I played quite of bit of samsho2 back in the day and bought it for my brothers xbox.
I should have been more specific… * i want a new game*, that has less emphasis on combos.
Speaking of ST, I think that game is just fine as it is.
The problem happens once you get into 15 sec long combos, where you just sit there watching your character getting hit. When I used to play marvel I would sometimes wonder if I was even playing a fighting game, half the time, neither player is in control of anything that is happening on the screen. It made me mad so I quit the marvel series. imo MvC3 is even worse.
@Graphf
the Tekken series put more emphasis into juggles than combos, same thing for theSoul Calibur, Virtua Fighter and Dead Or Alive series of games. those are pretty recent compared to HF/ST or SS2. like what d3v said, the Skullgirls combo system prevents brain-dead infinite looping so definitely check that out.
other than that, Fight Night Champion or similar games are okay as well if you want your fighting games a bit on the realistic side. and it doesn’t have 15 second combos that you have to wait to finish.
If he doesn’t like Marvel series, I don’t think he’ll like Skullgirls. There’s a demo for it on both systems and I want everyone to buy it and play it but it really doesn’t sound like his type of fighter.
Skullgirls only punishes true infinites. The system is designed so that anyone who has the knowledge of how the IPS works and is able to apply it can still pump out a long combo that can possible kill a character.
@Mr. X
it’s still up to them what type of games they want to play. i’m kind of partial to the “mad combos/juggles ftw” type of players because, to put it simply, winning is what competitive gaming is about right? you can spend your time practicing and making incredible combos and videos but if you don’t have any tourney wins, the buck stops there. if you can’t combo/juggle to save your life, you need to play RPGs.
i have been playing both the SF and Tekken games for a long time and i have seen popular players drop off the face of the planet [debatable as it is, proficient Korean Tekken players play MAD setups, mixups, oki and footsies; less juggles] such as Ed Ma and Maddogjin to pursue other interests. not to derail the topic, i only included that to emphasize the “winning is everything” point.
@d3v
thanks for clearing that up. i did see some 100% combos/TOD’s for some Skullgirls characters on the front page a few days ago so i guess it’s all about creativity to be able to work around that system.
The only limit Skullgirls has to long combos is the risk that dropping them can lead yo you taking bigger damage, since your opponents meter gain increases the longer your combo goes. That’s why it’s more recommended to go into resets than complete a really long combo.
Wrong. It doesn’t collect enough information to know if a combo is a true infinite. Any loop where you’d eventually get pushed out of range to continue would be deemed an infinite by Skullgirls, for example.
The actual design decision is to cater to youngsters and have big and flashy combos so they love it. If they are not flashy in terms of moves, add a stronger sound effect and a flash every time an attack connects. That’s the actual decision, sadly.
Nowadays, combos are just detrimental to the game, since they remove the importance of almost everything else due to confirming. Not really hit-confirm, by now it is just confirming, really. You can confirm outta jabs or shorts, but also after parry, long recovery moves, traded hits, meaties, jumps, unblockable setups, you name it. You add option-selects into super and we have this combo-fest that we see in current streams.
Do not get me wrong, I see the value of stuff like MvC2. But that’s MvC2, not every game should be like it - and we certainly do not need lesser versions of it. SF should not be about insanely fast mix-ups and resets, but positioning, reaction, self-control and the strategy. The self-control one must have to be really close to a dangerous character and still not be holding back or down-back is not trivial to achieve.
Open ended combo systems also allow you to impart larger amounts of personality and style into your play. Many people go for heavily optimized player, but some (like myself) enjoy going for high damage (similar to fully optimized) combos with a bit more personal flare and personality for the sake of expressing their own ideas a bit more.
Fighting games without combos wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.
Combos just allow you to do more damage from to your opponent as long as they are still in hitstun. That is all there is to it and there is nothing more that there needs to understand.
Combos exist to create a skill gap between experienced players and inexperienced players. They provide a reward for the player who has spent more thought and practice on the game than his or her opponent. Rewarding players who spend more time/find more stuff could also be called adding depth to the game.
Whether or not combos should be as long as some of the combos in Marvel is another question entirely. You could argue that super long Marvel combos are a resource management technique where the resource is time but whether or not that’s a fun or even worthwhile dimension of the game is highly debatable.
‘adding depth’ is true up to the point that they add decision points. That’s where combos shine. "Will he go for the reset? SHould he risk dropping to go for the max damage filler’?
Rewarding practice is exactly why people love long combos, I agree. I do also question whether that’s really good. People don’t want to lose to the masher, but maybe if the masher is beating you (not you personally) you’re not as good as you think. People use combo practice to cover up for gaps in fundamentals.
It’s like the guy talking about (SC or Tekken too lazy to check) earlier. He and his friends went out to play the game against others, and they thought they’d been playing the game wrong because the people on hte outside knew all kinds of optimized high damage combos. Then they realized that in their focus on combos and launchers, the other guys didn’t really know how to block.
That scenario doesn’t happen at the tournament-winning level of course, but its all over the rest of the playing public.
Combos add depth to the game even without adding decision points. Giving players something to master is adding depth, even if that something is timing on a series of button presses. When you remove resource management and resets combos add two specific things to the game in terms of stuff a player needs to know, all possible hitconfirms and optimal combos.
If you take two players who have a mastery of footsies and blocking the one who has also mastered combos will win. It’s a totally valid thing to have combos in a game just for rewarding players who learn the stuff that’s harder to execute. Besides that, combos are something a lot of people enjoy. How hard the best combos should be is a separate question. Even basic combos can become difficult enough that they seem burdensome to players rather than fun to experiment with.
When you take into account resets and resource management and consider them along with a combo system you end up with a lot of interesting decision points for players that can really enrich the game. You are correct in saying that’s where combos really shine. An open ended system for hitconfirming that allows creative, highly knowledgeable players to shine also adds to a game.
word on that, a loop like testament badlans wouldnt be possible on skullgirls despite not being and infinite, neither a braindead loop like mike z likes to call them
In general what you’re describing doesn’t require long combos, it just requires combos. Combos are pretty key to setting up resets, trading position for advantage, all of that stuff, but they don’t have to be 15 seconds long to meet that goal.
I would describe the need to master extended combos as ‘false depth’.
It becomes a game of ‘who invested more’, which is nice for rewarding people that put a lot of time in, and encourages repeated play from people that want to feel the advantage.
Still, Footsies and blocking aren’t something you absolutely master. Ultimately, one person is going to be just a little bit better than the other person. And that’s the skill I think the game should reward, not sitting in a dark room beating up a training dummy.
You could think of it like the way that MMO’s are set up to reward grinding. People love that that extra grind gives them a little bit of advantage in the gear progression, and they make the same argument, that their work put in is being rewarded. It’s just the opposite of what playing the game is really about.
If you wanna see what a fighting game without combos is like: Turtles Tournament Fighters for the NES doesn’t have any combos at all.
During hitstun the characters are completely invincible. You can’t even hit someone during a dizzy. God, that game sucks.