Ask 411 Games 01.16.12: Road Rash, Legends of Wrestling, Street Fighter The Movie, More!

Posted by Mathew Sforcina on 01.16.2012

Who owns the Legends of Wrestling franchise? Why do movies stray so far from their source video game material? Should Kill.Switch get a sequel? Why isn't there a Road Rash 2? All this and more covered this week in Ask 411 Games!

Hello, and yes yes yes, I know. I know I sorta promised something last week, but I didn't count on ending up playing Co-op Fable 3 with my girl for most of the day. So that's once again on hold. Not that anyone cares, most people seemed to want to argue about Owen and Martha Hart.

Oh yeah, I'm Mathew Sforcina, and this is Ask 411 Games. I will mention my thoughts on the whole comment war below, and then we can get back to the actual video game questions and answers that this column is supposed to deal with, cool? Cool.



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Remember, questions can go in the comment section, or, better yet, to [e-mail].

All right, Martha Hart: I'll admit that I'm slightly biased here. Although I am a wrestling fan, I'm also a wrestler. So I do tend to lean more towards the "forgive and work together" side of hatchets. You bury them and make money together. That said, were my comments out of line? Probably, despite it being, in my mind, not a serious attack. I sincerely apologize for the offence caused. I'm not going to sit here and try to argue debating points, or call on witnesses, I'm just going to man up, apologize, and move on.

Deal?

Tracie starts us off with actual video game content.

Why wasn't there a sequel for Diddy Kong Racing? I loved that game so much!

Diddy Kong Racing was seen by some as a cheap rip off of Mario Kart. Including a much younger me, who had a chance to pick it up cheap back in the day but chose instead to get WWF No Mercy.

OK, so that is probably a better choice overall for me regardless, but still.

But the game is more than a straight rip off, as it includes planes and hovercraft vehicles, a less varied but more strategic weapon system, and a full blown adventure mode, which was a welcome change from the usual "Race. Race more. Race slightly differently. Then Race again." system of unlocking most racing games have. And the game was fun, and successful. Released in the 97 Xmas rush, it sold enough copies in short enough a time to get the world record for fastest selling video game at the time. (Which is now in the hands of one of the Call of Duty games). And it's in the top ten Nintendo 64 games of all time in terms of sales. The game was popular, successful, good, and launched two other franchises (Banjo and Conker). So why wouldn't it get a sequel?

Well, for starters, we'll ignore the enhanced remake on the DS since that doesn't really count as a sequel. The fact is, the game did have two sequels planned. The idea seemed to be to split the game up slightly, and produce a game taking the biggest new development from the game, the flying, and produce a game based solely on that for the GBA, and then make a game that stuck to the guns of the original on the home console. The two games were set to be Diddy Kong Pilot (GBA) and Donkey Kong Racing (GC).





In both cases, the same thing happened that killed both of them. In 2002, Microsoft bought Rare. And that shorted out both games, as funnily enough Microsoft didn't want their company making games for their competition, and vice versa.

So, both games were cancelled. But while Donkey Kong Racing was totally killed off (with only the basic premise linking it to the later Donkey Kong Barrel Blast game for the Wii), Diddy Kong Pilot did end up morphing into Banjo-Pilot, which came out on the GBA in 2005. The characters were totally converted into Banjo-Kazooie ones, and the game was OK, but not great.



So that's the nearest Diddy Kong Racing had to a sequel. Since the remake doesn't count.

Also, how about a sequel for Kill.switch? I still say to this day Gears of War is a rip off to it.

… Well not just you. The guys who made Gears of War also kinda say it.



For those who don't watch the videos, Kill.Switch was a 2003/2004 game for the PC, Xbox and PS2 that holds the title of being the first cover based third person shooter (in that the idea of cover was the core gameplay mechanic. Plus it was the first to have blind fire). Namco took the dynamic of their light gun games, where you duck and hide from bullets, and put it in a third person game. So if you hate this idea/genre, this is the game to blame.

It's been brought up by the makers of both Gears of War and Uncharted as being a major influence on their games, which is kinda notable when you watch them. Plus pretty much any game with a cover system now is ripping Kill.Switch off or ripping off one of the games ripping it off. If you consider ‘taking an idea and using it in your own way' a rip off.

That said, although the mechanic was interesting and very influential, the game itself kinda sucked. The plot was meh and although the whole cover based thing was interesting and at the time new, the game wasn't spectacular. The game seemed more like a tech demo than an actual game. And as the system it helped pioneer became more and more ubiquitous, it became less and less unique. Now, it's barely known about.

Often it takes a couple of go-arounds for an idea or genre to go from neat idea to workable mechanic. The people who first get the idea spend so long working it out they end up forgetting everything else, so that when it comes out, it doesn't work as a full product. But it does end up inspiring others to take the idea and then use it in their product and do it well and make lots of money. Fair? Maybe not. But it's how things are done a lot of the time. It's better to be the guy who picks up the idea later than the guy who has had the idea in the first place.

Classy.



Dan 89 also wants to talk about a lack of sequels.

Why is there not a new Road Rash game out yet? I loved the N64 one, and I've seen polls and people talk about how much they miss the series. What's preventing a new one from coming out?

We have brought this up before, and sadly while some stuff has come to light, it's not too promising. Basically in the last year or so, some concept art came out of EA that was about Road Rash… but it was from 2006. Although it was interesting, in that the game looked a lot more streamlined and hectic, and would include, among other things, samurai swords.

…

Yes please.

But the thing preventing it's release? EA's attitude to the idea. See, middle of last year, Frank Gibeau, the newly promoted president of EA Labels gave an insight into how the upper people were thinking. Quote:

"We do have a couple of old franchises that we're looking at right now... reimagining them and bringing them back. We've got 25 years of good IPs and I've worked on a few of them in my career like Road Rash and the Strike series. So I have a strong affinity for a lot of the things we've done in the past. We kind of have a rule which is you've got to have a really good reason to bring something back - What can you do to it that makes it fresh and brings something new to the equation of the franchise? Like basically what we did with Medal of Honor when we brought it back; we looked at going after more modern themes... the war that's happening now as opposed to a historical war. That was the reason we brought Medal of Honor back. But when we look at Road Rash, the Strike series or some of these other franchises we really challenge ourselves. We can't just put them on new tech with the same gameplay from ten years ago, we've got to have something new. That's the typical challenge that we have."

So in other words, EA appears to not want to listen to the fans who just want the same game on the new platforms with better graphics and online play, no, they won't make Road Rash until someone comes up with a new and fresh take on it.

…

Samurai Swords! That's new and fresh! COME ON!!!

Ahem. Moving on.

Also, what happened to the Legends of Wrestling series? It was a real fun game series, had interviews with legends you could watch, etc..

The Legends of Wrestling series has been somewhat looked down upon by some, although I think it has some positives. Sure, it's buggy and the gameplay's pretty average, but Showdown had a hell of a roster and I maintain that the Career Mode in LOW2 was one of the best in wrestling game history.

…

Well I liked it anyway.

But what happened to the series? Simple, the series was made by Acclaim. Showdown was released in 2004. 2004 was also the year Acclaim shut down. Throwback Entertainment a couple years later bought out the vast majority of Acclaim's back catalogue. This includes the Legends of Wrestling series. So it's up to them to make a new one. Of course, since then WWE has both released a legends game or two, plus put a bunch of legends into their own games. So it might be harder to get people… Although not impossible. And maybe toss in a bunch of the indy talent… Hey, it's possible.

Willy Dope takes me a little out of my comfort zone.

What was the deal with the Street Fighter movie? Why were Charlie and Blanka the same person? Why were Ken and especially Ryu seemed to be mad out to look like baffoons? What was the deal with E Honda and Balrog working with Chun-Li? I could go on and on but basically i guess what the hell happened to the story and cannon, did the people making the movie have no idea of any of the street fighter backstory?

Well to be fair, they did try to get in as many characters into the thing. And several references. There's stuff like Bison's hat rack having all his alternate color scheme hats on it, and the game being geographically consistent. The problem is that for every small, minor touch that is kinda cute, there's a major one that gets on people's nerves. Like, for instance, Charlie/Blanka. Although to be fair, Charlie's existence as a playable character came later, so it's not like they combined two main people into one, just one major and one minor.

The problem isn't so much that the director and writer didn't know the backstory, it's just they tried to get too much in. See, any time you convert a story from one format to another, there has to be changes made. If you make a movie into a game, you have to add in large tracts of events in order to make the game last longer. If you convert a book into a TV series, you have to alter the pacing to give the thing length. And if you convert a game into a movie, you have to lose a lot of stuff.

There would be no way to do a full length movie of EVERY character's backstory and presence in the tournament without it running into 3-4 hours at a minimum. So the makers of the film did what they could to fit them all into 2. Some changes were inevitable, but the way they did it did rankle with most fans. But it's a side effect of there being far too much going on in the story.

Ideally, they should have focused the plot more. Kept it to the original 12 characters, with the 8 PCs all fighting each other until one, let's say Guile since it's a US film, wins, then you have Bison try to cheat and kill him and then you have some grand showdown with all the people fighting at once. Don't force everyone in, just focus on a few characters.

Of course, the reboot in 2009 did that, and somehow "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li" was even WORSE. But then, what that film made up for in reduced characters it lost much more on in going even further from the source.

Remember, questions can go in the comment section, or, better yet, to [e-mail]. I'll be back next week with… Stuff.