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This week on the Insert Credit Podcast, I come one step closer to realizing my destiny as the Drew Carey of Video Games. Join us on our bold attempt to add story to our podcast’s gameplay as we tackle the following topics:

1) Deleting one video game from your memory
2) A Club Nintendo Makeover
3) Ralph Nader vs. Video Games
4) The deal with Team Fortress 2 and hats
5) Improv Zone: Two doting parents (Rogers, Cifaldi) support their nationally ranked teenage Call of Duty player (Sheffield).
6) Pinball Wizardry
7) First Person Non-Shooters
8) Game wiki management
9) Pulling game villains from the public domain
10) Manipulating the touch-screen interface without your fingers

Sound production and music curation provided by Andrew Toups. Write into podcast@insertcredit.com with your own questions for the show, nominations for the  BGOAT (best game of all time) or the BGGOAT (best Genesis game of all time), and who you think deserves this week’s lightning round win. See you at 31!

-alex jaffe will have a serious discussion on this show about lsd dream emulator one of these days, he swears

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Video game journalism web log Hypertext Transfer Protocol Colon Double-Slash World Wide Web Dot Kotaku Dot Com features editor Kirk Hamilton joins us to discuss some topics I came up with literally 20 minutes before the show. It turned out pretty good! Here’s what you’re in for:

1) BioWare’s Gay Planet
2) Super Mario World as a Modding Community Playground
3) Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello vs. United States vice president Joe Biden
4) Modern pop artists in game music composition
5) Game-Inspired Hairstyles for your Girl/Boyfriend
6) Title schema for future Pokémon games
7) A report card for Platinum Games
8) The best power-up in a video game (and what constitutes a power-up)
9) Why Capcom hates Mega Man
10) How to inflate your game’s metascore

Plus, a lightning round with results to be judged by you the listener! E-mail who you think did the best job to podcast@insertcredit.com.

Thanks again to Andrew Toups, who did all the sound editing again. Music for this episode includes Sleater Kinney’s “Oh!” and Pizzicato Five’s “Trailer Music” and “It’s a Beautiful Day”.

Oh yeah! Last week, we had a whole show where we eulogized the PlayStation 2. Our “PS2culuar”, if you will (or even if you won’t, I don’t care, I will never stop making puns out of the word “spectacular” and there is not a thing you can do to stop me). If you haven’t grabbed it off iTunes or our RSS feed yet, you can download it here.

Lots of you have been requesting the Best Games of All Time list from a couple weeks ago, so I’ll post it here for your consultation. Don’t like these results? You can influence the 2014 Edition by e-mailing your nominations to podcast@insertcredit.com. Get to it!

-alex jaffe is particularly fond of Zexion’s hair in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
Chrono Trigger (SNES)
Tetris (Various)
OutRun 2 (Arcade)
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike (Arcade)
EarthBound (SNES)
Mother 3 (GBA)
God Hand (PS2)
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (GB)
The Secret of Monkey Island (DOS)
Half-Life 2 (PC)
Another World (Amiga)
Sid Meier’s Civilization (PC)
Bonk’s Revenge (TurboGrafx-16)
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
Minecraft (PC)
Cave Story (PC)
Super Metroid (SNES)
Final Fantasy Tactics (PS)
PONG (PONG)

Foreword: Why Fighting Games Matter

Introduction: Here Comes a New Challenger!

Chapter Zero: On Execution

Chapter One: The Anatomy of a Fighting Game

Chapter Two: Ryu vs. Ryu (everything you need to know about fighting games)

Chapter Three: Fleshing Out the Design Skeleton

Chapter Four: Intro to Combos

Chapter Five: Eleven Tips For Not Sucking At Street Fighter

Appendix: Recommended Reading

Foreword: Why Fighting Games Matter

Fighting games have long been dismissed by philistines as “button mashers”. This is, I reckon, because “speed-chess-poker-magic-the-gathering-rock-paper-scissors-fighting” is kind of a mouthful, and frankly, most of the people who think fighting games consist of mindless button-mashing never got deep enough into a fighting game to get to the speed-chess-poker-etc. part to begin with.

You might be reading this simply because you want to learn how to become reasonably competent at a fighting game. That’s a pretty good reason! But I am calling this article “The Educated Gentleperson’s Fighting Game Primer” because, well, I know plenty of Educated Gentlepeople who ought to learn more about fighting games, but don’t have a clue as to how to go about doing it.

Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably big into videogames; maybe you’re a devoted enthusiast, maybe you’re a journalist, maybe you’re an academic or amateur scholar of some sort, maybe you even make your own videogames. If you are significantly invested in the production and consumption of videogames as a medium, on a personal or professional level, you ought to know something about competitive fighting games as a matter of basic literacy.

Learning how to beat another person in a fighting game involves understanding elements of game design, psychology, programming and basic machine input/output, human physiology, motivation, and several other serious bodies of human knowledge — and then applying them to go beat down your buddy’s virtual avatar. You must train yourself to understand complicated situations and react to them with complicated physical movements within fractions of a second. Perhaps most importantly, you must learn how to get better at something: How to absorb good behaviors and discard bad ones, how to push yourself, how to practice, how to diagnose problems and fix them. I think it’s a good thing for people to do, period. To paraphrase MMA legend Renzo Gracie, “Fighting [games] is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul.”

As a budding professional in the games industry (I edit a magazine), I can directly trace my career path (for which I am incredibly grateful) to my early love of fighting games. Studying Street Fighter felt like seeing the Matrix as ones and zeros for the first time. Now, I can understand that not everyone feels the same about Street Fighter as I do — Street Fighter eventually led me to pursue actual fighting as another all-consuming hobby, so clearly I’m just kind of wired to like that kind of thing — but I maintain that a functional understanding of competitive fighting games is a worthwhile asset for any budding professional in the games industry.

The most fundamental thing that sets games apart from other artistic media — books, film, whatever — is that games demand a physical interaction between the text and the player. These days, we’re seeing games do all kinds of interesting things, from experimental narratives to designs intended for wildly different control schemes to engines so powerful they accurately model the way light works in real life. But amid all that, we’ve found it very challenging to develop games that express sheer joy at the level of the physical input itself. Fighting games require you to be proficient at the physical aspect in order to enjoy them, and as such I think they really do address the essence of the videogame as a medium.

Moreover, the process of playing a fighting game against another person can essentially be considered “game design, in reverse”. Playing a fighting game means you’re studying a game down to individual pixels, animation frames, processor cycles, and its player (your opponent) down to behavioral patterns, tics, and state of mind — all in order to make the game as miserable as possible for the other person. Your job is to take the tools the designers have given you — characters with moves — and turn the game into a sheer mess of broken parts that no one ever wants to play again. “Look at what you’ve made, designer,” you say, “Do you think this imbalanced, hackneyed crap is worth pouring my life into? Try again.” Your opponent is merely a canvas upon which you may paint with your brush of pain; the designer who dared suggest that this game was worthy of your time is the audience. (Of course, your opponent is trying to do the same thing to you, and somehow, both of you have a good old time and the game developers make some money.) Perhaps it’s not quite surprising why established fighting game veterans seem to be breaking into the industry; all they’d have to do in the office is, well, the opposite of what they do in the arcade.

So read this article. Maybe you’ll be bitten by the bug, maybe you won’t. If you’ve ever watched The Daigo Video and thought, “Man, I should learn how to play a fighting game sometime,” congratulations: Now’s the time.

Introduction: Here Comes a New Challenger!

I am convinced that fighting games are one of the most interesting things going on in videogames, and that they have been for a long time. I get the impression that lots of other people, smart people who often think a lot about videogames, think so too, but that they’re intimidated by the relatively high barrier to entry. Which is fair. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 26 because I was intimidated by the DMV, so, you know, priorities.

Here is the thing: Fighting games are not actually that hard to learn how to play, and play somewhat competently. But they’re very hard to teach . Most of us battle-scarred veterans learned how to play games by getting our asses beat for years before we even began to understand what we were doing wrong. That is not the way it has to be, mind you; just the way it is right now. Learning how to play fighting games by yourself (or with someone just about equally clueless as you) is kind of learning how to actually fight by yourself; that is, stupidly hard.

What makes things even harder is that literally the vast majority of Game in a fighting game is locked away from you until you are able to physically and mentally perform at a certain level. Starcraft is one of the most physically taxing game franchises out there, but it’s comparatively easier to get people hooked with a taste of the actual Game by teaching people different openings and game strategies and unit compositions, and then remind them that all the theorizing isn’t worth jack shit if they can’t attain a minimum level of physical execution. With Street Fighter , it’s like you have to basically take it on faith that there is an amazing game available to you after you spend years of your life training with the Wu-Tang Clan.

What follows is my attempt to give you a crash course in fighting games. I’m writing this because people frequently express to me the desire to learn how to play fighting games in the same sense that people tell me they wish they had time to cook more often or work out; if I write this, then I can just link it the next time you express this sentiment and save us both the trouble. Luckily, right now is probably the easiest time in the world to learn how to play fighting games, so really, you have no excuse. I may not make you a champion, but if I can make you literate, that’ll be enough.

Who I am: I am not a professional player or coach, or a professional game designer or anything like that. Far from it, in fact. I’ve played fighting games seriously since about 2002 or so. I’ve taken my licks as a tournament competitor, but I’ve only won a crappy little Third Strike tournament at an anime convention at Cal State Northridge, and my prize was some crappy Street Fighter anime DVDs (one of which I already owned). I’ve had the privilege of losing to some of the greats, but that’s about it. But I do think very seriously about the process of developing new skills — how to learn, how to practice, how to teach — whether those skills are about games or martial arts or whatever.

About this guide: There are many ways to learn how to play fighting games. For me, I spent years playing at the UC Berkeley BEARCade (RIP). My game of choice was Capcom vs. SNK 2 , which, as an introduction to fighting games, is kind of like learning a language by memorizing its dictionary and hoping for the best. As a fighting game, CVS2 is splendid. One of the best, really. But there is simply too much stuff in it — too many characters, options, tools, etc. — which makes it very hard for a budding fighting game player to improve. If something isn’t working, a newbie’s first instinct is to think, “Well, I’ll change to one of the other 40-odd characters , or use a new ‘groove’ (a set of different design elements like air blocking, parries, rolls, different super meter management, and so on)”, when it really should be something like “Hey, I should probably not jump so much.”

As a result, I spent years messing around with CVS2 — and by “messing around”, I mean “playing a lot ” — without ever getting that much better. This one guy at the BEARCade named Eric (“Meaneric”) Choi would demolish me for free, and I never understood why he could do that. It just seemed like he always had a dragon punch when he needed one, or a throw when he needed one. I must have spent a few hundred dollars trying to beat Eric. It took years before I beat him even once.

One day at the BEARCade, we were running through our usual $1-entry weekly tournaments, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo needed one more person to have a full 8-man bracket. Eric was the favorite to win, so he encouraged me to enter. “Okay,” I told him, “But you’ll have to show me how to play, first.”

“ Easy,” he said. “Just pick Original Sagat.”

In ST, you can pick “original” versions of the character cast that have slightly different movesets and properties than the normal versions. O. Sagat, as it turns out, has a fireball that is downright oppressive in its speed and recovery. So I picked O. Sagat, threw fireballs, and when people tried to jump over them, I’d hit them with a dragon punch. Simple and effective — and yet, it’s something I had never really thought about when playing CVS2, because when you throw fireballs in that game, your opponent can jump OR short hop OR roll OR parry OR Just Defend OR any number of options. Up until that point, I had never thought about how the fireball and dragon punch were supposed to complement each other, because I had been playing too many games which tried to mix up the fundamental blueprint established by the original Street Fighter II series by adding new and different elements to the mix.

