The Video Game Revue

Studies in 2-D Tournament Fighters

My buddy Rem was over last night and I gave him a brief, whirlwind tour of my 2-D fighting games collection. In order, we played Street Fighter III: The Third Strike (part of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for PS2), Guilty Gear X2 (PS2), Marvel vs. Capcom (Dreamcast), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Dreamcast), King of Fighters 2001 (PS2), King of Fighters 2002 (PS2), and Capcom vs. SNK (Dreamcast). I wanted to finish out with Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO (GameCube), but Rem cried "enough!" and we played NBA Street Vol. 2 instead. :)

I am not a great fighting game player, but I am certainly a fan of 2-D fighting games. The genre holds almost a very deep, rich appeal for me, and I enjoy the best 2-D fighting games on many levels. I consider them to be very social games--ones in which one perceives a very direct connection with one's opponent--but they can also be a satisfying solitary activity through training and battling the CPU.

Fighting games have a surprisingly convoluted history. Although the tournament fighter genre seemed to appear out of nowhere (to the eyes of the mass public, at least) with the release of Street Fighter II in around 1993, there were earlier titles such as Karateka and Double Dragon that had established many fighting game conventions much earlier. Street Fighter II set a new standard of sophistication, however, and it cemented a certain style of fighting game--one that dominated the 90's and ended up also breaking into the 3-D realm starting with Virtua Fighter and Tekken.

It's important to distinguish between "tournament fighters" and "street brawlers," although some games such as Karateka blur the lines a little. In a tournament fighter, two players square off and fight head-on, generally involving a great variety of different moves to prevent the game from becoming predictable. In a street brawler, players generally cooperate to fight hordes of stupid computer players. That's the difference in a nutshell.

Street brawlers were very common in the 80s and 90s, leading up to the break-out of tournament fighters. Popular street brawler games include Double Dragon, Final Fight, River City Ransom, The Simpsons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and even a couple of arcade Dungeons and Dragons games. In many ways, a street brawler resembles a simple platform game (like Mario or Sonic) in which players can punch, kick, and jump. A very common feature of street brawlers is a small depth dimension to the play area, such that players can move in four directions along the ground. The gameplay mechanics tend to be strongly focused on positioning and timing; it's important to try to group enemies together and not be surrounded, while also striking at the right time to avoid being attacked, since dodging is usually difficult. There generally are not any sophisticated combos, and special moves are often delegated to a single button or a two-button combo (eg. jump + kick to do a drop-kick.)

Tournament fighters have deeper mechanics where many more moves and combos are available to the players, leading to a great deal of complexity. Street Fighter II was a run-away success that essentially defined the genre, and certainly helped to introduce the idea that a fighting game could take minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. Movement is generally faster and more furious, and the abilities to block and dodge attacks make the defensive aspect a bigger element of the game. Tournament fighters frequently feature very sophisticated combo moves that require a sequence of buttons and directions pressed with careful timing to execute. Some games in the Tekken series, for instance, feature a system of 10-hit combos that require 10 or more button presses to execute, and if the timing is off at any point during the combo it is interrupted.

Tournament fighters are generally split into two categories: 2-D and 3-D. Although the earliest 3-D tournament fighters (Virtual Fighter, Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden) were obvious knock-offs of the same old fighting game formula, 3-D fighting games have since evolved along a different path from the 2-D genre, and the latest games including the Soul Calibur series definitely have a different feel from what 2-D tournament fighters have become in the meanwhile. It's worth noting that there are also 3-D street brawlers such as Die Hard Arcade and Fighting Force, but they are a highly marginalized genre, and generally when people talk about 2-D and 3-D fighting games, they implicitly mean to refer to tournament fighters.

Another interesting point to note is that street brawlers have always contained an exploration element, although it has frequently been drastically limited by the linear progression of most street brawler games. Certain titles like River City Ransom chose to exploit the exploration element to provide a more open-ended gaming experience, and the results were truly fantastic. Grand Theft Auto III, one of the most influential games of all time, can be said to have evolved as a 3-D street brawler mixed with a driving game and a heavy exploration element. The controversy surrounding GTA3 has always overlooked that it is GTA's quest-like exploration element that makes it a success, rather than the gratuitous violence.

Anyway, let's skip back to 2-D tournament fighters. :) While I was playing with Rem last night, I made a few simple observations. Please understand that my take on 2-D tournament fighters is by no means sophisticated; I partake of them in a strictly casual sense, and although my experience with them goes back a long way, it is not deep experience by any means.

The 2-D fighting games that I played last night seem to fall along a spectrum from the more mindless "jump and bash" variety to very technical feeling games. The difference, mainly, seems to have to do with the degree of difficulty in getting the timing of the game down as well as a bit to do with the pacing. In a game like King of Fighters, for instance, the feel is fairly technical--it requires some concentration and skill to properly attack and defend, and button-mashing doesn't generally work out very well. In Marvel vs. Capcom, on the other hand, the jump n' bash strategy is a bit more forgiving because the simplicity of basic moves and the fast pace of the game make it that much easier to dismiss the busier elements of the on-screen action and focus on dishing out a rapid successon of blows. Capcom vs. SNK seemed to strike a very appealing balance between these two trends.

This distinction certainly didn't relate strictly to pace, of course--it had a lot to do with the variety and relative utility of the different moves availabe to each character. In a really technical fighting game, each player's decision of what moves to employ in a given moment is quite important, and so familiarity with those moves is vital. In a non-technical fighting game, most moves do roughly the same thing (hurt your opponent in obvious ways) so a variation in what attacks are employed doesn't drastically affect the outcome. Classifying a given fighting game as "technical" or "non-technical" is complicated, however, because within a given fighting game there are bound to be certain characters with a more technical fighting style and other characters with a less technical fighting style. Generally speaking, a fighting game does set a certain pace for the technicality of its overall feel. Street Fighter III has quicker characters and slower characters, but it's never quite as carefree in feel as Marvel vs. Capcom.

Another trend that was noticed was that certain games had a very clean look while others packed the screen full of distractions. Guilty Gear X2 and Marvel vs. Capcom were easily two of the most busy looking games, while Street Fighter III and King of Fighters generally make it very easy to tell the fighting characters and their moves apart from the backdrop of each level. Being something of a newbie to fighting games, Rem expressed a strong preference for the cleaner-looking games, and while I definitely agree that the clean look is better, I still have a huge soft spot for Marvel vs. Capcom and Guilty Gear X2.

In conclusion, damn did I ever have fun last night. Hopefully this crazy evening of fighting games isn't a one-off occurance. It would be fun to see Rem develop some real skill at this sort of thing. It would be fun to see me develop some real skill too, actually.

posted by Parappa @ 4:01 PM