Two Years Is A Long Time

It’s not odd in any way to say to someone, “No, I don’t like that game”.

That’s always the case with most types of games. There would appear to be one exception, Fighters. If you’re a Street Fighter player and a new fighting game comes out and people ask you if you’re going to get it, when you reply “No” you get some odd looks.

Street Fighter 4 did something that very few titles in fighter history had done before, it revitalised a whole genre of games. Companies who saw the success of Street Fighter 4 decided that the time was right to release new titles and give people more variety of games to play than just one title on these next generation consoles.

Think about it, until Street Fighter 4 came out, what did we have? Street Fighter HD:R, Virtua Fighter 5, original Xbox games, some PS2 fighters, pretty much nothing that didn’t need either a custom fight stick or a PC with M.A.M.E on it. Then when Street Fighter 4 was released we were looking at a wave of title releases.

• Street Fighter 4 – released Feb 20 2009
• Blazblue: Calamity trigger  – released June 25 2009 (Japanese console release)
• King of Fighters XII – released July 28 2009
• Marvel Versus Capcom 2 – released July 29 2009
• Tekken 6 – released October 27 2009
• Samurai Shodown Sen – released December 10, 2009
• Super Street Fighter IV – released April 27 2010
• Blazblue: Continuum Shift – released July 1 2010
• Marvel  Versus Capcom 3: The fate of two worlds – released Feb 15 2011
• Mortal Kombat (2011) – released April 19 2011

Now, if you look at that list, that’s a fair amount of games within a two year period, not to mention the subsequent flow of titles onto the XBL and PSN from the SNK Playmore team. We have gone from having very limited choice to a veritable smorgasbord of options available to play.

However, if you’re a fan of a fighting game, you don’t have to like everything else that comes out from that genre. In fact, some of these games will be so different from the original titles which got you into fighters that you may dislike them, and that’s actually okay.

You don’t have to like them all. You’ll probably download a trial or play them on a friend’s console and question yourself for not liking them, thinking, “Hey, I should like that game; it’s a fighter”. That reaction is perfectly normal, but you can say, “No, actually, I’m not a fan”. You see, a lesson which I have learned over this past couple of years is that, it’s okay to not like something, as long as you’re not a dick about it.

The last part was the hardest part; not being a dick about it. I’m a dick about so many things, this was a new concept for me, but it’s working. When people ask me my opinion on MVC3 for example, I’ll tell them that game looks and plays well but it’s not for me. Same with Mortal Kombat. I’m actually allowed to not like these games. With all of the options available to me now, I think I can afford to say “No”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI[/youtube]