What makes a fighting game good?

PrairieDillo

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I grew up in the house that SF2 built so I really don't get all of this talk about Killer Instinct and Primal Rage. I don't even get KOF or VF.

The thing I do realize is that if there were a mess of sequels then I bet it was a good game if only that fans supported it enough that the developers kept on making them for arcade or console.

In that way I respect these series and collected many of the console variants.

• Street Fighter 2 and it's many variants.
• Street Fighter III
• Street Fighter Alpha
• Dark Stalkers series
• Capcom VS games…
• Guilty Gear
• King of Fighters and many of the other SNK fighters.
• Tekken
• Virtua Fighter
• Soul Calibur. I love the fact that it's weapons based.
• Mortal Kombat

Someone should have licensed from Nintendo to bring SSBros to the arcade. I'm SURE it would have done pretty good.

Games like Primal Rage, Pit Fighter never had a sequel.
Killer Instinct had 2 versions. I know some guys here really liked these but they did horrible and I personally don't have friends that like these games enough to have the machines themselves.

The games that I liked had:
• Depth of gameplay.
• Varied styles of gameplay/technique strategy for each the different characters.
• Great characters/art and animation.
• Balance in that some characters could be better than others but you won on skill instead of just playing a better character.
• In tournament style play, one particular "cheap" character didn't rule it all.
• Not only is it a great competitive game to play but it made for a great spectator game to watch masters play.
• Whole communities and a fan base that supported, documented and furthered it's reach.
 
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike - Fight for the Future.

The long name is not just for sugar coating. This is the pinnacle of the fighting genre. Anyone who wants to know what makes a good fighting game need not look any further. :)

But I have a feeling this isn't the right forum to be posting about this. About 90% of the guys in here could care less for fighting games let alone JAMMA games.
 
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Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike - Fight for the Future.

The long name is not just for sugar coating. This is the pinnacle of the fighting genre. Anyone who wants to know what makes a good fighting game need not look any further. :)

That's called depth!

I actually tell people it takes about 100 hours of play before you really start to get the depth of any of the good Street Fighter games.

I'm smelling some fighting game haters circling around this thread.
I know that this isn't Neogeo.com, EVO or any of the others that fighters flock to.
 
"The games that I liked had:
• Depth of gameplay.
• Varied styles of gameplay/technique strategy for each the different characters.
• Great characters/art and animation.
• Balance in that some characters could be better than others but you won on skill instead of just playing a better character.
• In tournament style play, one particular "cheap" character didn't rule it all.
• Not only is it a great competitive game to play but it made for a great spectator game to watch masters play.
• Whole communities and a fan base that supported, documented and furthered it's reach.[/QUOTE]"

The Killer Instinct games had all of these things. I would add to the list, replayability agains the computer or a live opponent. MK's had these except for UMK3 which had 0 replay value against the computer. I like most fighters, but they started to lose me when it came to "3D". MKs, SF2's, KI's were the big boys for me. I never liked Tekken or Virtua Fighter much. It seemed those games were all about knocking the opponent up in the air, watching him float, and seeing how much damage you could do while he was floating.
 
I think the best of the fighters are Marvel Vs. Capcom and Marvel Vs. Capcom II.

Both those games hold up well even now.
 
My top four would be killer instict, then MKII, the SFII, then Tekken III. While I have played almost all the fighting games those four stand out the most.

Killer instict had everything fatalities, combos, combo breakers, humiliation, secret stages, ect. It definitely is a game you have to spend a lot of time on to figure everything out. I think it's my favorite fighting game because I was working at the mall when it was new and would spend my lunch hour playing it everyday. The arcade had two machines and the one guy who gave me the most competition would be on one and I would be on the other. Then there would be a stack of quarters on the control panel from the line of people behind us waiting to play.

MK ans SF speak for themselves everyone knows why those are classic fighting games.

Tekken was one of the games I almost gave up on. It has a huge learning curve and if you don't know what you are doing a good player can wipe the floor with you. Once you learn the blocks and counters though the game takes on a new level of fun. I think it's initial learning curve is what drove people away from it in arcades. Thankfully it came out on home consoles and it gave me time to learn everything and then go to the arcade to try out those learned moves .
 
