What do you think of Spherax’ salty rage quit on Rising Thunder? Does he have somewhat of a valid point beside how bitch he sounds?

This was the MOST HILARIOUS FUCKING THING EVER when it happened. I even told the guy on his twitter to neutral jump the fucking fireballs. Rising thunder was a game that made neutral jumps over fireballs REALLY FUCKING GOOD too! Because all moves were on cooldown, if you neutral jumped a fireball, not only were you not allowed to shoot another until it went offscreen, they had to wait for the whole cooldown to finish!

It also lead to interesting things like if your opponent wasted an anti-air, then you could jump in all you wanted without fear until the cooldown finished.

Also I loved how Chel in that game could cancel sweeps into fireballs. Almost no game does that except Super Turbo.

Like the ironic thing about his whining was, he was playing the best character in the game, Crow. Crow had absolutely ridiculous okizeme pressure, and pressure in general. If he got in close, he could attack, cancel to short ring toss, jump over, crossup, attack high or low, then ring toss again, and so on, then confirm into a combo, into super. Crow was some cool shit, but also evil shit.

In short, No. He does not have a point. All of his whining is completely invalid. He is a bad player who has trouble with a simple low-level playstyle. Chel was not overpowered or broken. Ryu is not overpowered in SF4. Dude got beaten, claims the other player is bad and using a broken character to salvage his ego. It’s as simple as that.

When you get beaten, you need to acknowledge WHY you are getting beaten. You need to understand the faults in YOURSELF. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is using a broken character, you can pick that character too. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is a scrub. You’re a worse scrub for losing to them and being salty about it. If you cannot purge yourself of this mindset then you cannot improve. Developing a mindset like this makes you worse against players you should be beating the most easily.

I played a friend recently who played EXACTLY like this. He’d shoryuken out of everything I did to him after blocking the first hit, be mashing shoryuken in the middle of all my combos in case I dropped. This is a scrubby terrible behavior. I was tired at the time and fucking livid that he was seriously pulling this dumb shit when I was in a mindset where my ability to adapt was slowed down. So I began tapping him once, letting him shoryuken, and doing the crush counter combo. I then did something I don’t do often in SFV and switched characters. I chose a bunch of random characters I never play and beat him with almost all of them (rip zangief). I was annoyed, but I controlled myself enough to not lose to an opponent doing a basic (but bad) strategy.

Zoning is interesting. There’s a lot of ways to zone well, and a lot of ways to get around zoning. If you can’t figure all this out, if you can’t see what’s interesting about it, you’re in a bad mental place.

Many beginners to fighting games, including myself, get intimidated by frame data. They look at it like this huge spreadsheet of numbers that they think they have to memorize. I originally didn’t get framedata, but wanted to understand how combos were built, how people discovered them, and thought, “will I just have to memorize all this framedata to get it?” It took me a while for it to click. In reality, yeah people pick up a lot of framedata incidentally, but almost no one seriously memorizes all the framedata. People really only look for a few things, which moves are unsafe, which moves set up combos, which can follow up combos, and whether each move is plus or minus on block. Continue reading →

How would you break down the many different fighting game playstyles such as rushdown, turtling, zoning, or any others you can think of?

A friend of mine (ClarenceMage) came up with a really brilliant way of separating it out actually.

The idea is you have these two scales: Horizontally, you have a scale between Game Knowledge (left) and Player Knowledge (right). Vertically, you have a scale between Safe Guaranteed Play (top), and Risky Unpredictable Play (bottom).

Setplay revolves around setting up situations and capitalizing off of them. Setplay is highly reliant on game knowledge, it’s all about knowing the game better than your opponent. Examples of setplay players would include Armada (Honest Setplay) and Marn (Dog Setplay).

Buttons is about winning the footsie neutral game. It’s player knowledge, part game knowledge, so it falls somewhere between setplay and reads. You gotta know a bit of what your opponent is thinking, but also a bit of how to use your options best to win. Examples of Buttons players would be Hungrybox (Honest Buttons), PPMD (Opportunistic Buttons), and Infiltration (Dog Buttons)

Reads is about knowing your opponent’s tendencies. It’s about attacking at just the right time in just the right place. It relies heavily on player knowledge. Examples of Reads would be Snake Eyez (Honest Reads), Mango (Dog Reads) and Daigo (also Dog Reads).

