I can't help myself. I'm just so much more comfortable working with characters I'm familiar with, even if the combos have changed. I did mess around with Takeda briefly, but he's a bit of an odd duck with extremely long-range but unsafe normals and most of his combo extensions coming from enhanced specials. It was simply too daunting so I played it safe and focused on Mystic Ermac.

The good news (bad news?) is that Ermac doesn't just poop out stupid amounts of easy damage off of any touch any more. His combos are generally more difficult/involved and actually hover just below 30% damage with one key exception: any combo that lets you save Tele-Hold until the end. Unlike in MK9, the non-enhanced version of the move does no damage but puts the opponent into a hover state. The first instinct would be to use this move to add additional hits to the combo like a Spear or Ice Ball, but if you don't do that and simply wait instead, once the move wears off the opponent falls to the floor and takes 10% unscaled damage. With scaling as severe as it is in this game, there's no feasible set of extra attacks you could do that would match the damage. As an added bonus, leaving the opponent sitting there gives you time to annoy them by throwing off some instant-air Soul Bursts. You maximize your combo, generate extra meter, and do mental damage! It's a win-win-win!

So I've seen people using abbreviations to refer to character variations like MoS Ermac for Master of Souls. One of his other variations is called Spectral Ermac. I wonder how you'd abbreviate that...? (apparently I am 12-years old)

Ever since MK2 I've always been a... fan... of Kitana. No but seriously, those fans give her so many combo options that she's a really fun character to experiment with. Unfortunately, that also makes it incredibly difficult to optimize her damage. This is the best I could come up with after a couple hours with her but I'm sure there's something I'm missing that would give me a few extra % of damage.

She has a lot of safe strings that are hitconfirmable, but no high-low game to speak of. Honestly, I'm not sure what she's supposed to be good at. Probably zoning? Fans have always been one of the stronger projectiles in MK. I don't know why I can't do instant air fan in this game. I mean, I have zero execution, but still.

On the bright side, I'm getting a lot more used to dashing and running and run cancelling so it's more-or-less second nature now. The movement in this game is really interesting, and now that I've had a chance to understand it I feel like I'm in a much better place to appreciate high-level play than I ever was with MK9 or Injustice. Still not a fan of the kind of insane amounts of free pressure certain characters get. It boggles my mind that a character can perform a pressure string and still be +frames on block, but maybe that's my SF blood talking.

Part of me feels like I should be exploring the other variations of each character before moving on, but in the case of Scorpion and Kitana it's mostly just the same moves with fewer options. I think I'll pick up a less familiar character next.

My son took a nap while my daughter was in preschool today which never happens. I probably could have used the extra time to beat The Order or, I dunno, clean, but dammit it's lab week/month. So I decided to take the framework I built yesterday and see what else I could do with Inferno Scorpion.

As it turns out, there is actually a huge buffer window for inputting a Run command after an attack, so I was able to eke a few extra % out of my previous stuff and do a set of BnB combos for various situations like I did for MK9. Then I went and watched some other peoples videos and realized I had forgotten one crucial thing: Even slow-as-fuck normals can often be used mid-combo thanks to MK's buffering mechanics. Also Minion Grab can hit airborne (sometimes) and you can meter burn Double Spear. OH, and Double Spear is only -5 on block making it more-or-less safe giving Scorpion a really threatening high/low game off of Oki.

As for why I'm beating up Mileena, well, I recall she had the weirdest float to punish in MK9 so if it worked on her, it worked on everyone else. Not sure if it's the same case here but that's what I'm going with. The next step would be to optimize punish combos with stronger openers for different recovery frames, but I'm feeling pretty happy with where I ended up with Inferno Scorp so I'll probably move on to someone else. Maybe Kitana? Fans for days? I used her a lot in MK2...

Fuck two nights in a row I can't keep doing this. GOODNIGHT!

I'm baaack!

Some of you may remember the series I did of MK9 kombo videos when MK9 came out. It's been a while, but I'm back with a shiny new Elgato and two kids that make it impossible to get anything done o_O. We'll see how prolific I manage to be this time, but here's my limited day 0 experimentation with Inferno Scorpion because I only had Scorp and Sub and Kotal available because my PS4 didn't preload AAAAAAARGH!

So Minion Grab is interesting in that it gives Scorpion another recapture because Spear wasn't enough I guess? Gravedigger (FPxxBPxxFK) seemed like his best opener as it's hitconfirmable and only -1 on block so I went from there. Teleport came first because it's the kombo extender that gets hurt the most by gravity scaling. After that it was pretty simple math. Spear can recapture out of the air followed by Minion Grab that only recaptures grounded enemies. Then it became a question of the best ender, and I settled on Flame Fist. You sacrifice a few % of damage you could get off of another Kombo xxSpecial, but you put the opponent down right in front of you in a hard knockdown state giving you Oki opportunities. There might be some more damage after the first Teleport if instead of F+FKxxSpear I did a quick Run into a Kombo xxSpear, but the timing for that is way too tight and I am ass.

