When I first played final fight, it was at the arcades. It's probably considered one of the best beat em up arcade games of all time. Cody, Guy, and Haggar were the the main characters to choose from.

I spent sometimes $5 in quarters playing the game in one day. Unfortunately, we didn't have many local arcade games. So, we had to go to the arcades in another city or wait til the fair came around, or the occasional amusement park we use to go to in Tennessee.

When Final Fight was announced for the Super Nintendo, I was excited.... It had pretty good graphics, but there was a big problem: It only featured cody and haggar, not guy. The game was good but didn't quite have the same feel to it as the arcade....

that was ... until.......... the Sega CD version came out. CD quality sound, better graphics, and all of the characters were there. Even today, I believe it's still as close to the arcade as you can get with out actually owning the arcade.

Why does this game have so much staying power? It has been ported to several platforms, and some of the characters have also been used in several of the street fighter type games.

Double dragon lasted a long time, but its flare has pretty much died down. Combatribes was a good one for a short time, but it went out about as fast as it came in. There have been a lot of beat em ups, many trying to mix in fantasy or rpg styles in with them, like AD&D arcade games, Dynasty Wars, Knights of the Round Table, King of Dragons, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, The Punisher, Warriors of Fate, and many others.

Out of all of the thousands of arcade games that have been released, only a few have reached the legendary status that final fight has.... Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Joust, Galaga, Pac/Ms/Jr Pac-man series, Street Fighter, Strider, 194x, golden axe series, Space Invaders series, missile command, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Xevious, Zaxxon, Centipede, Mario Bros, Spy Hunter, Donkey Kong Series, Burgertime, Defender series, Metal Slug series, QBert, Frogger Series, and various others probably would make that list.

But this is a time to remember Final Fight.... I've played it a thousand different times and hopefully will play it again 2000 more times before the end!

Good Deal needs to make a Final Fight-esque beat em up without ripping off the game itself. Sega CD needs more new games like this one and I think it shouldn't take much effort to put together a game the caliber of Final Fight.

How is Burning Fists, man? I'm not seeing any outside reviews on it. What's the music like?

My copy of burning fist never worked correctly. So, I don't know.

Final fight was a great game. they need to make a sequel but don't ruin it with this 3D crap. Do it right. Update the graphics, gameplay, characters but no 3D!

I finally got to play the Capcom collection on my Xbox, which includes the Final Fight game. Even though Streets of Rage is a complete Final Fight knock off, to me, it's better than Final Fight. The gameplay is smoother and much faster and more aggressive than Final Fight. Just goes to show you if you can rip a game off- that 's the way to do it.

And why does everyone complain about transitioning 2d to 3d? (like Castlevania too) It's doable.

I don't think going 2d to 3d is the problem. It's just that many companies are not making good conversions or staying true to their 2d versions. Good 3d conversions = zelda, maybe some super mario stuff, although I haven't played them (3d marios) much.

Bad conversions = sonic, castlevania.

I've played several 3d castlevania games, and they've literally ruined the games. If it wasn't for the ds/gba/gb versions, the castlevania franchise would have been dead years ago.

Sonic... well, I recently read an article about how badly sega was doing in the market, and they mention all of these sonic 3d remakes just not being good at all, nor doing good in the market. Sega ruined sonic and the phantasy star online series.

I didn't think Lament of Innocence was really that bad.

Maybe companies just aren't up to such a task as going 3d and they get lazy. Notice you put down the fact that only Nintendo seems to know how to go 3d and no one else does. The other makers could learn a great deal from Nintendo.

Anyway, I wanted to like Final Fight but the gameplay was just too stiff and choppy, and not too responsive. I found myself hitting the X button (on Xbox) several times just to throw a single punch. I guess it's one of those deals where button mashing is supposed to be fun. Capcom and I... not a match made in heaven.

Sega... I haven't heard anything from them since Yakuza, and supposedly that game isn't getting enough praise. An Xbox version of the game would have been helpful. Could this be their end? I would hate to see it...

My personal opinion is that just because technologies are getting better, companies think that they absolutely have to go 3-D, with out knowing how to do it right. I think castlevania would be great if they went back to their roots, make a high-res 2d foreground and then make the a highly interactive 3D background. They've done it in the past on the 16-bit consoles, but why not now?

Companies have done a fairly good job doing 3d strategy, 3d rpgs and mmorpgs, 3d fps, etc, but when it comes to action or action adventure, and in many cases, platformers, it's a different story.

So, I guess the gameboys and ds do fill sort of a gap we have now days, even if almost everything is a remake or port of something else.

Um... there aren't many DS games ported from other platforms, by the way. That's why it's doing so well.

I don't doubt that there are few ways to do 3d right. I just get tired of hearing fairweather fans pissing and moaning. Igarashi was forced into submission to popular demand and, upfront, say "Yeah those N64 games sucked." Shemeful on the "fan's" part.

The DS Castlevanias should be Konami's guide to 3d done right.

That's good to know. Nintendo has disappointed me so many times, especially in their GB, GBC, GBA, Virtua Boy, N64, and their advertising and design of even the gamecube. I really enjoyed the gamecube, but they designed it to look like a plum and advertised it as a kids only system.

This also goes back to the SNES system, when they refused to allow blood codes and such. I also liked the SNES a lot. It had more colors/better graphics than the sega genesis, but they really limited themselves.

Then, they dropped the snes cd project, which later became sony's upper hand in the gaming wars.

Not only this, but the big N also believed they were unstoppable because of the success of the 8-bit NES system. Their mindset was that technology didn't have to move on and that they could actually be the role model for all other game companies then and in the future.

