Even the PS3 version of Virtua Fighter 5 would come and go with no online play. Meanwhile, on the PS2, despite the hype over online-capable shooters such as the Socom: Navy Seals series, Killzone, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, online play did not appear in Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 4, Virtua Fighter 4, Soul Calibur 3, Tekken 5, or any of Capcom’s many ports of old Street Fighter titles. Later on, the Xbox ports of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and Guilty Gear X2 #Reload made it somewhat worthwhile for fighting fans to pick up a used Xbox for cheap, but then they were introduced to the follies of poorly thought out online implementation…the most notorious oversight being that if one player yanked his ethernet cord out in the middle of play the match counted as a loss for both players involved, which meant in Xbox Live’s rank/record obsessed environment that every other match was interrupted by players bailing out when things didn’t go their way. To add insult to injury, the Xbox port of CvS2 was produced in such low numbers that copies of the game were almost impossible to find a year or two later, and it was followed up with a port of Marvel vs Capcom 2 which bore no online play, nor any new features of any kind.
Unfortunately, at this point hardcore fighting gamers were mostly still broke from shelling out money for a PS2 in order to play the first version of the game, and the system’s reputation for being heavy on dumb western shooters, and low on tried-and-true substantial Japanese franchises, didn’t help.
In Japan, they got some rudimentary online mode roughly about the time of Marvel vs Capcom 2, but even if you installed a mod chip and imported the Japanese version, you still needed a Japanese phone number to get online (because it was on dialup, HA!) Airy promises and rumors of online play surrounded the oncoming of each successive fighter, and each time gamers such as this author arrived home with their reserved copies on opening day to find that they still weren’t going to get to play online and that Capcom had postponed the debut of internet in fighters for another day.įinally when Microsoft, who had just had the audacity to break from the PC software business and enter console hardware with the XBox (which looked like a rejected Nerf gun design from 1993,) suddenly had the crazy idea to start this new “Live” paid online service, they managed to nag Capcom into releasing an online-capable port of Capcom vs SNK 2 to support its launch. From the start, with ports of PC shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, to later Dreamcast exclusives like Phantasy Star Online and Bomberman Online, all taking advantage of the modem, it was clear that internet was the future of multiplayer gaming, and there was an expectation that developers like Namco and Capcom would be including online play in their titles as soon as possible. Unfortunately, at least in the US, none of these titles ever featured online play. Despite the system’s low sales and eventual death, it was a hotbed for hardcore fighting gamers, with Namco debuting the original Soul Calibur to great acclaim, Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 2 garnering considerable hype, and Capcom releasing one arcade-perfect smashing fighter after another, including the first home versions of Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK, and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.
The tectonic plates of online play in the fighting game world first started their imperceptibly slow crawl with the advent of the Sega Dreamcast and its built-in modem and online service. This has been a long time in coming, as fighting game developers have dragged their feet on this feature for years, unwilling to make any major innovations or steps forward until they’ve milked all the money they possibly can out of their respective franchises just doing the same old. I’m going to go right out and say it: by far the most significant feature of Soul Calibur 4 is its online play.