I wish I could experiment more but it's like 3AM and my kids are gonna be up in 4.5 hours or so. I'll try to lab it up some more tomorrow. Any characters you'd like to see? I'm trying to figure out who the less popular characters will be so I won't be lost in the sea of videos on YouTube. Yeah I know, Scorpion was like the worst possible choice.

Stupid preload.

EDIT: So maybe Minion Grab doesn't only work on grounded enemies? I'm not even sure and I can't play because kids and I really shouldn't even be typing this but it's burrowing into my brain aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Let me preface this by saying Fuck. This. Year. As my first full year as a proud parent of two, many late nights were spent watching the gaming community and an entire country implode under the weight of oppression and social injustice while trying to shush one of my spawn back to sleep. I learned that hashtags are even more the-fucking-worst than I previously imagined and nothing retweeted after 11PM is anything good.

Thankfully, it wasn't all doom-and-gloom, as 2014 was another amazing year for games to distract me from the ever-looming maw of oblivion. The early year saw my gaming habits largely unchanged, with an infant son spending half the day asleep and a daughter in preschool. (Un)fortunately, children inevitably become more and more upwardly mobile and, as time passed, I found myself relying more and more on portable devices, be they my Vita, 3DS, iPad or iPhone, to fulfill my gaming needs.

While many games I would have loved to invest dozens-if-not-hundreds of hours into (including a handful of games I may have Kickstarted for way too much) ended up falling by the wayside, several more rose to the surface as standout experiences. So without further ado, this was my 2014 in video games:

2014's Old Game of the Year

Much like the GB staff in 2013, this year I wanted to expand the category beyond games released in the previous year so I could mention the 2012 banger, Final Fantasy XIII-2. As one of the most vehement supporters of FFXIII, largely on the strength of its battle system, it's criminal that I didn't get around to playing XIII-2 until just-before the release of Lightning Returns. While I simultaneously loved and hated what the Pokémonlike system for the third party member did to my min-maxer brain, the entire game was fantastically fun from start to finish. That said, the actual winner of this category is...

SolForge

The handful of you that read my GotY blog from last year may remember me saying something along the lines of

...once I get an iPhone I'll be sure to spend thousands more [hours playing SolForge] in 2014, probably while driving.

Well, I got an iPhone. And I definitely spent thousands of hours playing SolForge. And at least a few-hundred of those were while driving. OK I HAVE A PROBLEM.

As a person who craves, nay, needs to be multitasking everywhere at all times, SolForge has been a godsend. The incredibly lenient turn-timer and clear UI allow me to asses any board-state at-a-glance, then devote the rest of me to other tasks while my brain works on figuring out my next move. I can play while cooking. I can play while changing diapers. I can play while shopping. I can play while taking a shower (by propping my iPad up on the towel rack). And yes, I can even play while driving (NOT RECOMMENDED).

SolForge promotes creativity and freedom of expression in the way all great CCGs do while providing more than enough mechanical depth to keep my mind engaged in-between turns. Unlike Hearthstone, the variance is significantly more manageable and losses rarely, if ever, put me on tilt, meaning even a bad (luck) day is a good day to play SolForge. While the most recent card release (just a few weeks old) has introduced the swingiest deck to the metagame since the beta and has managed to scare me off of constructed for the time being, I am still having no shortage of fun playing unranked games and I have no doubt that with the next update, the developers will start steering the game back to where victories are decided by the play instead of the draw.

Runner-up: Final Fantasy XIII-2, FTL: Faster Than Light

Best Surprise

Fantasy Life

Everyone who described this game as "sort of like Animal Crossing" and left it at that has done Fantasy Life a massive disservice. Animal Crossing is a job. You do a bunch of menial repetitive tasks day after day, beholden to a limited window for productivity, with NPC's that get pissy when you forget to have lunch with them at 1PM or, god forbid, don't have time to play the game on their birthday. Don't get me wrong, I'll still probably pick up whatever the next iteration ends up being and I'll have "fun" with it for a handful of weeks before resenting the franchise all over again, but it's that comparison that almost caused me to write off Fantasy Life entirely were it not for a few key tweets from people whose opinions I trust.

So what is Fantasy Life? Well, you talk with NPCs and do stuff for them and there's a bunch of menial repetitive tasks you can perform every day like collecting shells and shaking/chopping down trees and you have this house where you can buy furniture and you can dress up your character or get your hair styled or... OK, so the comparison isn't completely off the mark. But while there may be some parallels in the systems for interaction, at its core Fantasy Life is more a mash-up between a tight RPG job-system and a single-player MMORPG.

At the onset, I was asked to choose one of twelves lives (jobs, classes, whatever) including four for combat, three for gathering, and five(!) for crafting. Shortly thereafter, I was free to take on as many or as few of those lives as I wanted, and I easily transitioned between them to take advantage of the myriad ways they complimented one another. This eventually lead to a sort of cascading playstyle where a simple task transformed into an hours-long play session.

