FGs: Best and Worst years

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

I just wonder what is everyone’s opinion of the best and worst years for FGs. My personal opinion is that the worst years are probably tied for 2003 and 2004:

2003:

Mvc2 diversity disappeared at this point. With the development of Santhrax and MSP, it made Doom, Blackheart, and Spiral based teams obsolete

Justin Wong continue complete domination of MVC2 leading to the scene becoming stale.

SNK goes out of buiness the previous year and Playmore decides to move away from the MVS hardware. This leads to the first yearly disruption of the KOF series.

SNK release SNK Chaos which is panned by both casual fans and competitive players. It enjoys a very brief competitive life before being deemed as too broken for competitive play.

Alpha 3 last Evo appearance, leading CVS2 to become somewhat of an Alpha replacement

Capcom seems to have abandoned the fighting game market at this point.

Tons of SFIV rumors persist but none come to light

Tekken competitive scene remains relatively stale. Tekken Tag is still holding on for dear life, but doesn’t create new players due to tons of high level matches ending in timeout. Tekken 4 is pretty boring to watch and play, on top of being broken and unbalanced. More than half of top 8 at Evo were Jin player.

SCII sidestep is broken, and matches become really stale at high levels

Capcom Fighting All-Stars is cancelled. Reason is unknown but rumor is that many people who played the original playtest considered it unplayable

2004:

Evo abandons arcade format and switch to console.

Justin Wong takes Evo for MVC2 and almost never loses a character doing so. This is his most dominant Evo showing for CVS2

CVS2 starts to show it’s imbalance. Almost an all C or A groove top 8 with many of the same characters. The game devolves into a turtle fest. Buktooth gets 5th places however with an N-Groove team of Iori/Morrigan/Ibuki

Capcom Fighting Jam is announced and early videos and screenshots are aggressively criticized by the fighting game community.

CVS2 EO is released for Gamecube and XBOX, but the port is unfaithful.

KOF Neowave is released but is heavily criticized by competitive gamers, and panned by fans.

VF4 Evo makes it’s only Evo appearance, but to little fanfare.

SC2 at Evo fairly unimpressive. The writing is on the wall for this game

Tekken 4 Evo fairly unimpressive, the end is near for this game

Tekken Tag can’t hold on any longer, the end is near

Few if any new games are released at this time

Guity Gear XX finals is basically a Sol Fest due to Dust Loop.  Daigo dust loops his way all the way to the Finals and get the championship.  Kensou represented some diversity going into top 8 undefeated but doesn't hang on that long.

Diversity in top 8 3s is pretty much done. Not even a Makoto player appeared in top 8

Good:  Daigo parry video was released, it was heavily circulated on the internet.  This lead to a new generation of players wanting to become competitive.  This is probably the beginning of the rebirth.

Best years:

2008:

BlazBlu is announced

SFIV is announced after many many years of rumors

Arcade Infinity and FFA release podcast dedicated to Sol Cal 3s scene. This gave players a perspective of the competitive scene.

KOF12 announced

KOF2002 UM announced

KOF 98 UM released to many positive reviews

Playable build of SFIV at Evo 2008. This was actually probably one of the worst Evos with low attendence, but it was a huge transitional year.

Tekken 6 competitive community is in full swing at this point.

Arcade Infinity ranbats are started. This became the first outlet for the American tournament scene and for SFIV. It made big names out of Gootecks, Mike Ross, and others

Gootecks starts his own broadcast. Originally it was dedicated to 3s players, but moved over to SFIV. He got high profile guest like Alex Valle and Justin Wong.

2009:

SFIV console release. It introduced 10 new characters which weren’t in the arcade version. This started a short debate as if these characters should be banned. However these character were put into competitive play.

Final Round XII becomes the first major and draws 250 players for SFIV. This number was considered huge for the standards at this time.

Local tournaments in SoCal and Norcal draw 100-150 man tournaments.

I Got Next tournament documentary was released giving a perspective of East Coast and West Coast tournament scenes.

Podcast almost triple in numbers.

Live streaming becomes commonplace at major tournaments

Evo brings in an 1,000+ man bracket for SFIV

Gamestop tournament finals has an exhibition. This is the first meeting between Japan and US, and we find that we’re close to equal. Daigo sweeps Justin Wong, but beats Japan champ Iyo.

 East Coast Throwdown becomes new East Coast major, and runs it's first tournament during this year.

Overall I think 2003 and 2004 were big low points, with 2008 and 2009 being high points. I think 2008 was the year where the big boom of fighting games was established, although a lot of stuff was in it’s infancy. Still 2008 was probably the least hype Evo, with fewer top players showing up than usual. I think in 2008 the scene was definitely on life support but it seems like SFIV really turned it around.

2

2009, 2010, 2011 are definitely the worst years for anyone who doesnt like sf4/mvc3 since good luck getting people to play anything else

3

Pretty much sums it up for whoever who is not Japanese.

4

As real as the Good Game Player’s talk is, I’m feeling very positive about the next couple of years or so.

Think about what we have on the horizon here. New games like KOF XIII, SF X Tekken, Skull Girls are coming out with many more unannounced projects in the works. And then we have some new hype going on in old games with 3S:OE being announced for XBLA and Vampire Savior getting some very hot attention in recent tournaments.

I feel like we have a very bright future ahead of us.

5

SF x Tekken looks wacky and spazzy which could be fun, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to address my biggest problem with SF4 (WALK SPEEDS!) so I’m not too excited about it. Good luck getting anyone to play KOFXIII. 3SOE… well I never want to watch another game of non-Japanese 3S ever again, but it will be fun to play for a while. I hear MK9 is good but nobody here plays it and the netplay blows. Skullgirls is the Great White Hope for people who remember what Good Fighting Games were like, I think. Hopefully we’ll see a new Guilty Gear in a couple years since Arc has the license again.

Sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see a really good footsie-oriented fighting game again, since SF has so clearly given up the ghost at this point.

6

I think the key to help other franchises grow is by having good online. It won’t matter how good the games will be if the online will suck. Only Capcom’s are popular enough to not give a shit about it.
I think that MK9 will not survive long after Evo mainly because of that reason. And that’s also the reason I see no future in KOFXIII, cuz Atlus are sending vogue messages about the online quality. As far as PR goes, nothing beats 3SO’s trailer with GGPO’s logo flashing over and over again.

7

Atlus really hasn’t said much of anything about KOF XIII’s online yet. Nothing about it is concrete this early in development.

8

lol @ 2008 reasoning including BlazBlue announcement

Obvious bias against Tekken is obvious :confused:

9

Word on the street (aka certain people in #capcom who you’d assume would know) is that Atlus are pushing SNK very hard for good netcode.

10

RF won GGXX that year. Kindevu got 2nd, Kensou got 3rd.

No Makoto made top 8 that year, but there was an Alex and an Akuma iirc.

11

lol @ justin making mvc2 “stale”

12

You are clearly not remembering Evo 2004. Sorry that is totally incorrect. I owned this entire DVD set and watched it countless times.

Evo 2004 was Guilty Gear XX, Daigo won this handily. The grandfinals came down to him and Kindevu (who was using Eddie). Not sure the score, but I believe Daigo went undefeated this entire tournament. Guilty Gear XX Evo top 8 was pathetically bad. There were about 3 or 4 Sols in top 8, the rest rounded out by Eddie and Faust. Only Kensou was in top 8 who was using Chipp. Kensou lost both of his top 8 matches to Faust players, RF being one of them.

You may have this year confused with 2005. However in 2005 it was #Reload.

2007 had the most Diverse top 8 for 3s, partially due to the 1 game rule that year. People thought this caused a lot of random results, and was highly criticized. In 2004 there was no Alex and Makoto. Top 8 was dominated by Kens and Chuns, with KO being the Yun player in top 8. But now that I recall there was a Dudley player who was Kokujin. He was the only non-top 3 character in 2004 top 8.

The parry vid withstanding, 2004 Evo was a stale and predictable as they came. Everything was a repeat of 2003. Yun and KO were in the 3s grand finals just like the previous year.

2005 is were things got more interesting with Tekken 4/TTT being dropped for Tekken 5. And Justin Wong being eliminated from MVC2 to only place top 4.

13

He honestly did. Everyone pretty much knew Justin Wong would win every year, to the point where the MVC2 tournaments weren’t even remotely interesting. Soo Mighty at the time was considered the guy who could possibly dethrone Justin, but honestly everyone always knew Justin would win. In retrospect, no it’s not so stale, but at the time it was. I know a lot of people on SRK wasn’t following the Marvel scene back in these days, but if you were it was painfully stale. Justin Wong’s Evo 2004 Evo appearance had to be the most lackluster and anticlimatix ever. Justin Wong rarely even lost a damn character the entire tournament, let alone a game. Justin Wong appeared unbeatable in 2004. Again, 2005 is when the scene started to really become interesting again. Sanford had been beating him all year, and Yipes took him out in Evo 2005. At this point it looked like Justin Wong could actually be touched in the game. In 2004 no one believed this.

14

It wasn’t anything bad… It only took 2 years for somebody to knock him out of Evolution. If anything else, it gave a lot of people something to aspire to. It set the bar for what’s considered GOOD Marvel play and what’s not.

I’ve never seen a game so hype in my 8 years of being around the competitive scene, and the MvC2 love only grew from 2k3 to last year.

Stale? Stale for players that had no aspirations to do anything but use their Iceman/Cable/Doom teams and complain that they couldn’t win anymore against Sthrax.

I like how your argument is that 2k3 made 2k4 stale, but things got better in 2k5.

15

best years of FGs was when they were in the arcade

16

So 91-97 approximately?

17

Team Duc Do

18

Arcades lasted well into the 21st century. Being from BK, you should know this.

19

They did decline however. I am talking about when they were basically thriving. I tried to pit it in the Golden age of it. I had 2 arcades near me but barley anybody went in. This was before I discovered CTF/NLA.

20

Oh well yeah, I agree witht hat. Where in BK? I used to go to Smiles in Bay Parkway when it was More Fun