Fighting Games.. what's the thought on them these days?

[Azazel]

So I've had a long weekend here, and while home alone and bored, I decided to have a poke through some of my PS2 games. Since I'm looking forward to Soul Calibur 3, I threw on Tekken 5 and had a bit of a play with it, but after 30minutes or so, I got reeeeally bored and started thinking..

Over the years, I''ve bought Tekken/2/3/Tag/4 and now 5. So many versions of Street Fighter since the SNES days that I've lost count. Soul Blade/Calibur/2 (on 3 platforms). MK2, DOA3 for XBox, and have bought/played/sold/rented any number of other minor fighting games, and I really used ot enjoy them on their own merits. More fun with a friend, certainly, but I was quite content, at least for a month or three to just sit there alone and beat the shit out of the CPU with any given game.

So the other day, I realised that while I bought, played and enjoyed Tekken Tag, I barely touched Tekken 4, and after a week or so, I left Tekken 5 sitting there on the shelf, after buying just a few clothes and not even opening up all of the cinemas. Soul Calibur 1 and 2 had (re)playability only due to the Edge Master mode, and even then I never finished them.

When DOA Ultimate came out, I entertained buying it, then remembered I had barely ever touched DOA3 despite having bought it 20 months ago and decided to wait another year or so till it drops to $20-ish.

So I'm wondering, is it just me, or are the standard 1vs1 figthing games played out now? Despite the ever-so-slight graphical improvements that come every year, I'm finding myself more interested in the peripheral aspects of the game - quality of animation, cinemas, and the mini-games. The bowling mini-game from Tekken Tag is more fun to me than the fighting in Tekken 5.. Anyone here remember Tobal No2? Kinda like Jin's beat-em-up in Tekken 5, only more fun.

What's my point? I'm not sure really. Just wondering if pthers are finding the Fighting game genre as played out and same-same as I am, and wondering if we'll see anything new to revitalise the genre, and if so, what people think it might be to give these things some interest back..

Or perhaps if it's just me and I've outgrown them, though I still enjoy most other genres that I liked in the past..

[stray]

I feel the same way, but not for quite the same reasons. Basically, I'm bored of fighting games these days because I don't have enough friends around to play against. I never did care about them as single player games in the first place (though a few were OK, if there was thought put into the storyline).

[schild]

Tobal No. 2 came out in America? Also, DOA3 was assy compared to 2. And Soul Calibur III is probably the best fighting game since Soul Calibur II. It's possibly worth buying on the merits of it's RPG system (Chronicles of the Sword) alone.

[Margalis]

Fighting games are only fun with competition. I'm in the same boat now. I used to go to arcades a lot and have a regular crowd to play with. Now I don't so it makes owning fighting games rather pointless.

[Kail]

I think it depends on what you define as "Fighting" games.  Personally, I love Smash Brothers Melee, and I think there's a lot of room for innovation in the genre.  But in terms of traditional, SC/Tekken/VF/DOA games, yeah, I'm just not really finding them that interesting anymore.  They're like FPSes or RTSes... Too much rehashing.  You can't just mention in three or four bullet points on how the combo system has been re-tuned to allow better parrying, or something, and expect me to drop $50.00 on the thing when I've got the old version collecting dust at home.  It's like the good ol' days, when every six months Capcom would release some new version of Street Fighter II which changed the number of times Bison's Psycho Crusher hit when blocked... I don't care, and I certainly am not about to drop fifty bucks on it. 

As far as "revitalising" the genre, two things appeal to me... one, as you mentioned, is to add some more interesting peripheral stuff.  There are a whole bunch of Tekken games out; if these guys have any clue about what they're doing, they should have a pretty decent fighting system worked out by now.  Take that fighting system, and give us something to do with it.  Give us a decent world that we can interact with, tell a story, that kind of thing.  The fighting engine is fine, now let us do other things.  Give me Deus Ex, not Doom 3.  If you want to include a token Vs. mode, fine, do so, but don't make the token Vs. mode the focus of the game.

Two, you can change the basic mechanics of the game to be something more novel.  I mean, REALLY change them, not just re-arrange and re-balance them.  There are a lot of ways to "fight" someone that do not focus on "combos," in which you do not need to duck or jump, in which you don't get to "block" attacks... Tekken and Soul Calibur and Mortal Kombat are neat games, but they're VERY similar from a mechanical point of view.  Look at something like Smash Brothers, or Power Stone, or Virtual On.  There are other ways to handle competitive one-on-one games.

[Daydreamer]

  Give us a decent world that we can interact with, tell a story, that kind of thing.  The fighting engine is fine, now let us do other things.  Give me Deus Ex, not Doom 3. 

Tangental question: Is there any genre that wouldn't be better with a Deus Ex? 

[Azazel]

Schild, I'm in Australia, and my Tobal No2 was a Japanese import as I used to know a guy who ran a little import shop in Chinatown here. It was well worthwhile, as it featured a 3rd person dungeon crawling type-RPG-ish fighting game where your character (selected from the 1vs1 game roster) had the full range of moves from the 1vs1 game, as opposed to, say Jin's dumbed-down moveset in the beat-em-up section of Tekken 5.

I tried Smash Bros melee as something to play with the GF, but both us found it too epilepsy-inducing as the screen zoomed in and out. Power Stone on DC was another game that was good, kind of a sub-genre somewhere between what I define as the "1vs1 fighting"games" (ie SF, Tekken) and "beat-em-ups" (Final Fight, MK: Shaolin Monks).

The point about competition is true though as well.. my friends who I used to play with are either gone to the winds, or moved to other areas of side of town (and they've been breeding, so even less time to play together) or in other cities and don't get together that often (so now we play BF2 online, and are looking for a MMOG). If I still had 2-4 regular friends that came over, maybe the competition and fun would still be there.

On the point of peripheral games, although I never played it, I'm sure someone here has - I always felt that DOA Beach Tittybounce Volleyball would have been perfect for added value to a DOA game. Or was it good enough to stand up on it's own as a purchase?

What's the RPG system in SCIII like? I hadn't heard about it, and I'm not familiar with Chronicles of the Sword. Is it better than SCII's Edge Master mode, and does it have enough solo content to justify the purchase?

[glennshin]

Not having proper competition is THE only reason I don't play more fighting games. BUT you know when you run into a buddies' buddy that enjoys some fighting game that you love and you HAVE to see what he's made of. There is nothing better than the feeling of fighting someone else who knows what they are doing. No other game genre gets me as exhilarated. Heart pounding, palm sweating sort of excitement.

It's a dream of mine to make an MMO where the fighting system were deep enough that the fights themselves were pure joy. A fighting game with ENDLESS amounts of fighters would very much go on indefinitely for me. Such a game would only need the thinnest veil for a story, but it would necessarily have to have a deep crafting/political/etc. minigames for ppl that just don't really enjoy fighting and to give the fighting a real purpose (protect YOUR guild city/be a bandit/etc etc.)

That's the dream anyway.

[squirrel]

I never played fighting games much - even in the arcades way back when i wasn't into them. But since a 360 kind of fell in my lap and i don't have a lot of titles to choose from i picked up a copy of DoA4. I have a buddy accross the country who also has a 360 so i pretty much only play online with him or occasionally in story mode. It's exceptionally good looking and fun in short bursts - 45 minutes is about my tolerance per session. Also good for when i'm doing 10+ jump runs in EVE...

[Murgos]

What the hell?  Is today National Necropost day?  This is like number 3 or 4 already.