Yeah, they had Lightning Legend on there last Friday. Along with an HnK beat 'em up and the game ilitirit’s avatar is from whose name escapes me at the moment. I love watching the poverty stream.
The Rival Schools/Power Instinct was just nice, though.
His argument is that there were a lot of fighting games released in that period.
I think his window for the drought is wrong though, the starting points should really be after the release of CvS2 and KOF2k2, it was after that we quit seeing many new games come out in the arcades, and it was also about that time that arcade players started drying up anyways.
Under his current definition of the drought, MvC2 was released in that time, and I don’t think anyone believes that applies 
I’d say the drought was late 2002-2008 (with the arcade release of SF4 and HDR)
SNK blamed piracy for their problems in the period, I know that. Still, the main draw of arcade play was getting to play a number/variety of other players, and MAME usually didn’t really offer that, even if you had 2 good pc-compatible fight sticks (playing a 2p fighting game on one keyboard is ugly).
I think the drought was due to the rise in home computing (consoles with enough power to run fighting games well, PCs and emulators), the dying of arcades (largely linked to my first point), and a general falling off of interest in the genre.
Actually, as I think of it, it could all be attributable to the rise of DC/PS2 era consoles. I have a hunch that people bought these good home versions of their games and realized that they’re not nearly as fun to play alone, and dropped the genre.
so melee isn’t a fighting game but powerstone is?
there is no divide in powerstone
Add Custom Robo Arena on DS
Wasn’t there a Gamecube one also?
Yea actually there is, I really liked the DS one. Customizations were great.
I can agree more with the drought being correlated to the shift in how fighting games are played and the shift of preference in genres (seems to me FPS is where it is at for most people now a days in America) more so than the number of games released. I have been playing Street Fighter since first grade (1991/1992) and I remember when there was a huge row of quarters lined up to play.
I will admit I have not been in an arcade since early 2000 so things might have changed but last time I went to an arcade I was disappointed in the lack of patronization I witnessed. To me that was more significant than the titles released during the past 10 years. Fighting games have always been more appealing to a primal side of entertainment and the shift from the public congregating to people playing at home is what in my opinion lowered the interest. If I had to play fighting games to play the AI only I would not be playing them at all, and that is what some people had to do.
I don’t know if there was any scene for them but Activation released three X-Men fighters in that period. X-men: Mutant Academy, Mutant Academy 2 and Next Dimension. Never played Next Dimension but I thought the first two games were fun
really really good post.
My experience is similar, except I was in High School when SF2 came out >> The arcade thing was particularly painful, because I remember trying really hard after I moved to PDX (in 2002) to find an arcade that had people actually playing fighters, and there simply wasn’t anything at all. Eventually I just gave up on it, like you said playing alone isn’t fun.
It’s funny how these things echo through though, both Tekken 2 and (especially) Soulcalibur were ‘killer aps’, and people bought consoles just to have the home versions of the game. SF4 certainly never got that kind of love!
Mostly what I see at arcades now is people popping in a few quarters/tokens, playing for a few rounds, losing, then moving on to the next game. Maybe I’m just not in the right area to see people lining up for a machine and eagerly watching the two people up at the cabinet anymore.
Oh shit. I remember those games.Good times.
Consoles and PC are cheap now than when arcades were hot. Why keep feeding quarters when you can get unlimited turns and saves in the comfort of your own home which, in the long run, is cheaper?
probably because if you’re not in a place with one of the established arcades (Regency, Southtown, Starbase, etc) those lines just don’t exist anymore.
Jed, this thread is fucking awesome.
vanilla Tekken 6 also predates arcade vanilla SF4
Epic avatar, by the way.
Thank you! I made it myself myself myself[SIZE=2] myself[SIZE=1] myself[/SIZE][/SIZE]
That is where my love of fighting games came from. You fed quarters constantly if you never won, which at first I never did. But the satisfaction of knowing that someone else had to ante up to fight you meant they were confident in their ability to beat you, which made wins/losses so much more substantial ( I know it is just a quarter or fifty cents a play, but it rarely stayed that way if someone really was determined to win).
Fiscally, it makes tremendous sense to buy the game, no arguement there. I just think an integral part of fighting games is lost when you play them with only a set number of people which almost always inevitably happened when played at home until online play was allowed, and even then it is not the same to me.
And guess what? In 2000-2005 this was before youtube and all these other internet sites where you could easily see the games and actually figure out if they were good. Half of these games weren’t known and not as common in the arcade.
I mean do you remember seeing an Arcana Heart set up in your arcade?
Funnily, somebody earlier said their local arcade had one…
But nobody played it so they took it out really fast ><