CAPCOM'S GREATEST BEAT-EM-UP ANNOUNCERS

With this week seeing the release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, it seems like a good time to travel back through the ages (or at least to 1997) to take in the aural delights of the finest announcers from Capcom's fighting games
Now, I know that there are some people out there who don't like a lot of these over-the-top, hot blooded, pulse-pumping announcers. Do you know why these people don't like them? Because they are hollow, soulless husks, so concerned with seeming "cool" that they hate anything that isn't dark and gritty. Oh okay, that's probably a little unfair: while there are people for whom these announcers just aren't cool enough, some people don't like them because they think they're irritating. I can understand that, because I've suffered through some truly irritating announcers myself. DJ Atomika from Burnout Paradise springs to mind; a constant, hectoring presence designed around some nebulous corporate idea of what's cool with the kids these days, combined with a weasly voice so smug that you want to punch the person that makes these sounds so hard in the throat that their larynx is reduced to the consistency of wallpaper paste. I think the difference is that, with Capcom's announcers, the level of cheese in their delivery is such that any notion of "coolness" or corporate slickness is blasted away, leaving only pure madness behind. They're oblivious to everything apart from hyping you up, and for that I salute them.
Anyway, without further ado: Let's Go Crazy!

Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, 1997

First up is the maniacal MC from MSHvSF, as voiced by Tony Daniels. Daniels, not content with bellowing like a loon as MSHvSF's announcer, was also the voice of Gambit in the 1990's X-Men cartoon, a role he reprised in Capcom's various Marvel beat-em-ups. Yes, he's the guy who sounds like he's shouting "Credit Card!" when you're playing as Gambit in Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
Part of the reason I like his work here so much is that he sounds a little like Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fame, especially at 2:29-34. Mostly though, it's the gusto with which he throws himself into his performance. When this man shouts "Look! Spectacular action!" you damn well will look. When he orders you to "feel sensational thrills!", sensational thrills had better course through your goddamn body like water rushing over Niagara Falls; I just hope he's never shouted it at a woman whilst on a date.
I love the way that, due to the way this video is ordered, when he gets to the K.O. countdown he starts off reading the numbers as though recording them is the single most important thing he will ever do with his life, but he loses interest faster than a seven-year-old at the opera until by number five he's checking his watch and wondering if X-Men: The Animated Series is going to be renewed for another season.
One thing, though: Choon Lee?

Capcom vs. SNK 2, 2001

Hiroaki Asai provides the commentary for CvS2, and what strange commentary it is. Obviously, English isn't Mr. Asai's first language, and his announcements are memorable mostly for the strange rhythm they're spoken in. Pauses where there should be no pauses, odd emphasises; it all adds up to narration that stays with you. When he says "I knew that Groove was in your heart", it sounds like he genuinely means it, and I'm grateful that he cares.
My favourite bit must be at around 3:08, when his delivery sounds most like he's reading from an autocue that's not updating quickly enough, and then he starts channelling Jerry Seinfeld. Actually, no, I've changed my mind. My favourite bit is "Here comes a new challenger. YOU MUST CRUSH THEM".

Marvel vs. Capcom, 1998

A female announcer for the first game in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, and her voice is provided by Sally Cahill. Mrs. Cahill is probably better known amongst gamers as the voice of Ada Wong from the Resident Evil series, and while Resident Evil is the bigger series, her work on Marvel vs. Capcom is what she should be remembered for. I have very fond memories of going on a school trip to London when I was a kid and seeing, for the first and only time, an MvC arcade machine. I threw in my coin and heard the glorious sound of Sally Cahill shouting "LET'S GO CRAZY" and I thought yes. Yes, I will Go Crazy. Crazy enough to play as a small, blue robot boy with a gun for an arm and fight against a hairy Canadian man with metal claws. So maybe it's a personal thing, my love of MvC's announcer, but all I know is that it always brings a smile to my face.
It's narration with a slightly different feel than the others in this article. Rather than the out-and-out madness of the other, it has more of clipped, sharp tone to it. Just listen to the disdain with which she says "here comes a new challenger" at 1:07. She thinks they're scum, this "new challenger", and if you don't wipe the floor them she will be disgusted with you.