The N64........ Nintendo's worst CONSOLE...... they were still hard-headed and didn't want to move in to an optical disc technology, making the game manufacturing cost skyrocket, and not many games could actually take advantage of the hardware the n64 offered, because Nintendo made it extremely hard to program in. The controllers are terrible, easily broken... I'm frankly surprised they actually got a handful of good games out of it: two zeldas and a rogue squadron, but even the rogue squadron game is so full of pixelation that it's sometimes even hard to see what's on the screen. People were forced to buy games for $100, because of the high costs of rom chips, which you might as well call legacy hardware even back then. You know how much it would have cost them to manufacture games if the n64 was on cd-rom? probably a couple cents per pressing, and they could have taken a more progressive approach to selling games: new titles $49-$59, six months or a year later $39, and eventually $19-$29.

and then the GBA........ I actually bought in to their lie and purchased a GBA when it came out, and it was the biggest disappointment in any game system I've ever had. Even the friggin' wonderswan is better (and cheaper). This is just an SNES on a stick but with lower resolution than an SNES. Ports of this, that, everything....... terrible rpgs like golden sun, breath of fire, terrible fighters - how the hell can you expect to play mortal kombat or street fighter or any good six-button fighter with two buttons and the little L/R flaps lol, terrible everything... Hell, I don't even know if there is one good gba game out there......

I know you like your WII and and DS, but for many people, it only takes one big mistake to lose a fanbase, but Nintendo has made more than any of them. They were cowards for not finishing up the snes cd project, in my book, and I'm saying this, knowing that it probably wouldn't have hit off with many gamers, but some one has to take the first step to new technologies, and they lost Square Enix because of this.

Nintendo has lagged behind technologies since the NES days, when gamers wished they could have games with similar graphics to the arcade systems of the same time period (no, not talking about donkey kong and joust) - Neo Geo done it, and even though the neo geo was really expensive, comparing the technical specs of nintendo vs neo geo, the neo geo was probably around 80x (or more) more powerful than the NES system but at only 2 or 3 times the price.

about time we had different takes on Nintendo

First of all, there are many rpgs thousands of times worse than BoF and GS. Quest 64 and The Immortal were awful as well.

The SNES was the choice platform for mortal kombat games. The Saturn and Genesis versions lacked the buttons and consistent control scheme that SNES has. The Sega CD Mortal Kombat is godawful, whether you like the system or not- terrible graphics and loading times and not enough buttons.

Now I'm not telling you what to like or dislike, I'm simply offering my take on things, since you have already.

It's obvious you're still pissed to this day about the Nintendo Disc fiasco, but every company screws up at some point. You make the N64 look a lot worse than it was. If it were that bad, it would have failed like the Virtual Boy. GBA has lots of good original titles (the Castlevanias, FF Tactics Advance, Onimusha Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Mega Man titles, etc- there's some good ones) that are carrying on into DS, but you are also right that DS can lose its fanbase on one miscue. That's the risk companies take, especially Sega, who sadly is no stranger to failure. Then again, one breakthrough can LIFT a company the way Halo did for Bungie and Goldeneye did for Rare. It goes both ways- part of the business side of the games industry I suppose. (Man were way off the thread topic. lol)

Have you considered being in the games industry? I think it would be more interesting than game testing all day long and doing nothing else with your time. Let's see what a Malakai-made game would be like.
:)

Besides I believe, as long as Nintendo plays their cards right, Wii and DS could redeem the company as a whole. I'd be shocked if sales didn't exceed those of the previous generation. They are quality products, and I can say so with conviction. Every time I go to their site there are new titles being released every few days. Could this make them top tier again? It's still just a matter of time, we'll find out soon...

Mortal Kombat is the great debate that will probably never end and probably why I'm somewhat disappointed at Nintendo's stance in the SNES days. The SNES did have better graphics, and in this game, you can see it plain as day, but Nintendo could have have its cake and ate it too if they didn't intentionally limit their fanbase. Fans basically had to choose between blood codes and graphics.

I will never say I'm disappointed in sega for the sega cd system, because it was revolutionary, but the 32x, while not a bad idea, was put out in the wrong time. Back in the atari 2600 days, when the new atari system came out, people wondered why they couldn't have just a chip or addon card put in their system to upgrade it, like a PC, but after people got use to throw away systems, having upgrades and addons, at least in North America, was like beating a dead horse. Why put more money in to it?

The Sega Saturn was awesome, but sega apparently didn't know how to advertise, and this was still in a time when we didn't get most of the good games from Japan. Japan got the 1mb upgrade, the 4mb upgrade, all of those neo geo and arcade ports, a movie card (for vcd movies and games like the special lunar silver star movie card version.)

What I said about Nintendo also goes for any other company, and by the time sega introduced the dreamcast, the fans were mad at sega and refused to buy it. I bought the dreamcast and thought it had great potential, although I didn't like the controllers. It spawned a great fighting series called Soul Caliber though, and there was also a really unique rpg called Elemental Gimmick Gear (which I need to finish up one day lol)...I wish they'd bring back an E.G.G. game on the new consoles, just to bring something new to next gen systems.

As far as me making a game, I started working on a P&P game a long time ago, with strategy and rpg elements, inspired by dragon force, dark wizard, and my own ideas, as sort of a medieval life simulation with fantasy elements and a fictional world, with the openess of something like morrowind, yet not be bound to strictly a fighting or war game, in hopes that it could possibly in the future be brought over to a PC game world in the future. What I realized is that the game was too complicated to turn in to a p&p game. It would have really required a computer to keep up with all of the information, as no DM would have been able to keep track of it all.