What makes a fighting game good?
Two words: Chun Li

Rrrrrrrrraaaaawwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
 

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I'm not a huge fan of fighting games, but the ones I do like are slower and timing based. Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Soul Edge and Soul Calibur.

I'm sure there is more to Street Fighter and the SNK fighting games than I've discovered, but you can just button mash and have a decent chance of victory. No way I'm playing a game I don't really care for 100 hours to try and discover its hidden depth.
 
I HATED the fighting games that allowed you to put together 25 hit combos by making 3 or 4 moves.

MKII is the best imo

sfII championship edition was good to.
 
I think good programmers are what really makes a fighting game good. If you have a game with poor hit detection and loose controls then that's a game that nobody will want to play.

My Favorite fighting games are probably SF2HF, SSF2X, SF3III, MK, KI2 and Tekken 3. Tekken 3 is probably the only 3D fighter I like.

I was also never really a fan of the SNK fighters.
 
What I loved about Mortal Kombat is that is was move and counter. Each match was like a chess match, hell Iwould takie scorpian and fake motion the teleport punch to draw a good player to block. Every move had a counter there was consequence for missing a move. And I felt there was real balance amongst the characters. MKII there was still some not nearly as much. That was all lost when MK3 decided to turn into Killer Instinct with the Kombo crap and the run button. THey should have left KI to KI.

SFII:CE was fantastic, but the problem with that game is complete button mashers could do well, and certain character matchups were just plain unfair. E. Honda to me remains one of the all time cheapest characters ever in a fighting game.

Primal Rage is one of my all time favorite fighters and I own one. I love the cabinet as well it is art to me. The game had combos and juggles but it wasn't like the other ones. The combos were actual button presses and ore like a series of moves. Then juggles were fewer and you could maybe do one or two moves as they fell, not 14 punches to the bottom of their feet to keep them aloft.

I liked the first few Virtua Fighters but the game got cheesy with the knock themn in the air and juggle crap. And Tekken was just horrible. You had 14,000 moves and 3 would work right. I remember beating Tekken 2 with King just by either hitting back and kick, or down down both kicks. Two moves first time I played it I walked through the game. His Enzugiri move (down down both kicks) could one shot people. And it had the juggle crap in it.

A couple you left out were Time Killers and Blood Storm. Not the best fighters but the inroduction to lost limbs was a nice gimmic I thought.
 
As someone else mentioned, this forum is on another planet when it comes to talking about fighting games. You're in for some disappointment.

What I loved about Mortal Kombat is that is was move and counter. Each match was like a chess match...

SFII:CE was fantastic, but the problem with that game is complete button mashers could do well...

CE is very much not masher friendly. Even games that were intentionally designed to be "masher friendly", at high levels, are not (the entire Marvel series). If I wasn't also a closet fan of the first 2 MK's, I could totally see swapping those two paragraphs.

Virtua Fighter had juggles from day 1 and is considered one of the deepest fighters ever (find a copy of 4 for PS2 and go through the tutorial/training mode if you want a taste of how deep the mindgames go). Tekken 2 it sounds like you happened to play someone that was new to the game (or didn't know what they were doing).

Every mediocre fighting game has the potential to be like a "fast chess match". It's just that some are intelligently designed (SF/VF/TKN/Etc) and others...not so much.
 
As someone else mentioned, this forum is on another planet when it comes to talking about fighting games. You're in for some disappointment.



CE is very much not masher friendly. Even games that were intentionally designed to be "masher friendly", at high levels, are not (the entire Marvel series). If I wasn't also a closet fan of the first 2 MK's, I could totally see swapping those two paragraphs.

Virtua Fighter had juggles from day 1 and is considered one of the deepest fighters ever (find a copy of 4 for PS2 and go through the tutorial/training mode if you want a taste of how deep the mindgames go). Tekken 2 it sounds like you happened to play someone that was new to the game (or didn't know what they were doing).

Every mediocre fighting game has the potential to be like a "fast chess match". It's just that some are intelligently designed (SF/VF/TKN/Etc) and others...not so much.


