There have been houston tournaments since. Sounds like another excuse!
If jobs are an excuse, well there’s your reason right there. Everyone that was into fighting games back in “the heyday” have jobs and responsibilities now. And even then, newer fighting games, like tekken, soulcalibur, doa, smash bros, etc. all have decent to large followings. And these new players generally aren’t interested in older SF games. If you don’t like that, then move on or put some effort into bettering the community. Bitching about how playing multiplayer-oriented games by yourself is growing “stagnant” doesn’t help anything.
We’ll see who’s the pathological liar in a couple of months, when Planet Zero in H-town gets it first. Your dumb ass is just hatin just because we currently have GGXX:Slash, Fist of the North Star, Rumble Fish 2, KOF XI, and Tekken 5 DR :arazz:
Online is the future of fighters and with it will becon a new type of player. One that conforms to lag and lag spikes. One that doesn’t have a stimulus from the “sound” of their opponent hitting a button. A fighting game player without fear, who disconnects at every opportunity, and weighs 300 lbs while standing at only 5’0, not that you’d know how tall he is…since he’s always sitting on his ass.
haha, actually on 3rd strike online ive had many raging demons escaped from because they could hear the tapping from my buttons through the headset. damn those street fighter sticks are loud
Don’t be so “glass is half empty” and so quick to dis, my friend.
Play mechanics would change. They change in every new fighting game. What’s new?
Last time I watched some match vids, I don’t recall the top japanese players looking like body builders. If you lost to a 300lb fat kid would you dis him because of it? That’s scrub talk. It has nothing to do with the scoreboard.
Online play has the potential to increase the competitive fanbase (and consequently, the money and participaton going into the scene). Yes, you get noobs, lamers and cheaters (online play introduces that dynamic). **You also get an elite few who rise to the top and make a name for themselves. **
Noobs? NOOBS? They were always there. They drop quarters, too. They drop the MOST quarters. You can’t have “elite” without “noob”.
Prelim online tourneys/rankings also mitigate lag as a factor. You can play “best of 7” or whatever you like. Lag wins one game, won’t win the whole deal. Yes, there are new stategies involving the online deal. Adapt.
Another thing, you don’t have to haul in cabinets or rent a a place with a limited time window to operate a tournament, and therefore make competitive concessions because of money, or lack of. Pure competition online.
The online factor will never be nil, but the fact that arcades and “real” competition is so few and so sparse, what do you want? Cracks me up that new skool fools want OG style “pure” competition when that shit’s been basically dead for ten years.
Look, I would challenge anyone who thinks online play is ridiculous to give zbattle a try and give OG Super a few rounds. And when you lose, what are you gonna say? “Send yer pic, n00b! I bet you’re fat!”
You think Fatal1ty has no skills?
The question boils down to, “would you rather be a big fish in a small pond or a big fish in a big pond?”
Back in the day (probably around '94) when I read that Mike Watson won a national tournament in a game mag, that fucking floored me. This was back when there were still literally MILLIONS of street fighter players and the cream of the cream of the CREAM were mostly in the Bay Area and LA. Back when every kid with a couple quarters in his pocket was playing Street Fighter after school and when a gazillion people played as hardcore as their abilities allowed (including your’s truly). WAY before online faqs or discussion boards were the norm…
Way back when the competitive scene was a hundred times bigger, that guy killed everybody and made it to the top. He was one of about a dozen players that dominated at the height of fighting games. My point? He was one of the big fish in one of the the biggest ponds there ever was.
That was the size of the competitive arena in the OG arcade days.
That’s the size of the competitive arena of online gaming NOW.
Start to see that, and then you can come on in to the new technique and two-thousand-six.
Honestly, does it really have to be that way? Granted itll be difficult for community to reach any sort of peak like it did when arcades were at their prime but like others have said, online play is what is going to have to eventually make the community. I’ll go and drop 10 bucks at an arcade on a weekend but where are they? Its a sad fact that the arcades had to die or are at the least on the tail end of their lives (unless someone gets it right and makes a chain of them i dont see them coming back anytime soon) but there is a lot that can done to help forward the community in my opinion. One being people actually getting off their asses and going to tournaments!!! If people actually care about the community then drive to a tournament once in awhile and compete. In my opinion its the best way to learn. I mean JW taught me a lot at MAGfest and i probably wouldnt have learned anything if i hadnt gone (granted i was running the game room but thats besides the point). Also, i wouldnt mind seeing people jump on SNK games and at least give them some respect and time cause i love NGBC and all it took was me playing it 1 time. Personally, i think if people worked together more and didnt bitch at each other all the time then a lot more could be accomplished. Thats my 2 cents, take it or leave it.
I’m worried it’s gonna suck. I was reading the xbl/sf:AE threads and from what I read it sounds like lag is a real problem. Still, I live in Cali. There’s probably decent comp within 100 miles as opposed to five states away. Maybe it won’t be so bad.
While I ultimately prefer ST, HF is still an awesome game. Either way it’s all good. One good thing about it is that you don’t have to worry about eating a super when the lag hits and your block dissapears.
i don’t think a new, flashy, game is really the answer.
i mean, a majority of players still play CS 1.6 over CS: Source. and don’t people play ut2k4 over newer editions?
i don’t think online is a big deal either. DOAU had a great online mode and received pretty high marks in gaming mags (read: your casual gamer’s favorite source of info) but it didn’t really grow.
complaining about lag is also not a fighting-game only thing. i think in madden, the linebackers react slower because of lag or something like that, but it really changes the game. madden also generates a lot of offline play… a ton of people go out to try that madden challenge thing.
i’ve met a ton of casual players that have enjoyed fighting games over the years, but a huge portion of them don’t even know what a cancel is. when they get beat bad in the arcades and quit, it’s because they don’t know what the hell is going on and have no clue how to get better. when i started playing senko no ronde (the shooter/fighting game hybrid), i hated it because i didn’t know why the hell i was getting hit or what i could do to hit people, it felt like i was just floundering around. thankfully, i played with people that were also learning the game so we would at least trade randomly.
i mean, come on… how many of us would’ve discovered v-ism combos on our own? i know when i played A3, i wouldn’t touch v-ism at all, it was too crazy for me… and yet that was the game where i finally learned what a cancel is. i used to play TTT all day with my friend and his brothers, but we sucked. didn’t know what a juggle was, let alone what frames were. backdash cancel? forget about it. when i played in the arcades i got destroyed and i had no idea what was really going on.
if these games had tutorials then maybe casual gamers would recognize the depth that these games provide. vf4: evo is such a great game to learn from and i believe it’s much easier to get into than any other fighter thanks to the training mode… it teaches you how to use poke strings, gives some great setups, teaches advance guarding techniques, and gives you tourney-class juggles. as i played against the cpu and i struggled in certain situations, i referred back to training mode… soon i started finding ways to actually utilize many of the things they taught.
the other thing is that i’ve found quite a bit of people who actually play, but they don’t play seriously. they just don’t seem to go out of their way to find competition. i know a ton of people who played soul calibur 2 but only within their group of friends.
that’s why i think a company-sponsored offline matchfinder would work beautifully, as you would be able to find people within your area that play. the arcade era is long gone and consoles are being ushered in, why can’t we gather the multitude of people who play console? srk is great and all, but if you google street fighter 2, srk doesn’t come up, so there needs to be a better way for casual gamers to find offline opponents.
A company-sponsored offline service isn’t a bad idea but I don’t think it will ever happen. Parents are too paranoid these days. All it’s gonna take is one 10 year-old going to someone’s house to play CVs2 and getting robbed and ass-jammed by a biker gang. Any sort of meeting service where you involve minors is stupid risky.
I’m actually surprised SRK doesn’t maintain a list of arcades with a scene. Maybe they do somewhere and I haven’t run across it. Obviously there is some upkeep involved. Someone would probably have to volunteer to do it.
Example:
Name: SVGL
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Directions: blah blah blah
Description: "Legendary blah blah blah… go get your ass kicked."
Games Available: xxx, yyy, zzz, etc.