Ok, I finally killed that dinosaur but now I'm having trouble mining the ore it was protecting so I probably need new pickaxe. If I'm going to make one I should probably make a better blacksmithing hammer first so I have a higher chance of my pickaxe coming out with a high quality modifier. The best hammer I can make needs master-rank beams and I'm only an expert carpenter right now. Well, I'm going to want to rank-up carpentry eventually anyways so I might as well do that now so I can make the beams myself instead of paying a ton of money to buy them from the vendor. I have almost all the materials I need to complete my carpenter challenges and rank-up, but I'm still missing a scale from that one really tough dragon that's a component for the bed I'm making for whatever reason. I need to kill that dragon for a paladin challenge as well so I can kill two birds with one stone by doing that. But actually I'm doing almost no damage to it with my current sword so I should probably smith myself a stronger one. Actually, I can make a sword that would be perfect for fighting the dragon, but it needs ore from that vein I haven't been able to mine yet. I probably need a better pickaxe.

With an abundance of widely varied progression tracks to make sure I never felt bored and an almost incessantly positive storyline of hope and kindness (you can beat the game without killing anything!), Fantasy Life was exactly the psychic salve I needed to deal with the darker parts of this year. If you have a 3DS you owe it to yourself to buy a copy of this game and let it put a smile on your face. Unless you can't appreciate dad jokes. Almost every joke in the game is more-or-less a dad joke. AND I LOVE IT.

Runners-up: South Park: The Stick of Truth, Wolfenstein: The New Order

Local Multiplayer Game that Makes Me Wish I Wasn't a Busy-ass Adult

The Jackbox Party Pack

What smart design. Even with the desync issue that seems to hit at least one player every other game, the fact that anyone with an internet browser can participate in a game of Fibbage or Drawful is one of the best gaming developments of 2014. I bought the game twice and played the game twice and already have gotten more than my money's worth of fun out of it. Unfortunately I'll be moving across the country soon to an area where I have no friends meaning my local multiplayer experience will likely be restricted to my Beyoncé and kids, and a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old aren't properly equipped to appreciate the comedic genius that is xxcloud420xx. Though our time was short it was ever so sweet, The Jackbox, and while we may be apart, know that every time I see Clippy what I'll really be thinking about is a sad penis and you.

Runners-up: Gang Beasts, Lethal League

Biggest Disappointment

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

Following a similar vein to my biggest disappointment from last year, SimCity, Beyond Earth is a game that I have played and enjoyed for dozens of hours already and will likely continue to do so into 2015.

BUT IT'S JUST CIV V WITH A SPACE SKIN. Sure, some interesting tweaks were made to the underpinnings with a build-your-own-Civ sort of approach and a fancy new tech-web, but I felt like I had explored both of those addition to their fullest extent within a handful of games. Now I'm basically just playing Civ V with less annoying military and much more annoying miasma. I guess from the start they made it known that they were going to be making Civ V in space, I just wish they had leaned more on the "in space" side and less on the "Civ V" side.

Whatever, it's still alright, and maybe they'll be able to differentiate it even more whenever the first expansion drops. Maybe they'll add religion!

Runners-up: Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015, Watch_Dogs

The Game to Pay Full-Price For but Not Play Because of Dragon Age: Inquisition of the Year

Assassin's Creed: Unity

Look, I like Assassin's Creed, alright? Even III was great. The series appeals to my gotta-collect-'em-all map-scouring sensibilities and I consistently derive hours upon hours of enjoyment out of every entry. So it was a given that I would be buying either Unity or Rogue and I figured what's the point of having this sleek current-gen box if I can't shove some games inside of it. Besides, if I waited I could probably just pick up the inevitable HD update for Rogue somewhere further down the line like I did with Black Flag.

My copy arrived in the mail and, sure, there was some weird business going on with embargoes and completely busted framerates or somesuch nonsense, but I wasn't concerned about that. However, my extremely limited sit-down time with console games meant I was still flailing away at the tail-end of Bayonetta 2 and I knew I had to get that done before Inquisition came out.

I beat Bayonetta 2. Then Inquisition came out. Inquisition is still out. 120 hours later and it's still out. And not done. So I'll get to Unity some time during the January doldrums while my kids are with their grandparents and I'm supposed to be doing something like packing up for our big move. The fact that the game will be significantly more playable by then is a fantastic bonus and, honestly, I can't wait.

Thanks, Dragon Age!

Runners-up: Far Cry 4, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Game of the Year

Ultra Street Fighter IV

I love fighting games, which should be abundantly clear from a majority of my activity on this site. If I were going to be stranded on a desert island with one genre (and an internet connection), I would want it to be fighting games. In fact, three-fourths of my blog posts from this year had something to do with fighting games. So when Capcom updated the most recent version of their storied franchise for 2014, it was an obvious lock for my GotY.