Street Fighter to me was always less deliberate then MK. The consequences for failed moves or bad moves just seemed less. The recovery was much quicker. MK miss a foot sweep eat and uppercut for 20% of your health, SFII miss a foot sweep, try again:)

Not bagging on it as I liked SFII:CE very much but as I could play for hours on a couple of quarters the oddball 9 year old would walk up and take E Honda and mash away and trap me in the corner and bam I would lose.

And Tekken 2 was against the computer, I walked up took King back and Kick does a front stomp kick that does dignificant damage and the down down kick does a flying enzugiri and it can one shot people.


BTW that game you linked...thats an actual game? I thought it was another MK parody on youtube.
 
I think the best of the fighters are Marvel Vs. Capcom and Marvel Vs. Capcom II.

Both those games hold up well even now.

These games will hold up until the end of time IMO - Just ease of control anyone can pick it up play it, but it's still deep enough to make most fighters happy, the eye candy - Even MVSC still looks good, and the characters are pretty much all legend.

As far as 3D goes, I think Tekken Tag was the first 3D fighter that when I started playing I felt like 3D fighting games were ready for the masses - I loved all the tekkens beforehand too, I disliked T4.
DOA for Xbox is another one that took the 3D fighters to the next level.
 
I enjoy almost every fighter out there. Killer Instinct is obviously my favorite and it's because I enjoy almost everything in it: the characters, the music, the stages, the storyline, the ultras/ultimates/no mercies, the humor, the combo and breaker system, shadow combos, the cabinet art and on and on. It's the whole package to me and that's what makes it good.

I can find something good in almost every fighter and have played almost every one out there. Mace: The Dark Age doesn't get mentioned much. Primal Rage is really under appreciated. I really enjoyed watching Soul Calibur experts play against each other when that game was going strong. Namco, Capcom, Midway, etc. all have made good fighters all with their own style that make them "good".
 
I love fighting games! A few of my favorites being:

Mega Man The Power Battle (big surprise there)
Mega Man 2 The Power Fighters (see above)
Any Street Fighter game except Street Fighter The Movie
Any Darkstalkers game
Mortal Kombat 1,2,UMK 3
Tekken 1,2,3
Any Capcom "VS" game
Marvel Super Heroes
X-Men COTA
 
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Wow, DEFINITELY not the right forum for this and lot of uninformed people making assumptions about fighting games on here and "cheapness".....


Street Fighter is not masher friendly. Anyone that thinks it is obviously does not know how to play the game. Any "true" SF game in the SF series (not the Marvel games" have tried and true gameplay.

"comic" book VS games, Marvel, etc, are meant for the more casual gamer to get into, with moves and specials and chains all being way easier with SF gameplay kind of thrown out the window. Marvel series now (Part II) basically is a shooter with offense and the gameplay surrounds 6-7 characters....


Soul Calibur and Tekken are far more masher friendly than any of these games, but at high levels you will be punished, juggled, re-juggled, etc.

Games like Killer Instinct where people think the game revolves around multi-hit combos don't realize that game is about resets and basics because if you try a multi-hit combo on a good player, it will be broken (you have to do the combo breaker motion as the button to the LEFT of the last button the person pressed for it to be broken, so you have to know the game pretty well, and high level players do)

I played the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter series extensively and in tournaments and I still am amazed at what a lot of uninformed people believe are the basis of these games...there is a definitive skill set for each game, but certain series are easier to get into (Soul Calibur, Tekken) but hard to master (Tekken is extremely crazy at high levels, SF series until IV came out to make is slightly more user friendly was always harder to get into)


Magog: If you lost to a 9 year old using Honda, you probably don't know how to block, run away to the end of the screen to throw projectiles or just don't understand the game. You can't lose to Honda in CE unless you are just walking forward and not blocking and mashing buttons. Each matchup is played differently and Honda isn't even good in CE, it's Bison and Guile who rule that game more than anyone...I don't even think Honda can compete in CE
 
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the oddball 9 year old would walk up and take E Honda and mash away and trap me in the corner and bam I would lose.

If you can't get out of a corner trap then that's something basic you need to learn... LOL
 
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