There Are No Bad Fighting Games
==Part 1: There are bad fighting games==
That is to say, there were bad fighting games. Back in the days when arcades a) still existed internationally and b) didn't have anything to prove. Entertainment was entertainment and nobody needed to be scientific about anything. You were a shitty little kid happy that for just a minute you were in a mall but not shopping with your parents, or you were a schlub drunk off a few beers looking for something to do other than get in a fight and harass women.
The point of those objectively bad fighters, and most good ones too, was to take your money for all it was worth. The more poorly crafted the game and the cheaper* the AI, the better. Fighting games, until the extinction of the classic arcade, suffered the same major problem that JRPGs do: the stakes are completely different between you and the computer AI. The computer's goal is to waste as much of you time as possible. The less damage you do to them, the more likely you will run out of time (or HP, batteries, patience, what-have-you). Run out of time in an arcade, and you have to pay more to keep playing. For this reason, even seasoned fighting game players can have trouble playing against classic arcade AI; The tit-for-tat that exists between two human opponents doesn't exist.
*this was usually because the AI could pull off powerful moves that you couldn't - less because of your poor execution and more because the inputs and executions don't register properly
Until competent console ports were possible, that last point - playing another human - was the saving grace of fighting games. The arcades still won out (what's better than one dude wasting quarters than two dudes), and people could feed all of their best and worst instincts - competition, bragging rights, mastering something trivial, and so forth. Any game that was mechanically interesting or solid enough survived (Street Fighter, Fatal Fury), along with a few of the trashier cash grabs (Mortal Kombat).
The story of bad fighting games should have ended with the advent of console ports. Good fighters came to consoles and had considerably dumbed-down AI (no need to frustrate players, because at that point they'd already gotten their money**), people could train on their own or play side-by-side with their friends. Any brand new title had to be even better, otherwise who would want to buy it without the hype of an arcade release? The problem was, even if the incentive for people to buy the game and be able to play forever was there, the technology to support the sophisticated arcade-born games was not. Not until the Saturn and the Dreamcast did players get arcade-perfect (on account of the architecture) ports of anything outside of Street Fighter.
So, allow me to rephrase. After the Sega Saturn, there have not been any bad fighting games.
**One final note about the early arcade days, regardless of whether the memories were good or bad for you, was that the cost of fighters today, even when coupled with DLC, was nothing compared to what they cost back then. The standard for arcade games was USD$0.50 per play (that's two quarters for those of you who aren't math majors). The console ports started at USD$70, with the more popular titles being closer to $80. So you could play ~140 times in the arcade or an infinite number of times at home (albiet for a bare-bones version of the game) for the same amount. What if the arcade version had a little tweak for balance or to add a new character? That was a brand new game, my friend, another $70 please. Today you can typically pay around $100 to get a brand new game with all of its content, and a sort-of insurance policy for any new content for the next two years. Then of course, there was the golden age of gaming (2001-2007), where you could get a full-featured game (MORE content than what was in the arcades) at a fraction of the price. But I digress, it's the idiot consumers that allowed the current state of affairs to happen.
==Part 1: There are bad fighting games==
That is to say, there were bad fighting games. Back in the days when arcades a) still existed internationally and b) didn't have anything to prove. Entertainment was entertainment and nobody needed to be scientific about anything. You were a shitty little kid happy that for just a minute you were in a mall but not shopping with your parents, or you were a schlub drunk off a few beers looking for something to do other than get in a fight and harass women.
The point of those objectively bad fighters, and most good ones too, was to take your money for all it was worth. The more poorly crafted the game and the cheaper* the AI, the better. Fighting games, until the extinction of the classic arcade, suffered the same major problem that JRPGs do: the stakes are completely different between you and the computer AI. The computer's goal is to waste as much of you time as possible. The less damage you do to them, the more likely you will run out of time (or HP, batteries, patience, what-have-you). Run out of time in an arcade, and you have to pay more to keep playing. For this reason, even seasoned fighting game players can have trouble playing against classic arcade AI; The tit-for-tat that exists between two human opponents doesn't exist.
*this was usually because the AI could pull off powerful moves that you couldn't - less because of your poor execution and more because the inputs and executions don't register properly
Until competent console ports were possible, that last point - playing another human - was the saving grace of fighting games. The arcades still won out (what's better than one dude wasting quarters than two dudes), and people could feed all of their best and worst instincts - competition, bragging rights, mastering something trivial, and so forth. Any game that was mechanically interesting or solid enough survived (Street Fighter, Fatal Fury), along with a few of the trashier cash grabs (Mortal Kombat).
The story of bad fighting games should have ended with the advent of console ports. Good fighters came to consoles and had considerably dumbed-down AI (no need to frustrate players, because at that point they'd already gotten their money**), people could train on their own or play side-by-side with their friends. Any brand new title had to be even better, otherwise who would want to buy it without the hype of an arcade release? The problem was, even if the incentive for people to buy the game and be able to play forever was there, the technology to support the sophisticated arcade-born games was not. Not until the Saturn and the Dreamcast did players get arcade-perfect (on account of the architecture) ports of anything outside of Street Fighter.
So, allow me to rephrase. After the Sega Saturn, there have not been any bad fighting games.
**One final note about the early arcade days, regardless of whether the memories were good or bad for you, was that the cost of fighters today, even when coupled with DLC, was nothing compared to what they cost back then. The standard for arcade games was USD$0.50 per play (that's two quarters for those of you who aren't math majors). The console ports started at USD$70, with the more popular titles being closer to $80. So you could play ~140 times in the arcade or an infinite number of times at home (albiet for a bare-bones version of the game) for the same amount. What if the arcade version had a little tweak for balance or to add a new character? That was a brand new game, my friend, another $70 please. Today you can typically pay around $100 to get a brand new game with all of its content, and a sort-of insurance policy for any new content for the next two years. Then of course, there was the golden age of gaming (2001-2007), where you could get a full-featured game (MORE content than what was in the arcades) at a fraction of the price. But I digress, it's the idiot consumers that allowed the current state of affairs to happen.
