I hope to one day go to Ground Kontrol again. If I ever am in the area again, I'll have to hit yall up.
I’ll be workin’ the VGHF booth, come by!
Life has been busy and stressful and I haven’t had much time for long-form entertainment, but I have been dipping into some fighting games I’ve never played, which led to some excellent short-burst gaming.
I’ve played around a bit with all the numbered Sam Sho entries (1-6, still haven’t gotten to V Special or V Perfect) and I can confidently say III is my favorite right now. I love the high damage (even for a series known for high damage). There’s intensity and purpose to every action and the sound design/visuals add to the pop of every blocked or landed blow. I played through as Shizumaru. Something so satisfying about bopping someone with an umbrella and taking away half their life. I know III is not usually considered one of the best ones, but I thought everything came together beautifully in this one.
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I next wanted to dip into two games I know @exodus has mentioned as favorites.
I played around a bit with Asuka 120% Burning Fest Limited (not Limit Over, which is I believe considered the true favorite around here, but I wanted to get a feel for the base version first). I love the simplicity of the controls and how fluid all the animations are. This game has a unique friction to it and I think I started to get why it’s a cult favorite. Attacks come out fast and wild and you can stack hits in interesting ways. The ability to juggle and follow your opponent in wild patterns reminded me of the best parts of Super Smash Bros. 64 and Melee. I also like the supers in this game because they cancel each other out. Weirdly reminded me of Bangai-O in that you almost want to bait a super out of your opponent and then counter it with your own sometimes. The ability to clash attacks and avoid damage by attacking is just really cool and should be in more games.
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Last was Garouden Breakblow Fist or Twist. At first, I thought this was a real garbage game. At the beginning of matches, you and your opponent have so much stamina that you’re just walking through each other’s attacks, both of you firing away full-blast with no hit stun. Soon, though, the pace slows down and this becomes a brutal strategy game of limbs. I love the emphasis on damaging specific body parts in order to maximize your damage. The mix of strikes and grapples works well, too. This is honestly a brilliant game and the different characters are fun to fight against. I had to figure out some of the tricky ones and use bizarre tactics to end up winning. Just buckets of fun. Tactile, dense, delicious game feel. My favorite moment was leg-locking some guy in a pink bear costume. For some reason, I can’t get the picture to upload here, but it happened and it made my day.
I always liked Samurai Shodown III. I thought the overall aesthetic and redrawn characters were rad.
Today is the 30th anniversary of Mortal Kombat. Here's to another 30!
RESSHOUMANIA
https://twitter.com/pattheflip/status/1580287724556165120
I finally cracked into the educated gentleperson’s fighting game primer
I appreciate the work, it's very good. I'll save it forever and pass it out to anyone who needs it. I might someday even print it out, bind it, and read it many more times.. I like the philosophy that's there. I like comparisons to working out, honing your mind and body. I like doing those things in real life, but not for fighting.
I feel like it is so painfully accurate. I'm accepting that fighting games may never click with me.
The article verifies the exact reasons I'd found that I don't enjoy fighting games.... this is just about my personal feelings, sorry.
I want to play them for the art, not to give someone an unpleasant experience. I don't get much joy from dominance or competition in that context. I can dominate at smash bros., but I don't feel good when I make someone else unhappy by styling on them-- I just feel really bad. I want to challenge myself, not someone else. I don't want to ever be somebody else's problem or obstacle...
I just want to play these games in single player mode and experience the story and eye candy. I guess that's as easy as looking up the optimal strategy. I'll do that and play through all the games in all the series I wanna play at some point, maybe I'll glean something from that.
I think it turns out that I *got it* all along, that my skill was always there, but my will to dominate never was. I'm glad that this article verifies that it wasn't something that I was missing, that I had already succeeded trying to understand fighting games.... I understand them... and cannot interface with them on a psychological level.
I'll continue to keep an open mind, open to any of that ever changing.. ♥
@treefroggy With a friend of mine I used to talk about how this is the satsui no hado, or the “killing intent”. When playing fighting games the drive to better yourself needs to gel with the fact that not everyone gets to win here. You don’t have to hate or want to disrespect your opponent, but you should want to beat them. Not everyone is going to want that, and I think that’s okay. I hope you find your path beyond the battle.
@treefroggy This article belies a sort of core split in what a fighting game is to me, that being the two tugs of people who play it like Chess vs people who play it like a game at a barbecue.
The Chess people want to push down as hard as possible on the existing systems and get the kind of experience they can only have from other people also pushing down as hard as they can. They want to swim on the bottom of the sea with other people who are also diving as deep as they can. There’s beauty there, for sure! I love a game that lets me do all the things a competitively played fighting game lets me do. I like to learn, I like to be tested, I like to ponder and theorycraft and experiment etc. But that’s not the only way to engage with them, and I think it’s probably not the way most people even want to.
