Fighting games [fahy-ting gāmz] n. – A genre that consists of games in which players compete in one-on-one combat, usually playing to the best of three rounds. This brand of videogame reached the height of its popularity in the early-to-mid nineties, drawing crowds of arcade-goers to the newest and best releases from the likes of Capcom, SNK, and Midway.

Arcades [ahr-keydz] pl. n. – Amusement centers that house a wide variety of coin-operated videogames. While they remain prominent in Japan, their gradual demise in the United States dragged the fighting game genre kicking and screaming into niche territory. Thanks to a dedicated community, however, fighting games never died out completely.

During the previous console generation, the fighting game genre existed in a state of awkward limbo. With arcades all but completely dead in the States, the few flagship franchises that still yielded new iterations (Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter, Tekken) quietly shifted their focus more towards consoles. But there was a problem. While fighting games used to enjoy lifecycles in the arcade before eventually being ported for home release, the console versions of last-gen fighters were the first and only ones that most gamers were able to play. Thus, the face-to-face competition that once defined the genre was strangely absent for all but the lucky few who had other fighting fans nearby. The genre had to adapt or else it would continue to stagnate and possibly even completely fade away.

The most obvious move was to bring fighting games online. Thanks to broadband proliferation worldwide and elegant services like Xbox Live, last-gen consoles were able to take a big step towards matching the online multiplayer experience that PC gamers had been enjoying for years. In general, PS2 releases got the shaft while Xbox versions of the same fighting games occasionally got the online treatment.

Fighting games, however, cannot be treated the same as an online shooter or sports game. The reason for this is responsiveness. Fighting games—especially 2D fighters played at a high level—demand precise timing when pulling off complex motions in increments of 1/60th of a second. For frame-counting fighting fans, even the slightest bit of lag can practically invalidate a match. During the last generation, the few fighting games that did provide online play were simply too laggy to even approach the consistency of one-on-one arcade matches. Still, the last generation made one thing clear: online modes were now necessities in fighting games.

Fast Forward (11/25/08): Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is released.

Last November, eager fans finally got to put HD Remix’s much-hyped online mode to the test. The game released on PSN and Live Arcade after months of delays, and the release date push-backs walked the line between generating buzz and forcing less hardcore fans to lose interest. Once HDR hit, however, it was met with positive reception both from the press and the discerning, protective Street Fighter fanbase. The main reason for this fanfare was simple: the online mode provided virtually lag-free play between broadband users.

To put it simply, HDR was designed from the get-go with proper online play in mind. The popular term for the portion of code in a game’s programming that governs its online playability is “netcode.” In 1up.com’s Ryan Scott’s review of HDR, he compared the game’s netcode to the Google algorithm. While it might seem like a strange analogy, the comparison is plausible. After all, Google’s backbone coding is what made their search engine superior to all competitors at the time of its launch. To the average user, Google’s search engine simply worked better than that of other popular sites, and this is the same response that HDR has received in regard to its online experience.

To understand how HDR’s online play ended up as smooth as it did, we must first go to the source of the game’s development. In charge of development was David Sirlin, long-time participant and leader in the fighting game community. He was a gamer-turned-developer, and he got to spearhead an update to his favorite fighter of all time: Super Street Fighter II Turbo. As a result, HDR was a labor of love, and from the beginning it was being developed from a different angle than other fighters.

Sirlin’s first important decision was to rebalance a 15-year-old fan-favorite. In his blog, Sirlin details the work that went into the gargantuan effort of rebalancing all of the classic characters in opposition to Capcom, the game’s publisher. Capcom wanted a visual update only, leaving the original game’s gameplay completely unchanged. Fortunately for fans, Sirlin soldiered on and successfully produced an honest-to-God update to Super Turbo.

Sirlin’s second crucial choice was to adopt an existing netcode for HDR, and being the fighting aficionado that he is, he knew exactly who to go to.

Tony Cannon is the creator of the fighting game matchmaking program, GGPO. Once again, the PC beat consoles to the punch. Cannon, a longtime fighting game fan and Tournament Director of the Evolution Championship Series, designed GGPO (Good Games Peace Out) to give PC users a central online hub in which they could challenge one another to compete in select fighting games run through an emulator. While there are other services that allow users to connect to each other over different networks, GGPO stood apart from the other software by somehow allowing virtually lag-free matches over decent connections.

