Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever I have some time, I want to spend just a little bit of time discussing an oft-overlooked, yet very important aspect of fighting games---the ambiance.

Yeah, gameplay is really important. Interesting characters are a must. At the same time, a dissonant or unpleasing setting can make even a game with great gameplay and characters a challenge to really enjoy.

So, by ambiance, what I really mean are the stages on which the fights take place, and the music that accompanies them. There have been some really beautiful works of music and art as stages in the genre, but there's also been some real clunkers. For some games, it's literally enough to break the game for me when gameplay and characters are fine (Marvel vs. Capcom 2 being the most notable example here; bland, boring stages and horribly inappopriate music make the game take a serious nosedive in the rankings as far as I'm concerned.)

What I'd like to do is take some of the most important games in the genre and talk about my favorite pieces of music and stages... as well as the ones that really need to go. This new series of posts will start... tonight? tomorrow? later this week?

Soon, anyway. Complete with screenshots that I'm going to crib from various online sources, if possible.

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