I miss those non-japanese fighting games

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Fighting games' origin is beyond Japan but one could say that this is place when quality titles began to appear - everything before was shit compared to SF2. After 1991, market exploded with bazylion japanese copycats hard to distinct from each other (Year 2014, does it sound familiar for you?) And then, it happened.... fuckin Mortal Kombat! Regardless of what you think of its quality, it had major advantage over Street Fighter rip off - it was so unique then! Uniqe because of its western oriented aesthetics and brutality. And those lovely digitized sprites - you felt like you were 'playing the movie' and by this I don't mean on-rails / no gameplay crap of nowadays. MK gave birth to new branch of fighting games genre, with Killer Instinct as its right hand. We had Primal Rage which was so poluar that it landed on almost every platform from Amiga to PSX and even a fuken Gameboy. PCtards had FX Fighter (with Turbo remake), Xenophage (repugnant alien tournament), Pray For Death (hell tournament organised by Death himself, with Anubism, Cthulhu, Bruce Lee rip off, devil, fallen angel etc. as participants), War Gods, One Must Fall fall and few others.

Most of them was designed with PC in mind so when this platform ceased to be considered profitable for genre's devs (=when japanese companies ceased to release PC ports), western titles was no more. Only MK franchise survived but until 2011 reboot, quality lacked a bit... The last new IP I can remember of was typical 1/10 game called The Untouchable from 2000 and that's it.

But... but few years ago tiny spark of hope shined - Capcom released SF4 on PC which was success enough for not to drop the idea and gave as SF X Tekken as well. What's more, it was an impact to bring latest MK to PC and earn on it, the same with Injustice. Killer Instinct was resurrected on Xbone. Finally, someone brought back diverstification to the genre and I keep my fingers crossed for more followers to come.

I'm tired of roosters being reduced to mix of anime cliche character clones, lolishit, moeshit etc. or take on example Virtua Fighter. Gameplay-wise is fuken brilliant but also has most boring cast ever, no shit - generic kwan blonde slut, generic kwandude, generic ninja, two generic wrestlers, generic sumo, generic Ryu-rip off... booooooooring, even more than Fifa 278 with Call of Doody 3423 combined. Why can't we get more of this:

...or this...

...or this:

 

[Gerrard]

Maybe if non-Japanese developers actually knew how to make a good fighting game...

 

[Haba]

Funny enough, none of those games are good fighting games. Novel, yes. But good games? No.

 

[Excidium]

MK3 was p. good

 

[Tehdagah]

I enjoyed Mortal Kombat 2011 a bit. Especially the story mode with Johnny Cage, which is a story mode done right.

Most fighting games today are too autistic.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Primal Rage (the one with the dinos) was shitty, played it on the arcade and felt like a waste of a good coin. Even worse if you played it on consoles, which were censored and you couldn't eat the human worshippers. I think doing that gave you bonuses, so it wasn't just for the novelty.

(fake edit: you take points from your opponenet and regain health. The pissing attack on the pic was also censored, according to wikipedia )

 

[DwarvenFood]

One Must Fall was pretty good.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Injustice is good + fun to me but I'm not autistic enough to really get into fighting game metagames or whatever so I could be entirely wrong

 

[pakoito]

One Must Fall was pretty good.

That soundtrack.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i don't remember its objective quality but i have fond memories of bloody roar 2. fast, very fast, and brutal.
i doubt any today's average videogamer wouldn't cry playing it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Injustice is good + fun to me but I'm not autistic enough to really get into fighting game metagames or whatever so I could be entirely wrong

Injustice is p. nice. It was a good move on MK team's behalf to ditch 2.5D mechanics (I refuse to have side-stepping qualify as real 3D fighting gameplay, see below) and go back to the still unbeaten OG 2D gameplay.

One Must Fall was pretty good.

That soundtrack.

It's a real shame Battlegrounds was pushed out barely playable and unfinished. It's one of the few genuinely 3D fighting games.

i don't remember its objective quality but i have fond memories of bloody roar 2. fast, very fast, and brutal.
i doubt any today's average videogamer wouldn't cry playing it.

Eh, Bloody Roar barely registers on fighting game difficulty scale. IIRC (it's been forever since the PS1 days) it was really easy to beat anything just by using the bunny girl. SNK and Mortal Kombat have set a pretty high standard when it comes to fucking the player in the ass without lube (though KoF XIII is notable in that the two final bosses are considerably easier than Magaki was in XI).