And so it is, but not simply because of some sense of nostalgia or genre loyalty. Ultra Street Fighter IV is, beyond question, the most balanced modern fighting game on the market. With a massive roster of 44 characters and a wide variety of system mechanics, it's an accomplishment that is nothing short of miraculous. There is no clearer proof of this than the remarkable character diversity that has been showcased at every tournament top-8 since the game's release. The competitive-scene has never been more exciting, and 2015 promises to push things even further with a massive $500,000 prize-pool for the Capcom pro-tour courtesy of Sony.

Some characters may have been left out in the cold (sorry Dee Jay), but Capcom continues to fine-tune the game with free balance updates to try and shrink the already minuscule tier gap. The experimental playground of the newly-released Omega mode seems to be pointing at a possible direction for SFV, but until that game comes out (in 2016?), I'll continue having a blast losing repeatedly with Rose in USFIV. I can't wait to buy the game for a fourth time on PS4.

I just hope they adopt the driver Cowboy cooked up for the guys at Lab Zero so I don't have to buy another joystick. Even though I kinda want to buy another joystick. Man I want another joystick. JOYSTICK!

Runners-up: 2. Dragon Age: Inquisition 3. Bravely Default 4. Bayonetta 2 5. Fantasy Life 6. Super Smash Bros. for 3DS 7. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call 8. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII 9. The Banner Saga 10. The Last of Us (Left Behind DLC)

P.S. If you're looking to get into fighting games a little bit more, be it as a player or a spectator, I'd like to wholeheartedly recommend the Tuesday Show on UltraChenTV. Hosted by David "ultradavid" Graham and James "jchensor" Chen, the show is a sort of catch-all for everything fighting games, including game news, tournament results, scene drama, and anything in between. You can catch it most Tuesdays at around 8:30PM Pacific time, but your best bet is to follow @UltraChenTV on twitter to find out when they're going to be streaming.

GET HYYYYYYYYPE!

Okay, the title might be a little over-the-top but this is a pretty weird/interesting story.

Earlier today (yesterday? Ugh why am I up so late/early?) a GameStop in West Hollywood held a promotional event, giving players a chance to get some hands-on time with Smash for Wii U before its release on November 21. Many players from the SoCal Smash scene were in attendance, alongside D'Ron "D1" Maingrette who was acting as host. Even if you don't recognize his handle, you may have seen him commentating this year's Smash Invitational during E3. Being one of the pillars of the Smash community, everyone's ears perked up when he put out the following tweet:

A complete unknown, the young girl earned herself the moniker Karissa the Destroyer for the dominating manner in which she dismantled a majority of her opponents. One of the attendees managed to capture a fair amount of her rampage on his phone, and another caught her beating D1 with a convincing 2-stock victory (exhausting both of her opponent's lives without losing any of her own).

So I guess the title of that video is a bit of a spoiler. You see, while some players, like Keith "Southpaw" Gordon, took their loss in stride, others, like Sky Williams, started getting an inkling that something was amiss. Key tells included Karissa showboating by performing difficult combos without looking at the screen and a third controller plugged into the Wii U with a wire that mysteriously disappeared behind the stage. Sky's full account of his experience is definitely worth a read, but it culminated in him witnessing a top Smash player, who had not been seen by anyone during the course of the event, hastily sneaking away from the GameStop after the event had ended.

The fact that Karissa is actually an actor represented by Talent Branded Entertainment was only a Google search away. Then someone dug up this megaton:

It's a casting call for people with some experience in Smash to act as ringers and lose to "[the casting company's] girl". The twitterverse reacted in its usual fashion. Many people merely brushed it off as nothing more than a cute joke. Some took exception to the idea that someone had put one over on them and responded in the traditional fashion with insults and, apparently, death threats accusing anyone in attendance of being in on it. And while the actual wording of the casting call seems to indicate that the plan has always been to reveal the truth in a future marketing push, others, like designer, ex-Smasher, and advocate for women in competitive gaming Lil "Milktea" Chen were more concerned about the impact such a stunt could have on young female gamers looking for inspiration, and the social implications of the fact that any such repercussions likely never even crossed the minds of the professionals behind this marketing campaign.

It's hard to think of a worse time for a marketing campaign centered around a fake gamer girl being backed by a male player. But whether this crops up later as a TV ad or a web promo or simply another thing for people to not pay attention to while they're shopping at GameStop, at least now you'll have some idea of where it came from.

Now that you're properly titillated, I'd like to show you my joystick. And by joystick I mean penis. And by penis I mean PS3 peripheral by which I control my characters whilst fighting streets. You know, this one:

This is my limited-edition Femme Fatale Fightstick from Madcatz, number 73/350 made. There's isn't much that makes her special, but I swapped out the stick when the old one went bad and of course traded my square-gate in for an 8-way gate because I'm not a maniac, so in those little ways she's unique to me. I've spent more time with her on my lap than pretty much anything, but never went in for any fancier mods because A) money B) what if I break her and C) money.

