I personally fail to see the argument that “Gamers can get the same or better at home, why go to the arcade?”
It makes very little sense, as gamers (particularly fighting games) have almost always had the option to take their business to their own home. Even when fighting games were booming in arcades in the states, people could still play those games at home… for the most part. People never went to the arcade to get a game they couldn’t get at home, they went to get an experience they couldn’t get at home.
Arcades don’t need better managers… if there was business, you better believe there’d be better management (a point Pi tried to illustrate with his experience as one for an arcade). If games make money, they get support, and if they don’t… then they don’t get support. The last fighting game I remember creating that atmosphere in New Mexico (in a big way) was Marvel 2, when it first came out. It’s the last game I can remember going into the arcade and actually waiting to play it because there were so many people (strangers) playing that you had to put your coin up.
The simple fact is, Albuquerque never had a big enough scene to support a real competitive fighting game environment. Even when the modern fighting game scene was in it’s hay-day, there were still only a handful of seriously interested people, and none of them stuck around long enough to get a real interest going. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it… the fighting game scene in tons of places is dying or has died. And perhaps home console dominated competition has taken over for that reason, and not the other way around. From what I saw in Davis, CA when I lived there (2003-2005), the people keeping the scene alive until the death rattle were the ones who eventually went to home console.
Anyway, here I’m talking about the fighting game scene dying, and I’m one of the guys who for all intents and purposes, threw in the towel on playing fighting games.
Without getting too much into explanation, I think the biggest reason arcade fighting games are a dying breed (and granted, I can’t say there’s hard proof for that statement, just what I’ve seen here, and in Davis) has nothing to do with management, or console fighters/options taking over. It’s in fact that tournament fighters are just going out of style. There was a time when SSF2 was a pretty game. Nowadays (especially 2D fighters), it’s hard to create a beautiful, yet intensely in-depth fighting game that competes with the hard-hitting graphics of certain console games, but also gives you all the complicated fast-paced action of games like Marvel or CVS2.
That’s my two cents.
Oh, and… how’s everyone been? And hey to all the new people that started posting since I last set foot in here.
