How about you guys make an effort to write some reviews?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

Sup all.

I decided to start this thread after coming across this one. The point I want to raise is that the main reason the general gaming populace does not appreciate fighting games is because of the terrible quality of basically all fighting game reviews ever. I am not saying that if the reviews were better EVERYONE would be playing fighting games – after all, no gaming genre could ever possibly appeal to everyone – what I am saying is that most people would at least RESPECT them, as well as the effort that goes into designing them and playing them at a high level. And with more respect and less misinformation around, eventually more people would come to play these games the way they are designed to be played, leading to more and more widespread competition, and less need to travel halfway around the globe to find it.

Now I have tried doing something about this on my website. I have reviewed a few fighting games myself in great depth, and asked for people from this forum (HeartNana and DarkGeese) to help me out. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Neo Geo Battle Coliseum by Dark Geese
The King of Fighters XI by Dark Geese and me
Arcana Heart by me, with much help from HeartNana
Jingi Storm: The Arcade by me
Hokuto no Ken by me

Now I know this may sound arrogant or whatever, but seriously, as far as I know these are the best fighting game reviews around, irrespective of whether someone agrees with them on a specific point or not. The main thing is that they respect the genre, they understand it, and they are capable of looking past graphics and animu (while still taking them into account!), and delivering some worthwhile insight into each game.

Now as much as I’d love to play fighting games all day and keep reviewing every fighter that comes out, the fact of the matter is that this is not practically possible given the rate at which new fighters are coming out these days. There’s just no way I could keep up, and if I tried I’d necessarily end up writing the same kind of vague, worthless, waffling reviews you get on 1UP, Lamespot, etc. Besides, I don’t live in Japan any more and it’s currently impossible for me to get any kind of competition in a fighting game at the moment, making it extremely hard if not impossible to acquire some real insight into these games.

So why don’t YOU guys try your hand at reviewing? How hard can it be to sit down for a couple of hours and put together your thoughts on a game which you know very well? Look at Dark Geese’s NGBC review: a simple, direct, no-nonsense exposition of his thoughts on the game. I would love to have such reviews on my site for Arcana Heart 2, Battle Fantasia, Accent Core, the new Smash Brothers (lol, yeah, I know), and even stuff like Big Bang Beat, Akatsuki Blitzkampf, etc., or even older games like Waku Waku 7 or Fighter’s History. It’s not like any of these games have received any worthwhile reviews yet – or as if they ever will if no one here decides to do something about it.

Isn’t it a bit of a shame that so many great (and not-so-great, but still worth looking into) games have never been reviewed with anything close to the level of consideration that went into making them? I, at any rate, certainly think it is.

Anyways. Besides Dark Geese and HeartNana, I have tried contacting a couple other people on this board in the past (one guy for Accent Core and another for Battle Fantasia) and they both refused. Too busy or whatever. So I am hoping this thread will be more effective in putting me in touch with a few more people to help out with reviews.

So give it a go. Post a review in this thread and let’s talk about it. Don’t try to use fancy words or whatever and make yourself seem silly – the point is not to impress people with your literary skills but with your insight into the mechanics of the game and the genre. Grammar/syntax/spelling errors I can easily fix.

If any solid reviews end up coming out of this thread I’ll add a header image, some screens, perhaps even a couple of high-level videos, and add it to my review archive alongside the other reviews linked above. So how about it?

2

I was going to come in here and post something sarcastic, but you defied all of my expectations for this thread and actually wrote some very well-thought-out stuff.

I, uh… agree. Unsarcastically. :shy:

It reminded me of how I used to wish that mainstream gaming publications (websites and magazines) would aim their reviews of fighting games more at the hardcore fighting game players than the average, casual gamer.

3

You know, I had actually read that Arcana Heart review before I started coming to SRK or knew who HeartNana was. Very nice job with it, taking both the game and the genre it belongs to very seriously without appearing overtly fan-boyish about either. Well done indeed and I too wish that the major gaming sites and magazines would get people who actually understand fighting games to write fighting game reviews.

4

Ha, those reviews you tagged were definately yours. This is a constructive bit of criticism, so don’t think of me as an asshole when I say this: You very noticeably tend to start paragraphs with “Now …”. You can even see it in this first post here. It’s nothing major, but it’s fairly apparent and distracting and detracts from the flow of the reviews.

On topic: I think this is a problem, certainly. How many people are in that slice of the venn diagram that includes both active reviewer and competitive fighting game player? A real effort might be to get them published on major sites. There’s probably plenty of racing game reviews out there by the real aficionados that I’ll never see because they’re never in the right place.

5

i didnt read your post but your website is the gayest shit ever and if i was pathetic enough to consider myself a part of “the gaming community” id be embarrassed that you consider yourself a representative of it.

anyone who takes video games as seriously as you do needs to die

6

lol u a gay ass bitch icybitch

7

Thank you for reminding me who you are. You’re that same douchebag who wrote that one article on “the proper way” to refer to a japanese made video game

8

I don’t think competitive games review well. Reviewing works for art. People don’t review football, or chess, or poker as games for the same reasons reviews don’t work for competitive games. I think trying to create primers for fighting games is a much better approach then trying to cast judgments on fighting games, especially when they are relatively new.

9

this is my favorite part seeing as you do it constantly

p.s. while looking for your insanely long article on how you’d personally revive the arcade scene i found this quote

ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah you are so so gay

10

This is a valid objection. But the reason people don’t review football or chess is that there is only one football and one chess, and no one has to make a choice between three dozen different varieties of each. Even in poker, which DOES have many varieties, these are so old (and it’s not like someone’s creating new ones every month) that there’s never any demand for some kind of insightful comparison between them.

Look, all I’d like to see is the occasional page-long sustained examination of a game, by someone who understands the genre. There is nowhere you can go to get that, and I think that’s a shame, especially considering how many thousands of pages of retarded one-liners SRK users create every day (see above). If some of these people put that energy into something worthwhile, I think that’d be really cool.

I guess the problem here is the same as at Shmups, where they even have a dedicated sub-forum for people to post reviews in, and 99% of them suck balls anyway, even though those people are very dedicated shmup players. Being able to play a game and being able to examine it critically seem to be two very very different things. The second presupposes the first, but apparently this doesn’t work the other way around. Back to PMing people I guess.

11

icycalm have you ever touched a girl

12

you should probably chill. I’d hate to see you banned again since you bring the comedy.

13

:shake: