I grew up playing games on joysticks, and then joypads, with single buttons. Home computer developers working with this often came up with quite inventive control schemes based on combinations of button and directions. Think Sensible Soccer and the range of types of spin that could be applied to each kick with a combined input at the right moment. In arcades, meanwhile, more buttons were already the norm, even if something like Street Fighter II did a lot with quarter and half rotations of the directional stick alongside its six buttons. Over time consoles (and PC controllers) brought in more things to press too, with multiple shoulder buttons and two analogue sticks the norm by the 2000s. Then Nintendo successfully went a very different route with motion control, and that decision resulted in its own wider echoes.
Some of those echoes were in the sad trombone sounds of awkward PS3 motion control sequences like Killzone 2’s insistence on making you tilt to turn wheels. A happier variety went cross-platform including to the motion-control-free XBox 360. Skate in 2007 was a key entry for that approach, using directional inputs on the right stick as inputs corresponding to the movements your character made on their skateboard. It achieved the same idea of the player’s movements being reflected on screen within a more established setup. This type of control wasn’t strictly in response to the Wii — Tiger Woods PGA Tour had been honing in on the same idea for a while longer — but it’s hard to see its growing popularity as a coincidence.
For EA’s boxing game Fight Night Round 4, the biggest change over the previous games in the series is the introduction of just such a control scheme. Left stick moves your boxer, right stick moves their hands. To do quick jabs, you jab the right stick up and across. For an uppercut, you have to go down and then around and upwards in a somewhat shoryuken fashion. Do it with a press of the right shoulder button too, and it lands a heavy haymaker. You can choose to switch to the old button controls too, but as someone coming into it new I didn’t see any reason to want to. The addition of a level of technique and motion adds to the game, making it less of a dry experience than it might otherwise feel.
This is particularly important because for all that Fight Night Round 4 includes its share of razzle-dazzle, and of gnarly close-ups of guys getting punched in the face, it is keener on boxing as a slow and tactical sport. Going all-out attack rarely does much good, as much as the commentators work themselves into a state of excitement about it (“one of the best rounds you’ll ever see!” comes up almost every match). The game’s stamina meter means you have to preserve your effort, and goes together with an emphasis on dodging and counter-attacking as the way to get the most powerful hits. It rewards patience, and the limited opportunities for successful attacks make their kinetic nature even more satisfying.
That change alone is not what made Fight Night Round 4 a breakthrough success, though. Partly it was surely just the usual slow, tactical accumulation of momentum, of finding gaps, which many an EA Sports series had managed before it. Another aspect is the status of the sport in the UK. Like its predecessors, Fight Night Round 4 lets you create fantasy fights between iconic boxers of different eras, with Muhammad Ali versus Mike Tyson depicted on the box, but it also includes some current contenders. In 2007, between Fight Night rounds 3 and 4, Welsh super-middlewight champion Joe Calzaghe won the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year poll, the first boxer to do so since Lennox Lewis eight years earlier. With Ricky Hatton also finishing third behind Calzaghe, it was a popular time for British boxing, and Calzaghe and Hatton (as well as Lewis) appear in Fight Night Round 4.
The last potential factor I notice is that Street Fighter IV, UFC Undisputed 2009 and Fight Night Round 4 all reached the top of the charts within the space of six months. They all had quite different histories, approaches and reasons to be there, but at the same time it is ultimately three different games about two people beating each other up. Just as there is a link to be made between the Wii’s proof of concept and less overt forms of control mimicking action, there’s something to be said for disparate games acting as each others’ proof of concept for online one-on-one fighting, and for a game bringing those movements together in the ring.
Top of the charts for week ending 27 June 2009:
Top of the charts for week ending 4 July 2009:
