Kick. Punch. It’s all in the mind…
I was a teenage fighting game junkie. As a kid, Street Fighter 2 opened up a world of competitive, face-to-face, “in the world” play I didn’t have the imagination to even conceive. Street Fighter 2 was such a cultural juggernaut that my friend Billy and I were play fighting each other as Ryu and Chun-Li in his parent’s living room based off the description of what he’d seen at an arcade. That’s the power the fight had over me.
As home consoles began to catch and eventually surpass the graphical might of coin-op machines, fighting games got more and more innovative. Unfortunately this trend of quality home gaming spelled the end of the arcade, curbing sales and the attention of new fighters.
Still, we played them all as much as we could, learning all the moves of our favorite characters and even creating our own to have imagination brawls once the adults took back the TV. Art of Fighting, Samurai Showdown and Mortal Kombat blew our minds and ripped out our spines, eventually opening up an entire 3rd dimension of battle in Virtua Fighter and Tekken. Being able to dive into this sort of high quality visual experiences felt just as amazing as being able to play it a much a you wanted.
Without that face-to-face option of competing against new people in public and the world wide web stealing much of the mystique of conventions like secrets, unlocks, and easter eggs, fighting games don’t have the mass appeal they used to have. Luckily, there’s still tournaments like EVO that continue to help fighting fans congregate and play all the best stuff! You guys are the best!
These days, thanks to independent developers, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and a robust retro gaming scene, many forgotten titles have received second chances at life. Indie developers will acquire the rights to a now classic franchise and develop a long overdue follow up.
There are always new ways to reinvigorate or recreate a work into something amazing.
Here are a few titles I’m dying to see revived, rebooted, and re-released in the future.
Power Stone
Platform: Sega Dreamcast| Release Year: Feb 1999
What It Is: 3D Isometric Arena Fighter
Power Stone is just one of the million reasons why Sega Dreamcast is heralded as one of the greatest gaming devices in history. 1-on-1 matches between 2 of 10 zany characters that get dropped into a 19th century saloon or factory to beat the crap out of each other with everything in sight. And I mean everything.
Power Stone offers bottles, chairs, boxes, fire, benches, lamp posts, bazookas, and support beams if you’re strong enough. Most fighting games leave you with fists and feet or a weapon that never comes off (and beams of inner force for some reason) in brawls to prove your fighting mastery. But in Power Stone, you’re not a fighter trying to prove his mastery of martial arts, you’re a treasure hunter trying to use any means necessary to take out your competition. It’s Indiana Jones meets Jackie Chan as you scramble to collect 3 magical gems that turn you into a super powered version of yourself and unleash powerful attacks on your foe.
Why It Really Rules: Originality & Setting
Power Stone offers a setting--the 19th century--seldom seen in video games at the time. Titles like Bloodborne, Dishonored, and Bioshock have done great work recently with the steampunk and gothic elements, but Power Stone dove into the world of explorers and treasure hunters I had only really gotten to see in episodes of Disney’s Tailspin. The world of Power Stone is filled with biplanes and hot air balloons, desert mystics, dusty saloons, factories complete with assembly lines. It had a colorful, cell shaded look with gameplay that let you be a part of that very lived in and populated world.
The character designs were strongly connected to this aesthetic, making them feel very fresh and unique despite being caricatures or feeling otherwise stolen from other media. To date, this game is the only place you’ll get to play a big, strong dude that turns into a rock monster when he powers up (because nobody’s making another Fantastic Four game any time soon.)
...and probably shouldn't
How I’d Bring It Back
Power Stone needs to return to basics. Since it’s owned by Capcom, an interested developer would need to create a similar experience but decidedly its own beast. Capcom has been killing its babies lately, and likely has no plans to bring back this franchise anytime soon. So take the nuts and bolts and do something fresh with it!The main focus for this restyling is the gameplay and the setting.
Gameplay: Improvised weapons and ridiculous and fun scenarios. The action needs to be small; stick with 1-on-1 matches unless strong gameplay incentives in the multiplayer combat mechanics are implemented for bigger groups. Imagine 2 and 3 player team up moves, combining Power Stone forms, multiplayer mech control, traps, tumbling stage, alliance bonuses or a sudden death duel for players that team up and win.
Also, tossing in wild and interesting weapons that possibly control differently for different characters based on size, strength, and speed would be fun. Trying to keep a particular fighter away from a specific sword or hammer could add some fun tension. The most important thing is that no single strategy rules out the other and that running around can still lead to victory for less skilled players. Lastly, whatever era it’s set in, the idea of grabbing powerful macguffins during the fight that power up your characters for a short time is a great one.
Setting: Power Stone used setting brilliantly, and that needs to be mirrored going forward. Whether it’s sci fi, mythical, wild west, or steam punk, the characters need to be reflexive of the era and time. The fighting arenas themselves need to be dense and filled with easter eggs and random occurrences. Waiters rushing through to serve guests. The crowd tossing weapons to their favorite fighter. A machine that materializes a weapon of your choice. Lots of options, but the character definitely need to be interesting and motivated in a way you can see at a glance.
Psychic Force
Platform: PS1 | Release Year: 1996 (USA)
What It Is: 2D Omni Directional Aerial Fighter
Due to the glut of fighting games throughout the 90s, developers were looking for any way they could to stand out which made positional mechanics were all the rage. Several two dimensional Neo Geo like fighters let you jump from the foreground to background to avoid attacks and fight on multiple planes while 3D Playstation-exclusive fighting game Battle Arena Toshinden that made the escape rolling and 360 degree hit detection a major part of of the gameplay.