Street Fighter Alpha 3, 1999

My absolute favourite, and pretty much the soundtrack to my teenage years. Greg Irwin provides the voice, and what a voice. Any pretence of coolness is not so much thrown out the window as it is fired out the window on a rocket powered by unicorn's screams. It's so over-the-top, so uninterested in concepts like restraint and decorum that it land squarely in "best thing ever" territory.
Half the things he's saying don't even make all that much sense. Phrases like "You have fists of God!" and "Can you march the way to glory?" hover around the line of complete nonsense, and they're all the better for it. His delivery occasionally lapses into "drunken hobo" mode, particularly at 2:03 when he shouts "AAAINT there somebody who can stop this fighting machine" and fills it with more changes in volume and pitch than an entire Rush album. I would love to know what direction Capcom gave him when he was recording his lines. "No Greg, it's not mental enough yet. Try it again, with more passion. Pretend it's a girl you've been stalking for six months and you're jumping out of the bushes to finally confess your shameful love to her."
To try and choose a favourite from all this magic seems a little pointless, but "Triumph or Die!" (0:38) is always a good way to get the blood pumping, particularly while being repeatedly slapped down by M. Bison and his bullshit Super Psycho Crusher. There's also his K.O. sound (0:48), one of the best victory announcements in videogames history. Opinion is still divided as to whether the KO from SFA3 was used in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; I've listened to them both and I'm still not sure. If it isn't the exact SFA3 sound effect, then it's someone doing a damn good impersonation.

So there you go. Hopefully that's enough evidence to convince you that all announcers in beat-em-ups should be borderline psychotics with a loose grip on reality and an even looser grip on the English language. It'll be interesting to see if Marvel vs. Capcom 3's announcers will be fresh in our memories in ten year's time.

GREAT BOXING RUSH-UP / WORLD CHAMP

Boxing: the sweet science. Well, as sweet as a science dedicated to causing temporary unconsciousness in a fellow human by using your fists can be. Don't get me wrong, though: I am a boxing fan, which is why I'm going to take you back into the mists of time with Visco's 1990 squared-circle-'em-up Great Boxing - Rush Up! for the NES.

I've gotta say, with a title like that this game is off to a very good start. It fits in nicely with the vainglorious boasting of most professional boxers, that's for sure. Before you've even opened the box, the game is telling you straight out that this is great boxing: none of that rubbish stuff you get whenever Audley Harrison fights, just pure meaty chunks of pugilistic action. It was rather depressingly renamed World Champ for the markets outside Japan.

A shocking lack of effort, especially because it doesn't actually mention to which sport "World Champ" refers. It could be "World Champ" of nailing your eyelids to the wall (sadly yet to be recognised as an Olympic event) for all you know. Okay, so I'm exaggerating - the boxart does quite clearly feature two large men punching each other, and the title screen goes some way to redeeming the drabness of the World Champ title by including the tagline "Super Boxing Great Fight" which is a nice, solid bit of Engrish to start the day off right. Even so, I'll be sticking with the Japanese version for one main reason that will become apparent later.

So, once you've started the game, you can choose between the various game modes: there's a two-player vs mode, a tournament mode where up to eight players can join in, and the career mode, which makes up the meat of the game. The career mode screen is pictured above. That's you on the left, trying to looking tough despite your receding hairline and bizarrely-shaped mouth. Look at it, squashed up there so close to his nose that he could lick his own brain: I'm not sure if he's supposed to have very large lips or a very small goatee. My brain can't quite seen to latch on to one interpretation or the other, like I'm halfway through a particularly difficult Magic Eye picture.
As you can see, the top-right of the screen is taken up with the training. Yes, unlike Punch-Out!! and pretty much every boxing game of this time, you can train your little fighter up until his style is impetuous and his defences impregnable. Simply pick the attribute you want to increase, press start and your sparring session begins.

The training consists of a fight between you and the lowest-ranked member of your current weight division. The sparring sessions work in exactly the same way as an actual fight, except your opponent is a much more willing sandbag than usual.
With the obvious limitations of the NES pad, the controls are very simple. You get one button to float like a butterfly and the other to sting like a bee, and the control pad moves you around the ring. If you press the dodge button just as your opponent throws a punch, you'll (hopefully) either block it or weave out of the way. Pressing the other button throws a punch, the type of which can be modified by holding the D-pad: up for uppercuts, down for body blows and left or right for straights.

