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.