On the GGPO website, Cannon briefly explains how it all works:

GGPO uses a peer-to-peer topology to run a complete copy of your game for each player, transmitting controller inputs over the network to keep these copies in sync. Each player’s inputs are sent to their copy of the game without having to wait for their opponent’s to arrive over the network.

If the simulations diverge, GGPO rolls back to the most recent accurate state, corrects the mistake, and jumps back to the current frame, all before the player can notice. This provides the illusion of lag-free gameplay.

So, as fate would have it, Cannon agreed to allow Sirlin and his team to implement the GGPO netcode into HDR. For more details on how the deal went down, you can read this interview with Cannon over at Capcom Unity. If that wasn’t good enough, news eventually got out that Capcom licensed GGPO’s netcode for use in future games. Thus, a new era was born with HDR ushering in a lag-free fighting game renaissance…

Well, not exactly.

In November of last year, it was confirmed in this Event Hubs article that Capcom did not plan on implementing GGPO’s netcode into their next major console release: Street Fighter IV. According to the Capcom rep interviewed in the article, Street Fighter IV’s next-gen graphics and audio require a different sort of latency management that Cannon’s code simply can’t handle.

But what about other upcoming high-profile fighters? With Capcom’s lockdown on the GGPO netcode, no other company will be able to use it. That means that all of the much-anticipated games shown below will offer online play, but their quality remains to be seen.

In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Guilty Gear creator and Arc System Works’ chief designer, Daisuke Ishiwatari made some not-so-positive comments:

I do think there is a definite shift going on right now, with the arcade market shrinking and more people playing at home. The network problems I mentioned earlier are still a factor on the consoles though, and so far, the technology that would equal the zero lag environment of an arcade just doesn’t exist yet.

In the same interview, BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori spoke his mind on the topic of playing fighting games online:

To tell the truth, I’m a skeptic about making fighting games work online on the consoles. When you’re playing against someone, I think the best communication comes from the fact that you have to share a physical space with your opponent and face off against them.

I worry that if we develop a method of fighting that doesn’t require you to face your opponent, this important communication between players will eventually be lost. That’s why I most want to involve myself with games that encourage this face-to-face interaction. As things stand now, I think this lack of communication is quickly becoming a reality, even in arcades, people are keeping more to themselves, but I’m not giving up. It’s sort of a personal mission of mine.

What Lies Ahead:

The fact that all of the games shown above are even in development for American consoles is a sign that fighting games are better off now than they were last generation. All three of them are next-gen revivals to classic series, and all of them are being developed for the fans. HDR’s online play shined a light on the possibility of virtually lag-free online fighting for all games and series. While Capcom may have GGPO all to themselves for the moment, other developers can still learn from the latency-hiding techniques employed in HDR. This focus on getting netplay right is what developers need to push for more than ever before because now it is actually possible to have playable online fighters. HDR has proven that for 2D fighters, and Street Fighter IV will be the next litmus test for 3D fighter netcode in this new era. They might not be using GGPO as the framework for SFIV’s online mode, but Capcom’s licensing of Cannon’s code indicates that the company is taking smooth online play more seriously than ever.

However the pursuit of lag-free fighting turns out, there is no doubt that there are some great releases coming our way this year. For fans who have been forced to import countless fighters from Japan over the last decade, domestic releases of big-namers like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, and BlazBlue are already causes for celebration amongst the fighting game community. So enjoy the view! For the first time in years, fighting games are punching and kicking their way back into the spotlight. Arcades—may they rest in peace—may finally be ready to pass the torch to the slightly less greasy and infinitely less tenuous venue of the online realm.

Discussion Questions:

• What 2009 fighting game release are you most looking forward to?
• Without GGPO’s netcode, how do you think SFIV’s online play will fair?
• Will arcades ever see a revival in the United States?
• What are the benefits/drawbacks of playing online versus playing locally?

Referenced Articles and Additional Resources:
http://www.capcom-unity.com/s-kill/blog/2008/08/29/ggpo_networking_guru_talks_sf_hd_remix_
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3902/dodging_striking_winning_the_.php
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2008/nov/28/capcom-confirms-no-ggpo-street-fighter-4/
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3171504
http://www.sirlin.net/sf
http://ggpo.net
http://www.2dfighter.com
http://www.shoryuken.com
http://www.evo2k.com

If you’re a fan of fighting games, you won’t want to miss this next editorial. Check back Tuesday for the full article.