Playing Honest is about sticking to guaranteed setups with a small chance of failure. Honest players tend to mix in a variety of approaches instead of pursuing a single gimmick and play according to what has the best odds of success. Honest players are the ones that almost always block low on wakeup or tech neutral. Honest players can have this tendency towards safety taken advantage of, but tend to have very consistent performance to make up for it.

Playing Dog is about going for what works and throwing caution to the wind. It’s about dogged persistence to win the way you want to win. Dog players tend to go for high risk high reward options or get killed trying. Dog players will ultra on wakeup, shoryuken in your face, charge the fsmash in the direction you’re about to roll, go offstage for the gimp.

Playing Opportunistic is a mix of Honest and Dog, trying to adapt to how the opponent is playing at that moment, seizing opportunities to grab just a bit more advantage where you can, but sticking to what you know works when the going gets tough. Opportunistic players are flexible, but can psych themselves out trying to follow their opponent’s patterns and be in the wrong mode at the wrong time.

Of course, there are a lot of ways to divide playstyles or categorize them. If you want to get deep down, it comes down to the player’s tendencies to use some options over others and the frequency of that option use, and you can’t totally quantify that.

Rising Thunder, Pocket Rumble, Divekick, Rivals of Aether… what’s the point of all these “beginner-friendly” games? Traditional fighting games are overwhelming at first, but you have to keep PLAYING them to git gud. Playing these baby games won’t magically make you a KoF/GG/Melee champion.

How many games do we need to dumb-down (oh, I mean, “simplify”) mechanics for scrubs before we realize that they won’t learn no matter what. Also, enough with “we want to explore the strategic element”. You can do that with all these other games that don’t need some 1 or 2-button control scheme.

The point is, I can bust out divekick and get anyone off the street playing in seconds.

King of Fighters can be overwhelming to someone who only plays Street Fighter, Guilty Gear is overwhelming to anyone who hasn’t played an arc sys fighting game before. Playing Street Fighter won’t make you a champion in those games, but it will give you a leg up, and you’ll certainly be able to wreck anyone starting fresh in those games. I know I’ve picked up random fighting games and been able to fight on par with people experienced in them just using fundamentals.

Having a simpler game to learn allows beginners to focus on the few tools they need to win, like fireball/anti-air, like the basics of footsies, meter management, simple combos, and so on. That’s a game that needs to exist in my opinion. If you don’t have games with a greater accessibility teach people the basics of the harder games, then it becomes a lot harder to get people into those harder games.

I’ve gotten people to play traditional fighting games with me and tried to give them the introduction and they were like, “This is cool, but there’s way too much stuff for me.”

How many games do we need to dumb-down (oh, I mean, “simplify”) mechanics for scrubs before we realize that they won’t learn no matter what. Also, enough with “we want to explore the strategic element”. You can do that with all these other games that don’t need some 1 or 2-button control scheme.

People will learn. Releasing new games with simpler control schemes isn’t harming the games we already have. They’re not establishing a new competitive standard. The further point I made is that these games are unique and do things other fighting games aren’t necessarily doing, which by itself validates their existence.

Being bad at a game does not make you a scrub. It does not make sense to write people off as irredeemable when they could potentially learn. If nothing else, these games are a useful tool to me personally, for introducing people to traditional fighting games in person.

These games teach you more with all their additional mechanics. Why regress. If you feel overwhelmed, there’s always the early entries in a respective series (e.g. SFII).

Except SFII is still too complicated for a lot of people, and on top of that, has the worst input read algorithm next to SFI, making it hard to even play the game at a beginner level unless you’re better at special move inputs than you’d need to be in order to play a more complex recent game.

Depth comes at the price of complexity, and sometimes people need a scaffolded experience or they simply get overwhelmed. It’s a regular pattern, beginners have so much to take in all at once to even play the game, they go a ton of rounds fumbling with the few controls they know and mashing buttons.

Simpler games with more straightforward basic functions can help alleviate this and allow people to develop the basic skills to understand the more complex games. Otherwise fighting games become a genre with no entry point, and that’s dangerous.

