figured i’d kick off a proper insert credit fighting game thread with this:
i have mostly been singing the gospel of guilty gear lately if you want to come through and kick it. also just picked up Melty Blood, heard the Community Edition has dope netcode. come to think of it, y’all asuka burning fest 120% fans might dig melty.
Melty Blood is toooooo faaaaaast but weren‘t there some folks from the makers of queen of heart working on melty blood, or something? cause that’s a pretty direct legacy I guess.
I've been enjoying playing terrible fighting games for like 30 minutes at a time (you came to my house during this experience once @pattheflip), and the next one I need to get is Twin Goddesses for PS1! I was just playing the Inu Yasha 2D PS1 fighter and it's like... actually pretty good! and kinda fun! I was surprised. I was all about that Shaman King fighter back in the day but now Inu Yasha is my guy.
Inu Yasha PS1 is legit! It's sorta proto-The Rumble Fish, which is totally legit!
There are terrible fighters, and there are TERRIBLE fighters. I don't think I could stand a night of The Masters Fighter, which I got in a spindle of bootleg PS1 CDs, right next to the half-decent PS1 Last Blade...
I kinda want to try diving into Phantom Breaker at some point. Kinda amazing that the beatemup has had a pretty long life on the digital storefronts in the US, but the original fighting game never got a release over here.
Vince I think I might have YOUR bootleg masters fighter over here.
Edit: I don't
You probably do! I could use another drink coaster! Or maybe we should play it before I take it off your hands!
I might’ve gotten rid of it when I bought a legit copy, which… I’m not sure why I did. I do have a bunch of those bootlegs from the Philippines still though!!
E.g.
French-Bread‘s first doujin games were, indeed, the Queen of Heart releases. They’re easy to find on abandonware sites these days, but I don‘t know how well they’d run on Windows 10. DxWnd should do the trick, hopefully.
@sklathill To me the peak terrible fighter is Way of the Warrior on 3DO… made by Naughty Dog… featuring a soundtrack by White Zombie… the game play is floaty Mortal Kombat but as spectacle the game is something else.
I absolutely adore weird fighting games, but I am just such trash at the entire genre. I finally tried out Golden Axe The Duel today, only to get completely walled for 20 minutes by the second enemy while playing on easy. That being said, I still had an amazing time, so that‘s okay!
I have a lot of fond memories of Bloody Roar, Ehrgeiz, and Bushido Blade (assuming that counts as a fighting game).
@pattheflip
Melty Blood seems really cool, but anime-esque fighters are just way too fast for me to handle. My brain shorts right out. I’ve been meaning to pick up GG for ages, but watching your streams has been a lot more satisfying than getting wrecked.
I don‘t really get the point of performance, so I don’t even try to be good at fighting games. I just find it interesting to explore their systems and interactions and animations and dynamics and mythology. I play them like sort of freeform single-player action games. Sort of a boss rush mode. Which, to be fair, is kinda how early versus fighters were formatted.
@azure Which reminds me… Street Smart. I hated that game so much…
@azure That sounds like a really good way to approach them. I don’t think I really have the brain to even dive into the systems as much as I’d like, but I do definitely like that boss rush feel of playing the story mode. Power Rangers on the Game Gear really fleshes it out with super low hp enemies that come in waves (only ever one at a time - it is a fighting game, after all), then finishes it up with the main baddie. It even has two very different sets of physics depending on the size of the fighters. I would love to see more fighting games with a robust story mode and alternate systems like that.
Imagine if they properly combined Final Fight and Street Fighter: belt scrolling until you reach the end of an area, at which point the scene gets locked off into a showdown.
There probably have been some things like this. My brain is grumbling in some direction I can't quite pinpoint, in that regard.
@sklathill I like to imagine the characters there are Takuma and Jeff Bogard.
That’s the dream, right there.
I haven’t played Guardian Heroes in a couple years outside of versus at a Saturn party, I’m thinking that’s kind of how it was, but I should go back and check…
Biggest life regret is that I missed the boat on fighters entirely and never put in my 10,000 hours because I never had anyone good enough to play against. Whole genre of masterpiece games you can‘t even properly engage anymore unless you catch one of the five Brazillian lunatics hanging out on GGPO. I’m still dead set on playing the Vampire Saviors for real.
Incidentally spent two hours this week just staring at backgrounds for X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes. Remarkably dynamic, lots of scrolling
https://youtu.be/TuMdbIXoHTA?t=517
We had to look at a lot of these kinds of backgrounds for our game Gunsport (which we are actually finishing soon lol), and while we couldn‘t do all the stuff they did in these, they did inform our decisions a lot. We mostly focused on KOF backgrounds, but yeah… backgrounds in those days were super impressive, and I’d love to see more of that kind of stuff. Somehow it's not as impressive when you do it in 3D, because there it looks “real” instead of otherworldly.
@P_Hominid Vapire Savior is such a good series. I’ve wanted to learn it for ages just so I can look at it more, but it’s so fast and intense.
Backgrounds are another reason I love watching fighting games - you can really enjoy them when you’re not trying to avoid being destroyed.
@James- Yeah I reckon Guardian Heroes is still the closest thing we’ve gotten, in terms of the level of control you have over your characters. There’s also “Tekken Force Mode” in Tekken 3, which I remember having a lot of fun with when I was like 14.
I’ve always thought it was weird more games haven’t done this. To begin with it seems like everyone who works on Street Fighter today is in love with Final Fight and they keep incorporating Final Fight lore. Wish they’d just go for it.
Guilty gear judgment had a mode like this, sort of. But without the big one on one boss battles.
Isuka had boost mode, which is multiplayer but also pretty close.
It will not surprise @pattheflip (or anyone maybe) that these are the only guilty gear games I own: