JLM

I wasn’t on here so much when this went down, so catching up on that thread has been, well, a real treat. I hope everyone enjoys their +1s on posts from 9 years ago.

Oh also this video is one of the best I’ve ever seen on the topic of fighting games. Succinctly breaks down the core concepts transferable across pretty much all fighting games in 15 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_R0hbe8HZj0&pp=ygUXV2h5IG1hc2hpbmcgZG9lc250IHdvcms%3D

Yeah, the leap from “good enough to beat your mates” to “actually good at the game” is often absolutely massive with fighting games. The games have historically been so bad at teaching you how to play that most of us didn’t know what being good at the game even entailed until some monster online demolished us. I remember that happening to me with SF4 and SSF2 HD Remix. I had been an avid collector and player of 2D fighting games since SF2. Had a modded Sega Saturn to play X Men vs Streetfighter and the like, played hours and hours of SF3 3RD Strike on Dreamcast against my cousins. I go online on 360… “Yeah I think I’m pretty good at Streetfighter I can do all the moves and stuff, oh noooooooooooo” I think that rude awakening leads to a lot of rage from new players. It’s a real fork in the road moment. I was like “ohh some of these people are playing a different game entirely, I had no idea. I must know more” whereas others will be “they’re using cheap tactics/this game is broken/if this wasn’t online I’d be winning/they’re just SPAMMING/I was BLOCKING THAT/ this character is bullshit” etc etc etc. If people don’t have the lightbulb moment about the RPS, reads, mindgames, frame advantage and the fact that many of the interactions are essentially turn-based, footsies, whiff punishing etc etc. Then they can either play the game as a knock about button masher and enjoy it at that level (or play single player) or get battered in ranked matches endlessly, never understand why it’s happening and then get very very frustrated. It’s great to see that the games are slowly improving at teaching the core concepts. it’s embarrassing that indie games like Skullgirls did a much much better job of it than the big budget releases for so many years. Guilty Gear Strive, SF6 and Tekken 8 are heading in the right direction but it has been a real slog getting here and there is still a ton of work to be done. Tekken 8 has an incredible feature where you can watch a match replay and then take over in real time at any moment, so you can explore what you could have done in the the exact scenario. The game also provides suggested punishes you could have done in that situation. I want stuff like that to be the standard going forward, because even with tutorial modes, trying to get good at fighting games in a vacuum is still absurdly difficult.

It really is a spot on Mr. Bean costume. Also the Osprey family resemblance is crazy!

Oh cool, always thought they seem like good guys. Never got on with the NRS games but I’m a big fan of Ketchup’s YouTube stuff. They have a great understanding of fighting games that applies to all games, even if I don’t play the same ones as them. Also remember Mustard proposing to his girlfriend on stage during top 8 at VS Fighting many years ago. Living the fighting game nerd’s dream right there.

