For those that don't know GGPO is a middleware that allows you to play games online for free. Not any game though, only the ones they have implemented/support. But from many months ago hackers started to DDOS the servers for some reason and now the service has been down for so long people are starting to say it's gone for good.

But fear not because a spiritual successor by the name "FIGHTCADE" came from out the aches. The middleware is based on GGPO but with many improvements like: it supports way more games, it has a coherent interface, it has chat, country flags to kno the user's provenance and inviting people to play requires no effort since is all based on invitation and Nat. But because is Nat if your modem or internet service is too secure or strict, playing online will be a pain since you'll most like have to do port forwarding and stuff....

Now the only problem Fightcade has is that because it's new not many people know about it and it peaks at only 400 users during the weekends. And those 400 hundreds are split between Street Fighter III (mostly Americans) and KOF 98 (the rest of the world), so there's not much variety. Yesterday I had to wait for like 2 hours for someone to appear to play a bit of The Last Blade 2, and even though the guy was from Brazil the matches were pretty smooth. In fact, playing Samurai Shodown here is way better than the SNK version on PS3 that lags like hell.

This is a good article that talks more in detail about Fightcade and now that we are close to Evo, don't you feel like playing some fighting games? http://www.usgamer.net/articles/a-fighting-chance-to-live-the-story-of-fightcade

BTW, those screens are mine and they look a bit rough because I played the games without any filter or scanlines, and on top of it I'm stretching the image to 16:9. The first screen is The Last Blade 2, the other 2 are Kizuna Encounter. The latter one is highly recommended for casuals because the game has a 4 button set-up, the combo system has a very forgiving timing, lots of normal cancels too so you can link up some decent combos without much effort.