Why I love fighting video games (even though I suck at them)
Much to my wife's dismay, I am now a proud owner of the Hori Fight Stick Mini 4. The roguish little thing annoys her to no extent. The click-clack of the micro switch enabled joystick and the brutish thud of its eight face buttons are stuff of nightmare for people who may not be interested in them.
Yes, the Fight Stick is loud but what the sound does is provide me feedback which may mean a difference between a "Hadouken" or a "Shoryuken". Well, let me rephrase it a bit for people not too familiar with those terms, who are likely to have no interest in fighting games.
I don't blame them, fighting games are hard. My fascination with them began when I was a kid. During one of my weekly visits to a mithai shop in Munirka (in New Delhi) I found two arcade cabinets stuffed away into a corner. One of them had contra, the uber popular side scroller that rightly became a phenomenon. The other was "Street Fighter 2" and from the line in front of the cabinet I could imagine it was popular game.
I waited in line with a coin in hand. The line was divided into two, one for the left which was the 1P or first player side and the other 2P or the second player side. I also noticed that the line on the 1P side was longer. There were only two people on the 2P side - one a boy who looked like he was in his 20s and his flabby, short-statured friend.
Both of them grinned from ear to ear as they beat one hapless opponent after another. Their character of choice was "Ryu", the tall guy was the one playing while the short one proclaimed his godlike status to anyone who was willing to listen.
Soon enough, it was my turn at the game and not surprisingly, I got bodied, a storm of hadoukens plastered "Guile" (a character whom I picked simply because he looked cool) and before long I felt the bitter aftertaste of defeat.
What happened that day began my lifelong fascination with fighting games. For days on end I would stand around at arcade cabinets trying to learn how other people were controlling the action on screen, the countless circular motions of the joystick and incessant button mashing became a topic of discussion that went on for hours on end.
A quarter circle for a "Hadouken" was the first move I learned and I have to profess that it felt surprisingly good to pull off moves. It felt even better to body opponents who blindly rotated the joystick and mashed buttons, unaware of the intricate dance of precise inputs.
That one move meant I could stay at one side of the screen and "Hadouken" my lungs out, catching the other player in one corner of the screen. If he moved he "ate damage", if he blocked he got chipped and if he jumped... well... when he came down, he had an ocean of blue energy below waiting for him.
Admittedly, this was a cheap tactic and it never worked with people who knew what they were doing but it felt good to win nonetheless. At best, it felt like a distilled version of chess, where you would try to read an opponent's move and plan your next accordingly.
Sadly, the days of the Arcade were numbered and the rise of home consoles meant everyone was playing at home. My first console was a cheap Nintendo knockoff which was being sold as the blandly named "Media" and though I enjoyed my time with the console, there were no true fighting games for the system: the Sega Genesis port of Street Fighter 2 felt half-baked and Mortal Kombat wasn't my cup of tea.
Marvel vs Capcom
It wasn't until a few years later when I bought the Playstation that I became reacquainted with Ryu and company.
The game was Marvel vs Capcom, and this time there was an "easy" mode which allowed players to pull off crazy-looking special moves with the press of a button.
It also felt like the game was mocking you for using the easy mode, you could only use special moves when you fill the meter at the bottom of the screen which meant you had no defence against players who knew their combos, which was a fancy word for an unbroken string of hits, and landing one meant greater damage plus the meter at the bottom filled a lot quicker.
This was the kind of balancing fighting games were famous for. Even when handicapped against an opponent who uses "one button special moves", the really skilled ones can build up their super meters faster and "output damage quicker" negating the cheap one button tactic.
It's also one of the reasons why fighting games are hard, it's to separate skill from blind button mashing. Fighting games hit bit of a snag for me after the Playstation. I had grown tired of the endless anniversary street fighter releases and the early 3D fighters weren't appealing to me.
Instead, I turned my attention to games like Metal Gear Solid and Halo, tackling terrorists at a remote archipelago and fighting "covenant's deep" in a ring-like planet. First person shooters took my fancy for a while as I rekindled my love for Doom and Quake, playing them hours on end. It wasn't until we chanced upon a video online that I became interested in fighting games again.
Street Fighter 3 Parry
The "parry" in this video refers to a move in Street Fighter 3 that requires you to make an input right at the time an opponent's strike is about to connect.
If that sounds confusing, imagine someone punching you and you only have a small window between the punch about to connect and finding it's mark to make a special input. It was something that even the pros had trouble with and here I was facing a guy who parried an entire combo.
EVO 2015
What I was unaware of was an entire community of passionate fighting game fans that sponsored tournaments to see who was the best in the world. EVO was a real tournament that pitted players against each other to see who was the best. With each EVO, the tournament grew bigger to the point where it now offers cash money as rewards.
With the rise in its popularity came players who dissected the game down to a science. Terms like "normals", "cancels", "EX cancels" are thrown around constantly in these circles, some of them requiring an entire glossary of terms to refer too.
These players battled each other at a skill level that I hadn't seen before, For them, the character on screen was an extension of themselves, they were at a level where they weren't thinking about the moves they were executing, they were doing it as a mere reflex.
Street Fighter 4
When Street Fighter 4 came out, fighting games became cool again and for the first time, Capcom, the developers of the series, had managed to update the 2D fighter into the 3D space without losing any of the fluidity. In fact, it threw even more into the mix - ultra combos, new special moves, focus systems, EX cancels... sheesh... enough to make my head spin.
Of course, my goals were more humble. It was just to get good at a genre that I have been trying to play since my days at the Arcade. Watching pro players play, I noticed most of them used joysticks, like the ones that were available at the arcade.
Sadly, none of these are cheap. The best of these start at around $100 and that's quite an investment. You see one of the reasons these things are so expensive is the fact that the parts used in them vary wildly. The cheaper ones are less responsive and wear out faster.
After about a week of research, I bought my Hori Fight Stick Mini 4 and I am happy to report that the cheap $40 stick works fine and is good enough for beginners. It makes me feel like a kid again, the one who grew up in the arcades trying to distinguish the Hadouken from a Shoryuken.