Don's Arcade aka Astro City: Torrance/Carson Fridays 8pm-3am

Regional Matchmaking Pacific South
2721

Actually I encountered this very same situation when I was trying to get Millertime/Tania (my gf) to play ST. Mostly it stemmed from me not having much local competition for ST without having to drive 20-30 minutes to get to an arcade.

First off, you can’t start off by boasting that new games suck and old games are better. You’re not going to make any friends doing that, and it’s a terrible sales tactic. It helps to just let them try the game at a casual level first. Just ask them if they want to try a new game, preferably at your house or arcade or whatever. If they’re stingey about paying $0.25 to play, you can let them borrow a a quarter. Suggest a newb-friendly character to play. Someone that’s easy to pick up and start having fun right off the bat. An obvious favorite of mine is Ryu, since he has just about all the tools he needs to win a match, but generally has a pretty simple play style.

I try to ease players into by teaching them the basics. Let them get a feel for the game on their own, but offer to give advice, suggestions, helpful hints, cheap and abusable tactics, to get a jump-start on their win/loss ratio. Once they pick up on that, it helps to reinforce the fundamentals of the game you’re trying to teach, as that skill will carry over throughout a variety of fighting games. After playing the game for a bit, even Millertime learned that ST is a game that focuses purely on fundamentals, and she’s actually transferred that skill over to SF4. She realized that she can fuck up most scrubs by applying basic strategy and execution in her matches that’s core in ST, but most new SF4 players don’t know about. This only helps strengthen her resolve to improve at ST, because she saw that it directly affects how she plays Honda in SF4, to destroy people who don’t understand how to properly block, zone, and feel momentum shifts.

Like for me, I taught Millertime how to store the ochio and do tick throws, since they’re very powerful in ST, as a cheap and easy way to win certain matches. She loves it. I also taught her how to properly do hands and use j.mk as the primary jump attack. Hands does fantastic chip damage, is a great way to counter poke, and it builds meter. J.mk is his primary jump attack because it has awesome priority, usually trades in his favor or equal health loss, and leads to a variety of tick throw and frame trap setups.

It’s to the point where she greatly enjoys fighting disadvantaged matchups, because she has to work so hard, play extremely technical, and have near perfect execution to win her toughest matchups. It really forces her to adopt a more strategic, patient, and analytical style of play, that helped give her a bit more range on how she approaches a variety of characters, playstyles, and game engines, across a multitide of games.

tl;dr. Being a good teacher and being supportive of your players, can help convince others to play older games, as long as there’s a strong scene around you.

2722

Not that you would do it but I’m glad you taught your girl to play ST instead of programming her to be a stripper lol. Unlike some guys I know lol.

But not to make light of what Eltrouble said. I agree I think it’s time for the old school to try another method when trying to convert new schoolers. A more humane method. Beating someone down and telling them they’re scrubs is not working. You gotta take them under your wing. It’s slow and it takes patience but it’s rewarding. In the FGC there’s too many players not enough teachers. And how do people learn how to break dance? You need a teacher. You can’t just learn it all on YouTube.

2723

I remember my brother asking me about how to deal with someone who knows how to counter your best strategy, since for him, taking away tools that you’re accustomed to working with spelled doom. Most new players simply give up, but I told him that the answer was as simple as countering what the opponent is actively doing to you that’s stopping you from playing how you want. If they parry a lot, just throw. If they throw you a lot, bait or overwhelm them. In-game, the opponent has technically conditioned themselves to deal with a situation in a degenerate fashion (unless it’s a match-up issue). That’s technically an advantage for you in 3s and most other games if you understand why – it’s a tell. A lot of these concepts just went right over his head not so much because they were complex, but because they seemed too basic (counter a counter), but after I showed him the basic of the basics, he felt really good about himself and how to approach me if I, for example, jumped in; he found out what anti-air normals were for in those situations.

Though it’s true that there are some things you can’t just learn from a teacher right there next to you (confidence in your play, nerves, feeling out conditioning, etc.), there’s a billion things they can do to help you enjoy what you’re playing and what you should focus on. If I never met Tenren, my Ibuki wouldn’t be half as strong as it is now. He helped me clean out all the garbage in my play and just made what I was doing a lot more clear in the long run. He didn’t have to do that, and even he admits that he’s not a great teacher, per se. Still, the concept of always parrying (which is and isn’t what it sounds like; it’s…a lot more devious than that…), perpetual mix-ups, “safe” offense, breaking down how the high/low game works, stagger stepping, low conditioning, crouch feints, baiting with normals – heck, my creativity in this junk didn’t emerge until AFTER I realized what these strategies were doing in the engine and my opponent. I don’t care what game it is, a good teacher can persuade you to play anything if you can feel like you can tackle the universe by the end.

2724

Tania just read that first part and laughed pretty hard. LOL.

I agree that the old 90s style of teaching new players doesn’t work anymore. It wasn’t like players were only restricted by their local scene, arcades, and EGM magazines to have a place to train and level up. Players don’t respond and thrive in such hostile environments anymore, since there’s about several more open and inviting venues, people, games, and online matchmaking system, to flock to instead. We have to learn to adapt to the modern fighting game scene by taking a more professional approach, and be willing to adopt patience and teach the new generation of players how to level up their game.

It’s what has largely contributed to the success of major e-sports titles, ranging from FPS, to RTS, to MOBA. They have a very organized network of stream content, tutorial, guides, player-run forums, and a wealth of information available, to help bring new players into games with admittedly high learning curves.

2725

You know what’s ironic? Those genres have very poor offline scenes with very exclusive events for pro teams, whereas ours has the most active offline community of any scene and 10 times the amount of community events that go so far as being national events (EVO, Canada Cup, Shadowloo). Yet we’re easily the most intimidating out of every known scene that’s established. Go figure.

Edit: Oh, we’re also like the fucking melting pot of every race imaginable…and every other kind of gender thinkable.

2726

Yup the Spartan system is definately outdated. You know what happens at the end of 300. We we all become extinct. We definately need a culture change.

It’s gonna be complicated though because how do you have a system that incorporates that wonderful rowdiness like in the EVO crowd and the more civilize way of teaching players lol.

2727

Fucking taunt every round when they lose after teaching them low forward xx super. That’s how you’ve disciplined me, Don. :smiley:

2728

It’s not really surprising. Having come from a competitive PC gaming background, I think I can provide some insight on this.

Computers have always embraced the internet and online as a viable platform to play on. LAN parties are considerably more difficult to organize from a logistics point of view, than console systems. A slight bit of lag hardly affects the performance of PC players, even at the highest levels, whereas any present lag in a fighting game absolutely ruins this experience. It doesn’t help that the online systems on both PS3 and XBOX are absolute garbage to PC gaming, no doubt due to the fact that PCs have had time since Quake to optimize matchmaking systems. Even to this day, both console systems are highly restrictive in regards to how you find and create online matches. Add this to the fact that our internet infrastructure is so limited in comparison to Asia’s systems, combined with the greater physical landscape of America over its Asian counterparts, and playing a fighting game online is pretty unbearable.

I love ST to death, but I absolutely hate playing on GGPO. I’m running on a 5 mb/s connection on a decent computer, and I still get frame skip and input delay. And this is for a 20 year old game.

Fighting game scene has had completely different roots. This culture was born in the offline experience starting with the packed arcade during the 90s in the Golden Era of fighting games. It was ALWAYS about that face-to-face interaction of beating someone down, and it continues to be.

We’re intimidating due to the roughness of our grass roots culture. PC gamers generally came from more affluent families who can afford the high-expense of a mid-to-high end computer and internet access, while most arcades thrived in lower-income areas that could afford $0.25 for a game. This also influences the communities that come up.

2729

But we’re reaching an impasse now where the newer players are from the same group that the PC gamers are from (affluent families) because of consoles and their similar infrastructure. With the parallels that we know of that shaped the past and the present, is it worth showing the new generation the qualities that made the FGC what it was back in the day [and now, to an extent]? I mean, it is true: people aren’t hungry anymore, which is something arcades forced onto people to make a quarter last. With a lot of the luxuries that are here now no one needs to be, which is why the level of play ends up being pathetically low. At the same time, there was a lot of ugly stuff before I even joined this scene, though I experience it somewhat with 3s sometimes – the oddities of arcade folks. No one is saying we don’t need a culture change to accommodate people, but that drive to improve, you know – that’s hardly something you can get from a pat on the back (hell, that would just make me mad and demand a runback).

I just worry because if this scene becomes too passive like the others, then a lot of what the community is currently doing with venues and majors won’t ultimately be valued as much later if more people are only interested in watching and not playing. Despite lag online, a lot of new players don’t seem to care about input delay or dropped frames as much. The DOA community flippin’ lived online until Tom Brady stitched together an offline community for it. If he didn’t do that and be a guide for people, there would be no Perfect Legend as we know him now. The alpha male mentality can go – I could care less. But I really do think that our scene desperately needs to keep that “I play to win, so try and stop me” mentality and stress it hard. Our scene does it better than the others, hands down, but we’re not…showing/telling people the reasons why that mindset is good for everyone.

2730

True. Our communities are starting to merge due to both the dedicated and passionate gamers who have organized video game competition into a legitimate sport, as well as the widespread available of the internet helping to inform others of what’s going on in the other genres. I think it’s worth showing off the older games to the newer generation. Even if they’re not into playing it, at least you can show them what it used to be like, and how game design evolved into what it is today. It’s as important as learning history in school. Sure it might not interest you, but it always imparts the ever-important lesson of knowing where your roots came from, and learning from past successes and failures in order to strive to provide a better future.

I don’t think you really need arcades to make you hungry anymore. What you need is driven players who can help motivate and build one another. You need guys who can push you to want to become better. Whether it’s talking mad shit, or giving you a beat down, or providing helpful tips and tricks, we have to find a way to maintain that hunger to a better player than you were before. Different people respond with a different stimulus, and I think that we, as a community, need to provide that in a variety of ways.

Gamers come from all walks of life, so there’s no doubt going to be some weirdos in the scene. It’s how it is in EVERY community.

Speaking for myself, I like to help new players by giving advice and critique. That’s usually why I spend a lot of time in the Newbie Section trying to give the new guys some helpful advice before the trolls come and aggravate them. It’s also why I enjoy talking about strategy and matchup information whenever I commentate for ST, to help gain insight to the guys who just think that ST is all about spamming fireballs.

Also I troll to piss people off. Not going to lie, it feels great beating kids at SF4 who don’t know how to handle Ibuki. It is delicious. I can almost TASTE their salt.

I think this is why we, as a community, are generally suspicious of e-sports organizations trying to adopt fighting games into their lineup. Of course, historically they’ve screwed up any relations that we’ve had in the past by promoting lackluster fighting games (Dead or Alive 4? Seriously MLG?) as well as not accommodating enough space or equipment for the FGC. That and the fact that it’s quite obvious they’re coming to us due to the recent surge in popularity of fighting games, so they see another cash revenue source.

We don’t take kindly to outsiders.

I have been telling people for awhile now that we need to follow MMA’s business strategy. Despite their rough and violent history, MMA has come into prominence as the premiere fighting sport that quickly replaced boxing. They’ve managed to maintain their rugged and aggressive feel, while compromising enough to bring a sense of legitimacy, professionalism, and sports flair, to make it a million dollar industry. This is what we need to do. We have to maintain our grass roots feel of that offline arcade scene, keep on bringing the hype, bring the energy that the FGC is known for, while putting on high-quality and presentable events.

This means we need the stream guys who know how to put on a show. Have the players take breaks between games in order to allow commentary to do their job. Have our top players understand what it means to be a pro player and to be in the spotlight as a representation of our community. Stuff like that.

2731

When you say “passive” how do you mean? I’m finding it hard for our community, the FGC, to be passive in a lot of ways. Also, the major problem is that now a days, people really do not get punished for losing at all. You want a match making system that works kind of relative to the way DOTA , League, or even Star Craft? You strictly match people up with people on their ranks. Does that hurt the higher players? yeah, but the higher players aren’t playing online most of the time, they’re at the arcade or tournaments putting in money to make big or to lose.

There absolutely needs to be some way to mimic the offline / arcade go about with money spent to play. If we’re talking in terms of making the average player see things on the higher player or the EDUCATED player, I think this is what could be explored. You want another idea of what needs to be explored? Stop making things so accessible. Yeah, it’s great to bring in new blood, but is that what happened with all the iterations of SF2, SF3, the Cross Over series? Did those really get dumbed down or made easier to the average player? And look at the community that still follows them, even before SF4 and MVC3 and the Cross Tekken SF mash up.

The learning curve didn’t hurt any player in a level that was close to the sheer satisfaction we got from understanding and learning the game. That I think needs to return, make things harder. Bring back the challenge, I don’t care how many sticks I’ll break if I have to cancel any normal into a special on a one frame strict window and another one frame strict window to go from special to super.

2732

You actually articulated what I meant by passive, though now that I think about it, passive isn’t honestly the best word I should have used here. Sure, we’re still rowdy, but you have this big group that isn’t and doesn’t want to be in the trenches. Learning in the comfort of their own environment, interacting with others outside of what has been the norm in the FGC since SF2, not much of an event goer but a stream monster – introverted. That’s not a cardinal sin or anything, but because we have this infrastructure built around face-to-face play at venues already, that’s an entirely different world people are missing out on unless there’s this extreme shift in where people go for low-through-high level play (online…when it isn’t so bad in America, maybe?). Half the time it has nothing to do with actual events that keep people from being involved. Most of the time, it’s about people not wanting to lose, be humiliated, or get harassed when it’s not even like that. Sure, you have your problems here and there, but normally guys are cool. If I didn’t go to SoCal Regionals, I wouldn’t have met Ryan or Pherai. I fucking blew back then, but those guys were supportive and nice to a tee.

And yeah, these games shouldn’t be getting easier. DOTA isn’t easy but it has a huge player base. LOL is the same. Starcraft is no different. So why is my Street Fighter on training wheels with the Turbo option disabled? The short answer is overzealous decision making in the game industry (ho-hum), but me bashing my own industry at this point is like…fuck, I don’t even have the energy to make a joke about how sad it is right now. :coffee:

MLG should have already understood on a very basic level that you can’t just “provide” a service when there’s already one given and on a much larger scale in the scene. I don’t see the problem in them having other events, but they’re intentions seem to be more about outclassing the legitimacy of the current majors and TOs, and saying “we’re your option for fighting game tournaments”. They messed up by having their events on dates that the community as a whole were doing things on. No one respects that, ESPEICALLY if this has happened more than once (which it has).

Big reason why I wanted to quote what you mentioned aside from the MLG bit is just DOA at large. This game…I’ll never understand how it managed to pull off some of the support it did. World Cyber Games? That one show with those ridiculous prize pots (I can’t remember the name of it)? MLG? Like…there’s a reason why the community for that game is so small…so why has it received all of this crazy support when it’s the least respected FG by comparison? Heck, Tekken didn’t pick up until, what…5? Capcom was always the money maker, Sega got around somehow with Virtua Fighter, and Namco was just there. I know that it has nothing to do with competitiveness, but Jesus, that game has received TOO much love from groups that don’t even know too much about it.

2733

I’m more irritated by how poor the online matchmaking system is in terms of coding. It’s shoddy at best. PC guys have had YEARS to figure out how to optimize these settings, alongside configurable options and filters to allow for a more flexible experience. Anyone who’s been on matchmaking knows that the filter options are fairly useless.

They tried to give players that sense of loss with the BP and PP system. It works sometimes, but it isn’t made as personal as a loss at the arcade. Give spectators the ability to select audio cues that the players can listen to? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think it will ever hurt as getting made fun of by friends and random strangers.

It’s difficult to design a game with today’s player in mind. Kids have ADD nowadays. If they feel a game is too hard, they’ll just stop it and move onto the next game. That’s the biggest danger to the fighting game market right now, there’s WAY too many games to choose from. Back in the old days, there weren’t a lot of viable fighting games that were played competitively, so the competition was much more concentrated on a few select games. Now we’ve got SF4, UMVC3, SFxT, Persona 4, Soul Calibur 5, TTT2, Blazblue, MK9, etc etc etc etc.

So now you have to design a game that’s both easy to learn and start playing and doing well immediately, alongside making a deep and technical game that will satisfy the hardcore fans. It’s no small feat to accomplish both these things. Of course, the opposite end of the spectrum is to do what Blizzard does. Just make the game extremely tactical and in-depth, and let the community and the hardcore crowd decide on how best to make this game approachable. The scene did a great job. Now you can’t throw a rock without hitting an SC2 stream, or a caster discuss matches, tutorials, guides, debates on different early-game builds, counters available, etc etc. The hardcore players in SC2 support the scene by contributing content designed to both support the hardcore scene, as well as invite new players to understand and to learn how to play the game at a competitive level.

Unfortunately most top players aren’t really interested in this type of stuff, save for a select few stand-out individuals. We’re starting to get to the point where we’re realizing that we have to support the new blood in order to continue to grow the scene, instead of just showing up to tourneys, taking 1st, and going home with the pot prize. Basically the SC2 community, as a whole, has matured more than the fighting game scene in general.

Honestly I thought SFxT was a dumb game that wasn’t casual friendly at all. There were about 5 different systems you had to learn in that game, all with the name “Cross” in it somehow . That’s not casual friendly. Casual friendly isn’t dumbing the game down to make it easy to execute combos, it’s making the game simple to learn minus all the fancy game gimmicks and mechanics. Persona 4 seems to be doing a good job with this.

2734

Capcom, and Japanese game companies as a whole, in recent years, have been extremely conservative in their business strategies and honestly don’t care much for community input and involvement. Capcom is better than most, but as you can see, they still don’t listen to the community 100%. They still create games the old-school way, by just coming up with an idea and putting it out there, and hoping it sells. This is worsened by the fact that they’ve realized that the VAST majority of sales are by casual gamers as opposed to the hardcore scene, and thus they cater to what is numerically their most dominant client. Casual gamers want easy mode games, so that’s what they’ll make.

American companies, such as Blizzard and Valve, have always gotten involved with the community scene, because they’ve realized that the community IS their most vocal and supportive fan base. Support them and they’ll support you. They’ve managed to find a balance between making the highest-quality games they’ve always made, combined with community feedback and testing.

And don’t feel about bashing your own community as long as your intentions are hopefully for productive debate and discussion. I forgot who said it, but a man once said that, “It is because I love my country, that I am willing and able to criticize it.”

As far as the WCG and MLG fiasco, it’s because they’ve never been part of the competitive fighting game scene, so they don’t really know what would be a good game to select. However, from a purely objective point of view, these guys want games that are pretty to look at, fluid, dynamic, and build tension. DOA seems to fit this ticket right here. They’ve got a bunch of big-ass-tittied women running around punching each other, and sadly, that’s what gamers are into. So basically they chose a game as fan-service in order to draw their demographic crowd. And that’s what happens when you let businessmen try to run a fighting game event.

And don’t even get me STARTED on this year’s SBO. What a fucking joke. But I already ranted about that in the other thread, so meh.

2735

Here’s one thing I have a problem with comparing the helpfulness of the SC2 / DOTA communities to our FGC. A LOT of people in our communities will always say, “YOU WANNA LEARN, YOU GO OUT TO THE ARCADE AND PLAY IN TOURNAMENTS” which is only half of it. People can learn from reading online articles here on SRK or watching youtube things, both of which have completely exploded over the past 10 years compared to what we had access to in order to learn new things like Kara or Roll Cancelling. It’s one thing to go out to the arcades and play, but there’s GOT to be some kind of return to these people the boost them up that is given to them.

Now I know that sounds like giving a handout to the people that are trying to get into the games and such, but look at the some of the casters for DOTA and SC2, look at what they’re willing to do in order to bring out more interest in people playing, and plant the seed and cultivate it for the people with an interest. They’re willing to explain things out and why they’re better in X build in Y situation. We in our FGC have a lot of people that say to come out to the events to learn, but just going out to put money and losing in the sake of “going out to get better” will only get so much done.