But the week of E3 Arcade Shock announced a set of Street Fighter chibi pushbuttons and something inside me (my common sense) snapped and I knew I had to buy a set. I had no idea how much they were going to cost, I just knew that I needed them. At first I thought about buying a complete set of Rose because, well, it's Rose, but decided that would be a bit redundant and besides, I'm nowhere near good enough to consider myself a character specialist, so I immediately set to wracking my brain for which characters I wanted to buy.

I decided that I would buy 8 different characters that I play with some degree of competency, then assign each of them to buttons that I felt really exemplified that character. I came up with something like this:

• Jab = Boxer
• Strong = Rose
• Fierce = Dhalsim
• PPP = Zangief
• Short = Dan (light Dankukyaku)
• Forward = Ryu
• Roundhouse = Dictator
• KKK = ?

It worked out pretty well (although I don't actually play Ryu) and fit within the limited set of characters they had available, but I couldn't figure out who would be KKK. Maybe Claw?

It didn't matter though because Arcade Shock started announcing more characters. Then they announced ball-tops. Then they announced more characters. Then they announced prices (ouch!). Then it hit me. Looking through the cast there were exactly 8 female characters available (sorry Poison, Elena & Decapre) and duh, I had a femme fatale stick. And of course once that was decided, the ball-top had to be Dan. Who else in the cast is a better fit for creepily hanging around a bunch of girls?

With this in mind I decided on a new layout based on my extremely limited character knowledge for most of the characters I was going to buy:

• Jab = Makoto (she has that one command normal? I don't know...)
• Strong = Rose
• Fierce = Sakura (cl.Fierce, cr.Fierce, j.Fierce, even with the nerfs)
• PPP = Ibuki (her target combo got buffed to not whiff as often)
• Short = Chun (Short, Short xx EX Hyakuretsukyaku, Ultra)
• Forward = C.Viper (because LOLOL she has footsies now so fair)
• Roundhouse = Cammy
• KKK = Juri (sometimes her punches are kicks!)

July 1st rolled around and I "happened" to be awake around 3AM and just "happened" to be refreshing arcadeshock.com when online preorders became available so I fought my way through the phone interface, got all eight buttons and one ball-top in my cart, and checked out. The next morning I told my Beyoncé that I had done a bad thing and had spent (exorbitant sum of money) on cosmetic upgrades for a video game interface device and she thought it was cute because she rocks my face off.

So on Saturday I got my package, tore it open, hastily watched a tutorial on button replacement on youtube, skipped most/all of the important parts, then opened up my stick and got to swapping. Outside of a minor mishap involving me not remembering which wires went into which buttons nor the fact that I had unbound L1 and L2 in the options, things went off without a hitch and she plays as crisp as ever.

Now I'm fully ready to get hype over Evo weekend, and if you run into a Rose player on PSN named catbond just know that while I may be ass at Ultra, I have a sweet stick! See you in the chat!

Gallery

(The following contains spoilers for Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist. Watch Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist HERE)

It all started with Street Fighter: Legacy, a two-and-a-half minute fan-made proof-of-concept short that showed more love to the acclaimed video game franchise than Hollywood had managed to muster in two full-length feature-films. Reactions were overwhelmingly positive and, a few years later, the short's creator, Joey Ansah, returned with a Kickstarter campaign hoping to raise the funds necessary to realize his vision of a Street Fighter movie that would be faithful to the source material.

In the first few weeks the campaign only managed to raise ~$27,000 out of a million dollar goal. The situation looked bleak until the announcement came that that the strong buzz surrounding the project had caught the attention of private investors. The crowdfunding campaign was cancelled immediately so that production could begin on Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist. A year later, the completed product was streamed as a movie on Twitch and uploaded as a 12-part miniseries to the Machinima YouTube channel.

An origin story within an origin story, Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist follows the early days of central series characters Ryu and Ken and their training under their master Gouken. Depicted in parallel via flashbacks is the young Gouken training alongside his brother Gouki under their master Goutetsu.

The film opens in 1989 with Mike Moh as Ryu and co-writer Christian Howard as Ken facing off against one another on a riverbank. Fans will instantly recognize Ryu's white headband and Ken's long hair, a look that was established in the Alpha series. The action flows between furious assaults and moments of slow-motion highlighting the heaviest blows. Ansah's decision as director to stay away from the ever-popular shaky-cam keeps the fighting crisp and clear, lending a real weight to the thud of every punch and kick and allowing the audience to fully appreciate the beauty of the choreography and the skill of the actors.

Before the fight can reach its conclusion, time moves back to 1987 as Ryu and Ken train in Ansatsuken (lit. Assassin's Fist) alongside Akira Koieyama as Gouken. Ryu and Ken are immediately set up as foils, as Moh's portrayal of Ryu's introverted and obedient nature clashes perfectly with the brash confidence and insolence of Howard's Ken. Context for Ken's demeanor in provided in a brief flashback as his father Mr. Masters, played by Mark Kileenn, leaves him at a young age in Gouken's care.

