Saturday 9 February 2013

Wreck-It Ralph and ZANGIEF (PONY)




Caught Wreck-It Ralph last night, a fairly pleasant rummage through (executive producer) John Lasseter's ruthless emotional plotting: I love you! I hate you! I LOVE YOU! etc. Bizarrely, Ralph posits a 2012 in which arcades are still relevant. I wish! A week doesn't pass that I don't read about some fight game mecca closing its doors in America or Japan. I guess acceptable online combat was the last nail in that coffin? Over here in the UK if you can find something resembling an arcade it's probably stuffed full of baby's first fruit machines or maybe (maybe) a broken Konami light-gun cab.

Ralph is also a signal that the 90s are now being gobbled up to prompt nostalgic affection. Street Fighter II characters are featured heavily in the film, perhaps a sign that if you remember 1992 with any level of clarity you should be a parent by now? Front and centre for the Capcom crowd was Russian grappler Zangief, talking us through what it feels like to be a bad guy with gigantic thighs. I've never really thought of Zangief as an evil character. I know he was a Bison stooge in the Van Damme movie but who gives a shit about that? I guess we're forever expected to operate on pre-Glasnost models of thought. To compensate for this terrible slur on the Red Cyclone, here's ten minutes of a player named Pony grappling his way through the kind of characters people usually pick to get an easy win in Super Street Fighter II X: Grand Master Challenge.

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