The barbecue people are still playing the same game at a 30,000 foot view, but they’re not concerned with the pressure. They don’t want to push as hard as possible and see what happens, they want to play around and throw some fireballs and beat their friends with all the effort and vigor of a backyard badminton game. It’s fun because you’re both trying to win, but you’re not playing explicitly to explore the depths of what badminton is; you’re there because badminton is fun to play. This strikes me as the way a vast, vast majority of people actually interact with fighting games as a genre. We just don’t talk about that part of it very much in enthusiast spaces because competitive takes all the air in the conversation. People who go online to talk about fighting games don’t talk about how Sub-Zero can throw an ice ball and that’s cool, they do it go talk about how his ice ball is a reasonable reaction to a poorly spaced jump from your opponent.
To really truly click with a fighting game then is to find someone to play backyard badminton with. You pick some characters who look cool, briefly scan their move lists, and try some stuff out. Maybe neither one of you can consistently do a dragon punch, and that’s fine! Sometimes you get it, and it’s cool when you do! Maybe one of you will decide to throw as much as they can just to see what happens and your own little meta will bubble up. There’s much joy to be had in the backyard. Once you learn how to swing the racket you can stop trying to improve yourself and just play in the space. Maybe those friendly skirmishes will inspire you to practice something specific (like hitting that dragon punch more often), and maybe it won’t, but either way there’s a lot of joy to be had here.
I’ll end here with a brief anecdote; some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a fighting game was in a theater green room in high school. We were in a production of Fiddler on the Roof and someone had brought in an Xbox 360 with a copy of Soul Calibur 4 filled with custom characters representing each of the characters in the play. Watching Tevya pick “Tevya” and fight his daughter while waiting for curtain was a blast and absolutely no one in that room could tell you anything about that game’s strategic depth. Clicking with a fighting game can just be laughing while watching Percheck get thrown off a crystal tower.
@TheFragranceOfDarkCoffee You’ve just given me a thought – the sort of thing that maybe would be the worst but maybe would be the best and I really cannot tell which of those it really would be:
A fighting game romhack/mod that before each match totally randomises the required command inputs for all moves on the selected characters. Leave normals alone, but all specials (and supers and whatever) get their inputs changed. Maybe dragon punch this match is now a quarter circle back. Maybe it is the spinning bird kick charge input.
The hope being that this reintroduces the floppy madness of the backyard sports play, and somewhat compacts the difference between the deep sea trench divers and the bbq’ers. Perhaps!
I was curious so I did a quick search of the “dark age” of fighting games (Let‘s say from the release of 3rd Strike in ’99 to SFIV in '08) and there are quite a few notable titles. Virtua Fighter 3/4, Soul Calibur II / III, Tekken 4/5, several KOF games, Capcom vs SNK 2, SNK vs Capcom: Chaos, Project Justice, Samurai Shodown V / V Special / VI and probably some others. Not to mention that 3rd Strike and MvC2 scenes were continually growing at the time. Not exactly a golden age but hardly a dark period.
@tomjonjon I know it’s just a text peculiarity of IC (auto fractions), but I kinda want Virtua Fighter 3/4 and Tekken 4/5 to be actual games.
Glad this sparked a great conversation. I’m grateful for IC where I can spout ideas & feelings, but want to avoid winding up complaining about something contrary to everyone else and wind up seeming presumptuous or in this case, whining about first world problems.
Another comparison for me would be board games, specifically mahjong. I also feel bad when I beat someone at Mahjong, and mainly what I get from the game is the sweet kinetic and almost ASMR feeling of the tiles…. I can’t lie, the taffy-like appearance is what I find so appealing…. I realize this may reflect poorly on me, but I like mahjong because I think it’s cool and the material of the tiles makes me wanna bite them.
Back on subject, this has everything to do with my genetics and upbringing. My entire life, my father (who I take after, and is more like a brother to me) described his athleticism: he never liked any competitive, head-to-head or team sports. He started with cross-country running and skiing in elementary school, in Maine. Mainers are big time loners, living in isolation. His favorite athletic activity he did for years was supportive role Ballet Dancing, which should speak volumes of our temperament. The one exception for him has been ping pong. I know he got into the predictive flow of that game, but no one is keeping score at all, the goal is to keep the game going, to rally to help each other get better.
If fighting games were just two muscle men tech’ing on each other, humping and grunting as they rise into the sky with exploitation of fighting game physics, their technical skills lifting each other up to exaltation, that would be my type of game. Read on for the conclusion of that thought, 
That kind of appreciation of the game is 100% me, haha. Countless encounters where I am watching two guys play, and I point out the people doing commerce in the background shopping bazaar. I’m in it for the art, technical play, and:
role play like this is always very exciting… gotta be the right time and place!
