Fighting Games are Awesome But......

I love a good fighting game and fighting games are probably one of the most fun genres around.  Grab a couple of friends and just beat the shit out of each other all night long over a few drinks, it's a damn good time.  Doesn't matter if it's 2D like Street Fighter or 3D like Tekken, generally speaking whacking out a fighting game at a gathering of gamers is a guaranteed good time.

As you may have been aware from my ranty post about how much I hate Tokyo, I'm currently stuck here on job training.  One weekend me and my buddy hit a game centre and I had a quick blast on Capcom Vs SNK 2.  That game is awesome and I was able to beat the whole thing with one coin which was pretty nice.  Following our little run at fighting games in the arcade, we went back to his place with some cans of beer and fired up a bit of Street Fighter Alpha 3.  We ramped the difficulty up to 8 (max) and took turns working our way through the games arcade mode.  We had to continue a couple of times but it wasn't too long before we made it to the end.

Now if you think I'm telling you all this to show off, I'm not.  In fact it's quite the opposite, I love fighting games but I fucking suck at them really hard.  Sure, I'm good enough to beat down the CPUs in an arcade or on a home console version but if you put me in front of someone who even remotely knows what they are doing, then I'm going to get smacked the fuck down.

I remember first coming to Japan in 2010, me and my friends had been playing an absolute shit ton of Tekken 6 and we were extremely excited to jump on an arcade version and try our hands against the denizens of Nagoya.  Generally speaking, there was little to not competition at our university with everyone who came play being embarrassingly bad with the exception of our group.  We were sort of successful online but coming to Japan and playing the people here was a completely different ball game.  We got beat down.  Hard.

Despite my complete suckage it hasn't turned me away from the genre.  I find the competitive scene for this genre absolutely fascinating and the dedication it takes to learn a fighting game well enough to play at a tournament rivals that of speed running.  All the things such as frame and hitbox data as well as how to use each character effectively is amazing and it's a great thing that people take the time and effort to learn this stuff in great detail.

Fighting games are great and the people who play them well are a treat to watch.  I only wish that I was better but I just can't wrap my head around that shit.  If I sat down and played one for a significant length of time maybe I could get good but between speed running and my backlog I don't think that will be happening for a very long time.  Guess I'm just destined to be the ultimate scrublord for all of time.

Skullgirls DLC is Disgusting

Skullgirls is a game I've not played, but looks pretty good and I'll be getting it on Steam once it's released.

Quality of the game aside though, while looking at the Steam store page I found something pretty rage inducing that I would like to share my thoughts on.  A long time ago I made a blog post about how Palette swapped enemies and characters in games are a bunch of lazy bullshit, go read that here.

http://identitygaming.blogspot.se/2012/07/now-thats-some-bullshit-2-palette-swaps.html

Now unless your Mortal Kombat, where your passing off swaps as new characters, doing this in fighting games isn't so bad.  Like in Street Fighter, being able to change Ryu's clothes or Sakura's school uniform from their standard colours to something that you find more appealing or something funky is cool, it lets you personalise your character a bit.

So those features were kind of cool and you liked it right? Well now, at least in Skullgirls, if you want to personalise your character just a tiny bit you have to fucking pay for that shit now.  Something that was a standard feature in pretty much every fighting game I've ever played is now being passed off as fucking DLC.  Also before anyone wants to tell about how cheap it is, I don't give a fuck, no one should have to pay for fucking palette swaps.

I can't remember if it was Persona or Blazblue or whatever but I remember in one of those guys you could pick like a section of clothes or part of the character, and then choose from like 60 odd colours so that you could really make something that you liked.  Sure it's a small thing, but making that a paid add on is fucking arse.

But you know what, I don't blame the developers, I blame the people who buy it.  You can't fault a bunch of people who want to make money on their game, and sure, if people are willing to pay for stuff that has come standard for years, then why not?!  Their the fucking idiots eating it up and telling them it's OK to pull that shit.  What's worse is that I found a community website with this announcement on it and people were fucking loving it!  I couldn't believe it.

Well whatever, I suppose I'm getting overly annoyed about a small thing, but it shouldn't fucking be this way! Goddamnit!  You are being charged for the dev to use the fill tool, think about that.

I suck at Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo

I just finished uploading the little showcase video I made for this game!  I'm aware that I suck, and I still need to solve some mic issues.  I'm still new to this whole, recording games thing, but hopefully, by the time the next showcase comes around, everything will be good and sorted.  Not much to say about this one, I died a lot but I managed to finish on a win! 

VIDEO TIME!

Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo

Think of this post as a sort of "set up" post for the next Saturn month video I'll be doing.  So next on the list is a game that is not only one of my favourite puzzle games ever, but my mothers favourite game of all time.

This game was brought over to the Sony Playstation and was fairly recently put into HD on the Xbox Live Arcade with online multiplayer (which is pretty much dead last time I tried)  For anyone who doesn't know what it is, it's a block matching puzzle game where you have to line up matching colours and then smash them with a circular gem.  What made the game different from any other puzzle game I played at the time, was the fact that you could select one of about 10 Street Fighter or Darkstalker characters to fight in the middle.

Each character had a unique "drop" pattern, so when you smashed blocks, you would send solid blocks to your opponent that would take a number of drops to turn into normal gems.  The more blocks you smashed, the flashier the move would be.  A few blocks would cause your character to taunt, a good amount would make them do a special, and smashing a shit ton of blocks made them do an ultra.

The game is fast paced, fun as shit and really flashy.  What people who only bought the XBLA version may not know, was something called the "Street Battle Mode" which was a series of challenges that you had to clear against stupidly hard opponents.  Still, in place of that, we got online mode, where I was getting my ass kicked every time by stupidly hard opponents, so it was quite similar really.

I was never amazing at this game, and I'm not nearly as good as I used to be, but there will be a video on this game fairly soon.  I have plans for the next few days, so I'll release the video about around Sunday or Monday, so keep an eye out.  If you like puzzle games and street fighter, you'll LOVE this