Street Fighter: Unrequited Glove2011-04-15 09:36 GMT
Perhaps it's not that usual to start any sort of article with a comment directly lifted from a gaming forum, but take a look at this if you would:
"The Dan off was great, I particularly liked the Ultra 2 on focus crumple going over you only to see your Ultra 1 fail to catch up with my bouncing away body!"
That, my friends, is Street Fighter language. On gaming forums throughout the interweb, folks regularly pop into Street Fighter threads and converse with each other in this strange, complicated dialect. If I had never played a Street Fighter game before it would completely and utterly baffle me; as it happens I have played numerous games in the series over the years... and yet I am still puzzled.
This could be down to the fact that, given my age, I missed the Street Fighter boat at the best time to hop onto it, back when the second game came out for the SNES. Had I started my quarter-circling back then perhaps I would have grown up to understand ultra-combos, hit boxes and complex tactical talk. I also might have never gotten to the stage where I became so old and weary that my inept hashing at the controls often left my character floating slowly backwards into the air after another brutal battering.
When you look into the game carefully, you realise that even the good players, let alone the great, take a great deal of information on board when planning their matches. Dotted around the internet there are freeze-frame captures of battles with hit detection areas highlighted. Each character has, say, around twenty-fives different moves each, of which you can combine into almost endless amounts of combinations. The most recent iteration of the game - Super Street Fighter 4 - has a roster of 35 characters that need to be learnt if you want to know what you're going to be up against and stand a chance against higher level players or the hardest AI settings. If you were to compile this all into one big FAQ you'd imagine it'd run into hundreds of pages, which is a pretty daunting thought.
It's not as if I haven't tried to make progress with the series, either. I've watched the numerous videos of exciting battles, I have tried to learn characters through highly complex control and timing guides. I've even sat in the Training mode on Street Fighter 4 for hours plugging my way through different moves and trying to chain them together into something even remotely impressive. Of course, I soon realised that this was only half the battle and I would have to learn how to not only predict what move each opposing character was likely to do next, but as mentioned above how to counter each of these moves in a clever manner. It's like a game of chess where you're having to move within a split second of your opponent and having to think three moves ahead all the time.
Perhaps the killing blow for any attempt of mine to break into the series (and perhaps the 2D fighter genre as a whole) was a particular winter evening a few years ago when a friend who had never played any Street Fighter game before challenged me to a battle on the 4th game, and proceeded to beat my tactical efforts with classic button mashing. In an instant I had any illusions of skill or tactics smashed; I simply wasn't good enough to beat a button masher, and the frustration that this caused meant that I probably never will be.
Hence, I am stuck floating in some strange two-dimensional Capcom wilderness. Button mashing wins you games against rookies more often than not, but it's hardly satisfying. Good tactics will see you hold your own against anyone, but those on the button rung of the ladder face an incredibly steep ascent to anything remotely useful and hence will be vulnerable to aformentioned pad slappers. I feel like I am too good to button mash, but my skills aren't good enough to counter it if it's used against me.
This article was originally going to detail why I hate Street Fighter, but in writing it it's actually shifted my viewpoint completely. I don't hate Street Fighter at all; I hate that I can't 'do' it properly. It's the one immensely popular section of gaming that I feel like a total outsider with, and I genuinely regret not being able to be a part of the excitement of a tense, tactic-filled fight. Sadly as much as I try, the more the frustration prevents me from ever making any real progress. Unfortunately for me, the Street Fighter scene looks like being one that I will forever sit on the outside of looking in.
"The Dan off was great, I particularly liked the Ultra 2 on focus crumple going over you only to see your Ultra 1 fail to catch up with my bouncing away body!"
That, my friends, is Street Fighter language. On gaming forums throughout the interweb, folks regularly pop into Street Fighter threads and converse with each other in this strange, complicated dialect. If I had never played a Street Fighter game before it would completely and utterly baffle me; as it happens I have played numerous games in the series over the years... and yet I am still puzzled.
This could be down to the fact that, given my age, I missed the Street Fighter boat at the best time to hop onto it, back when the second game came out for the SNES. Had I started my quarter-circling back then perhaps I would have grown up to understand ultra-combos, hit boxes and complex tactical talk. I also might have never gotten to the stage where I became so old and weary that my inept hashing at the controls often left my character floating slowly backwards into the air after another brutal battering.
When you look into the game carefully, you realise that even the good players, let alone the great, take a great deal of information on board when planning their matches. Dotted around the internet there are freeze-frame captures of battles with hit detection areas highlighted. Each character has, say, around twenty-fives different moves each, of which you can combine into almost endless amounts of combinations. The most recent iteration of the game - Super Street Fighter 4 - has a roster of 35 characters that need to be learnt if you want to know what you're going to be up against and stand a chance against higher level players or the hardest AI settings. If you were to compile this all into one big FAQ you'd imagine it'd run into hundreds of pages, which is a pretty daunting thought.
It's not as if I haven't tried to make progress with the series, either. I've watched the numerous videos of exciting battles, I have tried to learn characters through highly complex control and timing guides. I've even sat in the Training mode on Street Fighter 4 for hours plugging my way through different moves and trying to chain them together into something even remotely impressive. Of course, I soon realised that this was only half the battle and I would have to learn how to not only predict what move each opposing character was likely to do next, but as mentioned above how to counter each of these moves in a clever manner. It's like a game of chess where you're having to move within a split second of your opponent and having to think three moves ahead all the time.
Perhaps the killing blow for any attempt of mine to break into the series (and perhaps the 2D fighter genre as a whole) was a particular winter evening a few years ago when a friend who had never played any Street Fighter game before challenged me to a battle on the 4th game, and proceeded to beat my tactical efforts with classic button mashing. In an instant I had any illusions of skill or tactics smashed; I simply wasn't good enough to beat a button masher, and the frustration that this caused meant that I probably never will be.Hence, I am stuck floating in some strange two-dimensional Capcom wilderness. Button mashing wins you games against rookies more often than not, but it's hardly satisfying. Good tactics will see you hold your own against anyone, but those on the button rung of the ladder face an incredibly steep ascent to anything remotely useful and hence will be vulnerable to aformentioned pad slappers. I feel like I am too good to button mash, but my skills aren't good enough to counter it if it's used against me.
This article was originally going to detail why I hate Street Fighter, but in writing it it's actually shifted my viewpoint completely. I don't hate Street Fighter at all; I hate that I can't 'do' it properly. It's the one immensely popular section of gaming that I feel like a total outsider with, and I genuinely regret not being able to be a part of the excitement of a tense, tactic-filled fight. Sadly as much as I try, the more the frustration prevents me from ever making any real progress. Unfortunately for me, the Street Fighter scene looks like being one that I will forever sit on the outside of looking in.