The gameplay, it has to be said, is very basic. You have to hit your opponent and then mash attack, hoping your combo holds them in place long enough for you to pummel their face in, making it in essence an 8-bit version of Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots. I find it helps if I pretend that every time I press punch, a strong electrical current is fed into Piers Morgan's body via a randomly-selected orifice. It really is amazing what a bit of positive thinking can do to relieve thumb fatigue. While it might sound basic to the point of boredom, the gameplay offers more entertainment than you might think, just like, well, Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots. Most of the challenge comes from trying to move your boxer into the right position and judging when your combo is going to stop so you can try and get out of the way. The rest of the challenge comes from summoning the patience to accomplish the roughly four thousand hours of training required to get your boxer's stats high enough to take on some actual fighters.

Once you're sufficiently bored of the training, it's time for the big fight. Your first opponent is J Mollino, a pasty, sunken-eyed journeyman. He at least has a mouth positioned roughly where a human mouth should be, but hopefully you're going to be changing that. Before the fight, and between each round, GBRU lets you choose which punches you want to make more powerful by assigning you stat points for "punch" to them.

Personally, I always put it all into straight and then back away slowly whenever I get a combo going. It's not cowardice, it's called outboxing. The fighters also have two bars measuring their progress in the fight: one is a standard stamina bar that decreases as you throw punches and have your brain rattled against the inside of your skull by your opponent's attacks, and the other is a "spirit" bar that fills up when you successfully land punches. On the spirit bar is full the next hit will knock your opponent down, so try and keep those combos going and then put them on the canvas.

With his quiff and white t-shirt, the referee looks more like a cast member from Grease than someone officiating at a sporting event. I like the detail in fallen boxer's face, where in a handful of pixels they have really captured the anguished expression of a man with three broken ribs and a detached retina trying to stand up. Nice work there, Visco.

Eventually, you'll win the fight and your little proto-champion will no doubt be recording an interview at ringside and thanking Jesus for giving him the strength to beat another man into a coma like boxers so often do. You get a few extra stat points, move up a place in the rankings... and that's really all there is to it. Like real boxing, it's a relentless struggle to stay at peak physical fitness whilst beating everyone ahead of you in the rankings. Beat the five fighters in each class to move up to the next weight division until you've completed a Manny Pacaquiao-esque domination of the boxing world.
But who are the men standing in the way of your glory? Well, here's the reason I decided to stick with the Japanese version of GBRU, rather than playing World Champ. In World Champ, the boxers all have vaguely humourous names like Action Jim, Money Man and Jumbo Joe.

Despite his name, Jumbo Joe is the same size as all the other boxers. You lied to me, Jumbo Joe. How will I ever learn to trust again? However, things are a little different in GBRU. Let's take a look at some of your opponents from the Japanese version, shall we?

Well well, who do we have here? Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, Evander Holyfield and George Foreman? Almost certainly, although Hearns and Foreman are looking a little... pale, and by pale I mean caucasian. Maybe that's actually Tommy Hearns' long-lost German relative Tomas Hearnz. As ever, the Japanese aren't afraid to include thinly-veiled duplicates of actual people in their videogames, and they're much more interesting than the likes of Jumbo Joe. The higher up the weight classes you go, the more famous the boxers become, until you're left with only one opponent, the champion of the heavyweight division. Care to take a guess who it might be? Bearing in mind that this is a boxing game from 1990, there's really only one candidate.

Yes of course, it's Mike Tyson, or possible his alternate-universe double Mark Tysan. In World Champ he's rather boringly called Hard Head.

While a hard head is undoubtably a useful attribute for a boxer to have, it's not as interesting as fighting Iron Mike, so GBRU wins out over its American counterpart. Iron Mike has maximum stats in all departments, but of course he still hits harder than you even if you also have maximum stats. If you have put in the requisite grind to reach 99 in all stats, the fight isn't all that tough as long as you manage to stay away from Tyson. A few combos and he'll go down.

