It’s not coincidental that it was specifically console FPS. They have a few things that make them VERY friendly to people picking them up right away (notably a level of autoaim around your crosshairs to make it easy to hit). The rise of FPS is directly linked in my mind to the decision to make them low-skill friendly and the fact that you had easy online console play. FG’s went the opposite direction for one reason for another.
Capcom tried to copy some of the ideas, and we ended up with Xfactor /salt
PS: I agree with you about BF, its the only arc game I really like
so beside the game skill you had also to be computer literate about buying the right hardware and software or have someone do it for you. Usually PCs were expensive in the 90s during the peak of fps. so only a few could enjoy a FPS at its max settings, especially if you had a Voodo card.
FG were never really popular on PC even during the emulation era where you could play most console and arcade fighters for free. had also to do with keyboard and gamepad limitations. also a FG seldom pushes hardware limits to the max. You just have 2 players against each other. No LAN parties.
so basically after the demise of the arcade scene, FG moved completely from arcades to consoles and PC FPS stayed half on PC while the other half moved to consoles (with lower quality but easier and cheaper to set up). Even then console FPS can never reach the quality and versatility of the PC counterparts.
What I’m saying is that FPS, while existing and popular on PC, exploded on console, with starting with Halo. It got so much bigger probably for the very reasons you mention, its really pretty easy to plug in the internet wire on an xbox and then put the disk in. Also, production values wise, the Console FPS were generally of equal if not higher production values (equivocating here because I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘quality’).
I’m kind of with you though, consoles (and MAME) killed the arcades, then the lack of arcade play nearly killed fighting games. Hoisted on their own petard.
Well ignoring the 3d stuff (which was always going strong at least saleswise), It really was Arcsys (who does small-market games) and then a whole bunch of super-fringe tiny-company or outright doujin games.
I know people like those games a lot, but there really was a lack of solid mainstream fighting games in that era, and a bunch of fringe small-market stuff.
with quality I mean not the production but rather the reproduction values. The PC had better GFX, controls and sound in FPS.The Xbox was hardwarewise on par with the best PCs at that time, if not better and much better than any console, so Halo must have made an impression.
In FG the rift came when a lot of arcade FG players stopped caring when FG moved to consoles.
Arcades were there because, except their popularity, they were a cheap alternative to consoles and computers. Sure a lot of players migrated to consoles but also a lot were left out.
also a lot of countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden etc) forbade the entrance of minors to arcades. They had their consoles or computers instead. We are talking about different gaming mentality here.
Wanted to focus on this, if you were serious about fighting games, arcades really weren’t that cheap an alternative to consoles or computers, especially when the cost of play went up to 50 cents (well in the US, guy was talking about them being 1 euro a play, that’s kind of obscene). Stuff adds up.
ps: there was seriously a drought ironboy, its been shown pretty conclusively in this thread. Why do you people keep saying that there wasn’t?
and agai, there wasnt, the only drought is thre if you only cared for sf, USA case mostly, other countries had active scenes, hell even usa had active scenes
try to tell any player that were participating and running tournaments at that time, and he would laugh at you for that stupid notion
The popularity might be back, but it’s like what somebody linked god knows how many pages ago:
This genre went through that entire cycle in the '90s. There isn’t really a rebirth, although there’s a bit of a revival. The success of SF4 certainly promoted or even made possible the return of a few big titles that were basically over (SC5 and MK) as well as making possible some products that almost certainly never would have seen the light of day (Skullgirls), but its still not nearly where the genre was at its height.
I really don’t know why this is even in question, it matches by just about any model. Game production fell off after 2002, the number of players fell off massively from even slightly before that, in every single way fighting games fell off.
I kind of feel like people don’t like the idea that their games are the result of the drought, or get this feeling that their games being produced during the drought lessens them somehow. It doesn’t. We’re talking about market forces here, and in no way about the quality of the games in question.
Edit: And seriously, there’s more here than just Capcom. That fixation is odd too.
heh@it being you, thanks it was a really good way to look at it.
SC and MK were both dead until SF4 came out though, Midway died, and the mobile version of SC4 was supposed to be the very last game of the series.
Another way to think of it, how many new IP’s have there been in the drought that aren’t doujin anime adaptions?
I can think of Battle Fantasia and AH before, and Blazblue and Skullgirls after. That is also not a good sign of a healthy genre, well over 90% of the titles are sequels or adaptations.
Edit: That is cool, that list is massively ludicrously incomplete though. I mean no Karate Champ? Still it shows the arc pretty well, even with leaving out more than half of the '90s games.
mostly it is half a Euro but a cabinet of Initial D required 1.5 Euro for 1 play. yet no new games for over 5 years, except House of the Dead 4 for a few months. In the UK 8 years ago games required 1 British pound per credit, it was almost 1.4 Euro at that time.
true it wasnt cheap but those guys who took that seriously were born straight out of arcades. Even then it was much cheaper than spending money in dozens of console or pc games if you were a serious gamer. there were of course serious console and pc players too, but their expertise was in other genres not available to arcades (strategy, simulators, FPS, western or eastern rpg, adventure, some non-arcade platformers etc). to be specialized in fighters you had to be in the arcades. same for racing games and shooters. Console and PC ports of arcades at that time left a lot to be desired, marred by inferior graphics, waiting times and a gamepad.
Now with arcade costs being so high, consoles are the only way to cover up practice and matches,since arcade sticks became feasible.
I would say yes. No genre revival will get it remotely close to its peak, but there will be occasional resurgances like the SF4 one, largely nostalgia driven.
That’s true, I dunno FG’s just seem worse for that for me, but it might be because I don’t actually play shooters anymore, and play mostly indie games on PC… now that I think of it fighters are the only mainstream-published games I still play
Vampire Chronicle and Last Blade 2 are two of my favorite fighters that were released in that period.
I think the real reason why people see that as a dark period is that its the time in between when the modern arcade (as a place that everyday people went to in order to play games like Super Turbo) died and when Online play revived the scene (again, for laypeople and not niche fans). In between that, the only times that FG’s saw real popularity among the normal person market was the explosive success of Soul Calibur 2, Bloody Roar (a very popular Gamecube game), the 3D Mortal Kombat games and Smash Brother Brawl. None of those games are actually good fighters, but they DID sell well in the console market. It was really the release of SF4 that brought “games that sell well” and “fighters that don’t suck” back into the same arena. SC4 to a lesser degree, depending on your opinions about that game (great casual fighter with solid online, no competitive scene to speak of).
The death of the Dreamcast (and before it Saturn) really hurt the American FG scene when it came to selling games to non-FG fanatics as well. That was where publishers had thrown ALL there weight when it came to really quality home ports (CvS2, Vampire, 3rd Strike, even JoJo) and the PS2 didn’t get as good at publishing quality FG’s until the VERY end of its life as a console (Xbox and GC backed too many casual games like DoA). Not to mention the quality of consumer level fighting controllers never really progressed beyond the Virtua Stick and Agetec DC stick until you had the PS2 Happ stick, which no actual gamer wanted even if it was a really good recreation of the old Super Turbo cabinet sticks.