 

[ghostdog]

Best western fighting game evar.



turn based, obviosuly.

 

[Excidium]

Looks like a shitty clone of that cannon game.

 

[warpig]

Speaking of "original" fighting games, I wonder how many furry deviants were spawned by this:

Anyone remembers this piece of crap? One thing I liked was the visual style. I wish OMF 2097 looked more like this, it was a cool game but the robots were ugly as fuck.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Yeah, sure miss these stellar games...

 

[SCO]

Better ten Rise of the Robots than one Matrimelee.

 

[Job Creator]

 

[Azrael the cat]

That US fighting games spawned from MK says it all. When MK came out, it was huge with kids (including myself) and casuals, but was universally dismissed as shit by fighter fans and reviewers (reviews - in actual printed magazines - were a decent measure of quality in 1991). The problem was that while it looked incredible, every single character in MK played exactly the same, except for their 2-3 special moves. Same speed, hit for same amount, same endurance, no advantage/disadvantage in offence or defence, and (special moves aside) no difference in whether they were good at short v long range. It was also vulnerable to 'special move spam', where you just keep on spamming the ranged move. Still fun for me as a young teen, as those moves were both pretty and visceral, but very very casual as a fighting game.

Compare SF2. The special moves aren't 'win-by-spamming', but merely additional attacks to be used situationally (some characters favour minimal special-move use). Each character differs in how strong their defence is compared to offence (e.g. Blanka is all-out offence, Dhalsim is all-out defence), in their speed, how much damage they do, whether they're best at long-range or short-range (it's quite deliberate that Chun-li has no fireball attack and can be hit when she tries to spin-kick across the screen, while Ryu can fireball with impunity and Dhalsim has no close-range power attacks), and how much their blocks reduce damage. Even their basic moves are all completely different (Blanka's short-range bite-combos, Dhalsim's stretch-those-arms-across-the-screen, Ryu's generic balance, Sagat's push-them-from-short-range-to-the-middle-to-open-them-up-for-the-uppercut).

Yeah, I spent too much of my teenage years stoned in front of a computer screen. Come to think of it, the period during which I smoked marijuana (14-17) syncs up perfectly with the period in which I was playing console games at friends' houses instead of the monocled playing crpgs on my PC (played the shit out of wizardry and ultima as a kid, but abandoned the genre during my teenage years).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

^^That Revenloft game was bullshit.

Better ten Rise of the Robots than one Matrimelee.

Matrimelee is playable, at least.

also:

This one was kinda fun. It's basically Soul edge with the serial numbers filed off. There were a lot of characters, including a dwarf riding a steam-powered robot made of barrels, a modern-day janitor with a mop, and a chicken.


some other games:

Spoiler

Cardinal Syn

Dark Rift

BIO Freaks (lots of gore)

War Gods

 

[tuluse]

Western made fighting games that have come out in the past couple years:

Mortal Kombat 9
Injustice Gods Among Us
Divekick
Skullgirls
Killer Instinct

It's about as alive as this genre can be.

 

[Gragt]

I remember Eternal Champions on the Genesis as being decent but I wonder now.

There was also Weaponlord, which I haven't played but somehow fascinated me.

That one was cool for the posters of the girl in bikini:

And now for something more refreshing:

 

[Job Creator]

eh, you can't really spam ranged special to victory in MK, at least not against a human opponent

 

[Great Deceiver]

I remember Eternal Champions on the Genesis as being decent but I wonder now.

Eternal Champions was shit, it had some nice GFX for the genesis though.

And now for something more refreshing:

I played the shit out of Mondu's Fight Palace, mainly on my 386. It was a terrible game, but I loved the time period, everything about those years, so I can't help but think fondly of it. It had a Fatman soundtrack too, right?

 

[groke]

I remember Eternal Champions on the Genesis as being decent but I wonder now.

Eternal Champions was shit, it had some nice GFX for the genesis though.

And now for something more refreshing:

I played the shit out of Mondu's Fight Palace, mainly on my 386. It was a terrible game, but I loved the time period, everything about those years, so I can't help but think fondly of it. It had a Fatman soundtrack too, right?

It's also known as Tongue of the Fatman, but I don't believe The Fat Man had anything to do with it...?

 

[DraQ]

That one was cool for the posters of the girl in bikini:

That one was cool in general.