Ryu and Ken are preparing to move on to the next stage of their training, mastering the art of the Hado. For fans of the series this is the good stuff, as Gouken breaks down the technique behind the Shoryuken and explodes a training dummy with a respectable CG Hadoken. Ryu and Ken spar in one of the many excellent fight scenes, managing to work in a few of their trademark attacks including the Collarbone Breaker.

The film begins to cut back and forth between Ryu and Ken, and the Hado training a younger Gouken underwent in 1956. The fatherly love in Gouken's warm but firm training style, that Koieyama expertly portrays, is brought into stark contrast against the aggressive training style of Goutetsu, portrayed by the legendary Togo Igawa

The difference between Gouken's Mu No Hado (Power of Nothingness) and Goutetsu's Satsui No Hado (Murderous Intent) is immediately apparent in the demeanors of young Gouken, played by the actor Shogen, and his brother Gouki, played by Gaku Space. While the brothers' characters closely mirror the balance between Ken and Ryu, their rivalry has taken on a harder edge due to the nature of their training and mutual interest in Goutetsu's niece, Sayaka, played by the actress Hyunri. Most notable is the barely-contained rage that Gouki's body trembles with in nearly every scene. It teeters dangerously close to caricature, but ultimately is successful in portraying Gouki's struggle to master the violent force within him.

(Don't worry if all the "Go" names have you confused. There were times when even I had trouble figuring out who was being yelled at.)

Anyone familiar with these sorts of martial-arts stories knows what happens next. One student remains on the true path while the other steps close to darkness in an effort to hasten their training. While Ken is quickly set straight by Gouken, Gouki ends up leaving everything behind and eventually succumbs to the Satsui No Hado, transforming into Akuma. This change in character also means a change in actors, as Ansah steps in to fill the role of the Raging Demon. The effect can be jarring if not a bit confusing for series newcomers, as the half-English, half-African Ansah bears absolutely no resemblance to the decidedly Japanese Gaku Space. That said, with a series of spectacular feats of strength and a gravelly Japanese accent accurate enough to fool an avid anime-watcher, Ansah manages to pull off the character quite nicely.

There is a beautiful loneliness to the Bulgarian countryside that stands in for Japan in these linked narratives. The quiet isolation of Ryu and Ken's life is only broken on occasion by comedic relief in the form of an old man named Goma who constantly heckles Ken during training, and a brief stint to a bar near an American military base featuring a uniquely trollish cameo. Goma, also played by Igawa, sticks out as a particularly sore thumb with a ridiculously obvious wig and painfully forced lines, but thankfully his appearances are occasional and brief.

Everything comes to a head as the film reaches its consecutive climaxes, first with the reckoning between Akuma and Goutetsu, followed by a graduation battle of sorts between Ryu and Ken. It is some of the best martial arts choreography out there and replete with nods to the long list of techniques available to Ansatsuken users. Finally Gouken bids a bittersweet farewell to his students as they set out on their Musha Shugyou, a warrior's journey to self-discovery. While some viewers may be left wondering what happened to the seemingly inevitable showdown between Gouken and Akuma, fans of the lore know that the actual confrontation does not take place until after Ryu and Ken have finished their pilgrimages and Ryu has been overcome by the Satsui No Hado a second time during the World Warrior tournament.

Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist succeeds where other Street Fighter movies have failed, by paying proper tribute to the franchise that defined and continues to dominate the fighting game genre, and goes above and beyond expectations by being not only a good video game movie, but a good movie in its own right. While it is unclear what is next for Ansah and his crew, he has already stated his interest in making further films should Assassin's Fist prove to be a success. Whether you're a Street Fighter fan or simply someone who appreciates good action, this is a movie worth watching, and hopefully the start of a long, long series.

Stray thoughts:

• "...who the hell's Dan?"
• Blanka cameo, watch for it or you might miss it. If you think about it, you'll know when it's happening.
• When did Mr. Masters become Australian?
• "Hi Roo" (shoutouts to S-Kill)
• In the original canon, Akuma fights Gouken during his first visit and loses. I guess they didn't want to compromise his badassedness.
• Despite some confusion, even within Capcom, as to the true nature of the Shun Goku Satsu, Ansah gets to the root of it in the subtitles.
• A fight scene that inspires people to start talking about frame data in the comments section must be doing something right.
• Yo Ken, you're not supposed to give Ryu his red headband until Alpha 2.
• I wish you were here for this one Ryan
• Some excellent comparisons between gifs of the movie and game sprites here and here.

It was probably just a matter of time, but Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic: The Gathering and MTG Online, have filed a lawsuit against their biggest direct competitor. No, I'm not talking about Hearthstone.