Yeah, how d'ya like that! Not so tough now, huh? Wait, what are you doing with your face?

Oh I see, you're practising the great British tradition of gurning, as demonstrated here by a man old enough to have seen Mozart live in concert:

Terrifying, but it doesn't help him any and the World Championship belt is yours. Hoorah! You win a trophy and a pair of oversized novelty chess pieces.

After that, you get a couple of screens of congratulatory text telling you that your sublime skill in punching guys in the head has left the world of boxing changed forever. Aww. Sadly, the ending text is all in perfectly comprehensible English with nary a mistranslated sentence to been seen, robbing me of a heaping bowlful of Engrish and leaving me to wonder what the point of playing this game for so long was. Ho hum. At least it's nice to see that the programmers were fans of '80s glam-metal. How do I know? Because there are some rather odd inclusions in the "special thanks" section of the credits.

Alice Cooper and members of Hanoi Rocks and Motley Crue get a namecheck, which is sort of sweet. I can just imagine the developers beavering away somewhere in an office in Japan, programming a fake Mike Tyson while softly banging their heads or air-drumming along to "Poison" or "Kickstart my Heart". It's a nice thought.

And there you have Great Boxing Rush Up. All things considered, it's not a bad little boxing game provided you have the patience to train your boxer plenty. It's never going to take Punch-Out!!s belt as the best NES boxing game, but it's definitely a contender. Okay, I'm going to stop with the boxing analogies now. Plus, it's got a fake Mike Tyson in it, and what more could you ask for than that? I think I might create a Wikipedia page: unlicensed Mike Tyson likenesses in videogames. I suspect it would be longer than you'd think.

DEAD CONNECTION

Quick, think of a good videogame about gangsters. No, I don't mean gangster like 50 Cent, I mean gangster like smuggling hooch, wearing fedoras and going insane in prison due to the effects of syphilis (unlucky, Mr. Capone). You might well be struggling to come up with one, but next time someone asks you this question, you'll have an answer ready in the form of Taito's 1992 you-dirty-rat-'em-up Dead Connection.

The year is 1953. The place, according to the intro at least, is "A big city somewhere". Well, that's helpful. Within this city are men of justice, heroes who fight to rid the generic city of crime - but not small crime, oh no. They've got much bigger fish to fry.

A gigantic crime, huh? Sadly, the gigantic crime was not whale smuggling or producing bootleg planets as I had hoped; instead, it's the grim spectre of organised crime that you'll be fighting against in Dead Connection.
Our heroes are galvanised into action after a woman is brutally gunned down by a cheerful psychopath with a cigar and a tommygun.

Pretty horrifying, I'm sure you'll agree. The man behind this heinous crime is a strangely familiar-looking Mafia boss named Don Nerozzia.

You come into this arcade on the day my shoot-em-up is to be released and ask me to give you some change in ten-pence coins. Don Corleone Nerozzia appears to have cloned Christopher Walken to act as his bodyguards, which seems like a sound strategy to me. There's a reason he's the Don.
With your target in place, it's time to pick a character:

A fine bunch of decent, upstanding law enforcement officers. You might even say that they're, I dunno, Untouchable or something. James has definitely got a Kevin Costner vibe going on there, and Philip is somewhat Andy Garcia-ish.

Sadly, there's no Sean Connery to keep us entertained with his eerily accurate Irish accent. It doesn't really matter which one you choose, because they all play identically, and once your character is selected the game begins. Your character walks into the lobby of a swanky hotel, flashes his badge, tells people to put their hands up and then starts indiscriminately blasting away as his proud American heritage demands.

Dead Connection is certainly a shooter, alright: it has most in common with games like Smash T.V. in that it's a single screen shooter where enemies swarm in and you have to put them down with the variety of weapons at your disposal. The controls are fairly simple, although it sadly doesn't have the double-joystick system of Smash T.V. or Total Carnage. Instead, you fire in the direction that you're facing by pressing a button, and you also have a dodge button to help you avoid some of the lead being launched at your face. Pressing dodge while moving lets you do a diving roll, and pressing it while stationary makes you lie down to avoid gunfire and possibly catch up on some sleep.
One of the first things you will probably notice when playing Dead Connection is that the backgrounds are very, very destructible. First, have a look at the screenshot above, showing the first level in pristine, un-law-enforced condition. Now take a look at the same scenery at the end of the stage:

