It’s a daily crusade of mine to comment against the lame conceptions of my geeky brethren. As I’ve mentioned before, the dorks of our kind flood the community with their cancerous wish lists. I understand that video game companies like Capcom monitor the web in order to assess what their audience desires in order to determine the next product to be successfully unleashed upon the consuming masses.

Here’s the thing: I love democracy and capitalism. They’re some of the best social and economical systems known to mankind because they exercise the freedom of choice. They’re also natural companions, symbiotically taking the will of the people and directing the course of the future based on popular demand. The unfortunate flaw to both of those systems, however, is that if your society is driven by the majority rule and your popular majority is dominated by idiots, a lot of poor decisions are going to be made.

What’s worse is that those who are less refined also tend to be the most vocal of any depraved community. To quote Plato, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something.” Ergo, video game companies observe this type of feedback and recess the growth of innovation in lieu of pumping out lines of crappy sequels. Each episode designed with the intent of appealing to the lowest common denominator. The more a product caters to the mainstream, obviously the more successfully salable it’s likely to be.

That said, I take kin to Batman in that I recognize that I’m waging a war that I may never win. Yet I feel that even if I don’t speak out, it insures 100% that my voice will never be heard. I hope that while it may act more slowly, my nuggets of reason will virally spread to others so that the enlightened minority do not fade into extinction. That’s not at all to say that I always know what’s best, but I’d like to think I can sniff out a bad idea when it presents itself. I don’t know every direct path to greatness, but I can keep some lemmings from stampeding off of a cliff.

During my adventures within the fighting game community, I’ve been part in many fanboy conversations exploring the fantasies of crossover games, even before Capcom’s “Vs.” line came into existence. There was the usual pitch of a Street Fighter Vs. Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs. DC, Street Fighter Vs. Nintendo…and more than once, “They should make a Street Fighter Vs. Anime!”

Even in the mid-90s when the popularity of Japanese culture had not yet exploded, I felt that simply pitting the world warriors against a general idea such as “anime” was painting a pretty broad brush. It may not have been well-understood, but anime comes from more than one place, thus assembling any strong cast of intellectual properties into one product would require some expensive (not to mention risky) collaboration of licensees. I struck many a fanboy with a rolled up newspaper for suggesting such nonsense.

Lo and behold, 15 years later, we see the production of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, a title which more or less realizes the idea “Street Fighter Vs. Anime”. Within the same year, we’re also set to witness the release of Mortal Kombat Vs DC Universe, as day-late-and-a-dollar-short as that concept may be.Whether or not these titles add value to the genre, they do deliver a clear message: I done got told.

Yet I fight on… Speaking out with not only my words, but also my wallet (cuz I ain’t gonna enable these trends by buying that garbage). Whether I debunk crossover ideas or the perversion of simple character design, I’m out there somewhere. Cuz what else am I going to do with my time than bicker about video games over the Internet?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Games, Rants, Street Fighter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.