This is only loosely related to games, but I have to get it out of my head.

Remember, in February 2004, right after the Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus, when Howard Dean gave his victory speech for coming in third place by screaming the names of U.S. states and ending with a high pitched screech?

Watching it live on CNN--the U.S. channel, somehow I doubt the international CNN carried the speech live--I thought Dean sounded an awful lot like MD.45 vocalist and harmonica player Lee Ving screaming names of U.S. cities in the song "My Town."

Ahhhh. Getting that out of my head feels good.

What does this have to do with games? Mark Masoumi posted an audio commentary on The Bishop of Battle, a forgotten made for TV special about some guy played by Emilio Estevez obsessed with a made up video game of the same name (The Bishop of Battle, not Emilio Estevez), in which he (Mark Masoumi, not Emilio Estevez) said he didn't know the name of the band Estevez was listening to at one point in the special but would look into it.

I knew, so I replied that the band was Fear (which shared with MD.45 Lee Ving as its vocalist and harmonica player) and the song was "I Love Living in the City."

Fear reminded me of MD.45, which reminded me of the Dean Scream, which reminded me that the Dean Scream reminded me of "My Town.".

If you haven't heard of MD.45, you're not alone. It was an obscure punk metal side project of forgotten 1980's punk band Fear's Lee Ving and thrash pioneer Megadeth's Dave Mustaine. The band released a single album, The Craving, in 1996, which saw limited distribution, and never toured. (A remixed and remastered [read: ruined] re-release of The Craving was made available in July 2004, but, among other changes, Lee Ving's vocals were replaced by Dave Mustaine's.)

With GameSpot executive editor Greg Kasavin mentioning in his latest blog post that fighting games never surpassed Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, merely getting more flashy and complicated, now feels like a good time to post a February entry from my personal blog declaring the genre dead.

The fighting game genre is dead.

There hasn't been a truly new fighting game in years. Everything is a sequel, remix, or compilation. And calling the sequels sequels is pushing it; they add a few new characters and make minor changes and additions, but they're otherwise the same as their predecessors.

The genre refuses to evolve. It remains the only console-centric genre to rely on the digital directional pad instead of analog thumbsticks. Almost every fighting game still plays like Street Fighter II (1991) or Virtua Fighter (1993). Since the new games play like the old ones, making "improvements" means adding new things on top of already complicated games, making them too complex to attract new players and appealing only to existing fans.

Most attempts at doing something different fail either because what makes them different isn't implemented well or hardcore fighting game fans refuse to accept them (or both). Instead of attempting to better implement what made the different games different, developers choose to drop those changes in the followups, making them no different from their previous predecessors.

As existing fans lose interest and since new fans can't take their places, the market for fighting games shrinks and fewer and fewer are made.

And why do most 2D fighting games look like they were made in the mid-1990's? More importantly, why do most new 2D fighting games use sprites ripped from decade-old games?

But while the fighting genre is dead, its spirit remains. Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, wrote in a 1999 column (that inspired this entry) that adventure games were dead in part because key elements have been absorbed by the other game genres. The same now applies to fighting games. What made fighting games fighting games--deep combat systems and multiple, differentiated, playable characters--have been in other genres for years.

Perhaps the fighting genre can be revived in the future. Adventure games have made something of a comeback recently with Indigo Prophecy and the upcoming Dreamfall, which play nothing like the adventure games of old, getting the most buzz. Maybe, years from now, a new, unique fighting game will do the same for its genre.

I've dabbled in portable games over the years, but after a few months I always came to the conclusions that 1.) portable games are weak rehashes of console games, and 2.) little screens hurt my eyes.

But with the Nintendo DS's two screens, one touch-sensitive, and microphone allowing for games impossible on consoles and disproving my first conclusion, I broke down and re-joined the portable arena yesterday.

What convinced me? Oddly, a game making only token use of the DS's unique features: New Super Mario Bros.

New Super Mario Bros. may not be innovative, but it does do the other thing that can still excite me about a video game: it significantly improves upon what I have already played. This is not a new Super Mario Land; New Super Mario Bros. is a legitimate successor to Super Mario World.

New Super Mario Bros. wasn't the first DS game to catch my attention. Kirby: Canvas Curse tempted me last year, but it was only one game. Not enough to justify buying a system, especially one I thought would strain my eyes. Several other interesting DS games followed, adding to the temptation. New Super Mario Bros. was merely my breaking point.

So yesterday I pre-ordered a DS Lite and copy of Big Brain Academy from an Internet retailer, bought a copy of New Super Mario Bros. from the local Circuit City, and ordered copies of Brain Age, Kirby: Canvas Curse, Meteos, and Puyo Pop Fever from other Internet retailers.

That's six games plus the hardware required to play them. Quite an investment.

Now I pray I enjoy these games enough to ignore the eye strain. The DS is not just one little screen hurting my eyes; it's two.