PC perception.
Getting
real, the PC is not what most people would consider a ‘fighters’
kind of box, or indeed a games box at all. Most consider the PC
to be a ‘work’ box, not a games box. Now I know that everyone
reading this is more than likely to disagree. But think about this
– almost everyone reading this is from the PC gaming arena,
since it’s on a site of that nature that this article is being
published. You are representative of the PC gaming culture that
has online access, but it has to be acknowledged that the more serious
minded PC users dwarf the PC gaming audience. It’s only in
the last two to three years that the PC has truly come of age as
a games machine, and it’s no coincidence that it happened right
at the 3D accelerator card revolution. Be that as it may, just because
the PC is able to play really good games does not mean it is looked
at that way. It’s still regarded primarily as a ‘work’
machine. The machine we do our taxes on, write the occasional letter
on, and use AOL on. And as such, since it’s our ‘cerebral’
machine, if we do play games on it, they are generally more complex
ones. The RTS games, Age of Empires, Dungeon Keeper,
the deep immersive first person shooters like Half-Life and
Thief, and the quiz games, like You Don’t Know Jack.
All requiring some degree of IQ rather than reflexes to attain the
goals presented.
This is gradually changing,
but even so, PC games are expected to have a greater degree of depth
than their console cousins. And lets face it, with the greatest
will in the world; fighters can’t be considered that in-depth.
(Of course that depends on your definition of depth, but I define
it as the ability of the game to keep you coming back to it, due
to new and unrevealed content and fun factor. Fighters certainly
score in the second bracket, but not in the first. If you’ve
seen one guy do a front kick then you’ve seen them all. Special
moves and fatalities help here, but even then, most are just a variation
on a theme.). As a result, a fighter isn’t something that would
occur to most PC developers, mainly because one hasn’t been
done before. Very Catch 22. One isn’t done, because one hasn’t
been done. And if one isn’t done, no one else will do one...
etc etc etc.
These seem to cover the
main reasons that the PC has little fighter presence, besides the
inevitable Mortal Kombat ports, Rise of the Robots
(which was so dire, it is probably best to forget that this title
ever happened. As I recall, it started life as an arcade piece,
which was basically a 386 in an arcade box, then was a PC released
game in its own right. Some of the heaviest hyping going really
set this up for a fall), FX-Fighter and one small overlooked
game called One Must Fall 2097. Many people emailed me to
check this out, it’s an old game now found on the Epic website
as freeware. Originally written way back when, its specs require
a 486 with at least 4 Megs of ram. There you go, some genuine history
for you. But it does actually stand the test of time. It’s
fun, fast – in fact waaaaaay too fast on a PII anything, but
that’s progress for you. :)
FX Fighter was
from Argonaut, and was originally a SNES game, using the same FX
chip that was used in the StarFox titles. I can’t honestly
recall if this ever made it to market, but I know the PC version
did. It was very blocky as I recall, true 3D models being used,
but with very few polygons... I’m still trying to track down
a copy of this...Anyone out there got one?
So in closing, it would
appear right now that there’s a gap in the market for a good,
fun, original PC fighting game. Anyone out there feel like taking
this one on?
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Jake Simpson is a code monkey for Raven Software. He's badass.