In conclusion, this all points to a new type of DANCING RISING GAME that uses fighting-game style inputs and some smash bros. style tech to create a sort of 2D NiGHTs Into Dreams/Sonic looking Dance Exhibition, where the player is meant to nonviolently style all over the place for points…. It would look like a Smash Bros. Tool Assisted Superplay, and, I guess, that brings it full circle. If I can appreciate a superplay then I can understand that the will to be victorious is what leads two players into a state of flow that looks like such a beautiful dance. I’ll always be a spectator. (aside for that time I won a crew match with Ness in Project M) Tell you right now I have a blast watching the melee ““gods”” do their thing.
what @[deleted] added is how I approach fighting games. Eventually I’ll binge a bunch of them in a row. I went through Tekken 2 spamming Yoshimitsu’s Shark Attack combo.
@tomjonjon I’ve always figured that to a non-insignificant percentage of fighting game players, Street Fighter is fighting games. Considering that there wasn’t a capcom developed Street Fighter released between 1999 and 2008, and since there wasn’t netplay or social media yet to put you in contact with other players, the genre felt dead to the guy who loved super turbo and third strike.
There’s a weird… elitism? loyalty?( I don’t know what you’d call it) around Street Fighter. For example, I’ve noticed that at my locals, there’s people that play SF and then there’s people that play everything else. The guy that plays Strive also plays Melty Blood and is willing to mash in MK.
@KingTubb I wouldn’t choose the word elitism because I think it communicates some perceived superiority which I don’t think you intended (but does sometime happen). I agree the rest of your post is generally true especially regarding loyalty. There’s a good reason that Street Fighter has such a strong brand and mind share among game-touchers and occasionally general culture. I can tell parents in the pickup line at school that I like playing video games and I like competitive fighting games like Street Fighter and they nod. If I say I like competitive fighting games like Guilty Gear, I have to immediately follow up with “which is like Street Fighter”. You can’t have brand loyalty without brand recognition. (Sorry in advance, I work in technical marketing.)
I might challenge the notion that the SFIII series had a large casual following because very few of my friends who would occasionally play a Street Fighter game with me in college (when the III/Alpha series were active) even knew that there was a III, let alone an Alpha series, but that’s probably splitting hairs.
There’s a barrier to moving on and learning. This isn’t a dig at anyone, it takes energy to see something and wonder what else is beyond it. Because there is a large player base that has the Street Fighter series as their intro and on ramp to the genre, most people won’t get beyond it. But the people that do will end up finding plenty to like elsewhere. So yeah, this is why even I am very excited for Street Fighter 6 though I consider myself a bigger fan of Arc’s work.
So this is where you get to people who have self-selected to post on the IC forum. Because the forum encourages curiosity and exploration, we’re probably competent at multiple games in the genre. I’m the guy that plays -STRIVE- and also Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, but play several sessions a month of CVS2 and Third Strike on Fightcade, and will absolutely mash in Melty Blood (but I really don’t care for Arcana Heart), and my block and punish instincts will win games of MK vs my poker buddies.
I don’t think they’re “superior” but it is an attitude that is a part of video gaming at large. From Smash is a party game, why is it at EVO to Nintendo is for babies, there’s a weird need with a lot of video game enjoyers to feel like the thing they like is objectively better than the other games/platforms/developers in their hobby.
I’ve definitely run into the SF purest that won’t play a game cause it looks “too anime” or “has a block button, and block buttons are for scrubs”.
I’d agree with you, especially in the states. I’d wager that a lot of that had to do with the release of Third Strike especially coming at a time when arcades were dying.
I have not been keeping up with this video series, but the first smashing brothers one released, and it has a ton of development documents and stuff that is so cool.
The proportions of the Dragon King characters always made me think in another timeline, they would have filled the roster with characters from Alcahest
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Touki Denshou Angel Eyes is finally out on Arcade Archives today (well… I’ve only checked on the Switch version in Canadian eShop, but presumably elsewhere) after being listed as coming soon for at least a year. I know it’s hardly the best fighting game, but it’s in that Venn diagram intersection of ‘PS1 version was too expensive for me when it was new’ and ‘used copy for PS1 is too expensive on eBay’, so Arcade Archives pricing is welcome!
@Karasu Mikado had a promotional tournament today to celebrate the release. It starts proper at 9m53s but the video is quite short overall so I’ll leave the casual play preceding the tournament.
Gotta say the mix of the female roster, aerial play and aggressor-rewarding combo system makes the fights look like a cross between Arcana Hearts and Hokuto no Ken (AtomisWave).
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Pretty fun tournament at Game Newton yesterday: a team of five from Kansai (1P side) vs. a team of four from Kantō (2P side) and they fight in any order they want but they must use all 16 characters from Super Street Fighter IIX. Each loss = that character is eliminated, and first team to get all their 16 fighters eliminated loses the contest.
