Obscusion B-Side: Guilty Gear X Advance Edition vs. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper: The Closest Thing to Sammy vs. Capcom

Fighting game ports on handheld gaming systems didn't really become anything that could be considered truly "viable" until right around the start of the 21st Century. Companies certainly tried to make fighting games on handhelds during the 90s, but for every Nettou/Dead Heat Fighters game by Takara on the Game Boy, Street Fighter Alpha on the Game Boy Color, Pocket Fighter on the WonderSwan, or (pretty much) every single fighting game on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, you had Pit-Fighter for the Lynx, Virtua Fighter Animation for the Game Gear, or Fighters Megamix & Mortal Kombat Trilogy on the Game.com... Yes, those last two did indeed happen. Once the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001, though, the hardware finally started becoming more than capable of delivering an experience that could at least give the feeling of playing a fighter on a home console, if not being a great game on its own merit. When it comes to fighting game ports on the GBA, there's one game in particular that gets all of the attention, but there is another one that came out months prior that's arguably just as technically impressive, but gets next to no attention.

It's interesting to think back to late 2003, when it was announced at the Amusement Machine "JAMMA" arcade show that Sammy Corporation & Capcom would be producing a crossover game titled... Sammy vs. Capcom. Unfortunately, that collaboration would never go any further, so you can consider this Vs. Battle to be the closest approximation. Anyway, British studio Crawfish Interactive took on the challenge of porting Street Fighter Alpha to the Game Boy Color back in late 1999/early 2000 for Virgin Interactive, and the result was an amazing port. The sales were also good, so Crawfish was able to convince Capcom to let them do something even more grandiose: Port Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, the updated version, to the Game Boy Advance. Crawfish was definitely super ambitious with this port, as I'll get to later, & Capcom only added to that ambition, which sadly would wind up costing Crawfish dearly. As revealed in an interview with Nintendo Life back in 2013, when the original planned release date of Christmas 2001 was seen to not be possible anymore, Capcom decided to stop paying the advance that it was giving Crawfish, and revoked the royalties the company was set to earn from sales. While Crawfish did manage to finish the port for the end of 2002, the company wouldn't be able to recover form its various other financial woes, and come 2003 Crawfish was dead. Still, the port of Alpha 3 was celebrated upon release, & today is looked at as one of the most iconic "miracle ports" in the history of gaming, right up there with something like Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64.

While all of that was going on, though, Daisuke Ishiwatari & his team at Arc System Works would release Guilty Gear X, the sequel to their breakout PS1 fighting game, to arcades in mid-2000. After that would come ports to the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, & Windows PC up through the end of 2001, but it would be the final port that may be the most interesting one of all. Originally released at the very beginning of 2002 in Japan, Guilty Gear X Advance Edition was just as the tin advertised, GGX on the go, and unlike Crawfish's endeavor this port was done completely in-house at ArcSys. In fact, Advance Edition was kind of the spiritual successor to the two Guilty Gear Petit games for the WonderSwan, which were SD-stylized original-ish games for Bandai's little handheld that tried (which even featured an original character [Fanny, a nurse who fights with a giant syringe] who has yet to return to the franchise), because Kazuya Yukino was the director for all three games. Sammy Entertainment would release Advance Edition internationally in mid-2002, still a few months before Crawfish's Alpha 3 port, but would receive more mixed reviews upon release. Still, where the GBA would be home more to remixed versions of fighting games, like the two King of Fighters EX games, Tekken Advance, or Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Revival, Guilty Gear X Advance Edition & Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper are pretty much the only two direct ports of fighting games to the handheld, and both are arguably "miracle ports" in their own rights.

Therefore... When Sammy finally takes on Capcom, who will be the victor?

Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues IX: The Discs & the Streams Part 2

Today, if one wants to watch something anime, all one has to do is open up CrunchyRoll, FUNimation, Hidive, Netflix, Hulu, or even Amazon. Upon doing so, literally thousands of episodes, plus hundreds of movies, become available to choose from; so many, in fact, that it's overwhelming. Unfortunately, while the streaming option is so much more convenient than the home video option, it sacrifices the guaranteed longevity that home video can offer. In short, as I've said before on this blog, streaming requires one to watch by the terms of the site offering it, which in reality is by the terms of the licensing contract. For your big name franchises that will remain evergreens, this isn't a problem, as licenses will simply get renewed over & over. For anything else, however, there's always the dread specter of "license expiration", because once a license is not renewed, and no other company is willing pick it up, then that show becomes lost to time... At least legally. So, for this second half of the standard license rescue list, let's take a look at six titles that were once available via streaming, but today are nowhere to be found.

Can you believe that it's been nearly 10 years since simulcasting anime really started to become a normal thing? While CrunchyRoll was the first to standardize it, FUNimation wasn't too far behind, licensing its own small cadre of anime to exclusively simulcast. One of them was 2010's Rainbow ~Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin/The Seven of Cell 2, Block 6~, the 26-episode TV anime based on the Weekly Young Sunday/Big Comic Spirits manga of the same name by George Abe (story) & Masasumi Kakizaki (art). The story follows six juvenile delinquents & their mentor as they live out their lives at Shonen Special Reform School &, eventually, once they return to normal life. It also doubles slightly as a boxing story, as lead character Rokurouta Sakuragi ends up boxing to some extent. Obviously, the anime by Madhouse doesn't cover the entire manga, but it does reach a little before the halfway point, which isn't bad at all.

Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues IX: The Discs & the Streams Part 1

Last year, I forwent the usual type of license rescue list, instead focusing solely on anime that are legally available for streaming in English currently, but deserve home video releases... And already that list is kind of dated, because all of Saint Seiya & Beast Player Erin have since been taken off of CrunchyRoll, leaving them completely unavailable for watching legally with English subtitles. You see, that's the problem with streaming that no one really thinks about, until it happens to a show that they personally enjoy. In fact, fans of older movies went through a massive crisis when WarnerMedia announced that Filmstruck, which was a streaming service for all sorts of classic movies (including everything the Criterion Collection currently owns the rights to), was announced to be going away; luckily for them, Criterion announced its own service, which should alleviate some of those fears. Still, it is something to think about, so I'm starting off this year's standard coverage by doing a proper license rescue list, this time split up between two categories: The usual "was once released on home video, but currently is out-of-print" & the more timely "was available legally via streaming, but is now gone". Because, in the end, that's what's really important: The wild anime, the wild anime, the discs & the streams, the discs & the streams.

Still, even though I started all of this by talking about "the streams", I'm going to start everything off with "the discs", because last year was all about the latter, so I think the former should see some focus again.

In November of 2004, Geneon announced that it would be entering a distribution agreement with Toei Animation that would result in Toei effectively entering the North American anime industry by way of its own US division. These first DVDs would start showing up in March of 2005, and Toei tried something interesting out by releasing the first two volumes simultaneously (at least, that's what info I can find indicates). Unfortunately, when anime fans started buying these DVDs, they found some pretty glaring problems with them, like episodes not having proper chapter breaks, the DVDs being programmed to return to the menu after an episode finishes (rather than go straight to the next episode, like usual), cheap-looking menus across the board, dubs which didn't really excel in any way, & subtitles that were a little too "localized" for fans' tastes; also, Toei effectively didn't market the releases at all, so no one really knew about them. After 2005, no more DVDs were coming out, and in 2006, Geneon announced that the deal was over. It's a shame, too, because Toei had a couple of really interesting anime that it had chosen, and one of them was Air Master.

Obscusion B-Side: Hey, You've Got Your Comics in My Video Games!

Video games & comic books have been close companions for at least 40 years, with one of the earliest games based on a comic being Superman for the Atari 2600 back in 1979. Eventually, the inverse started happening, with comic books based on video games coming to fruition, and now game-based comics are a pretty popular category; almost every one of the biggest game franchises today have at least one comic, of some sort. In rare instances, though, the game developer and/or publisher decides to take a more direct route with this sort of cross-promotion, and commissions a comic to be made to go with the game itself. Now these tended to be short mini-comics meant simply to help establish the backstory, because not everyone is into reading paragraphs of text inside the instruction manual (especially if the game itself doesn't explain much), but with the death of the perfect bathroom reading material for video games, these direct comics tend to be limited edition-exclusive products. Still, let's start off the new year with a fun look at five examples, from my personal collection, of video games that had some sort of comic inclusion, with having to go to your local comic shop or bookstore to read it.

Yeah, I don't know why the side banner
used the wrong color order, either.

The game that Hideo Kojima headed up after the original Metal Gear put him on the map in Japan, 1988's Snatcher remains an iconic title, both amongst "Cyberpunk" & "Adventure" games. When it got ported from the PC-88 & MSX2 to the PC-Engine CD in 1992, Konami added something cool to the instruction manual: A full-color manga Prologue. When the game was ported over to the Sega (Mega) CD for international release in 1995, the manga was actually included & translated into English, though it was sadly done in greyscale to match the rest of the manual. Though it only runs for a scant 10 pages and doesn't credit anyone for the artwork, though I'm guessing that maybe it was original character designer Tomiharu Kinoshita, let's see how it does at getting newcomers up to speed about the world Kojima created.

December 2047, Neo Kobe City. Currently, mankind is under secret attack by "Snatchers", bioroids that kill people & then take their identity using artifical skin, with their ability to sweat & bleed making them nigh-impossible to identify. To combat the Snatchers, a special police force has been formed called JUNKERs, or Japanese Undercover Neuro-Kinetic Elimination Rangers. A man is being chased after & even shot coming out of an alleyway into a crowd. Everyone sees the man, whose face is now uncovered to show that he's actually a Snatcher, before his head is blown up by the man chasing after him. When asked if he's a Junker by the police, the man only responds that he's a "Bounty Hunter". Meanwhile, Gillian Seed is meeting up with his girlfriend Jamie to tell her that he's going to become a Junker, much to her disappointment. The two suffer from extreme amnesia, with the only memory Gillian having being the word "Snatcher", so he thinks becoming a Junker will help him remember who he really is, even though Jamie is afraid that doing so will result in something terrible happening. A transport arrives to pick up Gillian & take him to Junker HQ, and while Jamie can't hear Gillian's words due to the transport's jets, she still waves him off & wishes him well.