- a look back on 2002, by EvilNeil

So here we are again, at the end of another year. I thought it might be nice to resurrect one of those old High Voltage traditions and begin a collection of editorials. It also might be fun to have a brief look back at the year in our fandom, site and personal lives - to keep a record and to raise everyone elses’ self-esteem at the same time. God I’m so alone.

Once again, HerV was closed for a large part of year. On the 11th March, the physical server that hosted our virtual server at Tera-Byte Inc. suffered a hard drive failure, rendering all the data stored on it corrupted. In other words, everything was deleted. We got a months’ free hosting out of it… so we’re not with Tera-byte anymore.

Of course, our philosophy has always been that site backups are for little girls - so faced with total destructiON, we had little choice but to start over from scratch; a total redesign and recoding, plus re-entry of every review, special and article that we could find. Truth be told, we were planning a redesign around that time anyway, however this kind of scorched-earth approach to the whole deal was never considered.

The return to form was slow, gruelling work (Red is now condemned to a lifetime of working at fast food restaurants because he was coding and hacking and comparing Blue Mary pictures instead of studying for crucial exams) - but eventually, hope triumphed over er un-hope, and on Friday 19th June, 2002, at 3pm Greenwich Mean Time, HerV4 launched with surprisingly few problems, and more of just about everything except content.

Of course, while our policy on site backups is still that they’re for little girls, we find those knee-high socks and pigtails are just oh! so comfortable.

As well as the new sections and re-ordered staff roster (*tosses rose to DANfan*) - we’ve also tried a few other more ambitious projects, the biggest by far being the FAGMORT OF THE MILLENNIUM character battle, currently raging just left and below this sentence. We’re enjoying it thoroughly, and looking forward to seeing who places where in the end, and we hope you are too.

2002 was a surprisingly bountiful year for fighters. Although we’re never going to see the dizzy heights and sickening lows we lived through in the mid-nineties, there was enough releases, rumours and roms to keep the players busy and the forums flaming.

With all three of the current newest generation of consoles now available throughout the world, gaming companies had an all-new triumvirate of broad, powerful new canvases to splash their paint all over (ooer)

All of the big 3D fighter franchises saw new versions on new consoles this year. Sega’s Virtua Fighter 4 showed up on the Playstation 2 (something that would have shocked and appalled me ten years ago!) and did good business. After a frustratingly lengthy wait, the west finally got their oversized paws on Namco’s wonderful Tekken 4, and the non-American world finally got to experience the bouncy-bouncy audio-visual action spectacular that is Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive 3.

I’m not sure whether I should count it as a big franchise, but the fifth Mortal Kombat game, subtitled “Deadly Alliance”, released in the US in November brought the world to a standstill by actually being not a complete load of ass, concentrating on the gameplay rather than the exploding thigh bones and rainbow ninja.Even the arcades (those that are left) were not completely silent this year - Namco’s sequel to the splendiferous Soul Calibur was released to much acclaim and even more outrage, and even Capcom managed to get in on the act, surprising everyone with an announcement for the three-dimensional battle royale that will be Capcom Fighting All Stars.

The world of 2D was noticable less busy, though the stalwart companies continued to provide us with the occaisional delight. Capcom carried on their mission to release CvS2 and MvC2 on any piece of electrical equipment they could get their hands on, and also gave birth to the the surprisingly solid, if obviously limited release of Capcom vs SNK PRO on the PSOne console. They rounded off the year with Streetfighter Alpha 3 on the Gameboy Advance.

The King of Fighters legacy continued to limp ever onwards, with King of Fighters 2002 surprising everyone by actually being a good game, and both the KOF2K1 and KOF2K2 roms being dumped in record time.

Wild card unofficial Double Dragon fighter (!) Rage of the Dragons was also released to arcades, the Neo*Geo console and, not long after, dumped, and in all proved to be a moderate success, proof that you don’t need to be Capcom or SNK to make 2D fighting games (but it helps)

Lucky Dreamcast owners (an oxymoron if ever there was one) got a fine, fine conversion of King of Fighters 2000, courtesy of Playmore, and I hear two or three of them even paid for it.

One late-coming, but still exciting piece of news was the announcement that Capcom’s forthcoming CvS2 and MvC2 would be supported by Microsoft’s XBOX LIVE service. Although it won’t be available for a little while (and an even longer wait is in store for us poor Europeans) - this has the potential to be very big indeed. Providing people are actually willing to buy the damn thing.

Finally, although it’s not an actual fighting game itself, one videogame announcement that caught everyone’s attention was Team Ninja’s frankly stupifyingly fantastic-sounding Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Blatant, cheesecake fighting game fanservice has NEVER, EVER been seen before on this grand and marvellous a scale, and it’s too bad that the release dates were pushed back, else most of us would be playing it already. We at HerV can’t wait for this, I’ve already bought my XBOX and am salivating eagerly over every news update. And there’s your “comedy mishearing” gag right there.

The online fighting game community (if you can call it that) had another rambunctious year. Fighters.net closed forever and then er … opened again a few months later. You just can’t keep that Jason Jamieson chap down (believe us we’ve tried.)

It was in 2002 that Gamegen.com made the jump from “obscure videogame site” to “fighting game sprite rip Xanadu”, it’s mainstream debut to our community if you will, and it soon proved to be the most hardy, resilient, bandwidth-rich site in the entire history of the internet.

Outsite the internet (for yes, it really exists!) - this year saw the closure of the Southern Hills Golfland arcade in California, one of the “hot spots” of quality fighting game competition in the United States. Although fairly meaningless (sorry guys!) to those of us outside the US, it’s still a sad concept, in an end-of-the-era kind of way. RIP SHGL.

For me, the first half of 2002 was pretty much like the second half of 2001, with me being sad, and poor, unemployed and unloved. Fortunately, about halfway through the year, fate smiled (or perhaps grimaced during a bout of indigestion) and I once again found myself amongst the land of the working.

A couple of oh-so-welcome paychecks later and the cartoon porn, games consoles and realistic-breasted action figures began to flow freely once again. My collection of retarded things that I really shouldn’t be buying at my age continued to swell apace.

I’d just like to take this oppurtunity to thank all the forum regulars for their constant job-related mockery and derision over the past year. Cheers guys.

In other employment news, the savage, cut-throat world of the fast food restaurant chain lost not one, but two fabulous employees this year, as both Redranger and Punchinello moved on to bigger (?) and better (?) things. Red’s now working for an Internet Service Provider, doubtless forwarding technology-baffled housewives to Goatse.cx, and Punch discovered that putting his thumb in the waste disposal unit was both bigger and better than working at McDonalds, and so does that now. Probably.

As he may have mentioned once or ten-thousand times, ObiJay got a new girlfriend, one that according to him “plays fighting games to boot.” The smug bastard must pay, and the sooner we can find a way to expose his secret Bao fetish (so secret he doesn’t know about it yet) to her the better.

When the other staff were queried about their year, the reply was “read my livejournal, d00ds”. So we didn’t bother.

2003?

And what of the future? What (and who) is coming out in 2003?

Well obviously there will be a KOF2003, the begininng of the first completely non-SNK KOF story arc (I’m absolutely terrified) and I’m sure the ISO of Dreamcast KOF2001 will have been uploaded to newsgroups before the New Year’s hangovers have abated.

Then there’s Capcom Fighting All-Stars, and the almost humiliatingly awesome-looking Guilty Gear XX to tide us over.

Finally, let’s not forget Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball - because if anything can empty the entire internet of users overnight, it’s this.

Our ongoing Character Battle competition will of course continue to run and in the fairly immediate future will show us just who would have won the GameFAQs character battle if all those silly RPG characters and plumbers hadn’t got in the way.

And obviously Higher Voltage itself will continue to amble along, providing you handful of blessed readers with more mildly amusing self-depreciation and celebrations of mediocrity whenever we can, and we hope you can be there with us.

So yes, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, whether you’re here to correct someone on the forums for miscounting frame recovery times in VF4, or just like swearing and looking at anime girls with pink hair - HerV would like to wish you a stupendously happy and fulfilling Christmas, and an equally cheerful and satisfying new year. And we’ll see you when your eyesight comes back.

- The Higher Voltage staff, 25th December, 2002