Extensive remodelling of the kind not often seen outside warzones. It might seem like a pleasant if ultimately pointless bit of graphical frippery, but it really does make the game more fun to play. That's partly down to the fact that destroying the environment can help you out by killing some of your foes. For example, on the first stage you can kick the statue down the stairs by standing next to it and pressing the dodge button, crushing any goons at the bottom beneath a vengeful lump of rolling marble. It's like Home Alone, really, except you also have to option to shoot people. You can hide behind things too, which makes a nice change from something like Total Carnage where your only defensive option is to kill everything before it fires at you. You even get a health bar, further negating the frustration of dying instantly because you got hit by that one bullet that you didn't see.

Once you finish a stage, you're treated to a nice bit of story involving all your favourite mobster cliches. I like the attention to detail demonstrated by showing the knotted bedsheets going out of the window in the background. To finish a stage, you have to defeat a set number of enemies; when there are only three remaining, three tougher-than-normal goons will appear to act as a pseudo-boss.
It's all terribly good fun, I have to say. Apart from Smash T.V., Dead Connection is probably the best shooter of this type around. The game mechanics are good, and the lack of instant deaths and the ability to dodge make it a much less frustrating proposition than most shooters. The sprites, while small, have a lot of character, and the destructible backgrounds add a lot more to the fun than you might think.

Stage two is set in a junkyard. There're exploding barrels and cars, and you can watch the sky turn from sunset to nighttime as you cower behind a pile of tyres, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the thigh. Once the stage is done, you threaten a goon into telling you where Nerozzia is hiding, which is in a restaurant.

Eschewing any notion of stealth, stage three starts with our hero driving his car through the windows at the front of the restaurant, with Dead Connection really going out of it's way to portray Federal agents as violent, semi-suicidal psychopaths who are more of a threat to the safety of the country than the Mafia. A nice touch here is that if you shoot the table, the candles fall over and set the whole thing on fire. After this stage, our heroes are kidnapped and bundled into a car. Who will save us now!?

Andy. Andy will save us. Thanks, Andy!

Stage four is set on the rainy city streets, and cars full of mobsters screech back and forth, trying to run you over. You can enter the building and head to the balcony, where you can knock the sign down onto your enemy's heads. Anyway, this stage is bound to be a breeze with Andy on our side! Isn't that right, Andy?

Oh dear. I personally thought that exclaiming that poor Andy "bit the dust" was nice and tactful. You know why Andy died? Because he wasn't wearing a hat. Shame on you, Andy.

With Andy quickly buried in a shallow grave at the side of the road, it's on to stage five: the warehouse. It's got everything you'd expect to find in a warehouse: conveyor belts, Mafia hitmen, crates. There's a switch on the wall that you can shoot to drop a crate that explodes, filling half the screen with fire; unfortunately, the epicentre is usually about three inches away from where you're standing.

What better way to relax after a fight in a grimy warehouse than with a genteel garden party? Well it was genteel until our heroes shot everyone in attendance and burned down the building. They're not anti-heroes, they're criminally-insane arsonists with a body count to rival the Black Death.

Continuing theme peaceful outdoors theme, the next stage is sent a park with a curiously British-looking red telephone box. Perhaps, in these tranquil surroundings, out heroes will rein in their bloodlust a little?

Oh no, they've drowned a man in the fountain. That's a shame. At least they're nattily dressed in their colour-coordinated outfits. Take note, Andy: hats. They could have saved your life.

The final stage takes place on an actual stage, in an opera house complete with destructible piano and curtains. The enemies here are tougher than before, and completing the stage without frequent deaths comes down to using the collectable weapons well. As well as your standard pistol, you can pick up a slightly more powerful handgun, a rapid-firing tommygun and, best of all, a shotgun that can take out multiple villains at once. Eventually, the Mafia runs out of soldiers and you've completed the game. Or have you?

Shock! It was an ambush all along! They don't look scared for their lives: they look more like they've been caught doing something naughty by a teacher and they're trying to keep straight faces while being told off. At gunpoint. By Marlon Brando.
Just when it looks hopeless for our heroes, an unlikely saviour arrives.