Yeah this is the tough thing with fighting games, no matter how much easier they make the inputs and improve the tutorials, they are still really really hard to get good at! Also for every new game, there will be legacy players with years and years of transferable experience from previous games in the series or other fighting games. It’s also very difficult to learn by playing against random people online, particularly in ranked where it’s a short set and there are plenty of scumbags who don’t even stick around for the 2/3. I’m not sure exactly where you’re at, so my broad advice for all new players is usually these: - Try to learn one character and stick with them for a while if possible. Lots of varying opinions on what a good first character is. For Streetfighter people often say Ryu of course. It’s partly because he is the default character for 2D fighters and has the most archetypical tool kit, but also because the game is typically built around him as the base. The other classic SF2 characters are foils to Ryu, excelling at specific things when he’s the all rounder. Ryu can play a keep away game with fireballs quite well, but Guile does it better etc. However, I tend to agree with the other most common answer, which is pick the character who appeals to you the most. It adds motivation to play, it should make the game more fun and you’re more likely to stick with them even when you’re initially getting thrashed starting out. - Remember it’s a two player game! By far most common thing you will see when you watch two new players or casual players playing fighting games, is both players essentially playing their own single player game with little or no regard for what the other person is doing. Jumping, dashing, pressing every button, trying to land a combo they practised in trial mode, generally flailing like a nutter. - Off the back of the above, do less and observe the opponent. Again, new players are always doing things at all times. Always doing action action action for the whole round. Fighting games are partly about imposing your will and running your gameplan on the opponent, but this is only one aspect of it. Figuring out the opponent’s tendencies and habits, exploiting these and conditioning them to do what you want them to do are also hugely important. This sounds really wanky but it’s a useful analogy in my opinion. A round in a fighting game is an unspoken conversation between the two players. To relate that to the above, the typical fight between two players who don’t know what they’re doing is effectively two people screaming obscenities at each other until one of them passes out. This applies at all levels. Players who don’t have a gameplan or really know what they’re doing will still have habits and tendencies, and taking a moment to observe/listen to them before trying to do whatever you want to do can be very helpful. For example, a common habit of new players is to jump forward constantly. They want to jump over a fireball, they want to hit you with a jumping heavy attack and do the combo they’ve learned, they want to jump in because they want to hit you and it gets them in range to do that. If you start the round by jumping in yourself or by running face first at the opponent swinging, you might never learn that about them. If you start the round doing very little, just walking a bit and blocking, and in the first ten seconds they jump at you three times, you’ve got yourself a jumper. - Learn to anti air consistently with your character. Every character has dedicated anti air attacks. Luke as an easy example has two main ones: crouching heavy punch and his rising uppercut/dragon punch. If I’m learning a new character in a fighting game this is one of the first things I will learn how to do. If you can’t stop people jumping at you, you will have a miserable time. - Combining the above two points. You start a round against a new opponent, you walk and block a bit at the start, they jump a bunch of times. All I would do against that opponent initially is look to anti air. From there, you can see if there is a conversation to be had: them: I’m jumping me: every time you jump at me you will eat this anti air. them: I will continue jumping because I am not thinking. me: very well. Win round. If they *are* thinking, however, after the first few anti airs they might do something else. This creates a little flashpoint situation that is where conditioning/mind games can begin: Opponent jumped - > I anti aired -> then what did they do? Did they continue jumping with reckless abandon? Then maybe they’re not thinking/they’re very stubborn and you should focus your mental energy purely on looking for anti airs until they stop or you win. Did they stop after a couple? OK maybe they’re thinking, what are they doing instead? Did they get hit by the anti air and then block? Did they dash, did they do something else entirely? Do