Arcana Heart and Melty Blood have their own sites for news and discussion
Well when you’re creating a list of games you can easily forget about series or two. The first draft I forgot about Samurai Shodown, Mortal Kombat, and Soul Calibur.
You mean where arcades had house rules against fireballs, throws, okizeme etc.?
Don’t color it all wonderful. Scrubs were always scrubs and the difference between a popular era and a downtime is in the amount of scrubs playing.
In the ‘drought’ years we had the best ratio of hardcore players to idiots, so maybe that was actually the golden age when you look at it like that.
for 2.85 and a free download I could have my own personal fansite too, complete with discussion groups!.
The web is all about microniche communities having places to meet.
you needed to go to better arcades then… or convenience stores even 
Your position is that… what, popularity is a sign that the games/scene are/is bad?
By any nonsubjective criteria the genre had a much greater scale of titles *and *popularity before the ‘slump’ period.
I really hope you’re trolling.
Soul Cal 2
Soul Cal 3
CvS2
MvC2
VF4Evo
GGXX#R
GGAC
These are the games from that list I played.
Console 3S (SFAC PS2), GGXX#R/AC and VF4Evo were the games that made me want get deeper into FG
So this thread proved that the western 2D scene chose and stuck with old Capcom games as their main sauce dispite all these releases.
Honestly, I thought the PS2 years were better than the current generation. While everybody was crying about the fighting scene being dead, I was enjoying KOFXI, Hokuto No Ken, Arcana Heart, Eternal Fighter Zero, Melty Blood, NGBC, SamSho5&6 and, of course, the GG series.
I’m thankful that we now have KOFXIII, but aside from that, the only thing that could make this generation ‘worth it’ is if they made a new Darkstalkers… but honestly, I don’t have faith that Capcom wouldn’t fuck it up big time.
the problem was, unless you lived in a very few places you were mostly enjoying them alone.
(or with a small group of friends, but that doesn’t quite have the strength of phrase somehow)
I was enjoying them with a small group of friends… but we REALLY ENJOYED THEM.
We’d have our little fight nights where about 20 or so people would come into our halls as we passed the controllers around, and it was hype as all hell. Damn, I wish I could go back to those college days.
Some may not count it but it did have a one on one fighting mode
MK: Shaolin Monks (2005)
Maybe its about reference points then, because even with the small group of friends (sadly I was long out of college by then :p), the experience was nothing to getting in the 10 person line to play the hacked version of SF2 with (omg) air specials. There never was and never will be until magically perfect online play the variety and range of playing experiences from back then.
You could wander around the better arcades and very likely see a fighter you’ve never heard of and didn’t even know about (like going to the arcade downtown and seeing Rival Schools for the first time, or even the arcade by my house that mysteriously had Shogun Warriors), or you could play a big group of people, none of whom you’d ever met before and some of whom had techniques or skills that had never even occurred to you.
I’m sorry to wax nostalgic, but that’s what the slump is all about. The range of play and game experience was just gone.
Nice age, when execution had a meaning.
Power Stone 2 and Tekken 5: BR are missing from the list*[URL=‘http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sengoku_BASARA_X&action=edit&redlink=1’]*
Just like my small VF crew years ago. We also traveled out of state to meet up with other scenes. Heck, I even went to EVO in '07 to compete and hook up with other players there. Even played Itazan in the hotel room. Crazy stuff. As much as ‘having a scene’ is great and always welcome, it gets overrated at times and people think that you can’t have fun and get good with just 2-5 good strong serious players.
And no one has mentioned Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram. I’ll fix that.
[media=youtube]hC-Jcf8CaRk[/media]
I actually thought of VOOT, its kind of outside the timeframe. Game is older than you’d think >>
I’ll have to include Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand and Heavy Metal Geomatrix also.
so basically like… a whole bunch of rehashes, a few SNK games, 3D games and a whole bunch of games most people don’t know/care about?
Big deal. Close enough and it’s legit.
You’ve gotta consider, I don’t think he should list 2000 and 2001 games at all either. We have to draw the line somewhere!!
Also seriously, 1998
Firstly, nobody says there was 10 years without fighting games. Any idiot knows Tekken was still being released. The sleeping death of the scene people talk about was obviously the death of the 2d fighting game scene.
Secondly, yeah, okay, obviously MvC2 was 2000, so 9 years, sure, rounding error.
Sure, you’ve got CvS2 (complete commercial flop btw) and KoF2002 as the scene winds down, but after that it’s as entrerix says, just GG and a whole lotta sadness.
I dunno, we had a lot of different games to play as well as player levels. We had some tournament players as well as casuals. We had some Capcom and SNK games, as well as doujin fighters and off-the-wall imports (the latter being mostly thanks to me).
It was much better than the arcades at that time, which only stocked the games that took in the most quarters.
And that’s the point. Most of these games are games that people don’t know or care about - unless you are a hardcore fighting game player/fan. Everytime someone claims that there was a fighting game drought, they out themselves as a person who isn’t a fighting game fan, but a Street Fighter fan.
Ya know how COD fanboys get mocked when they don’t know their Counter-Strikes, their Unreals and their Quakes? Yeah, same thing, different genre.