I hate to say it so frankly, but I find myself being pulled towards indie and older games more and more as time goes on. I don't wanna be such an old man about it. I wanna give what all the new kids are playing a fair shake and not complain about my lawn, but it's so damn hard, and the games these days are making it even harder.
To cut to the chase, this post is about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.I was pretty hopeful about it at first. KOFXV turned out pretty well, and didn't go too far off from the KOF formula
I have my own problems with them sticking too the formula too much, but that's for another story after my editor gets her stuff together..
. The initial reveal seemed promising, and SNK clearly figured out how to make their shaders work nearly a decade after KOFXIV, but that reveal would be the apex of my excitement for the game.
About a year or so later, and my already low expectations have cratered tremendously. I had a rocky start with the game during beta, but eventually got more familiar with how the system works. I still maintain that the game is sorta hard to just "jump into" without doing alot of homework, but it's ok I guess. Not a game I'm gonna buy
Frame one i decided to be a conscientious objector to COTW due to the Saudi Royal Family's large stake in SNK. I try not to be a Debbie Downer about it since so many across the FGC are happy, but the Saudi Royal Family's Influence on this game and SNK as a whole is becoming too obvious to ignore and maybe it woulda been better if SNK died after releasing KOF '98UM. This footnote became a forehadowing huh?
, but it'll be fine enough to mash in every now and then at locals or majors. Then a new challenger appeared.
Now at first I didn't think much of the Ronaldo reveal. Knowing what I know about the deep ties between South America and SNK, I just figured this was collab meant to give a present to the crowd that's been down for SNK since day one, but smarter researchers than me connected the dots and informed me that Ronald is part of the Al-Nassr Soccer team owned by.... The Public Investment Fund! Oh wait, nevermind, umm I guess it's nothing
No reason to look up who owns the Public Investment Fund
.
Then after that the next character to be revealed was some guy named Salvatore Ganacci. When I saw this character on my phone at work, I thought he was a weird new OC for the game. Seemed like an odd direction, but whatevs. It's a new game and they're doing something new. Once again I had to have someone doing more due diligence tell me that this was another key figure in the Saudi Royal Family circle.
After that, I've been soured on the game and feel vindicated for not wanting to buy the game. SNK tried to assure us that being acquired by the PIF wouldn't affect them, and now we know that's a lie. And even after all of this I still feel a little obliged to not be a debbie downer about a game that has given me plenty of reason to be down on it.
I had to get my feelings about COTW out because too many people have been gassing it up too much, but, but I guess the bigger point this blog was supposed to be about it that modern games suck now. I have to be specific about this sorta thing, so lemme bring up an example. Among all of the reason I have to hate on COTW, a sorta notable one for me is the season pass. For like idk *checks steam....* oh this is weird
OK apparently COTW base game is being sold with its season pass as one unit for $60 USD as of this writing, which is kidna nice, but weird that it's still sorta noted as being base + season pass
.
Well the game has a season pass, which is just kinda normal now that part of the a fighting games roster is sequestered off to be sold for extra money. Personally I hate this and think it's a bad practice, but it's been so normalized now that talking against this practice is tantamount to saying fighting games shouldn't have fireballs anymore. And it's strange cuz like this wasn't always the case. In fact, I'm old enough to remember when a game tanked in due in part to doing something like this
Concurrent blog posts written without talking about how dirty Street Fighter X Tekken was done:0
. Games didn't always used to work this way. There's alot of proganda in gaming media that sold us this change as gaming is becoming expensive and needs more money to survive. And this is true to some point, but also this shit is excessive, and it's normalization has made modern entries in the genre much worse.
That's what I mean when I say modern games suck now. It's not so much that SF6 is a worse game than vsav
I do still think this, and I have a few bad words to say about SF6, but I'll save them for my next big article.
, but that SF6 and its contemporaries have all these extra monetization factors attached and that's not something I had to deal with back in my day. Throughout my years in the gaming hobby, I've had to sit by and watch as the overton window on monetization keeps moving more and more to the side of favoring corporations. Where gamers will excuse some of the worst financial abuses that happen even at their own expense because Epic can't balance a checkbook without addicting millions of children to gambling. I'm not fully blinded by nostalgia. I know Capcom would've added a season pass and lootboxes to SFII if they had the chance.
But the technology wasn't there for us to be exploited so easily, and I think the overall views on this kinda exploitation was viewed more negatively back then too. It's hard to say for certain, but the gaming environment was better, healthier in a lot of ways. One thing I consider is how there were more games available, and not just more games, but a greater variety of games. There was a time when companies like Capcom and SNK maintained 2 or 3 three different fighting games series at once. Sega, Bamco, and Konami used to release such oddball games that became cult classics. Part of that I think is that because the technology isn't as advanced, it didn't require as much work, so you can make more stuff with half of the effort it takes to make a single game today.
That's what I miss, it's not just about the monetization, but how alot of the environment has changed in addition to the predatory monetization that has become so commonplace. There's something lost I guess. Fortunately, indie devs are kinda filling in the gaps left by major publishers.
IDK how to end this, I'm about to play Asura the Striker on Steam, I suggest you do the same.