I ended up getting second place, losing to Meaneric in the finals. Which, at that point in my fighting game career, was the best I had ever done in a tournament before. I continued to mess around in ST for maybe another week or two after that, and then went back to CVS2 — and found that I had, mysteriously, gotten better at that, too. Looking back, I think it’s because CVS2 is simply ST with a whole bunch of additions and abstractions and options layered on top of it, and I had mistaken those additions for the game itself . After coming to understand the basic game interaction — fireballs, jumps, dragon punches — everything else just kind of made sense .

In this guide, I’ll attempt to recreate that approach. The meat of this piece will focus on dissecting about 10 seconds of gameplay that contain pretty much everything you need to understand about fighting games. There are other people out there who will try to teach you about fighting games in other ways. This is my way, because it’s how I learned to play them. I have played fighting games for a long time now, but I consider that moment to be when I started learning how to play them. At the end, I’ve written a series of concrete, immediately-actionable tips that will give you very concrete ways to improve your game, but they won’t really make sense if you don’t have the proper framework to understand them first.

I don’t make any claim to understand the game perfectly; there are far better players (and teachers) out there you should learn from, and I have no doubt that there are many people who will read this that point out that I have misunderstood a detail or grossly oversimplified a matchup. I’m sure I have! And I welcome feedback — hit me up on Twitter @pattheflip, or comment on this article if you dare navigate our byzantine comments system. I will not pretend to expertise, here. I’m just a guy with an arcade stick who likes to write.

A note on materials: This guide will mention a few games, but most of the basics will just be in Super Street Fighter II Turbo / HD Remix , so grab that on your Xbox/PS3 (or emulate it on your PC) and you’ll be good. I would highly recommend buying an arcade stick — any variant of the Mad Catz TE (which typically run about $100 or so, though you can find them cheaper on Craigslist and such) is a good place to start.

There are plenty of people who manage to make these games work with a gamepad. Some of them are actually pretty good. Really, though, I’d recommend learning with a stick from the very beginning. These games were designed to be played with arcade sticks; it’s the right thing to do. At the advanced level, there are lots of technical nuances about these games that are much easier to understand if you know how to use a stick and how they work. An arcade stick is your sword, your gun, your instrument of your will; what you like and why you like it, eventually, can say volumes about who you are and why.

Fighting games are highly physical endeavors. In many cases, your success or failure depends on your ability to see something coming and perform a rather complicated move with utmost accuracy down to fractions of a second. For example, the difference between throwing a fireball while walking forward and performing a dragon punch is entirely based on when you press your punch button; in the former case, you want toward, down, down-toward, toward, punch, and in the latter case, you just want toward, down, down-toward, punch. It’s easy to get one when you wanted the other if you are not clean and intentional with all your inputs.

When you’re trying to perform complicated inputs with a standard gamepad, you’re relying solely on your fine motor skills. Your fingers alone are responsible for doing everything , and since a gamepad is a relatively small device, the difference between something like walk-forward-fireball and dragon punch is a matter of hitting some very small switches that are very close to each other in just the right time. With a proper joystick, you’re using your entire upper body, and your fingers simply have to hit the right button at the right time instead of worrying about highly nuanced movements. If I need to perform a motion faster or slower, I can rely on my arm’s larger muscles to help out instead of just trying to make my thumbs work at increasingly finer levels of detail. (Think about how hard it is to drive safely and legally in any Grand Theft Auto game: it’s mostly because you’re controlling a car with two thumbs on sticks instead of steering wheels.)

Chapter Zero: On Execution

Broadly speaking, the skills needed to play the modern fighting game competently fall into two major categories; you must know what to do and how to do it. Knowing what to do means building your understanding of fighting games; knowing how to do it means developing your physical ability to produce the motions necessary to perform the right moves at the right time.

The two skillsets are more interconnected than you might expect. You may lose a match because you didn’t hit the dragon punch you wanted, when you wanted it; maybe that was because you didn’t properly execute the dragon punch input in time (a failure to execute), or maybe it was because you saw the right time to hit the dragon punch too late (a failure in understanding).

Most of this guide is going to cover the basics in a fairly execution-agnostic way; I will assume that you are capable of performing a fireball motion (down, down-toward, toward) and dragon punch movements with reasonable consistency (say, 80% of the time). If you can’t yet do that, there’s no shortcut for this — just go ahead and hit training mode until you can. Try setting certain goals for yourself, like doing five dragon punches in a row on one side, and then five on the other side, and moving on to fireballs only once you’ve managed to successfully do three sets of five dragon punches on each side. Think of it like a warmup before hitting the gym.

Does this sound like too much work for you? Stop reading now, walk over to a mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and ask yourself, “<insert name here>, have I ever done anything truly hard ? Have I ever overcome a challenge? Do I deserve what I have, or has everything simply been given to me? In work, or in life — have I ever had a chance to fail? Do I want that chance? ” If the answer to that last question is “Yes”, then you may proceed to hit training mode. If the answer is “No”: Leave.

Many fighting game neophytes are intimidated by developing the execution skillset; it’s not as hard as it looks. Once people have surpassed the first execution hump, they’re often demoralized because they feel like since they know how to do the moves, they should win more — even though they don’t really know when they need to do the moves in order to win. This guide is for those people.

Chapter One : The Anatomy of a Fighting Game

Street Fighter II is intimidating. Understandably so: Any given character has somewhere between 18-24 different normal moves coming from six buttons (three punch buttons and three kick buttons that each perform different attacks depending on whether your character is standing, crouching, jumping up, or jumping forward/backward), a few throws, special moves, maybe even a super or two. If I am playing a game of Quake III Arena and I see someone, my options are typically different flavors of “shoot guy with <whatever guns I have available> while moving in a direction that best reduces my chance of getting shot back”. At any given moment in Street Fighter II, I could conceivably perform upwards of 35-40 different actions. As such, the most useful thing a novice can do is simplify the game. If you learn to think of Street Fighter II as a series of predictable situations with optimal solutions, you can forget the 34 dumb choices in any given situation and focus on executing the one or two good choices.

In rather broad strokes, Street Fighter II is a game about imposing your will on your opponent. Your goal is to make a series of intelligent situations that constrict your opponent’s options, forcing them to make ever-more-dangerous gambles until they do something you can punish them for. You want to put your opponent in these situations over and over until they lose, and then you put them in these situations again and again until they don’t want to play with you any more. Basically, Street Fighter II — and modern fighting games in general — are about making the game as tortuous and awful as possible for your opponent while they try to do the same to you. It’s a beautiful thing.

To begin: Characters in fighting games take damage when you hit them. A “hit” happens when one character presses a button that projects a box the game considers an attack (“hitbox”) into an area occupied by a box that belongs to another character (“hurtbox”). In Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (hereafter referred to as HDR, because that’s a mouthful), you can actually turn on a view mode that shows hitboxes and hurtboxes.

Showing hitboxes in HD Remix’s training mode. Red means hitbox, blue means hurtbox.

Press medium kick while Ryu is crouching, and you’ll see a red box surround his leg. You can see that when you use your normal moves, your character winds up a little bit in the start of the attack, then the hitbox shows up. If your box hits someone, they take damage and are sent into a “hitstun” state for a little while, during which they cannot move, attack, or block. If your opponent’s hitbox comes into contact with you either before your hitboxes show up (when your attack is starting up), after your hitbox disappears (the “recovery” phase of an attack), or manages to connect with your character’s hurtboxes while cleanly avoiding your hitbox (say, by performing a crouching kick that goes under your standing fierce punch and connects with your legs), then you’ll get hit instead. If your hitbox hits someone while they’re blocking, then they’ll be sent into a “blockstun” state, where they won’t be able to move or attack but take no damage (or very little damage, depending on the game and move properties).

When you’re just starting out with a new character (or a new game), one of your first steps is to understand each move’s advantages and tradeoffs in order to find out which moves are good in different situations. If a move has a really short startup animation, that means you can use it to stop slower attacks before they start and put your opponent under pressure; conversely, if a move has a slow startup animation, you’ll have to be more careful about how or when you use it. If a move stuns your enemy for a long time when you hit them with it, you can use it to start combos and do heavy damage to your opponent (if it hits) or use it to keep your opponent blocking and make it hard for them to start attacking you; if a move doesn’t stun your enemy for so long, your opponent might have the opportunity to hit you after blocking it, meaning you should only use that move when you’re absolutely sure it’ll hit. Moves with hitboxes that cover the area above your character’s head are good for hitting enemies that jump at you; moves that extend far across the screen are good for keeping your enemy at range. And so on.

Note that every move in the game has an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on the situation it’s used in. That doesn’t mean all moves are equally good; there are some moves that are pretty useless or highly situational, and part of learning a fighting game is figuring out which ones are which.

Individual moves are the atomic unit of composition for a fighting game, but eventually, your understanding of fighting games will grow to include effective combinations of moves that can work together to mask each others’ weaknesses and synergize with each others’ strengths in ways that encourage certain styles of play. These effective combinations of moves are called “playable characters”; in the next chapter, we’re going to dissect the Adam of fighting games.

Chapter Two : Ryu vs. Ryu (everything you need to know about fighting games)

Ryu is the character that the entire genre of fighting games was designed around. Every fighting game , from King of Fighters to Guilty Gear to Marvel vs. Capcom to Tekken, can trace its design history back right to Ryu. So let’s break Ryu down — and in doing so, break down pretty much every fighting game ever.

As it happens, pretty much everything you need to know about modern fighting games is right here in this exchange:

That’s pretty dense, though, so we’re going to break it down into individual chunks. Let’s start with Phase 1: Player 1 throws a fireball, Player 2 jumps over it, Player 1 hits Player 2 with a dragon punch.

Phase 1: Crouching Fireball, Hidden Dragon Punch

Player 1 (Orange) throws a fireball at Player 2 (Blue).

Ryu’s fireball and dragon punch are two very interesting attacks (so interesting, in fact, that they basically gave birth to the fighting game genre); we’ll begin by looking the fireball up close. As an attack, the fireball has a fairly high amount of startup time before it turns into a hurtbox. Once it is out, Ryu has to wait for a little bit before he can move freely, and then he can move and attack at will. Depending on which punch button the Ryu player uses to perform the fireball, the fireball’s hitbox could be only halfway across the screen or almost all the way across by the time he recovers. Once Ryu recovers from throwing the fireball, he basically has the ground-half of the screen covered; the opponent can either get hit by it (leaving him in a short amount of stun and taking a bit of damage), block it (leaving him in marginally less stun and taking a small amount of damage), respond with a fireball of his own to cancel it out (resulting in no stun or damage for anyone), or jump over it, avoiding the fireball entirely. Essentially, throwing a fireball means putting yourself at risk in the immediate moment (by performing an attack with a long startup period) in order to gain an advantage once it’s out and covering a whole bunch of screen space.

So Player 1 threw a fireball at Player 2. How is Player 2 supposed to find the best option available to him? Well, we’ll start by looking for the ideal outcome: Player 2 wants to avoid taking damage or being stunned, because both of those outcomes would make it harder for Player 2 to defeat Player 1. That means that Player 2 can either respond with a fireball to cancel out Player 1′s fireball, or jump over it to avoid it completely.

