- Authenticity is a hard nut to crack, but there are a few hallmarks of the video game arcade of days gone by: first, they have video games. Lots and lots of video games, and (usually) pinball machines. They’re dark (so that you can see the screens better), and they don’t sell food or booze. You can make an exception for a lonely vending machine, sure, but full meals? No thanks. There’s no sign outside that says you “must be 21 to enter.” These are rarely family-friendly institutions, either. Your mom wouldn’t want to be there, and nobody would want her there, anyway. This is a place for kids to be with other kids, teens to be with other teens, and early-stage adults to serve as the ambassador badasses in residence for the younger generation.
Arcades always creeped me out a little bit. Why bother going to an arcade and spending money on games when you can turn on your xbox and be playing video games with your friends and/or people from all over the world? It's much more accessible, and can be done from the comfort of your own home.
The fighting game arcade scene is/was quite different than that though. Playing a fighting game with random strangers across the world is great, and playing with friends in your living room is fun, but they're not real. Not in the sense that you can get a true, competitive experience from it yet. Sadly, fighting games require split-second timing, measured in tenths of seconds, which is lost on even the best netcode and most powerful networks. think of it this way - in street fighter, you might have a tier list of characters from best to worst, and it might be decently well-balanced, in spite of the tricks people are able to learn. But take it online and the list can be totally reversed because certain tricks are hard or impossible to react to due to the few-hundred millisecond differences often present in networks. Playing with only your buddies offline is also seriously lacking because, although after a long time of playing with them you can get good, but it's nigh-impossible to get great. You need to play against different people, who play different characters in different styles, and you can only get that playing online (with all the flaws I've described) or in an arcade, or arcade-style setting. Like all things, you have to expose yourself to great people outside your circle to really understand what it means to be great. For most games I don't disagree with you, because the internet and home consoles have provided great convenience for players. But the death of the arcade scene for fighting games in America has been a tragedy, when you consider how many fighting games came out all of a sudden since 2008 - Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Tekken 6, and plenty of others. The competitive scene in the US is becoming stagnant, because only the old-timers, the ones forged by the fire and sweat of the arcade have remained at the top, while the average gamer has no hope of becoming a "great" fighting game player. I consider it a serious loss for the gaming community. It's not what you were thinking, I'm sure, but I felt like the comments on this post were really down on arcades, and I wanted to give another perspective.
I disagree with saying you can't get a true competitive experience from it. A few years back when Call of Duty 4 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 were popular, I was playing in lobbies with and against a lot of the "best" players in the game. I mean those that have a ton of kills while still maintaining a kill/death ratio and win/loss ratio above 2.00. The games were heated, and victory often came down to the very end of each match. So while they weren't real, the competition was still very much there. As for the rest of your post, that scene is something I didn't give consideration to in my first post, and as I am not involved in my scene there is no argument that can be posed against what you have said. That said, thank for you providing that perspective, it gives me a much fuller picture of the article.
It might sound like a fighting game-elitism thing or something, but I can't describe it any more than saying it's different. The timing on pulling off a huge combo in a fighting game is so far removed from the computationally simple matter of aiming and shooting in an FPS that online play completely loses the complexity. For example, check out this guide to a character in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and take a peek at some of the videos if you can. Looking at the string of inputs, and realizing that every single one of those is measured in frames and fractions of frames, it should be apparent why dropping a single packet of information could be vital. Zero has some of the more complex combos in MvC3 and, back when I was interested in the game more, he was considered a high-tier character in offline play, but executing his advanced combos was nearly impossible online, even if you could get it perfectly in local play every time. You have to vastly adjust your timing and at best only get part of what makes his combos so powerful. A character with less complex inputs automatically gets raised in tiers, often far more than they ever could have been, while complex and timing-intensive characters frequently get shafted. Competitive fighting game play online simply is not the same as locally, and local competition used to be available in arcades.
That is incredibly complex, and must take quite a while to get down and be able to pull off with any reasonable amount of complexity. I understand what you're saying with local competition being, essentially, better than online competition for fighting games. We can agree on the matter of it being different. At a certain point in FPS games, you reach a level where everybody can aim and shoot with precise accuracy. At a high level it becomes a game of anticipating your opponent, much as in the realm of fighting games, and always be a step ahead. At that same point winning and losing also becomes a function of teamwork, and having an executable plan that could be altered at any second.
Yes, that's exactly it. FPS, RTS, Fighting, and other genres all require different skillsets to be competitively viable. Although execution (the ability to aim and shoot accurately, for example) is important in an FPS, execution skill is not as vital as the greater strategy of the game. In a fighter, the intensely precise execution is not just an important factor but can be the sole determining factor between a miserable noob and a good (not great) player. Every game has a different balance of strategy and execution, and it happens that fighting games have, as far as I know, the highest ceiling of execution of any genre as a result of the intense nature of good combos. There is of course a decently high strategy ceiling in well-designed fighters, too. Different genres can certainly be competitive online. In fact, all games but those with the highest execution ceiling are pretty viable competitive online games. Unfortunately, fighting games suffer massively from this, and, to me, fighters are emblematic of the once-great arcade culture in the US. You may notice that I focus on the US in my comments, because Japan and East Asia in general still have arcades and, incidentally, tend to pump out some of the best new blood. As networks get better I really look forward to new generations of players in the US scene, but the arcade scene in Japan is really amazing. Unfortunately, unique to that culture too.
I don't think you even need an Xbox with Live to avoid an arcade. I've never known a time when one of my friends didn't at least have a NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Playstation, or Nintendo 64 at home. Since all of those allowed unlimited multiplayer, we didn't want to be at the arcade, even if our parents had let us.
I'm really quite sad that I never got to experience the "American Arcade", whether because of age or because of location. I was able to play arcade games, but the social experience would have been pretty cool.
Not a big deal at all since I've done the same thing. I do wish we could check if something was posted already by searching for the URL.
Ohhh, wait I see. The link you submitted has some extra stuff in it so a search didn't yield any results. Derp, nevermind then.
Carolina Beach still has a particularly skeevy Arcade. I have been told there is such a thing as a dime arcade.
We should hit it up sometime when you are out East.
this summer we could grow mullets and wear cut-offs and mesh jerseys.
We could line quarters up on the galaga machine and hog it.