This is not a genre with a deep well from which to dredge. It is a shallow pool, and from it you must harvest material that is equally appealing to both the gamer that mentions Street Fighter in the same breath as UFC: Undisputed and the otaku that transplanted the gel-formed breasts from his anime mouse pad onto his fight stick “for wrist support”. We need more than the same basic mechanic with different characters.

First, a question springs to mind. Where are the original games? Man can not live on bread alone, and nostalgia is certainly the comfort carbohydrate of gaming. A new Marvel game, along with remastered revivals of old favorites, aren’t going to be getting handwritten hate letters, but we need more on our menu than being fed snippets via Twitter in order to excite us, allowing Capcom to gauge interest in a new Darkstalkers game.

I do not share the rosy Zoltar’s fortune of those that would say the genre’s destiny is secure. I see developers drunk on the excitement of initial successes that breach expectation, pushing product to the market to exploit a moment as opposed to laying cement for a foundation. There are several troubling trends I see developing, and they need to be addressed.

There are some that see this tent revival of traditional fighting games as being naturally inoculated against a reccurence of the fate Oni-san and his contemporaries met when last they rode high on the hadoken hog. On its release, Street Fighter II blazed trails through uncharted realms... then faded into the sunset. Today, two dimensional fighters make their return, and they do it inside the arena of competitive gaming, a lucrative first world pursuit of pop culture mania nursed to robust health by games that followed after the fall of Capcom’s arcade empire. Street Fighter rises from the phoenix’s ashes amidst a world filled with players who are familiar with the sort of setting where fighting games shine brightest: structured player versus player contests. The idea of a tournament for games is no longer a curious cultural novelty. They are a new dogma for entire generations of dudes fueled by copious servings of yellow number five.

Street Fighter 4’s Bieber-esque level of success has re-shaped the landscape of the industry’s present day. Companies, including Capcom, are launching all Vipers in an attempt to get more two-dimensional fighting games onto the playing field, seeking to capitalize on a lightning-in-a-bottle convergence of genre virgins and grizzled veterans. Someone even released the eldritch seals on Ed Boon’s casket filled with native Romanian soil and set him free into the general population. 1992 has risen from the grave to shamble and feast upon the flesh of the living.

There is a lot of excitement about the future of fighting games pumping through the ventilation, and it has a unique musk. Me? I’m not so excited. I see another dark age if the developers, especially Capcom, stay the course. I see leeches in our future.

For those of us invested in virtual worlds where warfare of a modern nature is eschewed in favor of settling global disputes with martial arts tournaments, it wasn’t a bad show. Advance impressions of “Street Fighter X Tekken” seem universally positive. One comparison I read exhumed the jurassic bones of cult staple “Project Justice”. News that Street Fighter: Third Strike’s Online Edition would feature netcode by GGPO and YouTube sharing integration were met with a rousing chorus of God save the Queen, cheerio, pip pip, etc.

Once again, the industry circus has picked clean the carcass of Los Angeles, leaving behind naught save a smear of gore while supplying us, the remora we are, with that sweetest of sustenances: preview information. Good news, everyone! If you were haunted with foreboding, at a loss for what you might purchase as a Christmas gift for your girlfriend’s grandmother in calender year 2012, Microsoft and the Kinect have got you covered.

Tempting a Roman crucifixion... do we really, truly need time and resources to be spent on developing a next generation Power Stone? Better, instead, to create something that uses what we know and combines it with what we've learned since the days of the Sega Genesis. Fighting games are fun, but there could be so much more to creating them for the modern age than taking the old formula and slapping glossy varnish to its sides. Social media, online multiplayer, new peripherals; there are so many avenues to explore, and none of those things were around the first time you stopped staring at gawky girls long enough to learn to throw a dragon punch.

Now is the time to create. There is an important opportunity here, massive and slow, just waiting to be brought down and have its succulent meats feasted upon. Now is the time to draw in a new legion with the genesis of a beloved new franchise. Maybe even two. How reliable is the presence of the larger community in our corner of the marketplace when the games we have to offer are, at their very core, all the same game?

If you can think it, it’s probably been done. Now more than ever, developers have to get creative in order to stave off bed sores for the genres within which they work, especially within the genres on the more narrow end of the scale. When everyone you know has looked down the barrel of a gun from the first person and fired away at Nazis and aliens, it’s time to swipe some RPG elements, toss them into the mix. Then you can watch astounded as you create a new form of digitized heroin delivered via molded plastic, leaving behind only the red-eyed souls of the damned to forego sleep in order to “prestige” and start Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill once more.

Here’s a line that sounds like it should be uttered in a sterile conference room, but we will not survive the rigid adherence to traditional dynamics. It is no longer sufficient to take two characters, place them on a plane of two dimensions, give them a handful of input commands, and lord over the proceedings with some form of unique gimmick mechanic - a cancel/combo extender, comeback mechanism, or some combination thereof. In order to cement the presence of an audience that is increasingly afflicted with attention spans better suited on adolescent boys, more has to be offered as reward than the simple dopamine generation of winner versus loser.

It may seem common sense to say that the best way facilitate long-term health is to, surprise, create content that people want to engage with long-term, but apparently, conventional wisdom fucked common sense’s boyfriend and now the two just spend the day making their mutual friends feel awkward by finding new ways to call each other fat on Facebook. In order to keep people interested in these things, we need to be given a little heroin of our own.