No, the Spark has not fizzled out completely. The disheartening lack of site updates and editorials over the course of the last month has surely attributed to the assumption the Game Spark wasn’t meant to be. This is not the case, however, as I plan on finally putting on my next article by the end of the week. Job hunting, girlfriend’s graduation activities, laziness, and hanging out with family are all partially to blame for my sudden decline in productiveness.

Hopefully, once I post “A Matter of Perspective,” I will find the drive to start cranking out insightful editorials the way that I always intended to. Wish me luck, and as always thank you for reading. Leave comments if you have any to make!

Update: Well, now that so much time as passed, I have decided to scrap “A Matter of Perspective.” It simply wouldn’t be relevant anymore because it was going to focus mainly on the flood of first-person shooters that were released during the months of October and November of last year. With this dark period of delays behind me, I am finally ready to move on and start writing again. Keep an eye out for the next update, which will preview the new upcoming article.

Update: Due to other obligations, I have had delay this article considerably. I don’t know exactly when it will go up, but keep checking as it could suddenly appear at any time.

The business of reviewing games is no longer a simple matter of one critic expressing his or her qualified opinion of a piece of interactive entertainment. Gamers worldwide have watched the industry shift towards lower-risk, surefire “hits” more than ever since the current generation launched with the Xbox 360 in late 2005, and the way those games are reviewed has changed as well. Developing a AAA game for current-gen consoles necessitates large budget investments from publishers, huge (often partially outsourced) development teams, and a marketing push that easily trumps that of your average summer blockbuster in scope and diversity. With all of that money being funneled into game production, publishers need to feel confident that their product will launch with enough fanfare to fly off the shelves in the first two weeks. Now, part of launching a game is submitting review copies to publications worldwide, and oftentimes reviews go public before a game reaches stores. Naturally, developers want their game to receive positive review scores on a personal level: they want their work to be appreciated. Some publishers, on the other hand, have found another way to apply value to review scores.

In MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo’s write-up about developer royalties based on review scores, he exposed an increasingly common practice among game companies. Apparently, game reviews do more than just help consumers make informed purchases; they now sometimes directly affect the developers’ compensation for their work. Monitoring review scores is easier than ever thanks to aggregate scoring sites like MetaCritic and GameRankings.

MetaCritic is a fantastic measure of critical reception, and over the last couple of years it has blossomed into the go-to source for game reviews especially. Curious gamers can search for the game of their choice and then instantly be greeted with a list of every major review for it, complete with summary blurbs for each and the now-famous metascore out of 100. To make things even clearer, the score is encapsulated in either a red, yellow, or green box, which represent negative, mixed, and generally favorable reviews respectively. With games retailing at $60 for a new copy, their reviews hold more weight than your average music, movie, or book review. Game purchases are an investment to consumers just as they are to the developers and publishers. With all that money on the line and with MetaCritic’s popularity on the rise, game companies really want that green box.

Now that we’ve established the current climate within the industry and the newfound importance that game reviews have attained, let’s look at how the reviewing practices have changed in response to this shift.

People in the media are catching on to the new face of game reviews, and commentary on the subject is being produced online more now than ever before. Gaming blog giant Kotaku had something to say about critics reviewing LittleBigPlanet without having had access to the online play, which in LBP’s case is the meat of the game. At Leigh Alexander’s blog, Sexy Videogameland, you can find her response to the negative critical reception that Silent Hill: Homecoming received, which extends beyond that particular game and into the broader spectrum of game critiquing. Variety’s Ben Fritz even responded to Leigh Alexander’s article on his blog, The Cut Scene, encouraging critics to stop looking for details to criticize and instead praise a game’s broader accomplishments. Lastly, established game journalism John Davison even threw down his two cents on his blog, begging the question: Do game reviews help you?

It is encouraging to see such varied discussion on the topic of game reviews, so I am going to do my part now and give my take on the situation:

There are two major problems with the way in which games are reviewed today. Neither of them can be proven as fact, but I intend to establish a correlation in the following paragraphs.

