Podcast Episode 58 - Street Fighter IV Makes Me Feel Old

This week we only discuss the hottest news, specifically big Pokemon and Gamer Girl Bath water and then transition into what we've been playing (as usual).

For the third segment we've really been dropping the ball on picking topics, so Matt put a bunch of topics in a snow man's head. We will draw from that when we need a topic.  For the inaugural Snowman head pick we got Street Fighter IV and we get VERY nostalgic and start to feel VERY old.

News - 00:30 to 1:03:07
What We Played - 1:03:08 to 1:53:52
Street Fighter IV - 1:53:53 to 2:26:15

Specific Game Time Stamps
Shenmue - 1:03:33 to 1:13:30
Judgement - 1:13:31 to 1:30:44
Devil May Cry 5 - 1:30:45 to 1:38:54
Super Mario Maker 2 - 1:38:55 to 1:46:17
Operencia: The Stolen Sun - 1:46:18 to 1:49:07
Dr. Mario World - 1:49:08 to 1:53:52
 

Memorable Melodies: Theme of Cody from Super Street Fighter IV

Song: Theme of Cody (Cody's Theme)

Game: Super Street Fighter IV

Arranged by: Hideyuki Fukasawa

Today I chose Cody's Theme from Super Street Fighter IV both because I think it's dope, and not a lot of people understand where it came from. At first you hear it and think that Hideyuki Fukasawa really knows how to make a sick jam, but if you listen closely you'll notice that it isn't an original piece at all. It is however heavily altered.

In the early 90's Capcom put out an arcade beat em' up called Final Fight. The two main characters of that game are Cody and Guy, who you may now recognize as Street Fighter characters. The mayor of Metro City, Mike Haggar, gets a call that the Mad Gear Gang has kidnapped his daughter. It's up to Cody and Guy to rescue her!

At some point Capcom decided it would be cool to have Cody and Guy transfer over to street fighter starting with the Alpha series. This is what makes Cody's theme doubly cool. It's an arrangement of the original Final Fight's opening theme.

If you watch the above video you'll be able to hear the sweet sounds of Final Fight. The soundtrack was contributed to by seven different composers, so credit for it could go to Manami Matsumae, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, Yasuaki Fujita, Hiromitsu Takaoka, Yoko Shimomura, Junko Tamiya, or Harumi Fujita.

Cody is my main in Street Fighter IV, and I love listening to his theme. It gets me super pumped up, so if I ever need to get things done I can always crank up Cody's Theme and get down to business. 

Note: In case you don't know anything about Street Fighter IV, there have been four major iterations of the game. Cody came in during the second iteration Super Street Fighter IV.

Hot Podcast Action

I've been thinking about doing a podcast for a long time, but have held myself back for multiple reasons. The main one is that I recorded three episodes of a podcast in college with some of my friends, which wasn't exactly what I would call brilliant. It is no longer on Itunes, but I keep it on my computer as a constant reminder of how not to make a podcast.

The second reason is that I didn't know how I wanted to do it. You can go to any video game website and hear them rehash the weekly news. So I came up with the idea to talk about a different video game related topic, or specific video games each episode. That kind of specific and in-depth conversation would be interesting to me, so I hope it'll be interesting to other people as well.

Today I actually went ahead and recorded the first episode of the Game Time With Manny podcast. This past weekend my friends and I went to a fighting game tournament in Philadelphia, PA. Fighting game tournaments aren't something a whole lot of people have context for, so I thought it would be cool to talk about the experience for a bit.

I have embedded the podcast below for your listening pleasure. This is the first episode, so any criticism, comments, or suggestions would be extremely welcome. Also yes, I realize the audio quality is kind of bunk. My mic sounded fine, but Willy and Noukeo's weren't exactly the hottest. Next time I'll try to find new mics and mess around with the settings a bit more. 