In comparison to the casters, we have our Jago and Finger Cramp doing good. It’s a step in the direction I’d like to see that can cultivate interest in a similar way to the SC2 area, but at the same time, SC has been doing it for a hell of a lot longer than they know what to do now. Unfortunately, I think we’re still figuring out our approach to that concept. If the interest is still here after the complete saturation of fighting games we’re getting I think we may be able to pull something off in the right direction to building a better intro to the community other than “COME JOIN TOURNAMENTS THAT’S HOW YOU LEARN” but what if no one’s willing to help them? I think that’s another problem our community has in that we’re going to say we’ll teach you, but I don’t know any one person in the FGC who would have that much patience to take someone under their wing and walk through what higher players would consider fundamentals. And I know there’s a difference in understanding of fundamentals between the mediocre and and professional.

But it’s going to have to start somewhere, and I see it slowly, SLOWLY building now.

2736

I’ve had these discussions with editors, co-developers, friends who are devs, voice actors, and even people on the outside looking in; the game industry at large, aside from your Blizzards and Valves, do not care. Sure, you have the people who live to work on projects – that’s what they do. However, the “gatekeepers” who write the checks or approve junk at the high end do not really understand what should or shouldn’t occur during and after game development. There is, for sure, a vocal group of individuals who are like “what the flaming FUCK are you doing”, with some studios closing their doors behind some of the backwards logic. Truth of the matter is that there are many more people in the industry who just want to make a game to be considered no.1 but don’t know what makes a good game to begin with. We see this with “genres” that trend both on the independent and commercial sides, with backwards practices like linear sequences with no failure states because one dev who gained success looks like the role model to emulate; it’s really a showing of the business side along with gimmicks dominating a field that technically thrives on product variety, not “standards”. Quicktime events do nothing. So you have a cutscene (you technically shouldn’t to begin with), big deal. Don’t force button prompts and break game immersion cause X other games were trending unfulfilling Simon Says sequences.

I could go on forever. Most teams have kids straight out of university with ZERO experience in stitching together a fully playable game unless they were grad students at DigiPen or something, indies, or interns. Most have a general idea of game design, but don’t understand the basics that create all games from start to finish, neither in the abstract sense or in a contemporary light. Too much ambition, far too little experience with execution. 3rd Strike has “the basics” – game development has “the basics”, and those mainly include making smart entertainment as quickly as possible with strong feedback and focus testing, WITHOUT sacrificing a vision, core mechanics, sub-core mechanics, progression models, and of course player enjoyment. How can I play a game from the fucking mid 90’s (Uncharted Waters, Shin Megami Tensei, Duck Tales, etc.), and feel like those games, old or not, are more fun, enjoyable, longer, beefier in content, better paced occasionally than the newest games made by teams over +120 people…even though the old games were made by sub-20 people at best with shitty memory caps on everything? Hell, player education: Half-Life says “show, don’t tell”! Every other game after that, for some magical reason, wants to hold your hand in an extensive tutorial mode to educate you in the most boring way possible and act like you’re playing a movie. Not a lot of people like their job in this industry anymore unless they get to make what they want. Real talk: my industry does not care for anyone here, and unless a certain dev recognizes the problems ALREADY, they probably won’t change for the better. Japan is Japan; you’re better off asking Revege to make your 3s/Alpha successors considering how culturally engrained Japanese practices are. Yeah, Capcom Japan listens…to your wallet (I should find that one employee blog thingy a friend showed me).

2737

I just think a lot of people here on the forums regurgitate what other people say without giving much thought to it. Happens a lot. For example, I HIGHLY encourage new players to show up to their local scenes. Now I’m not saying that they just show up, pay money for a tourney, go 0-2, and continue to feed money into the pot. But I encourage them to show up to an offline scene in order to get involved with their local communities. It’s easy to feel disassociated from the rest of the community by just watching streams, going on the forums, and playing online. It’s not until you get to know your fellow players and really become part of a community that you can interact with at a variety of levels, do you start to become interested in learning more about the game, and the scene, in general. Evo was an extremely eye-opening experience for me, and my girlfriend and I have shown up to local events, majors, and repeat Evos again and plan on continuing doing so.

