Man that was quite the mouthful of a title. Anyways, Summer is upon us, the days are longer, and now it’s time for something, somewhat different.
During the Friday before the final weekend of May, I was randomly skimming around the internet and found out late that same night Combo Breaker 2022 was live. After going “huh, neat.” I jumped in and ended up binging most of the event’s headlining games, including, at least from the list of games I watched at least a good bit of; Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, King of Fighters XV, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Killer Instinct 2013, and Them’s Fighting’ Herds plus a helping dose of platform fighters in the form of Smash Melee and Ultimate, plus Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. What appealed to me the most about this tournament, even in the years I didn’t watch it, was just how broad and varied the main game lineup was. You got the new stuff everyone’s hyped for, alongside several older fighters that don’t make common appearances in events in modern ages (especially notable with Vampire Savior, aka Darkstalkers 3, as well as the final arcade releases of Street Fighter II and III). This representation of older games was especially true for the “Chicago’s Famous Mystery Tournament”, a tournament featuring a random grab bag of competitive multiplayer games including those outside the fighting game genre itself, capping off with a big finale in the form of taking several dozen arcade and early home console games and putting them into a WarioWare-styled lighting round blender. And the goal was, as hinted by the WarioWare comparisons, to beat the opponent in each round, most of them only lasting several seconds, and whoever won 25 rounds first was the winner.
Despite how great the event was and how I dropped most of everything productive that weekend to enjoy the show, watching Combo Breaker made me further realize why I hardly invest in playing fighting games as is, and that’s mostly from how much they, especially modern fighting games, really try to push you into online modes at the expense of having much to offer to someone that prefers singleplayer or local multiplayer. As someone that struggles with being dealt losses in games in general, especially online games where something is at stake, I especially felt that “online push” with Guilty Gear Xrd- besides the tutorial it pretty much only had the arcade ladder and the mission mode as its main singleplayer, and the Story Mode, a feature you usually see time and time again in fighters in the 2000’s, was reduced to a movie with no interactive elements, and that design choice carried over into Strive, which at least had rollback net code to improve the quality of online matches.
Needless to say this greater focus and ongoing trend towards fighting games guiding you, for better or for worse, into playing their online multiplayer modes above all else, especially ranked, made me not dive into Strive (as well at Street Fighter V and King of Fighters XIV and XV) the moment I got the physical copies on PS4 and made me want to wait out until further character DLC’s beefed up the roster count a bit before diving in. There’s also the case of a lack of a good PS4 fight stick to use on my part, which I mostly attribute to there being so many options to pick from and not knowing which one is the right choice for me without spending too much money.
And you may be wondering, sure, I do indeed have a fight stick that I ordered custom-made several years back, but it was a very expensive custom build and I would not want to break it further after having to conduct several repairs to it by hand, including to the internal wiring, and I already purchased several hundreds on birthday goods and don’t feel like making a big, expensive purchase on a new fight stick that I don’t currently see myself using a lot. I guess in the end I always saw myself more as an observer of fighting games as I always struggled to memorize character inputs or pick and choose a dedicated main. I don’t even touch Super Smash Bros, a game I used to play pretty often in my late middle school years thanks to Brawl, all that much anymore, and I only played Ultimate to unlock all the characters then didn’t touch it much after that, even when the DLC characters made their grand entrance.
Watching Combo Breaker live also brought to mind just how dominant and absolutely everywhere the Training Stages were. They didn’t necessarily “ruin” the matches but it got absolutely ridiculous when the grand majority of matches in modern day fighting games (primarily Street Fighter V and King of Fighters XV, two mainline games featured as part of the event). Why do they happen so much? Well, I watched a video on it from Maximilian Dood and chatted with some buds on Twitter about training or practice stages, and it mostly came down to having very little to no obstructive background features, having a grid to line up attacks, and not being as resource-intensive as the normal stages. The few people I’ve talked to about how these training stages, the “grids” especially, could be improved without straining the game’s ability to run at a locked or consistent frame rate or introducing distracting background elements suggested turning them into traditional dojos or gyms with some of the visual features of “the grid” intact. Improving visibility and contrast in the main arenas and not going absolutely overboard with background (and foreground!) details to destroy the frame rate during a fight would also help… maybe give each stage day/evening and night variants that always bask the fighters under a glow that makes them easier to tell apart from the background.
So that was my brief talk about fighting games and the crazy final weekend event of May that led to the creation of this post. Will I ever get invested in playing these fighters regularly, especially as part of a potential ‘venture into streaming gameplay? Honestly I have no idea. Maybe at some point in the future if I end up deciding to binge a collective of modern and retro one on one, side-scrolling tournament fighters one evening, rework my setup to better work with playing fighting games as well as streaming them, or meet some local people or groups on Long Island that are into fighting games (not just platform fighters like Smash Bros.) once the pandemic calms down. I do have considerable interest in Street Fighter 6, since it seems to address a lot of what turned me off from touching the initial builds of Strive and has no signs of what made Street Fighter V so polarizing at launch to a lot of people back then. Plus from the leaks, it looks like it’ll have a much meatier roster at launch compared to Street Fighter V, even if it doesn’t seem like it’s going all out with the returning characters (understandable considering everyone is getting new, high-def models).
Now if you’ll excuse me I got a birthday summary to write, cause my 28th birthday was very, very recentely.
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