players, Reverge Labs has taken a huge risk by making a title for fighting game veterans – and i think the community should support them for it.

If you really want to play the game well, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and learn all those scary things that make fighting games rewarding. The interactive tutorial will teach you the essentials as quickly as possible, but that won’t keep better players from putting you in frightening situations that only skill and experience can overcome. There’s no escaping that simple fact, but isn’t that what the genre is all about?

Two months ago, Greg Gertmenian and Brett D. Bayonne of Chubby Boy Productions launched a fundraising campaign for their follow-up to Balrog: Behind the Glory – a new short film about Vega entitled Matador. As some of you may have noticed, that fundraising campaign recently ended unsuccessfully.

I suppose it wasn’t meant to be, but i can’t help feeling a little disappointed – only because the script they showed me was outstanding. I can only hope they get another opportunity to make the film a reality someday. However, there is a silver lining here:

Continue? Episode 9 | Episode 8 | Episode 7

Continue? is a ten-episode web series starring Greg and Brett themselves, with three episodes released on the CBF u2b channel so far. The first one covers the premise and inception of the show, the second episode hits the ground running with some hilarious storytelling, and the third is essentially their reaction to the end of the Matador campaign.

Each installment will count down the clock until it reaches zero, at which point they will reevaluate if it’s worth continuing any further. So if you like the series and want to see it extended beyond ten episodes, please take a minute to show your support by subscribing to their channel or following @ChubbyBoyFilms on twitter.

OzHadou Nationals X was held in Australia this weekend as a Road to Evo 2012 tournament. CPS2 stepped up to edit this multi-game collaborative combovid for a live premiere in front of the attending audience. It was shown yesterday, between KoFXIII and UMvC3 finals.

OHNX CMV

Featuring contributions from eleven well-known combo makers, this video contains a wide assortment of classic and modern fighting games. Usually these projects take several months to come together, but somehow CPS2 got it done in 2-3 weeks – and it turned out great!

The two ST Guile combos were recorded as test clips a long while ago. The one at 1:02 was the prototype for the Guile mirror combo at 7:29 in SF? Guile Exhibition – minus the Time Over setup. In case anyone was wondering how it would look without that setup, now you know. The other clip at 4:02 was the most i could get out of a backwards super vs Zangief.

I also recorded the CvS and CFE combos based on some ideas that Keiko and i brainstormed, but i don’t have much to say about those clips – except that Izuna Dropping dinosaurs is cool.