Tournaments/Schedule: Y
This is why the “OG” players are a laughing stock, because they can’t get the sticks out of their ass and they think the arcades never have it’s problems. Broken sticks and faulty buttons are a million times worse than lag will ever be, only because you can disconnect and reconnect to the same person to get a better connection instead of hoping for some lazy arcade maintence person to fix a machine.
I posted my idea in another thread, but no one answered to it. My suggestion would be to have a patch download for a certain game that you could put into your console. The patch is strategies and tactics that have been invented by someone (it can be anyone); the person puts the “patch that would change the specific game forever” onto the official game website, and everyone downloads it from there onto their console.
Let’s say that SF4 comes out, one month later, someone finds out about normal cancels into air cross-ups, that person can record what they did, add some notes on how to do the technique, and put the whole file onto the official website. Any gamer who has SF4 can download the file and see a full movie on how to do said technique. It would help the gamer, so they wouldn’t have to search through many websites before they can find any decent information.
Personally, in a situation where there are good sticks and a lot of good competitive players, I consider that more “pure” comp than online play. It’s not just OG players that think this way. Most new skool players do too. They don’t want to leave the arcades.
What I was getting at is that those OG arcade days are dead and gone first and foremost because the size of the competitive base is so small now. Perfect sticks? No lag? Who cares about that stuff if no one shows up?
The competitive “purity” of an arcade means nothing if no one is playing.
Making remarks about PC games is all fine and good but you forget WHY some of those PC games are so big. MONEY.
PC gaming has millions thrown at it by sponsors, and there are large organizations that are dedicated entirely to running PC events and they pay out vast somes of money.
It?s also new games that kill off the old one every couple years. First it was quake1, then quake2, then quake3/ut2k3, then painkiller/ut2k4, and now it?s Quake4. Every couple years a new game comes out, you have to buy new hardware, and companies sink tons of money into making sure people play the game so they can sell you new pc components.
It?s simple math really. Quake 4 will have the million dollar world tour this year, the world cyber games, the electronic sports world cup, the americup, the eurocup, cyber athletes proleague winter/summer. And the money to fund all of this will come from the companies selling you a new 400 buck a pop video card, and 600 bucks a pop CPU every other year or so.
What fighting games need is not underground community growth, it?s main stream media, and funding. Back when street fighter first came out when you mentioned the words ?competitive gaming? everybody associated that with standing in an arcade feeding quarters into the machine trying to go on the longest streak you possibly can. Now you mention it and people think of PC gamers taking home large sums of money, and making it into the news.
If fighting games regained the spot in most peoples minds as the game where the competition is people would come in droves.
The only thing that can be done about this is people making a case to major associations to promote fighting games in their events. This would generate the kind of media attention that draws players in.
we don’t even need a company-sponsored matchfinder but i’m sure we, as players, can design our own, since we can’t rely on a gaming company to do it.
i’m envisioning it like a simple database… you can put in your profile, a userpic or whatever, games you play, and where you live, arcades you frequent, skill level at each game, etc…
i think this is a great idea!! i mean i know that i for one am pretty lazy and i dont want to sit at my comp and search through website after website (most ending up being in japanese) to find out how to do something. itd be great if someone would take the initiative and put up on a site info on basics to advanced play in fighting games. i dont know everything about every fighter so i know i for one could benefit from this greatly because i honestly dont want to go and sit at my friends house and have him show me how to cancel this into this and just waste his and my time practicing it, when itd be much better for me to sit at my house and figure it out BEFORE i go and play him. i def think that the mainstream wants everything to be easy for them and a lot of people view fighters as too complex because you can get ur ass kicked in 10 secs or less if youve never played before. People just want things to be easy, i mean look at all the Halo scrubs that love Halo and worship it. Its one of the easiest and scrubtastic games out (sorry if anything loves halo but its true) because of how easy it is to pick up and play. So if there was a site or a means to download things onto a harddrive in a system then i think thatd really help broaden the community. well that and lag free online gaming.
I agree with you. I was going through some combo videos last week and came across some high level play of Fatal Fury Special. I was like, this game is NICE! So I picked it up, and I LOVE IT. I can’t get enough of it. If it weren’t for the vids I would NEVER have played it otherwise.