Now, at the beginning of Phase 1, Player 2 is standing about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a screen-length away from Player 1. At this range, it would probably take Player 2 too much time to a) realize that Player 1 is throwing a fireball, b) decide to throw a fireball, and c) successfully execute the fireball motion in order to cancel the first fireball out. If Player 2 tried to do this, he’d probably end up getting hit by the first fireball before his own fireball had arrived on screen, or maybe he’d successfully cancel it, but would still be a little bit behind Player 1, because Player 2 started his fireball after Player 1, meaning Player 2 will recover after Player 1 — which leaves Player 1 with time to follow the fireball up with something else, like walking up to Player 2 and hitting him, or throwing another fireball. So Player 2 decides to jump at Player 1 and hit him with a jumping Roundhouse kick.

Unfortunately, this is where the Second Interesting Move In Fighting Games comes in: The Dragon Punch. The dragon punch is basically the anti-fireball; where the fireball sacrifices the present for the future, the DP borrows against the future in favor of RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Upon completing the DP motion, Player 1 is invincible for the beginning of the move; within a few frames, he absolutely owns the space occupied around his fist. Once that fist connects with his opponent, it sends the poor victim into a “knockdown” state, where he can’t do anything until Ryu stands up. Of course, the DP has plenty of recovery time; as soon as Ryu is on his way down, he is open to whatever world of pain his waiting opponent has prepared, if the opponent managed to block or dodge the dragon punch.

Check out the hitboxes on that bad boy dragon punch.

The dragon punch is the great momentum-breaker; its near-instant activation time and ultimate priority mean that, basically, if you know that your opponent is going to do something, you can beat it with the dragon punch. Your opponent can keep you pummeled under a barrage of fireballs and well-timed moves designed to keep you blocking, but one properly-timed dragon punch will reverse the momentum entirely and put you back in the game. However, if you miss a dragon punch, you might well lose the game. High risk, high reward.

So, to recap Phase 1: Player 1 throws a fireball. Player 2 reacts by trying to jump over the fireball and gets hit with the dragon punch, sending Player 2 down to the ground, where he’ll have to wait for a second or two for Ryu to stand back up before he can do anything.

Dat dragon punch.

That puts us into Phase 2, which starts with Player 1 jumping over Player 2′s knocked-down body, hitting Player 2 with a jumping roundhouse when Player 2 stands up. Player 2 blocks that jumping attack, performs a dragon punch of his own, and gets swept for his trouble. What just happened?

Phase 2: Frame advantage and baiting the DP

Phase 1 ends with Player 2 recovering from the knockdown that the dragon punch caused. During this time, Player 2 can’t take any damage (he has no available hitboxes), but he can’t do anything, either. Remember that every attack has a certain amount of startup, and only a select few are invincible during that startup (like the dragon punch); Player 1 can use the knockdown period to manuever himself into an advantageous position (which he does by jumping over Player 2′s knocked-down body) and starting his attack while Player 2 is still getting up. Basically, after Player 2 gets knocked down, he stands up right into a big old hitbox that gives him the following options: get hit , block, or try to dragon punch Player 1. Getting hit is very rarely the best option, but why does Player 2 decide to block instead of going for the dragon punch (called a “wakeup DP” in this case, since Ryu is “waking up” from knockdown). The answer has to do with the reason Player 1 jumped over Player 2 before landing the roundhouse kick. It’s called a “crossup” . But before we talk about crossups, we’ll have to talk more about blocking.

In order to avoid damage, you can block attacks by holding backwards on the joystick. Some attacks must be blocked low (hold down-back) or high (hold back). In general, most crouching kick attacks must be blocked low, most jumping attacks (both kicks and punches) must be blocked high, and most other moves can be blocked high or low. Note that in fighting games, your inputs are dependent on your opponent’s position : “hold back to block” means “hold the joystick in the direction away from your opponent”, so if you’re standing on the left side of the screen and your opponent is on the right, you’ll hold left to block, and perform a dragon punch by rolling the stick from right, to down, to diagonal down-right, and vice versa if your opponent is on the right stand and you on the left.

When Player 1 jumps over Player 2, he makes life harder for Player 2 in two significant ways. First, he makes his jumping Roundhouse Kick harder to block, because Player 2 has to block in the opposite direction (since Player 1 is now on Player 2′s right side, not his left). Second, he makes it harder for Player 2 to execute the “wakeup DP”; the proper DP input is toward, down, down-toward, but when “toward” changes from “left” to “right” halfway through the input, it makes it much harder to properly perform. (Some games are more forgiving than others in this regard; Street Fighter IV is one of them.) Even if Player 2 successfully executed the wakeup DP, depending on Player 1′s timing, there is a good chance that it would miss completely, because Player 2 would still be facing the original direction while Player 1 would be in the middle of jumping over him, leaving Player 2 very vulnerable. For Player 1, the crossup jumping Roundhouse Kick is a very solid decision, because it’s hard for Player 2 to punish.

Note that not all jumping attacks have this “crossup” property, though usually most characters will have one or two moves that make for good crossups. If Player 1 had jumped over Player 2 with a move that didn’t have a hitbox which let him cross up, Player 2 simply wouldn’t have to block that jumping attack and would be free to move once he was done standing up from knockdown. And sometimes, you might attack with a crossup move that makes cont act when you’re on one side, but the momentum from the jump carries you to the other, so they have to block your jump attack one way and your followup ground attack the other. Sneaky!

Crossup jumping roundhouse.

So Player 2 wisely decides that blocking is the Smart Thing To Do, and successfully blocks Player 1′s crossup jumping Roundhouse Kick. Blocking the kick means Player 2 won’t take any damage, which is a good thing, but he’s not out of the fire quite yet; Player 2 is stuck in blockstun for a little while, with Player 1 standing right next to him. While Player 2 is recovering from blockstun, Player 1 can force him to block additional moves that could inflict minor damage (“chip damage”, which is incurred by blocking special moves like fireballs and dragon punches) and extend his blockstun paralysis, or require a specific blocking input (a low kick that Player 2 must block by holding down-back, or an “overhead” punch which must be blocked by holding back — Ryu’s forward + medium punch, for example), or walk right next to Player 2 and perform a throw (forward or backward and Fierce Punch or Roundhouse Kick) which is very fast, if somewhat short-ranged, and cannot be blocked).

Put yourself in Player 2′s shoes here, for a second: You just jumped over a fireball, got knocked down by a dragon punch, and was forced to block a jump kick that left you unable to do anything. Player 1 is standing in front of you, but because you’re still reeling from blocking that jump kick, you’re at a disadvantage because you have to recover from blocking that kick, and Player 1 doesn’t have to. This means that your next turn to attack comes after you’ve recovered from blocking that kick, and you still have to wait for that attack’s startup phase before your attack’s hitboxes come out. If Player 1′s jumping roundhouse forces you to block for, say, 15 frames of animation, and you want to perform a crouching medium punch with six frames of startup immediately after you’re done blocking, you’ll need to wait a whole 21 frames (about 1/3rd of a second) for your hitbox to arrive. That might not seem like a whole lot, but in Street Fighter , it’s the difference between your crouching punch succeeding, or getting stuffed by pretty much any attack Player 1 has. This is called “frame advantage” and “frame disadvantage”; basically, Player 1′s moves have put him in a situation where he has the “frame advantage” because he can start his moves before Player 2 can start his.

As I mentioned earlier in this section, Ryu has probably about 35 moves or so. In Player 2′s situation, however, pretty much all of his moves are really, really bad ideas, because they’ll get stuffed by just about anything Player 1 does due to Player 1′s frame advantage. Right now, Player 2 can either a) continue to block and hope he makes it out with relatively minor damage, b) get hit , which is not really ideal, or c) try to perform a move. Of the moves that Player 2 has at his disposal, only one is fast enough to have a chance at beating anything Player 1 does. You guessed it — the dragon punch .

Now, let me point out something here: As Player 2 is making his decision here, he’s essentially trying to make an educated guess at what Player 1 is doing. After all, Player 1 landed right next to Player 2 after the blocked jump roundhouse; neither player really is far enough to try and react to what the other player does (though eventually, given enough practice, they might be able to). Player 1′s frame advantage mean that he could decide to walk up and throw, or continue to attack, or even jump again, and Player 2 will really just have to guess at how to respond accordingly.

So Player 2 is fed up with blocking and getting hit and generally being beaten up, and decides to go for a dragon punch. After all, that dragon punch will beat pretty much any button Player 1 decides to press: If P1 walks up for a throw, he’ll get hit; if he tries to make P2 block a low roundhouse, he’ll get hit; if he jumps, he’ll get hit; etc. Player 2′s Ryu majestically soars through the air…and misses the attack that P1 never threw. Oops.

Baiting the dragon punch.

Folks, that’s what we call a “baited” dragon punch. See, Player 1 correctly read the situation from Player 2′s perspective: P2 was tired of being on the defending end, and he knew that he had one option to reverse the momentum, which was the dragon punch. From Player 1′s perspective, he could either choose to attack (and risk getting hit by the DP, which would have knocked P1 down and shifted the momentum in favor of P2), or sit there and do nothing, which would either reset the momentum back to even (if P2 decides to block) or give P1 another opening (if P2 decides to do a dragon punch). Basically, P1 took a conservative tack by not taking the risk of getting DP, and his read of P2 turned out to be correct. Once P2 lands from the DP, P1 sweeps him, knocking him down again and bringing us into Phase 3.

Phase 3: The close-range high-low-throw mixup

Poor Player 2 just can’t catch a break. His perfectly-timed counter DP ended up getting baited and punished, and he gets knocked down again . This time, Player 2 blocks a few light jabs from Player 1 before getting thrown, knocking him down yet again and setting the stage for further pain. What happened?

At the beginning of Phase 3 (after Player 2 gets swept), he’s basically in the same position as he was after getting DPed at the end of Phase 1, except this time he doesn’t have to block the crossup jumping roundhouse (though, depending on timing, Player 1 probably could have made him block that if he had wanted to). Once again, Player 1 has the momentum, because he can start setting up his attacks while Player 1 is still standing up from the knockdown.

Step into Player 2′s shoes for a second, now, and feel what it’s like to be well and truly broken . You dodged a fireball and got hit; you tried to counter a whole bunch of attacks that never came and got hit. Player 1 is pretty effortlessly making you look like an amateur. You want nothing more than to be out of this situation, but Player 1 seems to be reading your mind re: potential get-out-of-jail-free dragon punch opportunities, so you’ve resolved to just hold back and block until the danger is over. After all, he can’t keep you in blockstun forever ; block enough attacks, and Player 1 will eventually be pushed out far enough that the momentum will reset and you can take another stab at winning this game.

Which is why Player 1 throws you. Because he knows you’re broken. He knows you can’t muster the will to try another counter dragon punch. So he walks up, makes you block a jab or two, and then takes a step forward and throws you, dealing a solid amount of damage and knocking you down.

Using the jab to set up a throw, or “tick throwing”.

The throw (typically forward or backward + fierce punch or roundhouse kick, though some characters have additional throws as well) exists to stop people from thinking of blocking as an invincible wall behind which they can hide from attacks. As it turns out, blocking attacks gets pretty easy pretty quickly; you just crouch-block everything except for jumping attacks and “overhead” attacks (standing attacks which force you to block high), both of which you should be able to react to if all you’re thinking about is blocking. By adding throws into the mix, the attacker gets to crack a determined blocker by making him block one jab, then throwing him; or making him block two jabs, then throwing him; or three, or zero. A determined blocker can escape a throw (called “teching a throw”) for low or zero damage, depending on the game, but in order to do so they basically need to go for a throw at the same time or slightly later than the attacker’s throw, which is tricky. So Player 1 forced Player 2 to block a fast, light attack, then threw him. This is called a “tick throw”.