Psychic Force basically kept the 2D fighting engine and instead added verticality. Two warriors enclosed in a cubic psychic arena were able to toss all manner of awesome looking powers at one another. This was a projectile fighters dream. You could punch and kick when you got close, but you could also shoot weak and strong projectiles at each other, dash around the arena teleport, and launch attacks from any direction including behind opponents because of an advanced defensive force field players could employ that’s still being used in Super Smash Bros today.
Why It Really Rules: Novel Fighting Plane & Super Mega Ultra Moves!
With it’s high-tech, manga influenced style, Psychic Force had the look of Ghost in the Shell with the feel of a Dragon Ball Z fight. These characters just felt so powerful. Even basic moves meant throwing devil fire traps and giant swords across the arena. If you could do the more complicated input sequences, you could literally stop time.
The most anime group of characters to ever anime an anime
While far from perfect with its generic anime style characters, forgettable story, difficult control schemes; that omni-directional, one on one fighting style remains an outstanding departure from most other fighter I’ve ever played, including the actual Dragon Ball fighting games it likely patterned itself from.
How I’d Bring It Back
With Square holding Taito and most likely the rights to Psychic Force, the best way to go is make something wholly different taking only a few queues from the original. Basically, ditch the hard fighting game genre constraint altogether! Psychic Force has awesome psychic powers, powerful heroes, more powerful villains, and an entire world at war as more and more dangerous psychic characters come out of the woodwork. This is basically an X-men story (or better yet, Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski). Either way, I say keep the powers, change the game play.
Make a Psychic Force an action game. Open world or linear stages are fine, but the idea is you get to play characters and cut loose against faceless drones using your awesome powers to really take apart whoever you fight (human for bad guys and robots for good guys). Then, whenever you meet another powerful psychic enemy, you can erect the psychic arena and take them on inside the box so you can’t get away. This could be an invisible wall style thing the game does automatically or a player controlled gameplay mechanic to stop escapes. From there, you could have largely the same style of fighting from either a 2D or 3D perspective depending on how the action portions of the game are designed.
You could make this a single player experience where you get to design your character and choose and build your psychic power sets as you grow and level up. Leave multiplayer to an online or LAN type of experience. You could add stage or defense building and capture the flag style games. Players take on each other’s structures either opting to encounter each other and erect a barrier or avoid each other. This would make characters who favor powers of confusion and misdirection more viable in multiplayer combat. I’m spitballing, but this sounds damn fun to me. I love building up characters to crush people in competitive games.
Zero Divide
Platform: PS1 | Release Year: 1995
What It Is: Robot 3D Fighting Game
Zero Divide is pretty much a launch title for the original Playstation. It pits several androids and robots against one another in one on one fights making it basically Virtua Fighter with robots. It has similar controls only on ring outs your character can grab the edge and flip back in. One difference it does have, however, is the character is a robot dragon, and quite frankly, more games should have robot dragons. Well received upon release due to looking and sounding amazing (thanks to being one of the first CD based games in the new Playstation era), Zero Divide spawned a few sequels that never really took off despite being a really cool and polished game overall
Why It Really Rules:
Seriously.. That was a bitchin Soundtrack.
I’m thinking about getting more into DJing, and if I do, I’m definitely taking a Zero Divide influenced moniker (Dynamo Divide maybe). This SDTK sounds like all the best and most whimsical parts of Transformers the Movie soundtrack.
Zero Divide was just fun and so easy to pick up and play. I remember my younger cousins being absolutely flabbergasted seeing it the first time. We tracked it down and rented it every weekend they visited. It innovated in small ways to make something solid rather than completely trying something new and mind blowing. But the fact of the matter is that we need those kinds of games. Today, publishers remain so focused on the Triple A aspects that most of the middle tier studios got swallowed up meaning there are fewer people around to innovate smart and slowly.
Midway Games: Everyone’s 4th Favorite Publisher.
How I’d Bring It Back
Today, too many fighting games have high numbers and subtitles in their titles. Even the crossovers have sequels, and the sequels have side projects. I think we’re almost on Tekken X Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Avengers Assemble vs SNK - King of FIghters '19Bringing back Zero Divide would be about making it more identifiable and broadening the scope of fighters. At the time due to the technology, a robotic 3D character looked far more convincing than the blocky humans we had in Tekken and Virtua Fighter. Now, we don’t have that problem. A combination of more humanoid looking contestants (reploids with fake skin etc) amidst the less humanoid looking ones would be so much fun to play.
Fully losing limbs and a having access to a mechanic that allows you to rebuild bits that get shattered, heal, or build weapons during the fight would also be amazing. Rather than being stuck with the shell you’re given like a paltry human fighter, robot fighters would be able to upgrade and repair themselves on the fly. You could even add a mechanism where you get to choose your mechanic which allows for certain abilities and segments to be added to your fighter, offering completely new combination. A little more Armored Core could really make a Zero Divide game special and completely different than everything else out there.
Thanks for reading and please check out some previous posts on games and the retro lifestyle.
Old School Gaming: What It Meant To Be The Beast
Retro Revival Part 1
Retro Revival Part 2: War Games
