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Fighting Games That Need a Comeback

Time is a cruel mistress especially in gaming. When developers try new things that don’t quite land at the time, either due to the market at the time or just due to being an odd concept it can just be lost to the mists of time. I take a brief look at a handful of these titles that flew under the radar… After all, there is plenty of online stuff, with games such as Fortnite, and the online casinos like you can find via pennbets.com, it was nice to take a look at some cooperative stuff.

Capcom Fighting Jam

Known as Capcom Fighting Evolution in the US, this 2004 tag-team fighter mashed together characters from multiple generations of Street Fighter, Darkstalkers and Capcom’s less successful Red Earth. The main gimmick involved the characters bringing over the fighting systems from their respective games.

For example the Street Fighter folk have a single-use Super Gauge while their Darkstalkers compatriots have a Nightstalkers-esque three-segment gauge they can use to power up their moves. This makes the mashup feel a little like bashing your favourite toys together almost like a miniature Capcom Smash Bros.

Capcom obviously found great success with their Vs. titles but the idea of mixing game mechanics as well as just characters has a lot of possibilities.

Fighting Vipers

Sega AM2’s quirky series saw two entries which saw ports to the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast respectively but hasn’t been revisited since 2001. Fighting Vipers took the three-button control scheme from the Virtua Fighter series and replaced ring-outs with barriers that kept the fight going to the end.

It introduced characters that at the time could be considered “cool” like Grace, an inline-skater and Picky, a teenage skateboarder with ‘tude. It even had a hair metal guitarist called… Raxel. The series never did that well in the arcades but the home ports did well on their respective systems. It would be nice to see the series make a comeback.

Bloody Roar

Take Virtua Fighter’s punch-kick-block button layout and add a “beast” button that turns your fighter into an anthropomorphic animal version of themselves and you have Bloody Roar. This Hudson/Eighting developed series saw five entries, three arcade entries that showed up on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 along with two console only releases that showed up across Xbox, GameCube and PlayStation 2.

The series focused on a highly adaptive combo system that was easy for newcomers to string moves together whilst having enough flexibility that experts could do some fancy stuff. The character roster started to get a little crazy adding bug and bat people but it was always imaginative. Definitely one of the more visually interesting takes on the formula.

Tech Romancer

Another Capcom entry, this time from 1998, involving giant robots beating the crap out of each other. The robots here are anime-style mecha, designed by the studio behind Macross’ mechanical designs, Studio Nue.

It’s surprising that this theme hasn’t been attempted a lot more than it has as there is something therapeutic about watching big hulking machines bashing each other. Breaking buildings and other bits of scenery dropped power-ups including different weapons and health and armour top-ups.

Ehrgeiz

Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring to give the game its full title was a collaboration between Namco and Square that is mostly known for including Final Fantasy VII characters. It was a full 360 degree fighter that had a focus on wrestling style moves giving it a very unique feel.

It got a port to the PlayStation that included a quest mode in the form of a dungeon crawler, similar in style to Square’s other quirky fighters, Tobal No.1 and 2. It would be fascinating to see Square revisit this concept now they’ve really upped the ante technology wise.

Are there any titles that you’d like to see revisited that have had an extended absence? Let us know in the comments.