Round one - Fight!

[The Curmudgeon]

It's no secret that The Curmudgeon loves fighting games. Street Fighter style best out of three games, side-scrolling old school beat-em-up's where a variety of suspiciously similar looking thugs all come your way and walk right into your fists. Love all that stuff.

So let's talk fighting games. Obviously SFII is the king of fighters, but what other memorable brawlers have you come across? Back In The Day, as pricks often say, Double Dragon was THE side-scrolling beat-em-up that ate more of my money than I would care to admit.. until Final Fight came along. And does anyone remember the game where you had to rescue not your wife, not your kids, not the President.. but Madonna??

Once Final Fight came along, about 20000 games copied the exact same engine and things all got a little formulaic and predictable, and the simple genius of SFII got lost among all the upgrades and semi-sequels (when Ryan is fighting fucking Megaman, it's time to look at what's happened to your franchise).

But anyway, knocking the shit out of people all in the name of entertainment - let's discuss.

[trashcanman]

I'm a huge fan of Dead or Alive, which is largely noted for it's sex appeal, but has a 3D fight engine that in my opinion stomps the hell out of nearly every fighter for sheer fun factor. Just a pure joy to play online and the coolest movesets of any fighter. I was a DD maniac back in the day. I bought up all the NES games as soon as they were released. I rarely play fighting games anymore since RPG's give me the most bang for my buck, but I still love the genre and had I more time and money I'd still play the hell out of them. Guilty Gear is supposed to be Street Fighter Quality and it's successor Blazblue: Calamity Trigger looks fun as hell too. Then there's the old X-Men vs SF and Marvel vs. Capcoms. Awesome. Remember Neo Geo? Samurai Showdown and World Heroes were major quarter killers for me too.

[The Curmudgeon]

Yeah, the Street Fighter/Marvel series were good, I just hated the million super moves you could pull off. It kinda ruined it for me. Still fun to play, though.

And oh man, the Neo Geo. God bless that machine. I always remember playing Metal Slug on that too and spending a fucking fortune getting to the same point every damn time.

I mentioned the Tekken movie in another thread, and that's a fighting game I could just never get into. Every magazine raved about it on the PS1, so much so that I bought it without playing it. What a mistake that was. I found it sluggish, unresponsive and just plain boring. And who the fuck was that guy with a tigers head??

What did you think of Virtua Fighter?

[trashcanman]

I lOVED the original in the arcade, but after playing DOA with a lot of the same mechanics, but a much faster pace and more exciting presentation. I found it hard to get back into when I demoed it on the xbox 360. I never cared too much for Tekken either. People fucking love it, though.