they always do the same thing after you anti air them, in which case is that a habit they’ve got? Add on about 100 more questions depending on how far down the rabbit hole you end up going. Pretty much every interaction in a fighting game can have mind games like this attached to them. The breakthrough from complete novice to lower intermediate player is to think about the “why” of your actions rather than just acting. - Combo-wise, the first thing to learn with any character is a decent punish for the opponent making a huge mistake. At lower levels the most common of these by far is the opponent throwing out their OD Reversal. Before that, just to cover fighting game RPS: You land a sweep, you knock the opponent down, you walk up next to them as they’re getting up. In this situation you are at an advantage. You have access to all of your tools, they don’t. You can throw out an attack here that is timed to connect with them as they’re getting up, referred to as a meaty attack by fighting game nerds. For example, You knock them down - > get to point blank range - > then sweep again, timed to connect with them as they’re getting up. The opponent cannot press an attack on this situation without getting hit by the sweep. If they press any punch or kick, your sweep will already be hitting them before their attack has a chance to come out. What they can do immediately when getting up (known as “on wake up”) is block or parry. Blocking and parrying happen instantly, so even though the sweep is already connecting with them, they can still defend it. However, knowing this, what you could do instead is throw them. This beats blocking and it beats parry. For them to defend against that, they would need to tech the throw by pressing throw themselves. However, if they anticipated a throw, pressed throw, and you did the sweep, your sweep would beat their throw. This is the basic rock/paper/scissors dynamic of most fighting games. Hit beats throw -> throws beat block - > block beats hit. There are a number of other things you can do in modern fighting games, but that core principle still applies even with other variables thrown in to spice it up. - So back to the OD reversal. Almost every character in SF6 has a fully invincible OD move. Ryu and Ken it’s OD Shoryuken, Guile it’s OD flash kick, JP it’s OD Amnesia. One of the main purposes of these moves is to give you the option to break the Rock paper scissors mind game described above. To go back to the scenario above. Knock down with sweep - > walk up, opponent has to guess if you’re going to Hit or throw them. If they guess hit and you throw, they get thrown. If they guess throw and you hit, they get hit. If they don’t want to guess, an option they have is to perform their invincible special move with reversal timing, so the move comes out as they’re standing up. This will beat your throw and your hit and get them out of the situation. Inexperienced/Lower level players will choose this option A LOT. It is a very very common tendency amongst new players to throw out OD reversals whenever they get knocked down or are in a disadvantageous position. The downside of the OD reversal is that it costs them two bars of drive gauge to perform, and if you block it or cause it to whiff, the opponent has massive, massive recovery and you can hit them with a punish counter. Some characters are not blessed with an invincible OD move and will “wake up” with an invincible super instead. This is reliant on them having the meter and you have to know which characters. Lily and Manon are two examples. The principle is the same though, they don’t want to predict your next move and are choosing tie option to try and beat everything. So after you block an invincible OD move or a super and the opponent is extremely vulnerable, *THIS* is the first combo you should know like the back of your hand. You can set the training dummy to do this in training mode. You can record wake up actions, so can select the move, knock them down, block the reversal and punish. What you do varies massively depending on character/available resources/which control scheme you use/how good your execution is. Main thing is something that does decent damage and that you can perform consistently. Other stuff… -Try to play long sets against people slightly better than you. If someone is beating you but you feel like you have at least a small chance, that’s a good level at first. - If you have match replays I can watch that’d be the best way I could give more specific advice. - when you play randoms online, have a goal in mind. I will anti air every time they jump, if I block their OD move I will land my punish etc. incorporating the thing you’re trying to improve and using these people as live training dummies is more important than trying to win. - apologies if any of this was either far too basic or far too nerdy, but hope some of it was useful!

I'm definitely getting Hades 2 over the weekend. First one was a masterpiece and I love an early access game. They can be a bit of a risk, but when it goes right (and it has for me with Ember Knights, Slay the Spire, Super Auto Pets, Punch Planet, Them's Fightin' Herds, though the latter sadly got screwed over by its publisher AFTER full release)) they feel like gifts that keep on giving. Big chunky free updates to a game I'm already enjoying every so often, nerding out over the patch notes, the whole thing. By all accounts Hades 2 is much further along than most early access games too. I'm sure there will be bugs and issues, but it doesn't look to be full of placeholder assets/dialogue etc. It looks like most of the game is there and they're using it to tweak and refine. Streetfighter 6 is a frustrating one for me. As a fighting game package it is the best main series Streetfighter release. Content, netcode, functionality, the insanely in-depth training mode suite, it has it all. By the end of its life I thought SF5 landed in a decent spot in terms of features/content etc. but SF6 still smokes it straight out of the box. I have played a ton of it, got a few characters to Master Rank, been to tournaments, all the usual stuff I do with fighting games. However, similar to SF5 (even by the end when I enjoyed it) I find SF6 to be infinitely more fun to watch played at high level than I find it to play at intermediate level. At high level it's glorious, at beginner level it's tonnes of fun, more accessible than SF4 and SF5, at intermediate level it is a deeply frustrating mental stack nightmare and it stresses me out if I play it for too long. As a result, my fighting game time at the moment is spent on USF4, Them's Fightin' Herds and Punch Planet. SF6 is getting its first major balance patch/season 2 update on the 22nd of May, so I'm hoping for a few tweaks to reignite my interest in playing it competitively. Not wanting to be a downer though, if you're buying it to play casually with a friend it's a blast. It looks fantastic, the returning characters have all been given new sauce or been reinvented completely, the new characters are cool (though the army of JP haters worldwide might disagree). It also has a modern controls option, so there's the option to do specials/supers without using the full inputs, which can be off-putting for people who don't play fighting games obsessively. You lose a bit of damage output and a few of your character's normal attacks s as a trade off, but again when playing casually it's unlikely to bother you. The central system the whole game revolves around is the drive gauge. You still have your super meter, which can build up to three stocks, and every character has a level 1, 2 and 3 super, but the super meter isn't used for any other secondary functions like it was in SF3/SF4/SF5. Instead you have the drive gauge. It starts off full at the start of every round. You lose it by blocking attacks, spending it and via a few other mechanics. You gain it over time, and it comes back faster if you're moving forwards. You use this to do: OD special moves (enhanced versions of special moves, formerly EX moves that used super meter, now they use drive meter.) Parry - Press medium punch + medium kick to absorb attacks. You can hold this down to keep absorbing multiple attacks but it drains the drive meter the whole time. If you parry an attack perfectly (just as it hits you) you get the drive gauge spent back. Perfect parry also allows you to attack immediately after parrying, so you can parry an attack and then attack while the opponent is still recovering. Drive rush - Press and hold parry, then dash forwards. This is a very fast movement option and you can attack whilst doing it. Normal attacks performed during this rush gain enhanced properties and allow for combos which wouldn't work otherwise, amongst a number of other benefits. Drive rush cancel - During a normal attack, press both mediums. This is similar to focus attack dash cancel (FADC) from SF4. You cancel the move you were performing into the drive rush dash, then can follow up. Similar to FADC this can be used for all sorts of things. Drive impact - Both heavy attacks together. This attack has multiple hits of armour on it to blow through the opponent's attacks. It also knocks the opponent back if they block it. If it absorbs an attack from the opponent and *then* hits them, it crumples them, allowing you to follow up. If they block it and get knocked back and they hit the wall (so if they're in the corner) they splat against the wall and you can follow up. The main way to stop this is to perform your own drive impact in response. It's almost like a little quick time event .They do theirs, it has a big over the top animation with loads of effects on screen etc. and you have to react and respond with your own as quickly as you can. Looking for and reacting to drive impact is one of the first things you should learn playing SF6 at any level. If your opponent knows it exists you need to be ready to stop it. You can also parry it, blow through it with certain invincible moves, or moves that hit it three times very very quickly as it only absorbs two attacks. But yeah, looking for it and being able to do it back as quickly as possible is important. Drive reversal - Whilst blocking, press towards the opponent and both heavy attacks. Defensive tool to knock the opponent away if they're applying pressure and you don't want to block. So the drive gauge allows you to do basically all of the system mechanics in the game. However, the downside is if you run out, things get very very very very bad for you.. All of the above actions cost drive gauge, getting punished by the opponent for whiffing/them blocking your attacks takes away drive gauge, blocking the opponent's attacks takes away drive gauge. If you run out, you enter a Burnout state. The downsides are: - During this time you cannot do any of the things above. You lose access to everything. This means: - You cannot respond to drive impact with your own drive impact or with parry. This is very bad. As mentioned above, blocking drive impact in the corner leads to a wall splat, and if your drive gauge is locked out due to burnout, it is very difficult to stop this. Also, if you get wall splatted whilst in burn out, you don't just splat the wall, you get stunned. It's not like a stun in other fighting games where you can mash buttons to get out of it either, it's a reaaaaally long stun allowing the opponent to follow up with anything they want. - Anything you block puts you in longer block stun than normal, so the opponent's pressure is worse, they can spam certain moves which would normally be bad for them if you blocked etc. Also you take chip damage (losing small bits of health for blocking specials/supers, which was standard in previous SF games but SF6 doesn't have). You can die from chip damage also, so being burnt out on very low health is awful. I have issues with some of the drive mechanics and would like some of them to be adjusted, but overall I think it's a really fun bit of game design. Rather than having to build meter during the match and then decide how to spend it (which you still do with super meter in this game), the drive gauge does the opposite. You start off fully loaded and then you can decide how to manage it, but there's a big old penalty if you spooge the whole lot. You can blow it all at once and hope you survive the burn out phase, you can spend it in bits, you can try to attack the opponent's drive gauge by making them block loads of stuff, you can spend it on rushing down like a lunatic, you can spend a chunk of it and then play conservatively for a bit while it refills, lots of possibilities. That is an insanely long post already so I'll stop, but once you have the game please hit me with any questions!

Cody Rhodes quitting WWE and doing the whole AEW thing wasn’t part of a WWE fictional storyline then, but it’s part of The Story now. That’s kind of my point, the distinction is so difficult to define that I don’t know if it’s worth trying. I don’t think it’s as simple as whether it can break the fourth wall or not, because sometimes wrestling does that and it’s good, often wrestling does that and it’s dogshit, sometimes wrestling doesn’t do that at all and it’s good, other times… etc. I don’t know what the context of the fictional wrestling world is meant to be, and what rules a story would have to follow to remain within it. It can be merged with reality as much or as little as anyone feels like from angle to angle. How effective that is and how much people like it is debatable, but I’m not sure there is a set of storytelling rules you can apply to a pro wrestling angle, especially since the death of kayfabe.

I’ve been gushing recently about FTR and Grizzled Young Vets because they do stuff in tag team matches that “makes sense”. They’ve thought about the little details and how a tag team would act if this were a real contest and they were cooperating to try to win it. So in the context of their allotted 20 minutes I can get all beard strokey and appreciate how smart it all is. I praise stuff like that because I enjoy it but also because it’s frankly not the norm. However, I will also enjoy Timeless Toni Storm in the next segment of the same TV show.

Yeah I have to agree with this. I usually hate “just turn your brain off and enjoy it” in response to criticism of fictional media. When Game of Thrones fell off a cliff towards the end, one of the many things that irked me was characters seemingly teleporting all over the place depending on where the plot needed them to be from scene to scene. I saw responses to that like “this show has DRAGONS in it and you’re worried about people travelling around too fast???” I thought that was a shitty argument because the show’s internal logic had established that people do take ages to get around. Travelling by horse and cart, walking for miles and miles, taking wind powered ships across the seas etc. My counter to that would be, what if Jon Snow turned into an 18 wheeler truck, yelled “Roll out!” And flattened all the white walkers? Even in a show with supernatural and fantasy stuff going on, that would still be preposterous. Pro wrestling though, the internal logic is just fucked isn’t it? Sometimes it breaks the fourth wall, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it borrows elements from real life, sometimes it’s pure fiction, sometimes real life stuff is happening and we thought it was fiction, sometimes they try to convince us that the fictional stuff is the real stuff. When it is pure fiction, the rules of that vary so wildly that I don’t know how anyone could hope to pin them down in the same way you would with a tightly written scripted TV show or movie. I love it when they somehow do tell a coherent story that isn’t immediately laughable or doesn’t fall apart when any scrutiny is applied. Despite (and, oddly, sometimes because of) all of the above, the fact they can get me genuinely emotionally invested in this insane form of entertainment when so much of it is nonsense is a huge part of the joy of it. To be honest though, I don’t really expect it to much of the time, nor would I hold it to the same standards I would other more focused fiction with slightly clearer rules. It is the path to either madness or at the very least simply not enjoying it as much.

Thank goodness there's no Collision this week, I'm actually going to get up to date before the weekend! Collision 27/04/24 OK Swerve got the opening segment he should have had on Dynamite here. Of the whole Swerve package as it stands currently, I still think long in-ring solo promos like this are the weakest part of his game. It's never bad, but he sometimes goes a bit of course and rambles and it doesn't always quite match the swagger and superstar aura he projects the rest of the time. He still sounded good here though and got the main talking points across. Aside from addressing the attack on Tony Khan and generally name dropping loads of notable names as the new champion should, I thought the best bit was claiming that the real best in the world is whoever's holding the world title. With him winning the world title on a card where two other guys were wrestling in a dream match to decide the best in the world, I thought it was important for him to say that. Solid first trios title defense for Bullet Club Gold with a pleasingly Jay White-y finish countering Andretti's springboard into the Bladerunner. Want to see some Collision main events against some more spicy opponents for these titles ASAP. Rey Fenix vs The Beast Mortos Fucking YES. Not only the extremely welcome return of Rey Fenix, but this match up, ooh boy this match up. This was high on the list of dream matches I had in mind when AEW signed Black Taurus, was so happy when I saw this graphic pop up. Loved this match of course. Rey Fenix is such a great babyface and I just adore Mortos. Any plucky babyface high flyer worth their salt could not ask for a better opponent. He's violent, he's mean, is a literal monster, a perfect base to let high flyers shine and has the best anti-airs in the game. They have to do this again, but in the meantime I have still yet to see Mortos vs Jack Cartwheel booked on ROH. Sort it out Tony Wonderful to see RUSH back, I have missed him very much. Decent promo from Serena Deeb. Fun match with Anna Jay and Toni Storm. Anna Jay's mini feud with the Toni/Mariah/Shirakawa wasn't a bad little run from her. Nice to see her get a bit of shine, looks like she's had fun playing the villain and delivered some perfectly acceptable TV matches. Bloody love Grizzled Young Vets. Gutted at what happened to them in NXT and struggle to find the time to watch TNA, so this was a real treat. I wish they'd let Gibson do a little promo before the match but we can't have everything. Would dearly love to see GYV vs FTR, two teams cut from the same cloth who appreciate the beauty of tag team wrestling and do it so very well. Much like FTR, GYV matches are so full of little touches and bits of seamless teamwork that you just don't see from the rest. With GYV I appreciate that their blind tags are often actual tags, rather than slapping the guy on the back. Drake caught in a headlock but instinctively reaching out for the tag as he's shot into the ropes, Gibson backed up into the ropes himself, putting his own headlock on Caster to obscure his vision and sneakily tagging Drake with his free arm. Great trash talkers as well. Gibson well known for it, but Drake at one point shouting "DO A RAP! I DARE YOU, DO A RAP!" at a downed Max Caster made me laugh out loud. Sign them up! Tremendous main event and an excellent first defense for Swerve. Pretty much all of the follow up I wanted for him on Dynamite happened on this show instead. Excellent episode that. Fenix and RUSH back, Mortos on the main shows, bonus GYV appearance, a brilliant main event. Superb.

This is one of the worst sentences I have ever read.

Get him to drop a “Helloooooo Glasgow, England!”

He was released, then re-hired under HHH. Feuded with Miz for what felt like an eternity as I recall. He vanished again for quite a while, but has recently been uploading pictures on social media looking the most shredded he’s ever been.

The Speed title belt has to be moving at a minimum of 50mph at all times or it explodes, so it has to stay on the road.