To be honest, what helps my game out the most was the SRK wiki and youtube matches. I’m pretty good at studying and analyzing player footage to glean insight into top-level strategies, player psychology, critical moments in the match, and what won or lost the match to the players. Just by watching matches alone, I managed to up my game considerably when I try to apply those concepts to my own game. This is largely why I have such a unique blend of a variety of styles, because I try to learn from watching different players with different play styles, and using what’s effective while trying to discard bad habits and weaknesses in my game. Bruce Lee’s philosophy operates best here. Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, and keep an open mind and spirit to all forms of ideology.

We’re starting to come around to cultivating a productive environments for new players and spectators alike. Finger Cramp and Ultra Chen are premiere groups that are helping by contributing useful, informative, and professional content into the community, not to mention the various guides and tutorials that are present on youtube. Maj’s Footsies Handbook has got to be one of the most insightful and exhaustive manual on the definition of footsies, its various aspects, along with great video examples showcasing how and why it works.

But it’s not enough to just have these guys do it. This has to be a community-wide effort to get new players to join our scene. This means we have to be more open and extrovertive in getting to know and help one another. Long gone are the days when some local scenes have a class hierarchy where the top-level players and low-level players didn’t associate with one another and people kept secret tricks and techniques from each other. We have to cultivate an open community whose goal is to pursue and alter the meta-game, while helping others reach that same level. This is largely why Japan, as a whole, has dominated the fighting game scene for many years. Not only did their arcade scene enjoy a lengthier period of popularity, many of their top players live in closer proximity than our own, they study and analyse the game at its deepest technical levels, and they openly communicate about any new discoveries and secrets. They’re almost like an active think-tank when it comes to games they are truly passionate about. Only recent have other countries began to even be present at their level.

2738

Post-product support is rarely a thought in most game company’s minds. They’re too busy cranking out games in an orderly fashion that follows strict timelines. It’s a habit that needs to change, a change which is spear-fronted by great companies like Blizzard and Valve. The industry is largely a copycat industry with occasional gems thrown in there. Look at how many COD clones have been released since the monster success that was MW1. Look at how many SF copycats came out after SF2, some of which were good, most of which were crap. It’s a bit of a hypocrisy where we praise success and invention, but really we attain for innovation and follow the paths that industry leaders and pioneers have already tread.

The issue has to do with the education system here in America. It’s absolute crap at every level, and standardization for post-public education is terrible. Half the technical colleges more resemble scam artists designed to keep student’s in debt with a high rate of graduation in order to get more students willing their seats. I was the victim of one such school. School systems barely have the budget and/or time to fully train a student to actually produce a game, rather they teach you one or two aspects of gaming alongside provided tools in order to get you scratching at the industry’s door.

Tbh, older games were extremely well-designed, in part, due to the simplicity of its nature. We had no fancy graphics, sounds, or multiplayer to worry about. They simply had to focus on developing a solid game that PLAYED well.

This guy totally gets it: (Comedic video on how good Mega Man and Mega Man X is)

Spoiler

[media=youtube]8FpigqfcvlM[/media]

So does this guy: (Modern games are built for idiots)

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[media=youtube]W1ZtBCpo0eU[/media]

Half Life was my first true love for competitive video games. Started playing that thing hardcore at least 4 hours a day every day against some of the best local players we had around. We even started a clan together. These guys were cut from the cloth of guys like Dennis Fong. Straight hard core Q2 guys, and when I came in, Q3A was in open beta test. I absolutely loved HL1 because it brought an entirely new perspective for the FPS genre in terms of engagement and storytelling. It was literally designed to make it as if you were Gordon Freeman, and besides the occasional loading times message, kept you fully immersed in the game without any cutscenes, tutorials, random hints and tips popping up, or any of that. Changed my life forever.

The “less is more” concept has pretty much gone out the door in game design, except at the indie-game level.

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Sorry for the super long posts. I get extremely long-winded whenever I write up any forum posts. This problem is probably exacerbated whenever I commentate on ST streams, lol.

Anyways, just found a random link for this game. It looks pretty damn interesting. It visually looks like Third Strike, and looks like it has more of that hardcore OG feel to it.

[media=youtube]tk3_oAdJKbA[/media]

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Yatagarasu, when it comes out on the 3DS, I will be all over. It has some of the brains behind the KOF makers and I think the capcom folk. It’s only three guys working on it, but I did make an impulse buy of a 3DS for it, I won’t lie.