A Frame-Counter’s Mortal Reluctance

“Are fighting games dead?” asked one user on the Gamefaqs/Gamespot forums. In the nine months following, multiple publishers and developers, utilizing new and old intellectual properties including Street Fighter and the anime Bleach, released almost a dozen fighting games. To many genre enthusiasts, 2008 was “the year of the fighter.”

Even at IPR’s own weekly Game Night, fighting games beat out every other genre–first-person shooters included–for the popularity prize we never got around to officially announcing. Sadly, Virtua Fighter’s appearance was brief and its departure abrupt. The chilly reception from Wednesday’s casual-focused crowd didn’t surprise me. Only habitual players willing to descend into frame-counting madness and memorize dozens, even hundreds, of moves typically enjoy the title’s unparalleled depth. Yet, to my surprise, even Street Fighter II, Capcom’s timeless 2D classic and a continued presence at tournaments around the world, failed to grab the crowd. Instead, Soul Calibur IV, a title best known for its high pixel count and weapon-based combat–not competitive gameplay–remains the night’s favorite fighter…so far. Judging by the reactions of attendees and passers-by during 2008’s final installment, I’m reluctantly inclined to admit Mortal Kombat vs. DC will soon replace Soul Calibur as the main title at future installments.

I’m not supposed to enjoy playing Mortal Kombat vs. DC. For the competitive likes of me, its button-masher-friendly gameplay automatically makes the game inferior to the more structured and nuanced Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter. “If it can’t be played competitively, why bother?” I remember my younger brother aggressively repeating after another late-night attempt of mine at playing a casual game together.  A ferocious competitor who religiously played Counter-Strike with and against some of the best in the world, he had no trouble convincing me, especially as the prizes at CS tournaments reach thousands of dollars.  Dreams of videogame fame and fortune surged through my head as his charming elitist stance became my own.

With an OCD-level focus on refining my Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter abilities, I quickly exhausted most of the competition online in North America. Knowing most of the best players reside in South Korea and Japan, I often shot out of bed at 4 AM for overseas combat sessions. On paper, I barely won more matches against my Asian bretheren than I lost, but Comcast tends to frequently disconnect paying customers for allegedly helping create bottlenecks, causing me to drop out and pay the statistical price. Time Warner may offer greater stability, but a 40 GB bandwidth cap (compared to Comcast’s 250) neuters this digital life of mine.

Purging Mortal Kombat from my videogame portfolio seemed easy, almost natural. Back in the days of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, my family’s budget allowed only one console, so I chose the former. Nintendo, still attempting to keep the kiddies “safe,” refused the implementation of blood in the first Mortal Kombat, but allowed the head and heart-ripping fatalities (makes sense, right?). The Genesis version harbored no such censorship. At the time, I didn’t know of, or care for, industry politics, and blamed my gimped copy on Midway, Mortal Kombat’s publisher. In retaliation, I played more Street Fighter.

The unfortunate infants in this 1933 documentary had to wait decades and decades for the first primitive arcade fighters.

After witnessing the IPR console kid community’s reaction to Mortal Kombat vs. DC, the deep-as-a-birdbath gameplay (with equal accessibility) and over-the-top moves (Shazam hurling a lightning bolt at opponents’ chests immediately comes to mind) don’t bother me as much. The industry needs greater diversity. Maybe these lads and ladies will someday feel compelled to dive into titles with steeper learning curves, or maybe not. As long as the stork keeps occasionally dropping the competitive-purist likes of me, Virtua Fighter has a market. And as long as Midway continues to churn out the highly accessible titles that might one day make it a successsful company again, the hardcore and casual gamers have a place to meet: in a “dead” genre that stands a fighting chance of outliving whoever ends up getting born this year.

So the fatalities are lame…big deal.

This entry was posted by admin on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Gaming, Industry, Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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