Party Game Sundays: Watching EVO

I haven't written one of these in the two weeks since I've been back and for very good reason. The first week I skipped we played Birthday Party Bash as a belated celebration for my Birthday, after which we played Scattegories. The week after we were feeling rather lazy, so after eating ourselves to the brink of destruction we decided to watch videos of competitive Beyblade players, and some super hot advanced techniques. For those that don't know Beyblades is an anime where characters fight with spinning tops. There are toys of the tops, which people apparently get super into. It's super funny.

That brings us up to this past Sunday, where we would have played some games, but EVO was happening. I love watching competitive fighting game play, and EVO is the tournament to end all tournaments. I don't like using the analogy, but it's basically the Superbowl of fighting games. So inevitably Noukeo and I forced Landers, who doesn't know anything about fighting games, to watch the EVO finals. It was actually quite an educational experience. Landers asked a whole lot of questions and we tried to tell him as much about what was going on as possible. We specifically watched Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Ultra Street Fighter 4. If you've never played Marvel before it is basically incomprehensible flashing, so we had to explain a whole lot about that. Street Fighter on the other hand is two people beating down on each other much slowly, so he had a pretty firm grasp on it.

When my brother started getting way into fighting games about five years ago he started watching streams of tournaments all the time. This made it so that I also ended up watching a lot of tournaments, and quickly got to know all the prominent players of both Street Fighter and Marvel. It's one thing to watch a tournament online, but it's completely different to go to an actual tournament. Philadelphia, PA is a few hours away from where we live, so we go to quite a few tournaments there. It's surreal to see all the players who you respect playing in person. What's really nuts is how loud everything is. When people cheer it's earth shattering. When something amazing happens the whole room erupts and it's deafening. That's one of the reasons I love watching EVO, because it's on a whole different scale. When you can hear the crowd super loud on the stream, it's probably out of control in the actual venue.

Thousands of people show up to EVO every year.

I'm personally super terrible at fighting games, but I understand what I should be doing in order to do well. So when I watch competitive play I can tell what's super lame and what's going to bring the hype. Since I know the players it's easy for me to latch on to who I want to win a match and it gets me way more invested in it. Even when we go to tournaments I just watch, but it's incredibly fun for me. I scream fairly loud when things get crazy and watching EVO is absolutely no different.

When we were with Landers watching the finals nothing particularly bananas happened, but I still got a little amped up. In Marvel the only thing I want to happen is for Chris G to lose. I've got nothing against the guy, but he always wins with what I find to be a boring strategy. He uses the succubus Morrigan to fill the screen with colorful projectiles in order to lame out the opponent. Much to my pleasure he did end up losing to Justin Wong, who is arguably the best fighting game player in America. Watching Justin win is always entertaining, because he's just so damn good at everything. You can't dislike him. I always want my boy IFC Yipes to win, but he never gets far enough for me to cheer him on anymore. I had to settle for Justin winning, which is always a fine alternative.

I was so happy Justin won. He jumped onto the ground and rolled around for a bit.

Street Fighter was much more hype for me, because I didn't really know what was going to happen. Unlike Marvel, Japanese players actually do well in Street Fighter, so there were a bunch of them in the top 8. There were however two American players and a French player in the mix as well. One of the American players SnakeEyez is incredible. He's been doing super well for the last year or so and his play is only getting better. He didn't win, but he did have some amazing matches. The day before Party Game Sundays he had a ridiculous match where he won at the last second against a previous EVO champ. Take a look at the video below. As you watch the end imagine me losing my shit in unison with my brother, who was on a different floor of the house.

I bet that most people who watch this video with no context will think I'm crazy, which is how I feel when I watch most sports. For some reason fighting games are just exciting to me. When watching I yell, scream, and occasionally want to cry. Sometimes I feel like I'm alone in this excitement, but after going to tournaments in person, I know that I'll never be alone in my hype.

If you don't know anything about EVO or fighting games you should just search for some EVO videos on YouTube to see some people lose their minds over a video game fight. Next week I promise we'll play something new. I just had to watch EVO, or I would have missed the hype!