Fighting games are dead, and the lack of evolution in the genre caused me to lose interest in new fighting games years ago, but I still play some older ones from time to time.

Specifically, I still play Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992), Street Fighter III: Third Strike (1999), Street Fighter Alpha 3: Saikyo Dojo (1999) (the version of Alpha 3 that debuted on the Dreamcast), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000) and Guilty Gear X2 (2002). Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting is legendary, and the others still appeal to me for one reason or another. They all have perfect or better conversions on the PlayStation or PlayStation 2, so I don't have to go about connecting obsolete consoles to my television set or track down arcade boards to play what I consider the best versions of these games.

But I can no longer play these games without pain. I used fighting pads from Ascii (now Sega) and NubyTech to play my fighting games on my PlayStation 2, but with my PlayStation 2 traded in for a discount on my PlayStation 3, and the PlayStation 3 having no PlayStation/PS2 controller ports, I am now forced to use a standard controller for fighting games, which is difficult and painful--I once got blisters on my thumbs playing the original Guilty Gear with a PlayStation Dualshock controller.

PlayStation 3 fighting sticks and PlayStation/PS2 controller USB adaptors are available, but reports from around the Internet say that they work only with PlayStation 3 games, so these things will not allow me to play my legacy-platform fighting games without pain. (If someone can tell me otherwise, tell me otherwise.)

It seems that if I want to play my fighting games without pain I have to buy PlayStation 3-specific versions of them when they become available. (And they will become available--with the exception of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, due to licensing issues. The Street Fighter brand has enough nostalgia value to guarantee publisher Capcom will re-release its games on new platforms for years and years, and Sega is sure to make yet another minor update to Guilty Gear X2 in the future, and by then the PlayStation 2 will no longer be viable.)

But will these unannanounced but surely forthcoming new versions of old games be any good? Capcom's recent record with Street Fighter is uneven. Street Fighter Alpha Anthology (2006) and the Street Fighter III: Third Strike half of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection (2004) are perfect or better conversions, but the Street Fighter II games in Capcom ****cs Collection (2005) and Street Fighter Anniversary Collection along with Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting for Xbox Live Arcade (2006) make me glad that I still have my copy of Street Fighter Collection 2 (1998 ) for the original PlayStation. And Guilty Gear Series developer Arc System Works has yet to release a PlayStation 3 game, so it is unknown what level of quality to expect from a PlayStation 3 Guilty Gear game.

I am willing to pay for these games again--I've purchased most of them multiple times already, so what's one more time--but they need to be just as good or better than the ones I currently own. There is no excuse for game publishers releasing inferior versions of older games on newer, more powerful hardware, and I will not reward them for such (lack of) efforts. It would be a shame to have to give up on games I have played for years and years because I can no longer play good versions of them with appropriately-designed controllers, but if that's what happens, it's just as bad for me as it is for publishers.