Rarely a day goes by here at 61FPS when we don’t at least tangentially talk about Capcom. Can you blame us? Some of 2008’s most exciting games will be released under the their banner and that’s not to mention the hundreds of titles they’ve made in the last twenty-five years that Pete, Derrick, and I still play with regularity. Last week’s announcement of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, a new fighting game that pits the publisher’s characters against anime icons from Tatsunoko’s four-decades-deep catalog, is particularly momentous. Alongside Street Fighter IV and Sengoku Basara X, it cements Capcom’s recommitment to the genre they all but created: one on one fighting games. What’s exciting, though, is that the genre itself is on the verge of an apparent renaissance.
Fighting games were literally a dime a dozen fifteen years ago thanks to the Street Fighter franchise. But by 2000, fighting games had started to stagnate, losing all of their accessibility and ultimately their audience, a downward spiral exacerbated by the extinction of arcades. 2008, however, will see the release of Street Fighter IV, SoulCalibur IV, Tekken 6, Virtua Fighter 5.3, Samurai Showdown Sen, King of the Fighters XII, and a number of others. Why now, of all times, for fighting games to return? The easy answer is the return of a public arena. Now that every home and portable console provide online play, access to casual competition has been returned to the audience. You can also see by the numerals tagged to each title in the list above that developers and publishers both believe that familiar faces will be the fastest way back into gamers hearts. What remains to be seen, though, is whether or not the actual gameplay in these fighters have returned to accessibility. The audience can play again, but will they want to?
Know this: 61 Frames Per Second wants to. And we will beat your ass in Street Fighter. Pow.