When Ryu knocks you down and stands right next to you, he has a whole bunch of options: He can make you block low, he can make you block high, or he can throw you. As the defender, your job is to either dragon punch (at just the right t ime), or defend the incoming throws and attacks until you see an opening to counter with an attack or throw of your own, or escape to safety. This is known as a “high/low/throw mixup”; the defender is basically put into a situation where he probably won’t have time to react to seeing what the attacker does and defend accordingly, so he has to guess whether the attacker is going for a high attack (block high), low attack (block low), or throw. Even worse, the attacker is forcing the defender to make these decisions at an extremely fast rate; if Player 1 forces Player 2 to block three jabs, he could have easily at any point made one of those a low short kick, or a throw attempt, or ended the string with a high attack. Obviously, as the defender, you want to avoid these situations as much as possible. In this case, Player 2 got thrown, which resulted in moderate damage and yet another knockdown.

All of that started from one fireball — one humble fireball, coasting across the screen, enabled Player 1 to keep Player 2 constantly on the losing side of the decision-making process. By now, you can see how that happened. But why’d he throw the fireball in the first place?

Phase 0: Fireballs, footsies, and jockeying for momentum

Earlier in this article, I described the art of playing fighting games as, more or less, “making the game as miserable an experience as possible for your opponent”. You can see how Player 1 did that; he threw a fireball that got Player 2 to jump, and that one ill-timed jump sent Player 2 into a cascade of unfair decision after unfair decision. The right fireball at the right time gave Player 1 command of the match — in other words, momentum .

But how do you get that momentum? Certainly not by throwing fireballs willy-nilly; if Player 2 had predicted the fireball and jumped in earlier, he could have easily landed a damaging combo into a knockdown and sent the momentum in his favor instead. The art of jockeying for position is where much of the beauty and skill of fighting games comes into play; recently, people have been calling it “the neutral game”. We can broadly define the neutral game as “the process of turning an equal situation into an advantageous one”.

Understanding the neutral game is important for a budding fighting game player because, frankly, this is where you lose the game; it doesn’t matter how good your combos are or how clever your high-low-throw mixups are if you can’t get that first knockdown you need to set them up. And when you start playing Street Fighter , it’s easy to focus on spiffy special moves and combos without thinking too much about how to create openings to land them.

Half-screen range right at the start of a match. If both players take a few steps forward, they’ll be within sweeping range.

Let’s travel back to the beginning of the Ryu-Ryu match we watched earlier and break down each character’s options. From the very start of the match, both players start at a range referred to as “half-screen”, where neither player can hit each other with anything except for a fireball or hurricane kick, and neither option is particularly good. When you’re at half-screen, with no frame advantage, it’s pretty easy to see a fireball starting up and punish it with a jump-forward roundhouse and combo from there, and the hurricane kick is a bad move to just spontaneously throw out because it doesn’t hit crouching characters, so it’s easy to duck it and punish with a crouching fierce punch or dragon punch.

If either Ryu takes a step forward from half-screen, they’ll be within range to sweep each other, which would give them the knockdown they need to start their crossup / tick throw shenanigans in close or pressure with fireballs (more on this later). What’s more, even if the other player blocks that sweep (crouching roundhouse kick), the attacking player can cancel the recovery from the sweep into a fireball, forcing the defending player to block that as well (and, depending on the strength of fireball used, get a slight advantage in terms of momentum). If they’re walking closer still , they’d be within ideal range for fast, weak attacks (jabs and short kicks) to set up throws, but it’s typically rather unlikely for both Ryu players to just close the distance like that without one sweeping the other first.

If either Ryu instead decides to take a step or two back from half-screen (for the purpose of this article, we’ll call this “two-thirds”), they’ll be in prime fireball-throwing range for one major reason: At this range, you’re too far to react to seeing your opponent start throwing a fireball by jumping over, since by the time you’re jumping over that fireball, the fireball-thrower has already recovered in time to dragon punch you out of the air (which, as we’ve seen, leads you to a world of pain). In order to punish a fireball with a jump attack at this range, you’d have to start your jump around the same time they start throwing the fireball, if not earlier — which means you’re anticipating a fireball, not reacting to it, and if that fireball doesn’t come, you’re probably just going to eat a dragon punch instead.

Two-thirds screen range. Easy to punish jump-ins, and fireballs are relatively safe.

However, at two-thirds screen range, you are roughly around the area where you can respond to a fireball with a fireball of your own on reaction. You will recover after your opponent does, since you started your fireball later, giving your opponent a slight advantage, but that won’t be a big enough advantage to punish your fireball; they might just be able to take a few steps forward (into half-screen range). You can also instead choose to jump straight up over the fireball, which is usually the smarter choice because you don’t risk getting dragon punched (you’re still too far away), and you don’t have to block anything, meaning you take no chip damage or blockstun, so you recover slightly faster from dealing with that fireball.

Further back from here is the full-screen range. From here, neither Ryu can do anything except throw fireballs, and neither player is likely to get hit by a fireball from full-screen. From here, you can safely jump over an opponent’s fireball, because even if you jump forward, their anti-air dragon punch won’t hit because you’re still too far away.

In a Ryu vs. Ryu mirror match, he doesn’t have many good options at a neutral 2/3rds or full-screen. He wants you to be at 2/3rds when he has an advantage, because that puts you in situations where you’re likely to either block a lot of fireballs or jump forward and eat a dragon punch (as we saw in the painful breakdown above), but in order to put you there, he’s going to have to knock you down first.

So both Ryus start at half-screen, and both of them need to knock you down — probably with a sweep. You might think that the best thing to do at the start of the round, then, is “walk forward a step or two, then sweep”. However, remember that you’re both playing Ryu, and you both want the same thing — so it gets a little complicated. If your opponent knows that you’re going to walk forward and sweep, they could sweep first, which you’d probably walk right into since you decided to close the gap. Or they could walk backwards to stay out of range of your sweep, and if they see you whiff the sweep, they could sweep your sweep (since your Ryu’s foot would be in range of their sweep). Or maybe they stay out of sweep range while you’re hunting for a sweep and make you block a fireball. And so on, and so on.

Full-screen range. Not much to do here in a Ryu/Ryu match besides throw fireballs or close the distance.

This kind of game dynamic — dancing in and out of range while fishing for hits to turn into an advantage — is called “footsies”. If you can react to everything, you can be a god at footsies, but if you can’t, you’ll find that you have to rely on your ability to read your opponent in order to give you the extra time you need to play footsies well. After all, some people will be more aggressive, some less aggressive, some better at reacting and some less good at it. It’s like playing poker at a very, very high speed (since every second you’re making new decisions in regards to attacking/not attacking, staying at range, etc.).

If that wasn’t enough to twist your brain into knots, consider how hard it is to detect bluffs in high-speed poker; that is, players will often be doing things to trick you into overextending yourself. Watch any high-level Street Fighter matches and you’ll see them walk back and forth rapidly — they’re quickly dancing in and out of range to bait the other player into, say, starting a fireball because they think it’s safe (when really, it’s not), or pressing standing light kick at a range where it’s unsafe to throw a fireball in the hopes that you’ll react, think they’re throwing a fireball, and jump in for a punish (which will then get dragon punched). Basically, once you’ve learned what you’re supposed to be doing (knocking your opponent down) you have to think about how to make it look like you’re going for a sweep so that your opponent will try to sweep you , and so on. Mind games.

Once you get the knockdown, you can go for a crossup jump roundhouse into some up-close shenanigans, or you can throw a jab fireball that is timed to hit them right when they stand up and immediately follow it with a fierce fireball — which starts a classic fireball-dragon punch trap that SF veteran David Sirlin describes in chapter 1 of Playing To Win  way better than I can, so go read it.

Congratulations: That’s everything you need to know about Street Fighter . Well, not really, but it’s enough to get started. Go find a friend and play Ryu vs. Ryu for a few hours (or the rest of your life) and then come back and read some more.

Chapter Three: Fleshing Out the Design Skeleton

Everything you’ve read about so far has been the essence of the modern 2D fighting game; the core upon which everything else is built upon. By itself, it is perfect — even better than Chess, perhaps, since Chess requires one player to move first. But it’s not quite so easy to sell Ryu vs. Ryu: The Game, so instead we have not-Ryu characters and not- Super Turbo games to flesh out that core skeleton.

Ken, of course, is a tweaked Ryu; in Super Turbo , he has a mashable throw (the knee bash throw with medium kick) that leads to interesting mixup opportunities after, and a dragon punch that has more invincibility frames, less recovery, and more horizontal range, plus a few different kicks that give him more varied poking options. However, his fireball doesn’t travel as quickly or recover as quickly as Ryu’s, making it harder for him to pressure opponents at far range or hold up against sustained fireball pressure from characters with faster fireballs, like Ryu or O. Sagat (in Super Turbo , you can select variations of each character designed to retain certain properties on their moves in exchange for sacrificing the ability to use super moves and tech throws). Also, Ken’s hurricane kick doesn’t knock down on hit, meaning you don’t get an easy mixup after comboing into it. The sum of these combinations typically make Ken a better character for less-patient players looking to easily punish jump-ins and use knockdowns as opportunities to land throws. If you play your few hours of Ryu vs. Ryu and find your best success with close-in pressure games, give Ken a shot.

On paper, Guile might appear to be very similar to Ryu; he has one move that’s good for beating jump-ins (flash kick) and a projectile (sonic boom) that’s good for pressure. Guile recovers ridiculously quickly from throwing his sonic boom, but it travels rather slowly, and in order to perform the sonic boom, the Guile player needs to “charge” back for a moment, then press forward and punch. So Guile can’t win a fireball war with Ryu or Sagat, and he can’t quite freely move around the screen because a good Guile player needs to always be charging down-back to keep a sonic boom or flash kick at the ready. Much of the time, this means that Guile needs to use his low-recovery sonic boom to close the distance; if Guile can walk behind his sonic boom, he’s basically covered by a shield. If Ryu blocks that sonic boom, Guile is in range to throw; if Ryu throws a fireball of his own, the two projectiles will cancel out, but Guile can hit Ryu out of his late fireball recovery with his spinning backfist (toward + fierce punch). In short, Guile’s character design is a combination of his moves’ properties (low-speed, low-recovery projectile) and the actual physical inputs, which restrict the player’s freedom of movement (the charging mechanic).

And so on, and so on, for Balrog and Dee Jay and Blanka and the rest of the cast. Pretty much every character is designed as a different answer to the question: “What do I do when Ryu throws a fireball at me?” Some characters have excellent options for dealing with fireballs, but aren’t so dangerous once they get in. Other characters have relatively bad options, but if they do get in, you’re in trouble.

And it doesn’t stop there. Each subsequent Street Fighter game sets up the Ryu fireball threat differently: The Alpha series makes you work harder to find openings, since you have more defensive options (very low chip damage, weaker throws, alpha counters, reversal custom/variable combo activations, etc.), but give you more tools to put together higher-damage combos (easy-to-combo super moves, custom combos, and so on). Street Fighter III pretty much got rid of the fireball-DP dynamic altogether by introducing the Parry system, which basically makes fireballs close to worthless — and so Street Fighter IV took part of that and made it weaker with Focus Attacks to make fireballs worthwhile but not game-defining. King of Fighters introduced the short hop, dodge, and roll systems to give players more options for getting around fireballs (each of which, of course, have their own respective weaknesses as well). Heck, we can even think of the Vs. series ( Marvel vs. Capcom and such) as asking the question, “Well, what if Ryu throws a fireball at me in a two-on-two or three-on-three tag match?”

