I often blank on what to blog about, so I figured I’d just write about what I was up to.
The Evolution Fighting Game Championships took place over the weekend, a prime example of what an esport can, and maybe should, be. The reasoning for that is where I’ve not played a fighting game in ages, besides Smash Bros., if that even counts. The last one I really remember playing was Street Fighter II on, I think it was an Xbox 360, a port of the game I grew up cutting my teeth on back for the SNES.
Still, even having no real knowledge of any of the games on display, it was easily accessible to interested observers like myself. Unlike StarCraft, which is easier than some games to parse information from, or League of Legends or Dota or Counterstrike, all of which I think are pretty darn hard to watch without at least some idea of what’s going on and not nearly as inviting to new viewers, fighting games are easy enough to get into.
You’ve got two characters on the screen, an easily viewable health bar for each one and you generally know the goal of the game – bash on the other guy until that health bar hits zero. No matter what game was on stream, be it Samurai Showdown (which was brand new to me despite being a pretty old franchise), BlazBlue, Tekken or Street Fighter, the rules are all the same:
If your opponent is upright, change that.
And fighting games are high drama. They have storylines, even if this is the only tournament of the year that you watch. While not everyone can fully appreciate all the precise button inputs and reaction times and memorization of movesets and fighter matchups and the ability to flat out read what your opponent is doing, people do know what stress looks like. And when the camera cuts to a player and he’s got no poker face at all to mask his defeat and his opponent is smiling and nodding and saying ‘yeah, let’s go!’, you kind of get into it.
Does the dejected player change his character, the stage or the mindset to win? Or has his predicament wormed its way so deeply into his brain that he’s just beaten and we’re going through the motions. And when these players have names, sponsors and their country’s flag next to their displayed name – you start rooting for them for whatever reason.
Suddenly, you’re invested. It’s easy to watch and see this guy’s an American going up against a Korean player. Oh, we know to root for there, right?
Well, not always. You can be a fickle viewer too. Maybe the should-be-easy-to-root-for player is using a not-very-fun-to-watch playstyle of camping on one side of the stage and shooting fireballs to zone out his opponent. Whatever works, right? It’s not like it’s easy to never miss an input to keep your opponent at bay, but it’s certainly not very fun to watch.
And if nothing else, you you can just root for which character on screen looks the coolest. Do you want the generic samurai with the katana and big hair to win or the geisha woman or the boxer or the gigantic, glowing robot? Spoilers, it’s not the last one! At least for me. Not nearly as cool as you might think. His movement was all wonky.
I used to mess around with fighting games a lot. I distinctly remember whining to my mom one time that my brother wouldn’t let me out of the corner when he was beating me up with Zangief in Street Fighter II. At that time, I was playing Ken, the coolest guy with the best music. She got onto him, “let him out of the corner!” and I got out, but I still lost. Obviously.
But my time for revenge eventually came.
The Sega Saturn, remember that thing? I barely do. It had a game called Virtua Fighter, which I think recently, kind of, had a resurgence and a new game or something. I played some weird dude named Lion, pronounced Leon, and he held himself like a praying mantis. You know, arms all bent upward at the elbow and the wrists flopped down.
I may have been 5 or 6 years old, but I was unstoppable. My brother, who I used to ask if he was the “King of Video Games” at that age, something he was thrilled to answer yes to, was getting absolutely wrecked. No matter what he did, I always beat him. Always. And I was just buttonmashing. He would get so mad and refuse to play with me. I forget what happened that had him get rid of that Saturn, but it was always so fun to play that game with him because the shoe was on the other foot.
That always happens, doesn’t it? When you finally lose that edge you honed to someone you never even saw coming. Student becomes the master and all that.
On Wednesday, I’ll have a fresh Storygank up to look through, though I’m currently working on two different ones. I’m trying to convince myself of which one to finish. At the worst, that makes the one after this one much, much easier. As for the Adventure, I find myself in the same boat. Two pretty good ones, not sure which one will go up Saturday. Hope you’ll give them a look too.
Oh, and I guess it’s worth noticing that this website has been active for three whole months now. Pretty neat, huh? I think so. I also crushed another ghost, 34:52, and banged out my fastest mile ever the other day, 9:42. It gets easier every day. But for the past few days, I’ve been taking a small rest. I feel like maybe I’ve earned that.
Thanks for reading.