For years, I have kicked around this silly hypothetical question in my head. “In a world where characters are scored based on their abilities within each video-game-related skill, how would I score in each?” In this post, I pick a handful of genres that represent my strengths and flaws as a gamer and give them a score based on a 0-10 scale. Let’s try this out!
Super Smash Bros. should be right up my alley. I love fighting games. I love Nintendo. I even loved playing Smash Bros. during the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube days. So why do I have such a hang-up with enjoying the franchise now?
There are no shortage of reasons for not owning an arcade machine. They’re expensive. They take up a lot of space. Unless you’re hacking it to run MAME and taking away the “purity” of the original game, their functions are pretty limited. They’re a pain to maintain. The list goes on.
But if I were to ever own an arcade machine…just one…it would be a Street Fighter II cabinet. One of the most symbolic machines in all of arcade culture, I have vivid memories of that game blowing my mind when I first saw it and spent too many quarters playing it over the years. Best of all, it’s still a great game worth playing today.
Arcade 1Up caught my eye when they announced a few months back that they were releasing new Street Fighter II machines. Having now stumbled across them at my local Walmart, my mind is in a tizzy trying to figure out if this is the time to finally make a lifelong dream of mine come true. In order to sort my feelings out, I’m going to write out both sides of the argument and see where I land at the end.
Over the past decade, I’ve overcome so much in the world of fighting games. Coming into Street Fighter IV as a lapsed fan of the genre with barely any skills to begin with, my knowledge and skills have developed to a point where I’m proficient in numerous fighters. However, there’s at least one entire sub-genre that I suck at: 3D fighting games.
30 years ago, Capcom laid the groundwork for the greatest fighting game franchise of all-time. It’s my favourite fighting game series and one that continues to stay top-of-mind, even when it’s currently not in my rotation. Let’s count down my favourite characters in the series!
For almost a decade, my prowess in Street Fighter has been an integral part of my gaming identity. Making the climb from scrub to 17th at the WorldGaming national championships many years later, I put everything I had into being the best I could be and it paid off. It proved to me that my knowledge and talents in games can go incredibly far if I really put my mind to it. Not only did all of that effort pay off for Street Fighter, but it increased my overall fighting game chops considerably to the point where I was a worthy adversary in almost every other fighting game I touched.
Flash forward to the present. Due to my personal grievances with the way the game was designed and the meta that built around it, I left Street Fighter V behind. I’d poke in here and there to check out new characters or major additions, but my time trying to be the best was behind me. Coming back to the game now in light of the update that reduces input lag only amplifies how far we’ve drifted apart.
I thought Marvel vs. Capcom had bitten the dust off the lackluster performance of Infinite. But recently, a fairly-reliable source has stated that a Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite update is on the way, and it will be renamed Marvel vs. Capcom 4. Whether it’s true or not is beside the point. What I wanted to do was to use this as a jumping-off point for a discussion around a future entry in the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Real or not, what does a hypothetical next entry in the series need to look like in order to rebound from disaster? Continue reading
Jonathan (aka xdarkdiamond98 on Twitch) is a top 20 mainstay on the Pocket Rumble leaderboards. In this set of matches, he pulls out the whole roster against my June! I’m still licking my wounds from the beating I suffered against his Sub 11! Thanks for the matches!
It’s been hard to get any Pocket Rumble matches going with the player base thinning out, but I squeezed in a few games against a tough Parker player!
Pocket Rumble was never going to usurp the likes of Street Fighter V or Tekken 7 at the top of the fighting game throne. However, I truly feel like the game had a chance to be bigger than it is today. The game had a lot of positive buzz when it was announced as a console exclusive for the Nintendo Switch a year ago. Nowadays, the game has been largely left behind by almost everyone that ever had any interest in it.
Roughly two months after launch, the game has fallen out of the Nintendo eShop top 30, the online leaderboards have tapped out around 10,000 players, and my recent online sessions felt like there were only a handful of people in the world still playing it. Despite how much I enjoy playing it, I’m reluctant to stream it anymore, as I tend to run into the same players repeatedly because they’re seemingly the only ones online with me.
What went wrong? And is there any way to get the game’s momentum back?
In Third Person 