In case you were wondering: This is most likely why in practically every 2D fighting game ever , (okay, an exaggeration — but a LOT of fighting games) the “main character” for the game — the one that the first player starts out highlighting at the character select screen — possesses a similar fireball/DP moveset. That way you can start learning the game by playing Ryu, see what moves and systems the game gives you to deal with the fireball/DP problem, and begin to build an understanding of that particular game’s design and mechanics based on what you know about Super Turbo.

Chapter Four : Intro to Combos

The neat thing about Super Turbo is that you can get a pretty decent game without knowing much in the way of combos besides simple stuff like crossup jump roundhouse, crouching medium kick, fireball. With most newer fighting games, though, combos are critical; having a decent bread-and-butter combo means you can win a round by forcing your opponent to make two or three mistakes instead of eight or nine.

At the most basic level, a combo is a string of hits that cannot be blocked if the first hit connects: The hitstun caused by the first hit gives you enough time to hit with a second hit, which gives you enough time to hit with a third, and so on. However, the way combos connect one hit to another varies. Ryu’s crossup jumping roundhouse, crouching medium kick, fireball combo works because you start with a jumping attack, which you recover from when you land on the ground, meaning you have enough time to start the crouch medium kick. Now, when you hit with Ryu’s crouching medium kick, you don’t have to wait for the animation to finish before doing something else; one of its properties is that you can cancel the recovery phase of the move into another move by performing the command for that other move before the kick animation is finished. In general, most of the canceling you’re going to be doing will be from a normal move to a special move or a super move , so you can press crouching medium kick, then immediately perform a fireball, dragon punch, or hurricane kick to combo. Of these three, the fireball is the easiest to consistently combo, although it doesn’t do as much damage as the other two or knock your opponent down.

By putting together a string of moves that combo into each other, you can turn your opponent’s mistakes into opportunities to take away 30-40% of their health meter, or more. You also get the chance to re-evaluate your arsenal of moves; if you have really good moves that are unsafe when blocked but can cancel into something else that is safe, then just make sure to use them together.

Naturally, different games and different characters emphasize combos to different degrees; if you are adamantly opposed to learning combos longer than 3-4 moves, you can still do okay in Super Turbo but maybe Marvel vs. Capcom isn’t quite your thing. Some people love practicing combos, some hate them, some learn to like them in time. I’m not the biggest fan of spending hours practicing combos, but it does feel nice to finally master something that’s been giving me trouble, and every now and then I take a step back and marvel at how I’ve been able to teach myself to perform successions of complicated movements. It’s kind of like programming a robot.

Like I said while discussing execution in the beginning of this article: There is no substitute for hard work. The easiest thing to do is look up your game and character online (see the appendix at the end for further recommended reading) , find a list of combos, and practice them until you can do them. In doing so, you’ll learn a lot about your physical habits, build your understanding of the game, and learn more than just how to do the combos you set out to do. You’ll learn how different moves connect in different ways, and how to look for new opportunities to land moves in the neutral game. You’ll learn combos that work very well for specific situations and matchups, which will teach you more about how to play your character. All of it is great — and really, it’s an integral part of the beauty of fighting games — but it is also work. If you want to get good — or even just literate — at this kind of thing, you’ll have to spend some time practicing.

I have a confession to make: I am Bad At Combos. I’ve never been a terrific execution-player, and I usually pick teams which make the execution part easier for me. If left to my own device, I’d rather play “smarter” instead of practicing harder. In other words, I’m lazy. But lately, I’ve been making more of an effort to step up my execution game, and it has opened up new avenues for enjoying the games than were previously available to me.

One thing that helps: When I sit down to practice a new combo, I typically start by running through the beginning of the combo and going straight to the end. It usually won’t work the first time (or the fifteenth) so I’ll start “chunking” the combo — memorizing it two or three moves at a time, getting those down, and then moving on to the next two or three. Once I’ve got a good feel for what it’s supposed to look like, and what my hands are supposed to be doing (and when), I try to identify the “pain points” in the combo — in other words, the parts where I am more likely to fail. Once I’ve IDed those pain points, I’ll continue “chunking” the combo, with an emphasis on practicing those pain points until they become near-effortless.

Ryu in Capcom vs. SNK 2 has a somewhat complicated “bread and butter” combo into super fireball; he needs to hit a crouching light kick, then a crouching jab, then a crouching medium kick, which he then cancels into the super fireball (down, down-toward, toward, down, down-toward, toward, then punch). When I sat down to practice this combo, I found that my pain point was the last bit — crouching medium kick into super fireball — so I practiced that, figured out what my hands had to do to consistently get that, then work that back into the original combo.

Once I start getting the hang of the combo, I’ll start practicing it in little mental drills — maybe I’ll practice it on one side until I can do it five times in a row without messing up, then try the other side. Eventually, I’ll turn the training dummy on to CPU-controlled mode, and just play an endless match where I practice hitting the combo in less-controlled situations. Eventually, it’s good to go against real human opponents.

The important thing to remember is that there is a lot of work involved in looking at a combo notation — something like “c. lk, c. lp, c. mk xx qcfx2 + fp”, which is the Ryu CVS2 combo I just described — and downloading it into your brain so you can produce the actual motions. Combo notations are the order of outcomes you need to feed the machine in order to produce the combo, but they won’t tell you things like “delay this attack a little bit so your opponent isn’t juggled too high, because otherwise you won’t be able to hit him with this attack later in the combo.” Those details are best left to your own trial and error, and help from others (be it in person or by watching a video). So don’t get demoralized if you can’t get it to work — instead, ask for help.

Chapter Five: Eleven Tips For Not Sucking At Street Fighter

This primer has been devoted to breaking Street Fighter down to its fundamental game design elements in order to make it easier to figure out what the heck you’re supposed to be doing and when the heck you’re supposed to be doing it — basically, giving you the tools to understand how the game works. However, giving you the tools without a few concrete pointers on how to use them isn’t really the nicest thing in the world, so here we go: Eleven practical tips that will make you less bad at fighting games.

1: Don’t jump forward. It may not seem like it to the fighting game novice, but jumping forward is an incredibly aggressive act. After all, you’re basically throwing away your ability to block for a chance to get in on your opponent, even though a) they’ll have plenty of time to react to it and b) pretty much everyone in any fighting game has a move that’s designed to beat your jump-in, knock you down, and welcome you to a world of hurt. When you’re in the neutral game, jumping forward should be treated as basically free damage and a knockdown, and if you can’t consistently punish people for jumping in at you, your first priority should be getting better at seeing jumps coming and punishing them with a solid anti-air normal or special.

Of course, there are good times to jump forward — punishing a fireball at an ideal range, or crossing up after a knockdown — but when you’re still putting together your Street Fighter ABCs together, telling yourself to Never Jump Forward is a really good way to force you to rely on your footsies and anti-air skills to get the knockdown instead of jumping. If you must jump, jump straight up.

2: Play a character you like. This might seem rather obvious, but playing characters you actually enjoy playing makes it a lot easier to want to learn how to play a game at a high level. It’s easier to spend time in training mode practicing combos and finding setups for a character you like than one you don’t. (Note that this tip does not mean “ignore tier lists”; I’ll cover that topic next.)

When you’re figuring out which characters you like, though, you should probably do a little digging to figure out why you like them — not because there’s any wrong reason to like a character, but because you might find that you like the aesthetics of Character A but don’t like the way they actually play as much as Character B. And if you like playing Character B in Game X, you might like playing Character C in Game Y, because they’re really similar.

Personally, I tend to enjoy playing characters that succeed by controlling space well from further out and using that control to gain the momentum (which, on the other hand, usually means they’re not that great when they’re being pressured). In Capcom vs. SNK 2 , I mostly play with Athena, Rolento, and Vega (A-Groove); in Guilty Gear XX , I used Chipp Zanuff (and Eddie, on occasion); in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 , I usually use teams built around Zero. Since I know this about myself, I’ll often watch videos of other people playing a new fighting game before I play it myself to see if I can get a clue as to who I’d like to start playing the game with first.

3: Learn the top tier. I’m all for playing the characters you want to play with, but if you want to understand a particular game at a reasonably competent level, you really should check a tier list to see who the community thinks is the best and worst, and why. This isn’t to say tier lists are objective statements of fact (there are several games where the highest-tier characters never won major tournaments), because they’re not. What they’re good for is telling you what kind of assets you’ll need to understand, and deal with, to be a competent player at this game.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 are probably the best examples for this tip because both games have an incredibly rigid top tier (Chun-Li, Yun, and Ken for 3S, and Storm, Sentinel, Magneto, and Cable for MVC2). Fact is, these sets of characters have abilities that define the rest of the game. Storm can switch between running away off-screen to waste time and build meter to rushing you down and mixing you up with a blink of an eye, Cable can kill any assist that you don’t have protected in a split second; Sentinel is a great assist and a fantastic damage-dealer, and Magneto is so fast you’ll be hit by a mixup before you even realize you should be blocking. This is the game you’re playing, and if you insist on running a team like Hayato/Jin/Amingo, you’re probably losing the game at the character select screen.

That doesn’t mean you can’t beat them with lower-tiered characters, just that you should seriously practice with these characters first to really know what you’re dealing with. Maybe you’ll find out that the “weaker” characters you like to use have some of the same abilities as the top tier ones, maybe you’ll find out that you actually like playing with the top tier characters more; whatever it is, you can’t say you really know the game unless you know who is good, and why.

Tier lists aren’t the be-all, end-all for a fighting game, mind you. They shift over time as people develop new techniques, get more comfortable hitting hard-to-execute moves and setups, and learn specific matchups in more detail. In general, though, they’re a handy reference for figuring out which characters offer the best domination potential per hour of practice.

4: Act with intention. In other words, you should always have a reason for doing something. High-level fighting game players press a lot of buttons. They’re almost always stepping back and forth, jumping in place, whiffing light attacks, and all kinds of other feints. (Some of us even like to exaggerate fake-hitting a button in order to get our opponent to react to it, which is fun.) These players pretty much always have a reason for doing everything they do, though.

When you press a button, know exactly what you’re doing (the intended move) and why (the intended outcome). If it works, you know what you should keep doing and when to keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, you can more easily diagnose what went wrong. Did you go for a sweep to hit someone out of a jump? Maybe that didn’t work — try a crouching fierce punch, instead. Lots of getting better at a fighting game is trial and error, but if you don’t know what you’re trying and if/why it’s failing, you won’t have any idea how to improve. It’s okay to be wrong about these things — you’ve simply found another thing that won’t work — but unless you have a specific intended outcome every time you press a button, you’ll never be right .

5: Learn how to play safe. Believe it or not, the hardest thing to do — especially under the stress of competition nerves — is play conservatively. There is no honor in blindly rushing down your opponent, especially if you lose because of it. Learn how to take a small lead early on and turn that into a larger lead by being patient, not taking unnecessary risks, and punishing your opponent each time they get more and more careless with their attacks. In Street Fighter, cooler heads prevail (and also look like an awesome Zen Jedi Master while doing it).

Sometimes this means you’ll be blocking a lot. Sometimes this means you’ll be keeping your opponent away while waiting for the time limit to run down. That’s okay! You’re the smarter player, using every resource available to win. No one cares when a football team takes a knee to run the clock down — that’s a tool that the game designers gave them to win, and it’s not your fault that your opponent didn’t play with that in mind. And if you find yourself routinely winning by not-fun methods, then you’re probably just playing a bad game.

6: Do what works. When something is working for you — maybe it’s tick-throwing a lot, maybe it’s using lots of high-priority moves, whatever — keep doing it. The onus is on your opponent to stop it (even if that opponent is also your best friend). If it’s a casual match, go ahead and try and help your friend find ways around it, if that’s what it takes! But don’t stop doing what works, even if you have to do it 18 times in a row before someone figures it out; you don’t do yourself or any of your practice buddies any favors by holding back like that. Also, don’t get salty (read: frustrated) and call people “cheap”, because it makes you sound like a newbie.

7: Throw a lot. Throws are a great way to get in your head and remind your opponent that holding back is not a magical shield that will protect them from all harm. Learning how and when to throw is a vital skill in pretty much every fighting game that has throws, and I can think of very few situations where a player lost because he was throwing too much (unless he was throwing instead of landing big high-damage combos, perhaps). If people call you cheap for throwing, throw them out of your house — anyone who plays a fighting game should have gotten out of that mindset at least 15 years ago.

8: When you’re trying to figure out what went wrong, look at the big picture. Let’s say your buddy catches you in a setup that you simply cannot get out of — there’s like, three ambiguous crossups, four throw opportunities, and 15% of guaranteed damage. Ouch! So you ask yourself, “How do I deal with this?”

Well, when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with it, you could try practicing how to block those crossups and tech those throws — and really, that’s not a bad idea — but the easiest answer is always “Well, don’t end up there in the first place.”

As such, the first question you should ask yourself is “How did I end up in that situation?” Maybe your buddy’s setup starts with a risky jump-in; if that’s the case, you’re never going to let him get away with that jump-in again, and you won’t have to worry about blocking three ambiguous crossups, teching four throws, and taking 15% in guaranteed damage. (Man, that’s a pretty nasty hypothetical setup.)

9: Spend more time in training mode. Obviously, it’s great to get as much head-to-head practice as you can — after all, unless you’re one of a rare few who get their rocks off by building ever more challenging combos and generally breaking games, that’s probably why you’re playing fighting games in the first place. But you won’t get the most out of your head-to-head sessions if your execution isn’t on point, or you’re rusty with your characters, or you just haven’t picked up the game in a while.

Some people are really devoted to training mode and use the advanced combo recording functions to practice dealing with specific setups; if you’re up for that, that’s great, but even just playing for a few minutes every day will help keep your game looking good. And that, in turn, will help you get the most out of your precious few head-to-head play sessions.

10: Play online…sometimes. Between GGPO (PCs), Xbox Live, and PSN, we’ve got many different ways to find some real human competition without leaving home — something which competitive Street Fighter players in the past never had, meaning it was hard to get good at the game if you didn’t live near an arcade. Unfortunately, fighting games are pretty much universally affected by lag to such a degree that you won’t be able to recreate competition conditions while playing online, since we’re dealing with games that can often come down to individual frames and adding usually about 70ms of lag on top of that.

Here’s the deal: Playing online is a great way to build your matchup experience, especially if you don’t live in an area where you have easy access to other people who play every other character in the game. However, you have to keep in mind that it’s really easy to develop bad habits by playing online too much . Players can take more risks, jump in more, and use more unsafe moves, because it’s harder to punish mistakes when you’re dealing with lag — and you may find that if you play online a lot, you’ll find setups that work online but not in local multiplayer.

So, play online. Play a whole lot! But if you can, get some solid in-person sessions in too, preferably with people who are good enough to bring you back down to zero-lag-land. Maybe you’ll find that playing online will give you the match experience you need to be a better player, or maybe you’ll find that it’s too hard for your hands to constantly switch between “online mode” and “local mode”. (Better yet, play Super Turbo on GGPO, as it feels a lot like playing in-person, and really, it’s kind of hard to find people who play ST and live nearby.)

11: You are only as good as the people you play with. Even the most dedicated training mode warrior won’t get better without people to push him/her to improve. In order to get better, you need people who are capable of beating your ass in different ways — which means that as you get better, you’ll need to find new people to play with, and find ways to make your current practice buddies even better. And, really, that’s what fighting games are all about: Making new friends, and beating the virtual shit out of each other. So get to it.

Appendix: Recommended Reading

This is not the greatest article ever written about Street Fighter. (This is only a tribute.) Here are a few handy resources to further develop your SF game.

David Sirlin’s Playing to Win is a free ebook that was a huge inspiration for me, and it’s practically required reading for anyone who ever tries to compete in pretty much anything.  The rest of the site is worth reading, too.

Seth Killian’s Domination 101 series of forum posts are similarly useful in-depth guides to putting together a competition-friendly mindset, and it’s more fighting-game specific (if a little bit dated, as they’re like ten years old by now).

Once you’ve put in some time with this guide and your copy of ST/HDR, Majestros’s Footsies Handbook is a great place to continue your education.

For the budding fighting game technicians who are reading this, James Chen’s Capcom vs. SNK 2 systems guide is probably the longest dissection of a fighting game I’ve ever read. If you’ve played CvS2 — which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest 2D fighting games ever to grace this planet — it’s worth leafing through the guide to see how everything works in a nuts-and-bolts level.

In general, Shoryuken.com is worth checking in on; the front page is always full of new match videos and tutorials, and the forums are a good place to go learn about specific games and characters. Whenever I’m about to pick up a new character, my first stop is that character’s SRK forum.

Definitely don’t forget to check in on Twitch.TV streams; watching high-level players go at it can teach you a lot about what the game is supposed to look like when you play it, which is handy for trying to figure out what you should look like when you play it, too. So far, I haven’t seen too many consistently good instructional resources on Twitch, though. It’s mostly good for watching tournament streams.

If you’re a Redditor, game-specific subreddits (like http://www.reddit.com/r/mvc3 ) can be a good way to stay on top of buzz and new techniques without having to sort through dozens of SRK forums.

In general, you’re trying to learn a new game or character, you’ll want to do three things pretty much whenever you can: First, practice combos, setups, and neutral game in training mode; second, watch character-specific match videos and combo videos on YouTube to see what other people do with that game/character; third, get some quality head-to-head time with your training partners. Make sure you’re doing all three of these, and if you aren’t seeing the results you’d like to see, figure out which one you’re not doing and do more of that. It’ll help.

patrick miller is a world warrior

I recently wrote a list of my eight favorite PlayStation 2 games, which I published on Kotaku. Note its sub-heading is “OPINION”.

I would have published it here, though I love attention (evidence: 5,500 Twitter followers, posting something on the internet right now, etc), and also Kotaku gives me enough money to buy a new pair of shoes with every article I write.

I was going to make it a top ten list, and then I decided I’d had almost enough of people complaining about the length of my articles, so I restricted myself to eight. Kotaku is a Real Journalism Website, so I was working with a deadline: I didn’t have time to put any sort of squeeze on the text to make it ten snappy entries instead of eight roomy ones. Oh, well!

So here’s a “director’s cut”, of sorts — these are the two other games I wanted to include. If I were putting them into the list as it appears on Kotaku, these games would be #8 and #9, pushing Psi-Ops to #10 — I mainly put Psi-Ops at the end of the list because it was a great excuse to get its godly Japanese box-art (by Shinkiro) onto Kotaku.

Before we jump into these two gross text jumbles, allow me to apologize to the guys on this forum: neither of the games is Socom.

To quote oGSpY from the forum: “I’m willing to bet the guy from the article has never played or heard of Socom. In my opinion most people either have played Socom and loved it or haven’t even heard of it, only a small minority of people who played the original Socom games I would say didn’t like them.”

Now to quote crazyinsane51 (who might be oGSpY’s evil twin!): “More like the 8 worst games. I never played any of them or heard to [sic] much about.”

Guys — first of all, hi. Second of all, I played the Socom games. They’re neat! crazyinsane51: you’ve never heard much about these games, so why would you assume they’re the worst? How would you feel if someone saw Socom on a Gamestop shelf and said, “I’ve never heard of that game — it must suck?”

Anyway, here are the two not-Socom “director’s cut” entries of my favorite PlayStation 2 games ever. I’m probably preaching to the choir here, in some extent. I figured it’d be fun to post these somewhere, anyway.

9. Chulip

Chulip is a “kissing RPG”, though it’s actually less of role-playing game and more of a graphical adventure. It takes place in “Long Life Town”, which is a pun on the name of the Japanese town Minami Senju. I lived in Minami Senju for five years, once, Chulip director Yoshiro Kimura lived there even longer. Minami Senju, by the way, was also the inspiration for Wall Market in Final Fantasy VII. Enough about Minami Senju: Chulip is a game in which you are a boy who is attracted to a girl who is sitting on top of a pipe, just beyond his reach. He wants to kiss her — it is his primary dream. Kissing this girl is a goal at the end of a long, winding road of Animal-Crossing-like fetch quests. Unlike actual Animal Crossing fetch quests, however, these all climax in our hero kissing a non-player character with some sort of bizarre personality quirk. Each kiss levels you up and makes you more attractive to the girl. I’m barely doing the game any justice with this description. It is a glorious, visually richly lovable entry in the Walk-And-Enjoy genre which later birthed games such as Sword & Sworcery. And it’s also one brilliantly cohesively designed overarching riddle that you’ll have to spend a lot of time hanging out in Long Life Town to fully unravel. Chulip is a hangout game. You will love hanging out inside Chulip. And oh my god, it’s just $9.99 as a PlayStation 2 classic for PlayStation 3 on the PlayStation Store.

8. Neo Contra

First of all, Neo Contra is not one of those dumb 3D Contras on the PlayStation. It is a work of Nobuya “Contra: Hard Corps” Nakazato, also known as Nobuya “Rocket Knight Adventures” Nakazato. If you love either of those seminal Genesis classics, you will dig Neo Contra so hard that you will literally (figuratively) be an archaeologist by the time you’re done. Bam, it’s four god darn dollars used at GameStop. What’s so good about it? Well, it’s weird, it’s stickier than maple syrup, and it’s snappier than bubble wrap. The plot is a grotesque maybe-parody of the Metal Gear Solid series. Its opening cut scene shows a guy cut an airplane in half with a samurai sword. One stage of the game has our heroes flying into an enemy base on top of a helicopter — like, they’re running on the blades. And the weapons feel fantastic. This is all of the old, great Japanese arcade shooters, with a hot liter of More Everything ladled all over the top of it. It is the guts of Heavy Barrel; it is the experimental joystick-twisting direction-changing and strafing of Ikari Warriors. It adds Panzer Dragoon (or Rez) to its mechanical repertoire, as well — you’re fighting enemies on two planes: the ground, and the air. One button is devoted to locking on to air enemies. Holding a shoulder button locks your strafing direction. It’s just — it’s great. Contra: Shattered Soldier, its spiritual prequel, is great as well, though it’s nothing Contra: Hard Corps didn’t do better on Genesis. Neo Contra, meanwhile, is weird as heck and it’s not ashamed. Reviews back in the day were leery and weary of it before even playing it (“A Contra which is not a side-scroller?!”; monocles popping out of eyes), so its reputation sank. So yes: the occasion to love it is nigh. And yes, Jim Lee drew the cover art. Just . . . look at the opening video.

. . . Yep! That’s about it out of me! I hope you enjoyed reading this “2 hot 4 for Kotaku” word-slam.

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A whole bunch of you sent us your nominations for what should be considered the greatest video game of all time. Together with Kris Graft, the Insert Credit panel reaches a decision.

-alex jaffe

So how do you put together a list of the Top Ten Videogames of 2012? Well, in my case, you don’t: For one, I have probably played only barely more than ten games this year, most of them weren’t released this year, and anyway, ranking games is kind of boring. Better, I think, to talk about the games I played that were interesting, and what they made me feel, however flawed they might be. That certainly makes more sense than Patrick Miller’s Top 5 Games of 2012, anyway. Here it is: Ten games I played in 2012.

Patrick Miller’s Unifying Theory of Game Development (or: Honorable Mentions: MechWarrior Online, Planetside 2, and Tribes: Ascend)

I’ve gotten into free-to-play games in kind of a big way this year, mostly because I love me some MechWarrior, and Tribes: Ascend and Planetside 2 are pretty cool too. At the moment, I’ve spent about $100 between the three games, and I don’t regret it (even though, strangely enough, I’ve only actually spent about $5 of that real-money in-game currency so far). I think free-to-play is really interesting from both the business and game-design perspective, and if that’s how devs can bring back the above three IPs, I say: Do it! Print yourself some goddamn money.

Most of the revenue-generating action in MechWarrior Online takes place here. I think there might be a way to blow stuff up sometimes, too.

Despite the fact that I have, by now, logged plenty of hours playing the above three games, the fact is that they are kind of crap. Which is okay, because at this stage in their development, they’re kind of meant to be crap, though that is weird.

Developers are largely breaking out of the traditional Hollywood model of making games. Only so many studios can do triple-A blockbuster games, these days, and as a consequence of lower barriers-to-entry in game development, the natural risk-averse nature of big-money projects like major games, and (hopefully) a more diverse and mature market than that of ten years ago, your mainstay triple-As just don’t pull in the cash they used to.

Instead, devs are aiming for the Silicon Valley/tech startup model: Your founders come up with an idea, put together a small team capable of putting together a minimum viable product with whatever bootstrapped or venture capital funding they have, and if that minimum viable product is enough to sell enough to fund further development (or attract more VC money for the same purpose), the devs go on to build out the rest of the game and eventually retire on a pile of money. Venture capital and early users are basically the ur-Kickstarter.

And why not? People have already made their fortunes in the web/mobile app market. Everything that can be disrupted with a goddamn smartphone app either already has been disrupted or will be in the next year or two, probably. At this point, finding something that will make your iPhone an even more useful tool is a fool’s errand. (If you don’t believe me, go watch some startup pitches from the last year or so and ask yourself, “Um, do I know anyone who would use this for more than 20 seconds?” If the answer is “Yes” then proceed to defriend those people on Facebook — it’ll hit ‘em where it hurts.)

So what do you do when you’ve already sold the people everything they need? Well, you sell people games that will take up all the spare time they’ve saved in their lives by using your smartphone apps. Now that all their real-world decisions are taken care of, go give them a fabricated world in which they can make even more decisions — and charge them, somehow, for the privilege.

The down-side to all of this is that we can now expect games (especially free-to-play, online, microtransaction-based games) to suck when they come out, much like we’d expect any new social network or whatever to suck when it comes out — which is kind of counter to the Hollywood model, where games are at their prime (in terms of quality and cultural relevance) shortly after release. MechWarrior Online, Planetside 2, and Tribes: Ascend are all, objectively speaking, kind of ass; I found myself playing them mostly because I think they’ll be really cool if they make it for a year or so, and by then, it’d be real nice to have some sweet gear.

Meanwhile, the free-to-play game that made the biggest splash in 2012 is League of Legends, which is about three years old at this point, because it has had three years to grow from “Hey, this might be a cool thing, give us money” into a proper game. But each of the three games I mentioned above all kind of offer the promise of something cool, in the future, should they survive. The risk, of course, is that we won’t give a shit about them by the time they’re actually worthwhile (I guess that’d be, like, the Flickr or MySpace of videogames?) — and who wants to put a three-year-old game on a list of 2015′s best games?

To The Moon

Underneath my hardened, man-killing, facepunching exterior, I think I’m a pretty sentimental guy. I’ll cop to watching stuff like Love Hina and Karekano during my formative weeaboo years, and I suspect I probably have an unexplored weakness for torrid romance novels usually read by ladies in their mid-40s. To The Moon is kind of like The Notebook, I imagine (having never watched The Notebook, mind you), except it’s meant for people who played Japanese RPGs from the 16-bit era. That is to say, it’s non-stop heartstring-tugging cheese. I started tearing up upon hearing the piano at the menu screen before I had even started playing the damn game.

Fun fact: I originally bought this thinking I was getting Kerbal Space Program. Understandable mistake.

I don’t think To The Moon is particularly deep or well-written, mind you. You know how there’s always a bit in an old JRPG where you need to sleep in an inn to trigger some story conversation, and you’re always really annoyed because the guy you’re controlling doesn’t have the Sprint Shoes, and you have to just kind of walk around? To The Moon is basically three hours of that, except you’re piecing together, via time travel and memories and stuff, a story of love and loss and Asperger’s (or something — it’s not particularly specific).

As cheeses go, To The Moon is industrial-strength Velveeta; sure, it’ll make you cry, but even while you’re crying, you’ll feel kind of cheap about the whole thing. I discovered that one of my hallmarks of personal adulthood was feeling a bit gross after eating McDonald’s, as though I had made The Worst Possible Decision in order to satisfy my hunger; the ten minutes I spent scarfing down a stomach-filling meal for under $4 was counterbalanced by the evening of regret I had laid out in front of me. To The Moon is the Dollar Menu item for sadness. If that sounds harsh, it shouldn’t — just realistic. After all, it still made me tear up, which is more than I could say for Dear Esther.

Addendum: After writing this, I read the Wikipedia entry for The Notebook, and, yeah, this all sounds about right.

Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is another strange one; I recommend it because it is interesting, if flawed. I’m including it on this list because what it made me feel, if anything, is “numb,” but that is kind of the point. Bear with me.

The buzz surrounding this game upon release felt rather shallow. Psychedelic! Trippy! Ultra-violent! Blah, blah, blah. Hotline Miami does something interesting, but describing it in terms of the pounding soundtrack or the visual motif doesn’t really do it justice (imagine selling someone on Quake by saying, “Hey, it’s kind of Gothic! How ’bout them Nine Inch Nails? Oh, and you shoot stuff.”).

Here’s what you do in Hotline Miami: You go to your apartment, check your voice mail, go somewhere and murder a few dozen people, and head back home, making sure to pick up a pizza or rent a movie on your way. In doing so, you are trying to solve a mystery: Who is leaving messages on your answering machine, who are the people sitting in your living room wearing animal masks, and why are you killing these people? You can’t solve the mystery without killing people (and the narrative is set up as a flashback, so really, those people are all already dead, and you’re just replaying the action), so you just shrug your shoulders, grab your baseball bat, and go to work.

Ryan Gosling in Hotline Miami: The Movie.

I say Hotline Miami made me feel numb. This is why: I did not enjoy the violent parts. Not because I am opposed to violence in games, but because it wasn’t really that much fun. Each floor you play through might as well be a puzzle game you’re trying to brute-force a solution to. Your player is every bit as fragile as his enemies, so combat is swift and visually gory (lots of blood and heads rolling, etc.) but not particularly visceral. Your hits lack any oomph whatsoever. It’s not satisfying, and I don’t think we’re actually meant to enjoy it. Or at least, it wasn’t designed so that I was meant to enjoy it.

In-game, I might have been knocking a guy out with a door, slamming his head against the ground until it exploded, taking his tire iron and beating two other people to death, and so on, but in my head, I was calmly — perhaps even boredly — dissecting a problem set. I might as well have been working on a crossword puzzle. Minesweeper takes an actual tragic situation (re: unexploded Cold War mines left in countries that hosted proxy wars) and abstracts it into a pleasant game of number-crunching; Hotline Miami plays up the garish bloodbath and achieves the same effect.

As I wrote in the introduction to this list, games assign consequence and meaning to mundane actions (pressing keys becomes killing people). Hotline Miami makes the killing feel mundane. It’s a chore I have to get through because I want to see what’s new at my apartment and grab a pizza. Killing a house full of people is my 9-to-5 tedium. To me, it feels like a study in psychopathology — perhaps that of videogames and the people who play them (and, judging from the ending, the people who make them).

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

I put Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (hereafter known as Marvel or maybe even MAHVEL BAYBEE) on last year’s list, mostly because I was impressed that Capcom had managed to isolate and refine the essence of everything that made MVC2 great and do it intentionally with MVC3. This year, UMVC3 made me feel like shaking my head and saying “Man, fuck this game.” In a good way.

Over the last few years, I’ve been something of a casual fighting game player. I fell off the Street Fighter IV bandwagon shortly after Super dropped because I just don’t enjoy the game. Aside from a few Capcom vs. SNK 2 relapses, I hadn’t been that devoted to any one particular game. MVC3 came along, and I got into it in the least-committed way possible by basically sticking to a rather solid team and sticking with it for most of the way. I didn’t experiment much, because what I had was enough to hang in there and have a good time with the guys I play fighting games with.

Then I went to Evolution 2012.

After Evolution 2011, I wrote The Anatomy of Hype. Interestingly enough, almost everything about my Evolution 2012 experience was different. I spent most of my time holed up in the hotel room playing Marvel, because dammit, I wanted to play Marvel, not spend time talking to people who weren’t playing Marvel. (Kenan and Andres: Sorry about that.)

I ended up not doing too well in Marvel (I did better in SFIV, and I actually played against a guy who decided to come to Evo after reading The Anatomy of Hype — sorry, guy, and welcome to Evo), but even though I did pretty shitty in Marvel, I did manage to hit one combo — the Zero lightning loop — which I had explained to me only a few days earlier and didn’t really understand all that well, in actual competition.

So much of my post-SFIV fighting game experience had, up until that point, been trying to find the easiest ways to not put on an embarrassing performance that I forgot what it felt like to put myself out there. To try something new, experiment with it, fail, and then eventually get it right when it mattered most. I was a changed man after that match. I shook my opponent’s hand, and then went right back to the hotel room to help my buddies grind out games in order to prepare for their pools.

After Evolution 2012, I became a Marvel Player. I let my Xbox Live Gold sub die out because I just wanted to spend time in training mode. I saw my Marvel-playing friends every week, and my not-Marvel-playing friends less and less. Most people take a break after Evo; I showed up at my buddy Bihn’s house every Wednesday, stick in hand, and parked my ass on his couch for about five hours straight. We still have a recurring playdate.

Marvel players are a breed apart from other fighting game players. On balance, we’re probably more likely to get into fights; we tend to have disavowed our interest in pretty much any other not-Marvel fighting games; we’re constantly seeking the answer to one question, and that’s “When’s Marvel?“ Before Evolution 2012, I was a dabbler, someone who could speak Marvel but was not fluent. Now, Marvel is kind of like speaking in tongues.

(The best part is this was at an MLG event, and they don’t run Marvel tournaments.

Competitive game players have an It’s Complicated relationship with the games we play; often, the game we’re best at is one we hate the most. “This game is stupid” is a common excuse whether we lose or win. We are apologizing to the other person for playing a game that is imperfect. It’s kind of like saying, “Sorry, we could have had a better match if we were playing a better game, but this will have to do for now.” (In this light, Mike Z’s devotion to Skullgirls, and David Sirlin’s to Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix are both perfectly understandable.)

UMVC3 is quite possibly the only game I’ve played that takes that sentiment and embraces it. The entire point of the game is to craft a team and hone your execution until everyone you play is convinced that Marvel is the dumbest game ever. Training sessions consist of you doing this to your friends, back and forth, until someone someone comes up with something that makes the game seem dumber still. The fighting game community has a name for the feeling of being frustrated after losing: “Salty”. Marvel is like mainlining saline solution.

Salty.

Allow me to provide an example: The team I use right now is Zero, Doctor Doom, and Vergil. Zero has some of the most obnoxiously potent normal attacks in the game, and if he hits you one, he can potentially land a combo that will kill that character (and without worrying too much about spending meter, too, as he generates plenty on his own). Once he kills one of your characters, your incoming character must block a mixup that essentially amounts to a 50% chance of not getting caught in the same combo that will kill that character, and then your third character comes out into the same mixup. In MVC2, that kind of lethal power put Magneto in the top tier, often only if backed up with the right assists. In UMVC3, you get all that in one character, and you don’t need to be a crazy-good combo execution specialist to get that, either. I won’t delve into Doom and Vergil’s strengths, but suffice it to say that they’ve got plenty of knockout power as well.

Now get this: Zero players have won approximately one major MVC3/UMVC3 tournament in the history of the game (Flocker at Season’s Beatings 2011). When compared to teams that simply don’t let you move for chip damage (Chris G’s Morrigan/Doom and Filipino Champ’s Dormammu/Doom) or characters that basically get a Win button if you set them up properly (most notably Phoenix, though Strider Hiryu, Frank West, and Phoenix Wright all fall into this category), the ability to destroy a whole team with one initial touch is fairly tame.
In Japan, this more-broken-than-the-last design earned Marvel the title of kusoge (literally “shit-game”). For Marvel players, this is what we’re here for; that feeling of helplessness and frustration and FUCK THIS GAME that we instill in others and are instilled upon in turn. Once your palate gets used to all that salt, everything else just tastes bland.

Sound Shapes (and, reluctantly, Dear Esther)

I played Dear Esther for the first time earlier this month, in order to steel myself for the upcoming Gamasutra Top 10 Games of 2012 hashing-out meeting. It was not brief, and I did not enjoy it, though I can appreciate what it did. (Dear Esteban, from the Fuck This Game jam, was a nice palate-cleanser.) If Dear Esther made me feel anything, it was “bored.” (I am not one of those people who insist it be permanently stricken The List of Videogames, mind you; I just didn’t like it.)

I have a feeling Sound Shapes is my Dear Esther; I adore it, but not for what I do in it. I like playing it, but it’s not a satisfying platformer. The first Beck level (“Cities”) just felt so good. Capital-A Art has never done much for me; I’ve never seen a painting and felt warmth and beauty pour into my soul, even if someone tells me It’s Really Good. But something melted inside of me when I saw the “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” clouds in Sound Shapes. That isn’t an experience I think everyone will have playing Sound Shapes, but I had it, and so it needs to go on this list.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Perhaps the thing that Dear Esther and Sound Shapes have in common (and we might as well add Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery to the list) is a willingness to de-emphasize Game Mechanics in favor of The Experience. Some art games tell stories through the Game (stuff like Passage as probably the most basic example), by leading you through a decision-making process that makes you Feel Things. But Dear Esther and Sound Shapes seem content to simply be, to offer you a cocktail of experiences of which the actual player-game physical interaction is only one element, and a rather minimal element of that.

Remember when CD-ROMs first became a viable delivery medium for games? There was this awesome explosion of weird crap that came out once devs realized they had a stupid amount of storage space: lots of CD-quality music, FMV cutscenes everywhere, and…um, not really that much in the way of good games except Myst. “Play” is one element of a videogame, not the only element, and it makes sense to me that some games are best made with a minimal design in mind. If I were playing a more complicated game — say, Lemmings — through a Sound Shapes level, it’d probably suck.

As it turns out, “minimal game design” segues nicely into my last entry on this list.

ZiGGURAT and Super Hexagon

If I learned anything from ZiGGURAT and Super Hexagon, it’s that we, collectively, don’t really know how to make videogames.

As I understand it, Game Designers exist primarily to build Systems meant for players to navigate. The success or failure of the system depends on its ability to make the players feel what the designer wants them to feel: “competitive” for something like Starcraft 2 multiplayer; “cooperative” and “serendipity” for, say, Journey; and so on. But much of this system-designing is taking certain fundamental game design interactions and mashing them up: Starcraft 2 is a mix of Risk (overall increase in power over time), Poker (the fog of war), and rock-paper-scissors (asymmetric player options in the three different races). The actual core “game” in Starcraft 2 is clicking and box-selecting things, and then pressing a button on your keyboard to tell those things to do something, and then selecting something else. Wrap Risk/Poker/RPS around it, and we call it Starcraft 2; wrap your hard drive’s filesystem around it, and we call it Windows 7. Sometimes, we subtract instead of adding; Canabalt is Super Mario Bros. without the coins, or the levels, or the different directions, or the enemies, or the powerups.

I have written a decent amount about the nuts and bolts of ZiGGURAT and Super Hexagon in How to Not Suck at ZiGGURAT and everything you need to know about the future of videogames, respectively, so I won’t rehash all that. Instead, I’ll focus on the one thing both games do ridiculously well, albeit in different ways: They both focus on videogames as a matter of milliseconds and seconds, not minutes or hours or days or “lives” (in either the game-sense or the real-life sense). They are both exercises of Game Design at the most atomic level: micro-interactions between player and game. No extrinsic motivators, no bars going up, no meta-game layer, just pressing buttons to do a thing. Sit back and think about all the games you’ve played in the last year. How many of them can say the same?

Over the last week, I’ve been playing a lot of Super Hexagon, and I asked myself a question: Why do I have to hold down the left and right buttons to move? After all, there are no parts in the maze where I can get through a hole that is smaller than one of the sides of the polygon I’m orbiting. If I’m on the correct side, I’m on the correct side. So why can’t I move a fixed distance at a fixed rate by tapping the button and remove the inaccuracy of holding it down? That way, I wouldn’t have to deal with death by overshooting the gap I was aiming for, which seemed to me to be an inconvenience of the game, not The Point Of The Game.

I suspect that I was, in fact, missing The Point Of The Game; I wanted a control system that would validate the decisions I was making (“navigate over there”) and prevent me from dying in situations where my inputs did not match up to my decisions (“I tried to navigate there, but ended up over there instead and died”). But Super Hexagon isn’t about making decisions, it’s about playing the damn game with the tools you’re given. It is unfair and brutal (and the only thing you have going for you is that it’s real easy to start over and really you can complete the whole game in six minutes and change), but that’s kind of the point. If it were just about the decisions you make, it’d be Super Hexagon: The Text Adventure. Super Hexagon just issues you, the player, a challenge: “Betcha can’t navigate through this maze real fast.” And you are compelled to answer: “Oh yeah? Betcha I can.” That’s all it is — a new challenge for its own sake.

Decision-making in Super Hexagon.

Tim describes his work with Action Button Entertainment as making “minimalist e-sports”. I get where he’s coming from: “e-sport” in the “game that is designed to stress excellence in play, rather than narrative progression or other stuff” sense of “sport”, just on a machine instead of with an actual ball”, and “minimalist” because he’s not making another Street Fighter or Starcraft or whatever. I prefer to describe it as “making new videogames”, which is something that very few game developers seem to be doing.

To illustrate this distinction a little bit further: Starcraft 2 is an “e-sport”, but we can kind of zoom in and isolate one particular game dynamic which could be a “minimalist e-sport” of its own. For Terran players, Marines, Siege Tanks, and Medevacs tend to be the backbone of your army. Marines are cheap, but fragile; Siege Tanks are expensive and have a long-range attack with splash damage, but they have to be stationary to perform that attack and are rather fragile; Medevacs can heal Marines, which comes in handy (especially after they use Stim to sacrifice some health for faster walk/attack speeds), spot for Siege Tanks (since Tanks can shoot farther than they can see on their own), and drop both Marines and Tanks into areas that give them a tactical advantage. Marines are good at killing isolated Tanks, but bunches of Tanks will kill innumerable Marines.

Well, when one Marine/Tank/Medevac army goes up against another Marine/Tank/Medevac army, you get a really interesting game, because each player needs to find ways to bait the enemy army into running into their tank line, upon which the enemy army will almost certainly be vaporized. So you feint manuevers to make your opponent think you’re leaving when you’re not, you find ways to take the high ground, and so on. That interaction right there, between those three units: That could be a minimalist e-sport. That’s what I want to play. So why do we bother with stuff like an economy, or three races, or other units? And why stick with an input system that dates back to the creation of the original GUI?

To dissect another one of my sacred cows: Ryu vs. Ryu in Super Street Fighter II Turbo is the Perfect Matchup. You got your fireballs, your dragon punches, your air hurricane kicks. It’s the fighting game skeleton around which the other 15 characters were designed — why bother with the other 15? Play ST Ryu, and you’ll know everything you need to know about fighting games. (I intend to write another article that will prove this.) And so on. Try this with your favorite games and see what you come up with.

2012 was a remarkable year for videogames. A lot of great stuff came out, and some of it actually made it on this list. Call the games industry butter, ’cause it’s on a roll.

But for all the great games that people made, well, there weren’t that many great games. Do yourself a favor and New Game Plus this article (go read it again), paying attention to how many games I actually liked for being good games — games that made me want to play them for their own sake, not because playing them was something I had to do for another reason. But both ZiGGURAT and Super Hexagon establish as their fundamental premise that if I am not enjoying playing the game at the millisecond-to-millisecond level, everything else in the game can go get fucked, which makes me feel, well, cared-for.

patrick miller really likes videogames, you guys, honest

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The Oakland Three reminisces upon the highlights of this fiscal year through the lens of events in the world of the video game entertainment medium. The topics discussed are these:

0) Tim’s victory assignment
1) The most memorable moment in a video game this year
2) The greatest disappointment this year
3) Who won 2012
4) Video Games’ Person of the Year
5) 2012: Year of the Kickstarter
6) Vita vs. Wii U
7) New Year’s Resolutions
8) Game of the Year 2013
9) Closing thoughts

Sound editing provided by Andrew Toups, with music from The Zombies (“This Will Be Our Year”) and Neu! (Fur Immer). Next week, we will finally settle once and for all (until next year) what should be considered the Greatest Game of All Time. There have been a whole lot of video games, though, so we are only considering those nominated by you, the listener: e-mail your choice for Best Game Ever to podcast@insertcredit.com, and who knows? We may just prove you right.

-alex jaffe believes that while 2012 was pretty nice overall, it was no 2010

• Bulletstorm
• Grand Theft Auto
• Mortal Kombat
• Splatterhouse
• Kindergarten Killer

Today, insert credit’s own Hollywood correspondent Vito Gesualdi takes a look at one of these classic titles, to see whether such a widely celebrated game could really push a potential killer over the edge.

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This week, Jordan, Jesse GO!‘s Jordan Morris joins the list of guests I specifically started this show for the express purpose of getting on the podcast. Together with frank, tim, and brandon, we discuss:

1. Video games of Christmas Past
2. Fighting games as an Olympic event
3. Comedy in Japanese games vs. comedy in American games
4. Adrien Brody’s Predators: The Official Game of the Movie
5. Santa Games
6. What defines a good side quest
7. Chun-Li as a sex icon
8. Mid-nineties mascot design
9. The Grateful Dead of video games?
10. A GOD HAND Christmas Miracle

And, of course, our music list:
Lemon Demon – BRODYQUEST
Add N to (X) – Metal Fingers In My Body
Add N to (X) – Revenge Of The Black Regent

Sound editing provided by Andrew Toups. Join us next week for our end of the year podcast! We’ve already revealed our Game of the Year, but there’s plenty more to talk about where that came from. And, in TWO weeks, we will begin what we hope will be an annual tradition where we re-evaluate the Best Video Games of All Time. If you’d like us to consider a game, submit your nomination to podcast@insertcredit.com, and follow the news in our Facebook group.

“Yabba Dabba Doo”
-alex jaffe (as made famous by Fred Flintstone, as made even more famous by tim rogers)

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A whole bunch of games were released this year. We discuss which one was the best.

Music: “Somebody That I Used To Know”, Gotye

-alex jaffe