HEX: Shards of Fate is an upcoming Free-to-Play digital card game being designed by Cryptozoic Entertainment, creators of the World of Warcraft TCG that heavily inspired Hearthstone and a wide variety of other tabletop/board/card games. A self-described MMOTCG, Hex hopes to offer players a wide breadth of PvE content to be experienced solo and in groups in addition to the traditional PvP trappings commonly associated with TCG's. It also borrows more heavily on the mechanics of Magic than any other TCG I'm aware of.

This is a bigger problem for WotC than it might initially seem, as the online version of Magic has been under fire this year as players have gotten fed up with the incredibly poor quality of the client. Their feeble attempts at an update have only served to make things worse, and have left players bewildered as to how a company could let their flagship product remain so fugly and non-functional when Duels of the Planeswalkers exists.

Of course for a long time none of this mattered because Magic was literally the market when it came to online TCG's. Even with the recent genre explosion of significantly prettier games like Might & Magic: Duel of Champions, SolForge, and Hearthstone, WotC were able to cling to the fact that no competitor could match MTGO in terms of breadth, depth, or complexity, which granted them a captive audience of the most hardcore card-game players. But that seems to be exactly who Hex is targeting.

No bones about it, there is a lot of Magic in the DNA of Hex. It seems less like Cryptozoic set out to build a completely new TCG ruleset and more like they reimagined Magic as a modern game designed to take advantage of a purely digital format. Outside of a slightly more flexible resource system and a number of card mechanics that would be impossible with cardboard, Hex plays exactly like Magic, right down to deckbuilding, win conditions, and turn structure. Once a Magic players learns that a Troop is a Creature and that "Spellshield" means "Hexproof", they can jump right in to playing Hex.

Hex is literally offering everything that MTGO has (minus the absurdly large cardpool and the exorbitant prices that come with it) with a significantly more attractive wrapper. This has put MTGO under much closer scrutiny and, instead of putting up or shutting up, WotC has fired back with a "no you shut up" by suing Hex and Cryptozoic for copyright violation, trademark violation, patent violation, and consumer confusion. You can find an excellent breakdown of the entire lawsuit and how much of a leg WotC has to stand on in this article by Douglas Linn. He's a lawyer specializing in business law and estate planning by day, and the director of QuietSpeculation, a site focused on strategy and finance in Magic: The Gathering, by night.

Perhaps most worrysome are Linn's conclusions:

This is company-killing litigation if Wizards prevails on its claims AND gets all the damages that it wants. It means that if Wizards wins on either the second or third claim, the court could permanently prevent Hex from making the game.

I predict that Wizards will win on its patent claims, it has a good shot at winning on copyright claims, and it will lose on its Lanham Act claims.

There is a very real chance that Hex will never see full release. By the way, did I mention that this is a Kickstarter game?

The most interesting wrinkle in this entire story is the fact that Hex is one of the multi-million-dollar video game Kickstarters that followed in the wake of Broken Age née Double Fine Adventure. 17,765 people funded Hex: Shards of Fate, to a tune of $2,278,255, with 13 of those people paying $10,000 each. Of course there are inherent risks when backing any Kickstarter project, but this is likely the first and certainly the biggest video game Kickstarter at risk of failure due to legal action.

While the people at Cyptozoic are trying to stay positive, their dream of building this incredibly ambitious digital card game (and their entire company?) may be at an end. What could this mean for Kickstarter if over $2 million in backer money suddenly disappears? And where does this leave the future of MTGO and the DCG space? All I can say for sure is that they are Wizards™ and this looks fucked up.

Between the down and dirtiest brawl we've ever seen leading up to a console release and so many flagrant misuses of the word "misogyny" that Merriam-Webster and Oxford are literally going to have to update their dictionaries, 2013 has been an incredibly topsy-turvy year in the world of video games. Thankfully, it hasn't all been controversy and knife-fights, as 2013 has also been one of the best years for video game releases, and I got to play quite a few of them.

2013's 2012 Game of the Year Presented By PC Ports

Resident Evil 6

No one is more surprised about this than me. Last year, my experience with RE6 on PS3 was so negative that I wrote a blog post breaking down all the mechanical failings of the game, and subsequently named it my "Biggest Disappointment" of 2012. They had ruined the perfect balance of Resident Evil 5 by trying to make it play more like a shooter and, as everyone knows, shooters suck with a controller.

You know what shooters don't suck with? A mouse and keyboard. It was with this in mind that I felt compelled to pick up the game again on PC, at a significant discount of course. And let me tell you, the increased fidelity made such a difference it was like night and early evening.

Yes, the game still straddles genre lines in all the wrong ways, but being able to reliably snap headshots and melee enemies down without burning all my stamina on quick shots changes the gameplay from an exercise in frustration into an activity that is kinda maybe sorta fun. Of course I continue to be 100% bought in to the dumb-ass fiction of that universe and all of its unintentional camp, and the interwoven storylines are handled in interestingly, rather than being another instance of dumb Capcom recycling assets in that dumb Capcom way (*cough* Devil May Cry 4 *cough*)

It doesn't excel at much of anything, but like all games Resident Evil, RE6 manages to provide a decidedly unique experience. I'm glad I was finally able to play it.

Runner-up: Dust: An Elysian Tail

Best Sexy(ist?) Surprise

Tomb Raider

As one of the games responsible for launching us into this dark age of video games "journalism", thanks in no small part to the developers going out of their way to cram as many feet into their mouths as possible during every interview, Tomb Raider quickly fell off my radar of games to care about in 2013. But a conspiracy of 33% off coupons and my loyalty to Rhianna Pratchett via her father convinced me to pick it up anyway.

And wow, what an excellent game from top to bottom. Sure, ludonarrative dissonance. Okay, she should probably put a coat on. But none of those things take away from what is, top-to-bottom, an incredibly fun action game in the Metroidlike style. The combat is crisp and varied, and the various travel tools doled out throughout the game make exploring the well-crafted environments consistently fun. The story succeeds in giving an origin story to this more relatable, more human Lara Croft (gameplay conceits aside).

Whether or not the developers actually understood what they were making, they succeeded in modernizing Lara in all the right ways, transforming her from a caricature to a character and providing me with one of my favorite experiences of the year.

Runners-up: Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale, Soul Sacrifice

P.S. If you own a 3DS, you really should pick up Attack of the Friday Monsters! I can't think of any game that does such a good job of capturing the joyful innocence of childhood. Just press play, alright?

EDIT: Embedding is broken for some reason. Linky instead.

Best Digital Card Game that is Embarrassingly Better Than Magic: The Gathering Online

SolForge

MTGO is not a good game, or rather is a good game saddled with horribly broken technology. It's a sad state of affairs when the first online experience of one of your top players is so poor, they immediately declare it to be their last. So the timing couldn't be better for the various DCG's that have entered the market in varying levels of release, and right now the cream-of-the-crop is SolForge.

It may not have the production value of Hearthstone or the sweeping ambition of Hex, but it is the only game on the market to take full advantage of the digital format by creating something wholly unique from the more traditional ways of playing with cards. The draw five/play two structure means that there will always be meaningful decisions to be made, whether you're on turn one or turn twenty. And with a fully implemented tournament system, it is the best place for players looking for high-level constructed and draft play.

I've spent hundreds of hours on SolForge in 2013, and once I get an iPhone I'll be sure to spend thousands more in 2014, probably while driving.

Runners-up: Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Hex: Shards of Fate

Biggest Disappointment

SimCity

Let me preface this by saying that I do not hate SimCity. I have actually been able to eke out something in the area of a hundred hours of play time that I genuinely enjoyed.

Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that the SimCity I got was not the SimCity I wanted, and those hundred hours can't fill the shoes of a game that I would have eagerly played for a thousand more. I'm sure I'll check back in on SimCity from time to time, but it will always be underscored by thoughts of what could have been.

Runners-up: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time

The Amazon.com Game to Pay Full-Price For and Not Play of the Year

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

I was so excited for this game since I first heard about it who knows how long ago on the 8-4 Play podcast. The team up of Level-5, one of my favorite developers, and Studio Ghibli, makers of Whisper of the Heart, sounded like a dream come true. But when it finally came around to release time, I had just bought DmC and was still hurting in the wallet a bit from the holidays and thought, well, maybe I don't actually need this game.

Then came the Quicklook and I was immediately sold. The quality of the voice work and animation blew me away and I just knew I needed to be in this world. So I put my order in to Amazon and by the end of the week, the game was in my greedy little hands.

It's hard to remember now, whether I was on the tail end of DmC or something else was pulling my attention, but I was only able to make it through the prologue into the first instance of actual gameplay before I put the game down to play Fire Emblem: Awakening. That held me until March happened and I never looked back.

Right now it's sitting at the top of my to-do list, right behind Final Fantasy XIII-2. Just a couple 60+ hour JRPG's. No sweat.

Runners-up: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

Game of the Year

Fire Emblem: Awakening

What happens when you take all the best bits of a long and storied franchise and cram them into a single game? You get something singularly amazing, and that's exactly how I would describe Fire Emblem: Awakening.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is not only the best game to come out in the TRPG genre since 1998, it is easily one of my favorite games of all time. The well written story provides just enough intrigue to keep things moving without getting in the way of the incredibly designed battle system. The gameplay is the perfect balance of breadth and depth, not too intimidating for genre neophytes but complex enough to keep the most dedicated min/maxers entertained for hundreds of hours.

Nintendo joined the digital age just in time. No matter what the new hotness may be on 3DS, Chrom and friends will never be more than a few button prompts away.

Runners-up: 2. The Last of Us 3. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies 4. Beyond: Two Souls 5. SolForge 6. BioShock Infinite 7. Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm 8. DmC Devil May Cry 9. Remember Me 10. Gone Home