Arcade Vs. Online: Fate Of Two Worlds

Every week I’m always reminded just how lucky I am to be in New York City that we have a pretty lively arcade scene thanks to Chinatown Fair. As a member of the fighting game community, I catch myself wondering often what my life would be like if their was no Chinatown Fair. Nearly each and every week the best players descend on lower Manhattan to slug it out in one another in Super Street Fighter IV or Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Friendships are made, rivalries are born, this is where you go to hone your skills or maybe try out that new combo you were tinkering around with in training mode back home. It’s pretty scary to think that the Arcade scene is non-existent in the majority of the country now. It‘s not like back in it‘s hey day when every deli and Laundromat had a Super Turbo and Mortal Kombat machine.

Playing games with real live people... awesome...

So what have we got in it’s place? Well online play of course. But online play will never hold a candle to an arcade community. Online may work it’s magic for those with a affinity for FPS’s, but it really cant replace what arcades have done for the fighting games with concerns to building a scene.

There’s many good things about online play, don’t get me wrong. You can almost always find a match at anytime of day or night. Unlike arcades, which have business hours, if you feel like chucking some hadoken’s at 4am, your set. Not to mention your roster of opponents opens greatly as you can fight against anyone in the world, this however is a double edge sword. Now your open to fighting many more scrubs or casual players, so there’s a dip in the quality in play. I run into Shoryu-happy Kens, and button-mashing Balrogs so much I don’t even want to touch online half the time. However, usually, if your at an arcade, and someone is willing to put there money in the machine to play against you in front of a crowd, you can expect to get in some good matches.

A glaring issue that comes with any online game is of course lag. It’s effects are so game-changing, that most players don’t even recognize playing online as actually playing. There’s good reason for this, due to the fact that many of these games require reactions that have to be thought of and executed within a 60^th of a second, no way to expect that to go smoothly playing someone on the other siode of the country. This sorely splits up the scene. An entire generation of people, who may want to seriously get into the tournament circuit, see online as the only way to play. Due to the fact they probably haven’t even seen an arcade cabinet in their life, you can‘t really blame them, but it‘s just not possible to react the way you need to with even the smallest fraction of lag.

My biggest concern though is social aspect. That comes with having an arcade community is just something that will never, ever be able to be replicated by online play. Yeah you got your headsets and you can talk smack during a match but it’s not the same as if the guy is standing right next to you, in fact Im sure most people would be less incline to talk reckless if this were the case. The anonymity which online gives has it‘s pros and cons as well. You don’t know whose on the other side of the screen, and while that might be a good thing for the 12-year-old who rage quit on you and then has the nerve to spam hatemail, you actually miss out on a lot because of it. For the most part online it’s one and done, you get in a few, you wine or lose, and that’s it. Aside from a really well played match, or a quick “GG’s”, generally you never hear from the person again. At an arcade though all it takes is usually is to run into the same player two or three times before you start to talking to each other about the game. From there the branches of a whole network come together. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else, and eventually, everybody knows everybody. You exchange numbers, set up practice sessions, organize tournaments. Before you know it your having dinner together in large groups, having heated roundtable debates with top players. Discussing the world’s mysteries, you know, like whose cheaper in MvC2, Magneto or Storm? Or are option selects too good in SSFIV? You cant get that with online.

This is what the current generation considers as

If I was growing up now with games and the lack of Arcades, I am positive my life would be completely different. I would have never gotten in the scene, met the people I’ve met, probably wouldn’t be here writing this rant. How lucky indeed.