October 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
I have been working as a content manager for almost three years now at Overloaded and in that time I have seen dozens of fighting games coming into my inbox. Fighting games for consoles have always been a huge success with famous fighting series like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken and many more, so it makes sense.
As a collector of (handheld) game consoles, a few months back I managed to get my hands on an old almost worn down Neo Geo Pocket from arcade legend SNK. I got attached to the little thing in no time and spend many hours playing games like Metal Slug and even BaseBall Stars. As the Neo Geo Pocket pretty much failed big-time in Europe against the GameBoy, it’s pretty hard to get games. However my friend Ping Fang in the USA mentioned it was easier to get some good games over there. After a few weeks he managed to get hold of the most famous fighter games for the console like Fatal Fury and SNK vs. Capcom. While playing those games with their limited use of colours and pixels, not even to speak about the limitation of just 2 action buttons, I started looking back at some of the mobile fighters I tested.
Why did most of them fail to attract my attention while they where technically more advanced then those SNK games? The answer is probably simple. Just about all of them try to create a fighting game with complex moves that need a lot of button pushing as we are used to on the current consoles. With the limited device input capabilities, that is a pure nightmare! This while a SNK game like King of Fighters bases it’s choice of moves mainly on the position of the characters. So while you for example normally punch with the A button when standing in front of your opponent, it can turn into a shoulder throw when standing at the same spot as your opponent. Now that is smart thinking as the game suddenly offers many more moves. Also systems like the build up of power for causing even more damage to your opponent really help in creating a better experience.
So what would be the ideal configuration of a fighter game? I recon using the D-Pad for moving of course where a D-Pad with 8 directions is perfect. The 3 and 6 button could be used for punching and kicking for right handed people, while the 1 and 4 would do the same for left handed gameplay. Even more ideal would probably be a device where you can play horizontal. The D-Pad under one finger and the other ones on the softbuttons on the other side of the device. The SonyEricsson models like the W550i would be great for that (though the D-Pad is not the best one). But what if the device would not support an 8 directional D-pad? Well, who presses down and left or down and right at the same time? So you can move to the normal replacement buttons like using 1 for a jump to the left side, 2 for jumping up etc. and use the 0 and # or 7 and * as action buttons.
I’m not a programmer, so I cannot evaluate the possibilities to implement this on let’s say 80% of the devices on the market. However what I do hope is that game developers try to pay more attention to the user interaction instead of pumping up their games with to many possibilities. At the same time, I hope device vendors will put more attention to implementing good D-Pads that allow fluid play. Face it, the Gizmondo and N-Gage showed us that nobody want’s to use a console for calling, but the consumer does want to use it’s mobile phone for gaming!