Looking at Marvel vs. Capcom 3 reveals that someone in Capcom HQ realized this. There a lot of little unlockables lurking behind corners, but the presentation is being fed strawberry-infused air at an oxygen bar when you’re starving. It’s pleasant, and there is certainly something going on, but you need so much more. Why implement a system wherein I earn points for my match performance when I’ve achieved all I can with those points after casually playing around with the game for an hour?

Here we collide teeth first with the divide between western and eastern design philosophies while somehow managing to get quagmired in the awful common ground between them: infinite amounts of energy for wasting time creating more of the same. Breaking out of the mold of tradition and doing a bit of genre bending would be a great start to putting down some insurance on the longevity of our new-again hobby. What if you could unlock an alternate costume for Dante by landing a 100% combo? What if using Magneto’s super to land a knock out 50 times allowed you to change some of the properties on that super? What if you could design a custom logo to plaster on the side of your Sentinel? Just because I would draw a huge penis on Sentinel’s arm doesn’t mean everyone would.

Compounding the frustration of sweaty-palmed eagerness to grope beneath the shirt of games we loved when we were teenagers and antiquated design concepts is an inability to effectively leverage the strengths of the modern feature list. The spotlight of broad appeal is shining brightly on our corner of the universe, but how long will it remain when we are being given games whose multiplayer support is so poor you would have an easier time finding a good fight online playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters on your NES?

Having a ready opponent with just a few button presses feels like the day you stumbled across masturbation: when it works, you’re left wondering how anyone did anything other than this before. Instead, we are given bad interfaces, unintuitive options, and poor netcode. I would be remiss to allow any reader to think this is a Japanese problem, lest they forget the upper decker NetherRealm gave us as a gift. Fighting game developers seem incapable of fathoming the mysteries of the internet. Did the team responsible for the online mulitplayer component of Smash Brothers: Brawl become a journeying torture squad available for contract work at major development houses?

You’re going to have a hard time remaining relevant in an environment where the primary mode of competition - and in some cases, the only functional one - is face-to-face play. Yes, fighting games really do belong in hotel ballrooms, being played by two people sitting side by side in uncomfortable chairs. What are you supposed to do the rest of the time? Well and good to create a game requiring constant social contact for players in a place like Southern California. Something altogether different for the same game lost in the wilds of Montana.

It is for these gamers, the players without ready access to arcades and the quality of competition such settings breed, that it becomes so important to embrace innovation and foster re-playability. Losing the interest of players whose options leave them seeking the games that perform better in their native habitat - the perpetual puppet show of racism and homophobia that is Xbox Live - is another efficient method of engineering doom.

Finally, lest I sound contradictory for spending time arguing the case for features that do more to integrate casual gamers, care needs to be taken to assess just to whom the offerings are being targeted. Yes, we need Johnny Q. Ritalin in order to bolster our ranks. There is, however, a lingering inevitability. No matter how well things are handled, even if Aksys developed a game where the “booby ladies” stepped out of the television and into your lap, there is going to be population attrition. We stand a good chance of losing players no matter what happens.

The current titles making the rotation in consoles and arcades are well-designed from the perspective that they are equally adept in pleasing both casuals and crusty farts. No man is ever in danger of becoming demoralized by more skilled opponents when there is an X-Factor left to triumphantly activate with smug self-assuredness: here comes five bars of jump back Akuma hypers, asshole.

However, there is a large contingent of the faithful, those bleary-eyed morlocks that remained true to the arcade during the Ides of March between CvS2 and Street Fighter 4, that see comeback mechanics and lose interest. These players must not be pushed aside in favor of the arrival of fair weather consumers. The conversion of these come latelies into dependable fans should rightfully be priority one. Following closely behind on that task list is designing games so as to not run off the people that fed you quarters when everyone else slow danced with Master Chief. If America’s new love affair with dive kicks runs its course, who will remain? When Street Fighter II sparked off an over-saturation that eventually saw two dimensional fighting games demoted to novelty status, a core group of fans were the link that allowed these games to return to prominence. Running those very same fans off now means that should we go back to being the video game equivalent of opening for Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth at a county fair, there won’t be a third chance at glory.

There is a lot of promise on parade. Quality games are being made. The community is growing. But allowing things to continue as they are will see things slowly fade away, and I don’t think that’s anything anyone wants. Not in the least. Whether you’re one of the folks that would love to see fighting games featured alongside Starcraft or Counter-Strike on the world stage, or you’re a guy that simply wants to have a steady supply of fun fighters until the day you die, we all have an interest in the years to come.

It will be, however, almost impossible to cultivate that potential without addressing the issues at hand. Consider this an intervention. It is 2011. Your game should have the internets, and they should be good. You can’t expect to attract new fans and keep the attention of old ones with a steady diet of dinosaur eggs. It’s time to stop eating the seed corn and put some of it in the ground.

Now, please, someone grab that silver crucifix and help me seal Boon back in his tomb.

Fighting games need their Modern Warfare moment.Incorporating aspects of other genres: exploration, gathering, upgrading, those present true possibility for increasing viality.The guys that kept the homefires burning moved on to... who even knows what a Third Strike arcade goblin does at home.