Time for a New Stage in Fighting Game History

Fighting games need to grow up.

They’ve had their moment in the spotlight. We’ve seen all there is to see of their current paradigm. I get it already, developers. Every female character is going to wear a slutty outfit. Schoolgirls in short skirts are fair game. Boobs are awesome. Violence is equally awesome. Long strings of complex commands completely unexplained by the game are the norm. Single player exists because it has to and is deserving of little to no focus.

I’m not saying the current state of fighting games is bad, I’m saying it’s time to move on. 

JRPGs get a lot of crap for being stuck in the past. Everything about them is stagnant. From character designs to save systems to menus to combat, all aspects of modern JRPGs could have come from a decade ago with almost no change.

The only reason fighting games aren’t getting the same level of shit for the same problem is that they’re not as popular. 

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Multi-Playing

It has recently occurred to me that for what might be the first time in my gaming career, the majority of my current efforts are focused on multiplayer affairs. This is a confusing and unexpected turn of events. My normally reclusive self would be horrified if he knew about this new me, this me willing to dive into the perils of online gaming and risk loss against an army of foul-mouthed twelve-year-olds. 

To deny the truth would be futile, however. My time is currently split between Dirt 3 and Mortal Kombat, the latter of which I have developed a particular obsession with. Admitting that I am paying far more attention to multiplayer than is my norm is different from claiming something preposterous like having not battled a CPU in weeks. Nonsense. My presence in both games is still firmly rooted in a base of single-player used to warm up or pass the time in a less stressful manner.

Still, the fact remains: I’m playing nearly as much multiplayer as single player right now. That has almost certainly never happened before.

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Headsets and Headaches: Xbox Live's Redemption

I learned something today. It was a truth that sunk in slowly and reluctantly; that my years of conditioning fought until it could deny the obvious no more. I had long trained myself to believe precisely the opposite, but through little more than sheer luck and a sudden revelation, I discovered what should have seemed plain but that was hidden by my ingrained biases. 

The overabundance of headsets on Xbox Live isn’t actually a bad thing.

Hear me out. I know it may sound crazy at first. Before today I would have thought the same thing, but I now believe there is validity to the argument that Microsoft’s widespread dispersal of headsets with all their consoles may been a boon instead of a burden. 

The argument has long gone that gaming on Xbox Live is a chore. You slap on your cheap headset and have to suffer through countless arrogant morons spewing profanity and racial slurs while kicking your ass and making you wonder what’s wrong with the world. 

Let me be clear. All of that is still true. Dealing with the lowest common denominator on Xbox Live is still a cause of many migraines. There’s something about the aggression of online competition coupled with the relative anonymity of the online setting that seems to bring out the worst in people.

Most people.

It’s in this qualifying statement that we begin to see the upside to the proliferation of voice chat.

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The Mystery of Mortal Kombat

To celebrate my recent purchase of a shiny new Madcatz Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition Fightstick, I began scouring Xbox Live Marketplace for any demos of fighting games I might have missed. There wasn’t too much to be found, honestly, but one I did happen across was Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

It was only five dollars!

Ah, what could be better than a bit of old-school nostalgic fun with the wacky cast of Mortal Kombat, right?

So I plugged in my stick and fired up the demo. After only a few minutes, I was left with one question.

How in Raiden’s name did anybody ever like this game?

All the characters play the same. There’s no variety in move sets, aside from a couple of lousy special attacks per character. The movement is slow and plodding.

Oh yeah, and the game has the worst, most frustrating AI in the history of everything ever created by man.

I’ve poured over 40 hours into Street Fighter IV at this point (a small number by hardcore standards, but a lot from my more casual standpoint) and I’ve put nearly 30 into BlazBlue. These are games are different from Mortal Kombat, but surely the 2D fighting game basics I learned in them would translate into at least enough basic knowledge to beat the first character on novice difficulty in arcade mode, right?

Nope.

I’m not ashamed to admit, Kitana handed me my ass over and over and over again as I tried out an assortment of stupid-looking characters trying desperately to get the hang of one of them. Never mind that they all played exactly the same, I thought that surely one of those times I would be able to beat her.

And I did, eventually, through sheer dumb luck. Yay for me. Then I was promptly defeated by enemy number two.

See, the problem with the AI isn’t just its difficulty. Oh, it has plenty of that, don’t get me wrong. But good fighting game AI will make you feel like you’re fighting against another person (at least to as large an extent as possible). Mortal Kombat seems to revel in its cheap, cheating, cheesy AI.

At no point did it come even close to fooling me into thinking I was playing against something smart. I was simply playing against a series of canned responses. Had I spent more time with the game and figured out some of its patterns and learned more good patterns myself I could have gotten farther. But as that would have been the opposite of fun, I did not.

Some deep, dark part of me has a strange fondness for the Mortal Kombat characters. I can’t explain why. I hated all the MK games as kid, too. My next door neighbor used to sucker me into fighting him all the time and continually beat me to a pulp because I had no idea what I was doing and he didn’t bother to tell me. My times with every Mortal Kombat game I’ve ever played have been almost universally negative, with the sole exception of playing the surprisingly decent Shaolin Monks with a friend.

Despite all of this, I still occasionally play an MK game, hoping to find something decent and justify spending more time with these terrible characters I love for some reason, yet it rejects me every time because, well, all of the games are absolutely terrible.

Street Fighter holds up well and is still playable to this day.

Mortal Kombat is a giant pile of crap and always was.

I suppose I was hoping to fire up the Ultimate MK3 demo and find something decently fun enough to relive a couple of memories for a few bucks. Maybe I was even hoping for an experience like I’ve had with Street Fighter IV recently, where I finally discover the game’s hidden secrets and find out why it’s so much fun for so many.

But to have an experience like that, I suppose the game would have to be good.

Even the port of the terrible game was terrible. The menus were basic, amateurish, and ugly and the game had almost no options. I couldn’t even find a way to remap the controls to make them work better with my arcade stick. What arcade fighting game in its right mind, no matter how terrible, doesn’t allow players to easily use an arcade stick? Madness, I say. I know the game was an early example of an XBLA release, but man does it ever show how far we’ve come since the early days.

Well, I can definitely say this: had I bought this Xbox Live Arcade rendition of Ultimate MK3 based on some crazy notion of nostalgia that came from nowhere, it would have been the worst use of $5 I’ve had in quite some time.

Come to think of it, though, I haven’t tried Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe yet.... Maybe that one is better....