Problem #1: Self-fulfilling Prophecies

Look at the list above. These ten games represent the most critically praised games on the 360. Other than the inspiring exception of Braid, this list also represents some of the most hyped and heavily marketed games of this generation. My point? Sometimes it seems as though there is an invisible range in which game scores can fall according to the marketing push behind them. Granted, a lot of times games get a lot of press because they are promising. The problem, however, is that high-profile games among the likes of Halo and Gears of War seem to have their review scores cemented in the 9-10 range before they are even released. Big-budget shooters like Halo and Gears may be polished, enjoyable games, but do they really deserve to have averages above 93/100? Averages are a funny thing. Generally, the more values within a given range, the lower the average will be. In the case of modern game reviews, however, average scores for high-profile games seem oddly high. Note Grand Theft Auto IV’s average of 98/100. Now, one publication’s perfect score might mean something different that another publication’s equivalent, but for the average of over 80 worldwide review scores to nearly reach 100% is mathematically unusual. This is further aggravated by the fact that this average is computed using scores appropriated from dozens of different sources, which use dozens of different rating systems and criteria… which brings me to my next point.

Problem #2: Inconsistent Standards

Here’s an excerpt from Davison’s blog posting:

Reviews editors are increasingly just editing individual reviews, and are not editing their reviews sections. Otherwise, we wouldn’t constantly see these contradictions.

To paraphrase:

“This game is just like this other game, and that makes it awesome.”

“This game is just like this other game, and that makes it terrible.”

Davison makes a good point. Why do certain games get significantly lower scores than other games that have the same technical problems? Some would argue that the overall experience is what matters when reviewing a game, essentially suggesting that a game’s technical merits and faults are negligible as long as it all just “works.” The trend seems to be this: higher-profile games and/or sequels are penalized less for their technical faults or “sameness” to their competitors than other, less gargantuan efforts. This is purely speculation, of course, but I think that my theory holds water when looking at recent reviewing patterns among big sites like IGN and GameSpot. IGN has been recognized among the observant as being more on the lenient side of the spectrum with their scores, so granting important releases like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4 perfect 10’s came as only slight surprises. It was when GameSpot also granted those two titles the same scores that I sat back and got to thinking about this whole issue of the shift in the reviews paradigm.

One can practically feel the pressure placed upon those reviewers’ shoulders. Everyone expected GTAIV and MGS4 to be great games, but those perfect scores really generate a lot of positive press. In fact, I would go as far as to say that scores like that have the power to sway unsure buyers among those who actually read game reviews. About a year ago, rumors fluttered about the internet about the termination of Jeff Gerstmann, Gamespot’s former reviews editor over giving Kane & Lynch a distinctly low score. While the real reason for his termination was never officially disclosed, the rumors were enough to spark speculation.

This fear became manifest this year when several different game companies decided to pull coverage and advertising from popular games magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, reportedly because of negative previews and reviews. This practice is incredibly unethical, in a business sense, but it has gone unpunished. EGM, being the trusted publication that it is, remains vigilant in its honest coverage despite the possibility of coverage cuts.

With all of this fuss over scores, maybe getting rid of them altogether could benefit the situation. Play magazine as recently as the last year decided to do away with their ten-point scoring system, now offering only a “parting shot” summary statement at the end of their reviews. According to their editor, Dave Halverson, this change was made to prevent readers from simply skipping over the written review and jumping straight to the numerical score. I personally believe that a more consistent agreed-upon scale would be appropriate along the likes of the movie industry’s five-star scoring. Fortunately for movies, however, their reviews tend not to have much of an effect on box-office sales, so film critics and their publications are free of the unfair pressure that currently plagues game critics.

The Good News:

When looking at average critical reception of a game on MetaCritic on a negative, mixed, or generally positive level, you are going to get a helpful, accurate sense of the game’s quality. Good games are good, bad games are bad, and the mixed ones will appeal to fans of their genres or intellectual properties. At this point, I encourage gamers to stop focusing on the numerical scores that often accompany reviews and actually read the reviews. A game might receive a perfect 10 nowadays, but you can bet that the reviewer still took the time to address problems within the game that might prove to be deal-breakers for certain people.

Discussion Questions:

• How important is a game’s numerical review score?
• To what extent do reviews affect game sales among all demographics?
• Do reviewers tend to sweat the small stuff too much or not enough?
• What should be done to eliminate scoring bias as a result of pressure from game companies?

I look forward to reading your responses!

Referenced articles:
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/05/29/low-metacritic-costs-developers/
http://kotaku.com/5069820/the-rush-to-review
http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2008/09/coming-home.html
http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2008/10/as-noted-below.html
http://blog.jwhdavison.com/2008/09/do-game-reviews-help-you.html
http://kotaku.com/gaming/rumor/gamespot-editor-fired-over-kane–lynch-review-328244.php