Bananamatic wrote:20 years?
you mean back when netplay wasn't a thing
Some Dreamcast fighters had netplay. Also, Kaillera days "hi".
before street fighter 4 revived the genre in the west
I could go on for a very long time on this subject because it's largely a narrative wrapped in half truths, but I'll get to the crux of it: where did SFIV come from? Do you think Capcom just decided that they were gonna return to making fighting games after not making a serious effort at it for seven years? The genre was already on an upswing. 2007 remains one of the best years that genre has ever had, and Capcom capitalized on that. Many people seem to forget, but Capcom used to develop the Gundam VS games, and needless to say, they made a killing off of them.
The felt the wind and changed course accordingly. The "revival" (more of an upsurge) in the West happened for one reason and one reason only: marketing power. The same kind of marketing power that isn't nearly as effective in an arcade environment because consumers aren't bound by platform restrictions or cost, but by what's in front of them.
shmup ports sucked
Again, Dreamcast and for that matter the Saturn say "hi".
and ps2 wasn't able to run ketsui no matter how hard they tried?
Chalk it up to the arcane hardware of an SH-3 arcade board not translating well to the arcane hardware of the PS2.
arcades had a place back then because the hardware was straight up better than what we had at home, virtua tennis was fucking amazing seeing how all I had at home was a fucking dendy with nintendo tennis
I didn't even know Virtua Tennis was an arcade game until several years after I purchased it on Dreamcast. That was the beauty of that console: it was so close to a NAOMI that you had many perfect or close to it conversions.
now arcades have fuck all to offer
Things I don't have at home, off the top of my head:
- A CRT for 240-480p games
- Any arcade PCB or cabinet
I have tons of console sticks and some low lag IPS panel monitors that I've decided are good enough for now, but why not have the option to go to the arcade and play games the way they were unequivocally designed to be?
especially with hardware holding the games back at worst (look at CAVE's later output) and being equal to pc and consoles at best
This was a problem twenty years ago dude! Neo Geo games kept getting released well into the 2000s, among several other examples I could think of, and they were still able to push the hardware in ways many thought weren't possible. Not to mention the parity between the Dreamcast and NAOMI, either.
and less options due to the way arcades work (why would someone pay to lab in the arcade when you have a perfectly fine practice mode at home with delay settings?)
Because there's an off chance that someone may come up to challenge them? Maybe someone they've never played against before? Unless you just want to play training mode forever, that is.
so you straight up say that arcade=less features?
why would someone want to pay extra and waste time commuting to play a version with less features?
It's a tradeoff. Unless you have a PCB in a cabinet at home, you're not playing the game exactly as it was intended. You can get close through ports or emulation (or sometimes even get an improved version of the game through reduced input lag), but ultimately, you will notice that the game you thought you knew is a little different once you play it in arcades. I can attest to this myself with GGAC due to it running faster on PS2 as well as KOF98, which I had only played in FBA prior to moving here.
"hey dude want to come over to play street fighter?"
problem solved
Now imagine you live in Japan. It'd go something like this:
"Hey dude, want to come over and play Street Fighter?"
"I'd like to, but isn't your apartment basically a broom closet?"
"Well, yeah. What about that one dude's house?"
"He lives over an hour away, man"
"Oh, I know, why don't we meet at a location that works for all of us, where we can play Street Fighter with other people too?"
"Maybe get shit faced on the way there?"
"Totally!"
you're playing offline, no lag, with whatever controller you want instead of being stuck with the sticks they have installed (good luck if you're a hitbox or pad player) while spending way less money
and you're playing the better version with more features on top of that
Don't romanticize console games. Several PS4 fighting games do have input lag, even after patching, so that's more or less a wash overall. Depending on the game in question it may come out ahead as it does for Xrd and BB, but I wouldn't generalize that at all.
As for spending way less money, that depends. Are you counting a console as a sunk cost? What about the sticks/controllers? PCBs for multi console capability? DLC? If you don't own a console at all, you could play several hundred games in the arcade before you start to go over that investment.
sure killed street fighter V
The game that
failed to meet its sales target? The game that halved Evo entrants in a year?
Besides, you're missing the important part: Guilty Gear is catering to a different audience. People that want a simpler fighting game have many options to choose from. It's akin to CAVE announcing that the new Dodonpachi is going to be a game you can clear on a phone (apologies to the DFK fans in advance).
all you need is some sort of a gaming cafe (which are in almost every country unlike arcades) with ps4s or even pcs and you can play just fine
or just meet up at someone's place
There's nothing wrong with either of those. Even here in Japan, they just opened the Red Bull Gaming Sphere to the public and it's basically just a place to play PS4 games. I've held events at my house because it's large enough to do so. It's not like even where arcades still exist that nobody's thought of these alternatives, but they're just that.
I think you'd benefit from a trip to Japan so you could see how well arcades can work. Your mind might be blown once you see that sometimes they hold freeplay events for certain games, or that some of them don't allow smoking.
