12

Meh, the guy just doesn’t know anything about fighting games, and it seems like he has no plans to seriously try any out. There’s no way to win an argument with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about and doesn’t want to learn. I’ve had friends who think the same way he does, but if I get them to sit down with me to just half an hour of a fighting game, they always come away with an appreciation of how difficult and complex the good games in the genre are. This guy plainly won’t do that, so whatever. Who cares if he’s entirely wrong, it’s no sweat off my back.

13

How has any genre evolved since, say, NES times?

Graphics are moot, since every genre gets updated graphics, and if you just update graphics, its still the same exact game, just looks different.

RPGs I can think of nothing major. Some new status effects. New ways for exp to work or to get stronger. Changes to the user interface to make things easier to understand(ie stats more easilly viewable).

FPS gets what, new guns? Hitting a certain part of a character makes them take more damage?

Sports get more ways to customize your team.

Music games weren’t around long to my knowledge, but they haven’t evolved at all either.

Fighting games get new systems and move properties, and a whole bunch of single player modes.

RTS Gather resources/make army/attack. Pretty much the same as Fighting games in terms of evolvement. Improved resource gathering, new attack/armor properties.

Its to the point where its now you need to either make a new genre(unlikely) or find a new way to combine current genres to make a new game. Its mostly taking rpg elements into other games, ie warcraft 3 using rpg elements to make heros, sports games using rpg elements to give players stat growth through a season, ect. The tekken 5 cards add rpg elements to fighting games, they just don’t have any effect on gameplay as they are all presentation. RPG elements are usually popular. Almost everyone likes to see their skill/weapon/character get stronger, or to try to win with the weakest possable. For anyone who’s played the Ratchet and Clank series, look at all the RPG elements added/enlarged between the first and third?

And one question regarding genres. Can anyone tell me why Zelda is an RPG but Ratchet and Clank is a platformer?

14

If someone doesn’t look deeply into any genre they will fail to see the changes. Of course theres changes to fighters just like there are changes to FPS, RPG’s blah, blah, blah. It takes a fan of these games generally to realize the changes but they are there.

Like I can tell you lots of changes between UT, and UT2k4. HL and HL2 but to some people it still simply means point and shoot.

15

What a lot of game players want more than anything is freedom. My sister, an idiot, says the reason fighting games suck, namely 2D fighters, is because your movements are restricted to a linear 2D plane. Hence why fighting games like DOA and MKD are more successful, much to the dismay of lacking any real depth in the fighting engine.

Under that criteria, the only genres I can think of that truly have “evolved” and evolved for the better are stealth and action. Play all three Splinter Cells and you’ll see what I mean.

16

Unfortunately the majority out there probably think like bludwid. These kind of people don’t want to think when they play a game; they just want to sit down and be sucked into the game story and graphics and let their brain melt.

In this ADD generation, finding people who are patient and dedicated enough to figure out the essential strategies of a competitive game and analyzing why they lose are getting rarer indeed.

17

In defense of the ADD generation and to slander it at the same time. Taking video games lightly is a good thing; however it’s not like they’re spending their valuable time wisely in the first place.

18

Idiot, you can spell, you just can’t read. Look at my post. I wasn’t making fun of your spelling.

19

One of the coolest things is story mode for 1P fighting- CPU (all the time on the console, since none of my friends play fighters seriously).

Project Justice and GG went the extra mile in character development, story paths, etc. :tup:

20

Really?
Whos Better Than JUstin In Marvel

21

Anyone who says that fighting games havnt evolved since Street Fighter 2 and that it all the gameply that is involved is simple button bashing is a ignorant moron.

The fact is, fighting games, wether they are 2D or 3d, is one of the hardest game genres to master, and esicialy today ,for new comers to learn the flow of gameplay.

One thing i have noticed is when a noob first tries a fighitng game they either resort to simple button bashing or simply abusing special moves. It appears the mainstream gamer has no understanding of how to play fighting games. My opinion is that companies should do what virtua fighter 4 evo did, come with alot of match video’s to “educate” people who are new to this. When i show some of my friends match videos of high tournement japenese players playing alpha 3 or 3rd strike, they are simply amazed and even sometimes get pumped up to play the games they used to call “boring and simple”.

As another person said before, fighting games require alot of time,practice and competition for a person to improve his skills. And today, most young people dont want to invest in that time and prefer something easy to learn like halo, were you can have a lan party and batle many people. I guess that sadly is they way it is today and will be very hard to change, espicially since most mainstream gamers are informed by mainstream media who unfortunately know fvck all about the fighting games “culture”.

I also think most magazines are to blame the bad opinion fighting games(mainly 2d) get in regards to mainsream gamers.
After picking up the latest issue of the australian magazine “Play” the reviewer complains that a button bashing christie is overpowered and Jinpachi is too hard.
The reviewer gives the game a score of 91% which is a pretty fair and accurate score, but i notice that he also compares it with the horrible DOA 2 - which was also awarded a score of 91%.

Another australian magazine, i think it was the official PS2 magazine also stated that button bashing characters like christie were sometimes overpowering and cheap. That magazine also a stupid quote when talking about soul Calibure 3, by saying something like “Tekken games are easy, even your grandmother can easily beat you by doing cheap 10 hit dial combos on you” and that “Soul Calibur 2 was a true gentlemans game unlike tekken”…

If we are to go a few years back, the Dreamcast magazine from the UK would give legendary games such as SF:3rd Strike scores of 70% with idiotic comments like “if you are looking for another no frills street fighter game, then this is it” or " oh sigh, another 2d fighter".
The same magazine gave another great game like Last Blade 2 a score of 39% because according to them it looks worse then Street Fighter 3 on the SNES!!! Did you hear that? Street Fighter 3 on the snes lol!