And there’s also the part where you glorify sub-SFII games like Divekick and Pocket Fighter. These games aren’t really good for learning either, I don’t care how you spin it. How many people have played those games and then seriously taken up more complex fighters? Usually, people get serious about FGs are actually playing with other people (friends, tourneys). Or through their desire to improve. These types of 1 or 2-button games are just gimmicks that become boring after a short period. They might be worth mentioning because their simplicity lets you easily discuss more fundamental concepts in the genre, but that is about the extent to it. I mean, people don’t discuss level design in NSMBW because it’s obviously too difficult, so they stick to the simpler SMB, and that’s fine for educational purposes, but we can’t keep teaching 1+1=2 over and over, nor should we glorify the work of people who think that coming up with 1 (not even 1+1, but literally just 1, which is what Divekick and Pocket Fighter are) is some revolutionary new idea.
Basically, if someone comes out with a sub-SMB platformer (like an autorunner), we ignore it, correct? So why behave differently for fighting games or any other genre? That kind of started as one ask, but turned into another.

Maybe they’re not good for learning? I don’t know yet. I haven’t had a serious chance to test out teaching people through them. So far I’ve mostly just been going with 3rd strike because it’s free and online.

I don’t really know how well they work as an introduction tool. They’re still pretty new. I admit that I’ve barely gotten to play pocket fighter, and never with another person.

I think they’re worth a try. Maybe I’m wrong and they don’t translate into anything. How about we wait and see?

The other thing is, Divekick is absolutely 1+1. There’s a lot more going on in Divekick than in an autorunner. I know it looks simple to you. Even I thought the concept was kind of stupid when I first saw it, but after playing it with other people it clicked and became interesting. Divekick asks a lot more of the player than any autorunner does. There are a lot more “inferential judgments” going on. (totally coining that term on the spot here, might even throw it in the glossary)

It’s like footsies in a traditional fighting game, it doesn’t make any sense to you when you first start playing, so you just mash, then you wonder why the other guy is hitting you more. I know I’ve had many people get surprised when they actually sit down and play divekick with me and realize that there’s a lot more to it than they initially thought.

And Pocket Fighter is more complex than Divekick, so it probably has more complex strategy to it.

The other thing is, fighting games are way more complex than SMB. If you strip away SMB you have something that is barely a game, if you strip away fighting games, you still have something left that is arguably just as complex as SMB.

When you get ‘stuck’ in a fighting game, like, say, when you play against a character you don’t know how to fight and you just don’t understand how to deal with them because all of the moves of that character seem to have priority or the char. just has better ledge game (in SSB) or this one move you just don’t know how to counter, what is your process for figuring out how to deal with or counter this character (or a certain tactic)?

I almost never get stuck, because I generally have a good understanding of how the systems work. Mewtwo teleports at me, I know I need to have a hitbox on the spot he’s about to appear before he’s there. I’ve worked out plenty of anti-jank tactics versus snake’s grenades and mines. I’ve spiked lucas players trying to tether to ledge for free. I’ve uppercut dhalsim’s limbs. I’ve faultless defense’d Faust’s blockstring pressure into his unblockable (so he can’t run up into it as fast because FD pushes him away further, and since it’s an unblockable, I can’t jump out like with a throw). I pointed out to my friend in KoF98 that Athena’s hard autocorrect divekick was probably really unsafe on block, because it wouldn’t make sense to be safe on block (turns out, yeah it’s really unsafe).

Everything always has a counter. Either you hit them before they do it, you punish them after they try to do it, or hit them in the middle of it. Good understanding of the system as a whole, good expectation of the trends in the system (like knowing which moves are probably unsafe), being able to recognize what happens with the move in different situations, and thereby being able to diagnose the move’s weakness. Like Dudley’s cross counter in third strike doesn’t counter low attacks. I never read a guide mentioning this, I just played a lot and noticed it as I played.

If I’m having trouble with a character, I usually look up guides for the character I’m having trouble against. Learning how they see things from their perspective is helpful because it also includes their weaknesses and what they need to watch out for. Investigation into framedata can be helpful too, as it was with Necalli in SFV, learning that his blockstrings into the stomp special are tighter with the light stomp, but more disadvantageous on block, and have a gap with the heavy stomp, but more neutral on block.

There’s a large number of resources you can potentially look into in order to learn how to beat characters for any popular fighting game.

I recently played PM after a long time and for the first time against a player and how the FUCK are you supposed to fight Marth? ALL his moves have priority over everything I did (not to mention longer range). I could only beat the player using Charizard and his giant-ass hitboxes with flame-tip and claw sweetspots.

Hahaha, that’s funny. Marth has an advantageous matchup against charizard, because charizard’s tail isn’t disjointed and marth can just whiff punish slash it, also because marth gets good combos on floaties and can space against Charizard in shield really well (and charizard already suffers against shield pressure).

I play with the second best Charizard player in the world actually, and as you may know, I main Marth.

Some key things to remember are, priority doesn’t apply to air attacks. Air attacks cannot clank, so forward air from Marth will cut through your hitboxes.

Marth’s big weakness is that he doesn’t have any attacks that come out particularly fast, and his attacks don’t have great recovery. His fastest ground attacks are jab, down smash, and Up B, all coming out on the 4th or 5th frame.

If your friend is spamming SH double fair, you can either move out of the way, then hit him right when he lands (charizard has an amazing dash dance) either with a grab or forward tilt (charizard’s forward tilt is amazing), or move in closer to him and shield on the spot where he’s going to land, so he’s forced to land in your shieldgrab range. These apply to any character.

Marth’s dash attack sucks, can be beaten by shieldgrabbing or just letting it whiff and punishing it.

Marth’s down tilt is his best neutral move because it has amazing IASA frames, so it effectively has a short recovery. Also has a reasonably fast startup of 6 frames. He can usually dash out of it before getting shieldgrabbed, but it’s still susceptible to whiff punishing.

You want to DI marth’s fair chains out, to avoid getting spiked. His up tilt and dash attack have a trajectory that sends you in at Marth, so you’ll want to DI down and in at Marth. Those three moves are how he sets up most of his combos. His grab is normally useful in combos, but charizard is so heavy it rarely comes into play. Just be sure to DI down and away from him when he forward throws you. On lighter characters, he can also down throw as a DI trap into fsmash, so you’ll have to guess which way to DI to avoid getting fsmashed.

His fsmash by the way, has almost no shield pushback, so you can shieldgrab it no problem. If he’s out of range, then let him whiff the fsmash and you are totally free to run in and do whatever you want to him. I do this to a lot of marth players I know are worse than I am when I feel they’re about to fsmash. Just wait at the very edge of their fsmash range, let them miss the attack, dash in an grab.

As charizard, watch out with your dash dance, your tail lags behind you, and can be slashed if you’re not careful.

Any tips for Ganondorf in PM? I wsa using him and couldn’t do jack to Marth until I picked up Charizard. I’m surprised Charizard has a bad matchup against Marth, though that’s probably because the other guy just wasn’t that good. Also the setup was laggy so that might have given fatso charizard the advantage.

Ganondorf, he’s also on the lower tier side like charizard, hard to say how his matchup against marth goes. I think marth still has the advantage. Luckily I alt Ganon. Ganondorf is all about single hits and spacing, Marth is also about spacing and has disjoint. Ganondorf kills in a few hits, Marth has nice combos, though none of his grab setups work on Ganondorf because he’s too heavy.

Basically, you want to hit him when he misses you. Ganondorf gets great followups off his down throw versus marth. At lower percentages, he can regrab (marth can DI forward or behind ganondorf, so turn appropriately to catch him). At higher percentages down throw gets guaranteed followups into fair or bair depending on DI. Ganondorf can’t move that well to whiff punish grab marth, but he can move in on marth forcing him to land in bad positions and be open for a shieldgrab.

Ganondorf has a nice jab, much faster than any of marth’s moves (one of marth’s central weaknesses is that he has no good fast moves), so that can be useful in a pinch.

Ganondorf’s down B can outprioritize all of marth’s grounded moves, but it loses hard to aerials or shield. Side B is good for shenanigans, when you scare him into shielding you, or if he tries to shield while on a platform and thinks he’s safe (since normally you can’t grab people unless you’re on the same ground they are). Air version gets better followups, ground version has better range and can avoid attacks like Dudley’s short swing blow. Ground version can be teched before ganon can do anything about it, air version does a small juggle which ganon can usually at least jab off of before they get a chance to tech. Up B is also a grab and can shenanigan people in much the same way, grabbing them when they think you don’t have the grab option.

Most of the matchup is going to be moving carefully, and poking at marth before he swings or waiting for him to miss a swing and poking him. You’re just gonna have to get used to reading a lot harder and winning neutral more with worse tools. Ganon has nice range on a lot of his attacks, technically better than marth’s on fair, you need to get better at figuring out when he’s going to attack, avoiding it, and hitting him back. You don’t need to win neutral as many times as marth does, because you get bigger rewards for winning neutral.

I beat a guy playing falcon yesterday every single time while I played Bowser. In Melee. If you have good enough instincts, anything’s doable.