Miss D. E. Machina appears and shoots Nerozzia in the back. It turns out she's Andy's (understandably upset) girlfriend. Phew, thanks for the save, ma'am. I'm just sorry that in trying to save these lawmen you have stained your soul with an act of murder, condemning yourself to a life of crushing guilt for the rest of your days.

And that's Dead Connection: not a story about the sudden consequences of not paying your phone bill, but a really rather good arena-style shoot-em-up with a nice Prohibition-era setting (or at least it would be if it wasn't set in the 50's). I heartily recommend that you give Dead Connection a go: the action is fast and very fun, the graphics are detailed, the music is good and there's a nice range of (rather well done) digitised speech to enjoy. The only drawback I can think of is that it is very short: if your know what you're doing, you could probably complete it in around twenty minutes. Mind you, that might be a good thing for a lot of people. Ciao!

THE FREAKISH CONTESTANTS OF JEOPARDY! ON THE MEGADRIVE

Jeopardy! Yes, it’s that game show.

If you’re not an American, you’ll likely have no idea what Jeopardy! is. It’s a general-knowledge quiz with questions sorted into six categories and put in order of difficulty, like so:

Harder questions = more cash = fun for the whole family. In the early nineties, a company called Park Place Productions released a version of Jeopardy! for the Megadrive / Genesis, which is where the screenshots in this article come from. It’s a fairly standard quiz game and is decent enough if you like that sort of thing. It does have the nice bonus of allowing three players to play with only two pads, but unfortunately it is so glacially slow that even those fakirs who live on top of poles in the desert for decades would get frustrated with it and move onto something more fast-paced, like watching the subduction of tectonic plates.
I don’t give a stuff about that, though. I just wanted to have a quick look at freakish contestants that you can choose to act as your avatar in this grim hellscape of general-knowledge torture. And here they are!

Bank manager alert, with maybe a hint of Al Pacino in Serpico. His jacket appears to be strangely corrugated, like maybe he’s wearing a fur coat with lapels. Between his beard and grey-and-pink tie, he’s the very definition of an early nineties businessman, thus making him the most boring-looking. I bet he’s really extreeeme when he’s at home though, always riding around in his yacht and doing coke off a supermodel’s popliteal fossa. Ugh, you dirty sod, where did you think the popliteal fossa was? You disgust me.

This young lady, who may well be Dobby from Peep Show, is storing nuts in her cheeks to eat at a later date. Her most impressive feature, however, is her impenetrable helmet of hair, thick enough to harmlessly deflect a .45 round yet soft and yielding enough for a woman. Wait, what? I lost my train of thought there for a second.

This guy’s not a freak. How do I know that? Because he’s quite clearly Mathew St. Patrick, an actor most famous for playing Keith in the excellent Six Feet Under. Check it out:

Uncanny, no? I think it's the lantern jaw that does it. Maybe he was a contestant of Jeopardy! before he got famous and he was accidentally digitized into the game world where he had to find his way out by riding a magic motorbike and throwing a Frisbee and oh no wait that’s the plot of Tron. The only mystery is why he’s wearing a janitor’s coat. Actually, I don’t think that’s a coat: I think his whole torso has been carved out of wood.

Patrick Bateman? Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s everyone’s favourite American psycho. I literally cannot see anything else when I’m looking at that picture. It looks a little like this:

Or even this.

However, don’t stare at his tie too long, because it is actually a swirling vortex that leads directly to a universe of pure madness. Just so you know.

Finally, there’s this charming lady. She seems nice enough, even if her blouse does look as though someone vomited onto a Jackson Pollock painting and her eyes are two soulless black pinpricks. Hmm, those eyes are worrying me; I’ll just ask her straight out about her intentions. Hey lady, are you a raving lunatic who will creep into my bedroom while I sleep and stab me over and over again with a screwdriver, only stopping when you lose your grip on the murder weapon because your hands are slick with my blood?

Well, I’m glad we got that sorted. And those are the contestants on the Megadrive / Genesis version of Jeopardy! They sure were a bunch of freaks, huh?

ARRRGH.

Also, I am terribly immature. So long!