Basically my point is, i dont think people from mainstream media and magazines should review fighting games unless they no the “culture” and actually no the most important part of the game eg the fighting engine - not the graphics etc.
I find that these mainstream reviewers are very misleading for people who are not really into fighting games, and also that these reviewers are also to be blamed to as why fighting games are not doing that great in the mainstream today/

One final note, the reviewers who bash the tekken games praise up the Virtua Fighter games as being deep, original and balanced, which is 100% true. But in saying that it makes you wonder since these morons can somehow play such a deep game as VF and still cant beat a button bashing noob using christie. Sometimes i think game reviews dont play VF, they just take the word of other reviewers opinion that its such a great game.

22

The problem with reviewers is that their given all of a week, if even that, to review the game. There’s not one among us who has learned everything about our game of choice (or games) in a week, and we cant expect the same of them. Fighting game reviews are skewed because the reviewers are forced to rate it on the same system that they use for other genres, which simply cannot work.

23

I think game reviewers do a fine job. Why? Because most casual gamers will spend about the same amount of time learning a fighting game as they do reviewing it. A week. Face it theres more casual gamers than hardcore gamers so they are catering to their target audience. Whats that audiences question?

Can I pick it up and have fun immediately?

24

I remember reading a review of cvs2 from ign (i think it was cvs2, atleast) and I loved the review. Yes, like every other review for fighting games, it was horribly wrong and didn’t talk about anything that a fighting game fan would want to know. But they specifically stated that they could not write for those people. They talked about graphics and options, but explained that the hardcore community sees more. That was a good review. This guy is just straight up lying.

Also, did he just mention VF4?! I mean, the fucking trainer has so much depth, so how can he say that shit?

25

The obvious problem has been repeated enough times that it really does make fighting games look bad to not address them. The games don’t change much. First of all, the majority of changes have to do with the super meter, and the whole point of a super meter is to restrict the usage of the new changes. You know, because we don’t want those things being done all the time.

Like in SFA2, you can do custom combos and Alpha Counters. What does that mean to the average player? Nothing. It takes too much effort to do Alpha Counters, and nobody understands custom combos enough to realize why they’re so powerful. So these two big differences are completely missed and SFA2 plays like ST but with different graphics. Oh, there’s more differences from ST? Of course there are! But they’re even more fucking subtle.

What has Capcom and everybody else been doing to fix this? JACK SHIT. They’ll continue making the small changes that on a deep level have an impact on how hardcores play the game, but they’re not helping new players get into fighting games. Everybody’s got their cheap, two-cent answer for how to make fighting games popular again, but didn’t it ever occur to Capcom that maybe they should study the problem? Then maybe brainstorm some solutions? “Nah, we’ll just make games by recycling all of our old shit. The old skoolers like that.”

26

That’s the funniest part of his arguement.

Even some of the scrubbiest people still beat random mashers.

27

[quote=Dasrik]
Idiot, you can spell, you just can’t read. Look at my post. I wasn’t making fun of your spelling.[/QUOTE

Huh?

You lost me there. I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about the guy in that forum.

28

I agree. What Hardcore gamer reads magazines off the shelf? That’s the first hole in that theory. If you want a review of a game in your genre by people who play the genre, then check websites and forums, people who actually know the genre of the game they are playing, and don’t get money for just jumping on the bandwagon.

Game Journalists are Journalists first, then b/f’s g/f’s husbands/wives, then angry young children, and then maybe gamers.

29

People have been playing chess and checkers for God knows how long (I think chess came from the Arabs during early Islamic expansion)and those games still have things to offer new players. Fighintg games can also have unlimited depth if they are well made games.

It seems that so many casual gamers just don’t get that a good fighting game is as deep as the players make it. Or, it could be that the curve has become too steep and too unviting. Why play a fighting game for a year only to be ridiculed as a scrub when you can jump on a recent pvp mmorpg and become proficient very quickly?

30

More than half the people I know have ADD and they play Fighting Games. Actually, very few peopld don’t have ADD and they play competetivly in big tournaments and such.

I got ADD and I love my Guilty Gear.

31

I absolutely agree with this analysis. I’ll give an example: I love fighting games, but I feel I am not as dedicated as the “pro” players; I’m more casual. So no, I never had a real need to learn how to Alpha Counter or take advantage of custom combos in Alpha2. Hell, I was reluctant to learn how to parry in the SF3 games. So yeah, to me, SF felt like good old SF2 with supers. KOF, on the other hand, had just as much technical stuff, but a lot was easier to pull off (rolls, stock evades, activating Counter/Armor Mode, Advanced SDM timer in KOF98). But even then, the basic gameplay stayed the same.

Now, to say that Capcom didn’t try to make things better is an understatement… they tried with Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, which tried to make the game more user friendly. And SNK always changed their systems up in every KOF (even if the changes were minor).

But even despite all these efforts, a good majority of players will play a game and give up–even though a lot of the fighting game community is still playing Third Strike and KOF98, it’s still small compared to the other people playing all sorts of other games. The mainstream’s attention span is limited and people will always move when the next big thing comes out.

Until the next fighting game killer app comes out, fighters will take the backseat to other games.