lol I think you went overboard there. I didn’t say fighting games suffered the *same *silly defensive quirks, I said… well this is what I said!:
In SC players may be seen blocking and t-bagging the floor in an effort to be safe. Sure it looks silly, but you get moments like that whenever players wanna be cautious. In all seriousness; better safe than sorry. Is it any better in SF when two turtle players face each other? How about something offensive… with two fireball spammers tossing plasma at each other for over 10secs? Sure we know the technical reasons for that, and it’s not a players job to put on a show for onlookers, but I’m not the only one who facepalms on moments like that. It’s something that happens in any fighting game.
Oh I fully recognize this. I even noted in my original post how ridiculous it looks when two charge characters hold DB against each other. I’m just saying that button-blocking promotes gameplay in which silly moments are not only more frequent but look more silly when they do happen as compared to back-blocking ones. Also, I agree that it’s not a players job to put on a show for onlookers. It’s a designer’s job to design a game that is as fun to watch as it is to play.
It being my fighting series of choice, I can assure you Soulcalibur is very exciting to watch. I might be biased, though.
Smash Bros. has a block button and it’s very frantic. And there’s vids of high level UMK3 play that’s more kinetic than some SF matches. Block button and all.
Your opinion. My opinion is the opposite, UMK3 blocking gets more interesting when you know the situation each character is in more.
On the opposite hand, I rarely can get through a SSF4 stream or casuals without laughing at the charge characters sitting down to tea, or the shoto’s meeting in the middle (though the later again becomes more interesting when I’m actually playing the fireball character)
Very true it happens every time. You need a decent amount of experience and knowledge about a different mechanic in order to judge it fairly.
Why do people keep bring up the issue of SF adding a block button? The topic isn’t about that. Also why should a block button negate crossup? Holding guard with your back turned wouldn’t necessarily turn you around automatically and your still vulnerable in the back.
I like the guard button for the benefits it brings to the games I play, in particular VF. It can be used for guard buffering, instant stopping of and more free movement and feinting.
MK gaurd button system complements the game well. And even though theirs no cross up in mk games, theirs still mix up and high.low games to get around guarding.
Mk was never a game for excessive jumping in my opinion.
As more indy developers tackle the genre, we won’t have to suffer stagnant ideologies and experimentation will give rise to new experiences. And stuff.
Sorry but I just can’t figure out what you’re trying to say here. This is not a dig at you or your message. I am just honestly confuzzled.
Actually, for any player who understands the underlying intricacies of what is going on within the game, any kind of presentation would be interesting. The real test comes when people who know nothing about the game are watching it. Is their attention grabbed? Possibly enough to try the game out for themselves? That’s the real test.
I am not making a comment about the depth of strategy, or even how fun it is to play. I am just making a comment about how this single aspect of the gameplay looks. This is not a comment about the overall look of MK, Soul Calibur or any other game. Just the blocking. I don’t like how button-blocking looks. You are free to disagree or even refute my points, but I would prefer to keep discussion to just the blocking, and how button-blocking compares to back-blocking.
It seems I screwed up in my last post, I thought I was stating the obvious and true and people agree I wasn’t. So please tell me, what’s so “backwards” and “foolish” in my words? (honest, my english is crappy but it seems it was the logic which was stupid, and I don’t see how)
It seems pretty obvious to me that in 3D or multi-player fighting games (Smash Bros) you need a button to block, I always saw this as a way to restrict your mobility, since you can’t move and block at the same time. Another thing that comes with guard buttons is the ability to move your stick freely while guarding, buffering something or stuff like that.
It’s true that in 2D fighters a block-button could be useful, but yeah it would eliminate the cross-ups, and it would mess up with current charge-characters mechanics, since they are all made to be charged while guarding.
My guess is that 2D fighters designers choose to use back as the guard button to complicate things on purpose. I guess they saw their lack of dimension as a simplifying agent.
There’s nothing else to discuss. The type of blocking is relevant to the system its being built in, regardless of it being 2D, 3D. People say the thread ended with Tony’s post but in truth…Reno pretty much summed it up way before that.
It has nothing to do with relevance and it comes down to functionality. Holding back to block prevents movement. In mvc2, you have that full screen jab trap from sf2. If you try to dash back during twitch guard, even though nothing is touching you, its a 2 frame input just to move backwards. Why is trying to move backwards a fucking just frame? It shouldn’t be like that. Characters like strider who have very little movement anyway still get fucked cause he can’t double jump upbck when there is something to block on the screen. Instead of double jumping, he gets locked into guard. So a character with bad movement is restricted even further due to holding back for block.
If you do it like ssf4 does with proximity guard, it doesn’t effect full screen but if you’re close to the poke and it doesn’t hit you, you’re now locked into block stun again. The only way out of this crap is to jump upbck and certain characters can counter that like ryu\sagat\guile all can counter that with a well timed FB.
Holding back to block actually does fuck up the games cause it restricts movement too much. Its just that its been here forever and everyone is used to it.
You can’t design a block button like MK, that would fuck up everything 2d wise. You would have to design a block button and then make sure back\dwnbck still triggers a block BUT only when block is being pressed. With this method, you still have 4 corner blocking in 2d games and proximity\full screen guard can be removed from fighters.
It would definitely make OS attacking much harder. Right now, we can hold dwnbck+attack for a 2n1 block\poke. To do that with block button, it becomes blokc+dwnbck+poke. Also while holding block on a joystick, its very hard to transition into other normals if its going to be a 6 button game. You’ll have 1 finger locked onto the stick while trying to tap the other 5 and that gets pretty complicated.
a block button certainly gets rid of a few problems but now a few different problems pop up.
We pretty much said the same thing, only difference is I look at it as games are different. You can’t apply one mechanic in one game to another game and say it works, doesn’t work or make blanket statements for 2D/3D games like the dude tried to do above. Its like that throw discussion I heard awhile back, with people saying nonsense like SC’s throw system would work better with VF’s style, or Tekken would work better with so-and-so…the throw system works with whatever the game was made with. Just like blocking is made to suit whatever game it was made with.
The only problem in this thread is that people don’t play enough variety of games, so they end up trying to talk about different games like they’re jigsaw puzzles when in reality they are ignorant.
