Ahh, specs. I’ve read your posts many a time. You are great at arguing and also great at proving other people’s points when you didn’t mean to.
Hence the whole argument on my end about the community being made up of a lot of elitist pricks.
practice makes perfect or close to perfect. I am sure the pros like daigo practiced day and night. Most of daigo’s gameplay doesnt even involve fancy combos or dash cancels and he is doing fine.
If someone’s looking for BEGINNER friendly SF4, Volt on the iPhone is good. One button Ultras, supers, nowhere near as many links, fewer characters. If the netcode were better it’d be more fun.
I think that’s what it is. SF4 isnt’ fun to me. It’s arduous, boring at times, and I always feel like I’m trying to drive a car without power steering when I play it. I don’t understand how we went from a game like 3s which controls impeccably to a game like SF4 where every fight feels like it takes place in quicksand. I think that’s part of what makes the game so non-beginner friendly. I’ve been playing fighting games since World Warrior, so I’m not a beginner; I love them. I’ve played all the major ones to varying degrees of competency a lot of the ones most people outside of die hards don’t know about.
And for all that experience, I don’t think there’s anything beginner friendly about SF4. I’d hate for SF4 to be my first fighting game. The trial mode is piss poor, the controls are wack, FADC makes things needlessly complicated because it’s awkward rather than being seamless like RCs in Guilty Gear, trying to do the simplest of combos (at least ones that would be simple in any other SF game) requires lots of time in the training room (and this is someone who loves training mode.) I have to give anyone who stuck with the game props because I gave it a shot and couldn’t take it. Like someone said, you’ve got to love it. I love Third Strike, I love Guilty Gear, but when I play SF4, I feel like the game is wasting my time with arbitrarily difficult and arcane shit. Like Capcom thinks I’m going to keep playing it simply because it says ‘Street Fighter’ on the cover.
TL;DR: Put it this way: in SF2, your grandmother could pick Dhalsim and do pretty well if she pressed the right buttons, which is something I don’t think you can really say about SF4. THAT’S beginner/casual friendly. In addition, pros still find the game interesting enough to keep playing it after all these years. which is why SF2 is still one of the greatest games of all time.
Elaborate.
But that’s the hard part. How to balance the fun of being able to “pick up and play” a game like SF4, whilst still maintaining a modicum of difficulty and complexity. In Insurgency, a FPS i used to play, there was a steep learning curve and many players quit after about a week due to constantly losing and feeling like they weren’t ‘getting anywhere’. That feeling is the exact opposite of what any developer wants to plant in a gamers head. It means they don’t play or recommend the game. With that said, I don’t think games like SF4 have space for causalities to be honest. There is too much to explore. Large roster of characters and mechanical intricacies. This in no way means you should only play it if your serious because gaming after all isn’t all about links and cancels, but its definitely something to consider when you pick up a franchise like SF.
Must I? Surely you can go back a few posts and read.
The barrier for scrubs to land their 1 frame link is to buy an Asus monitor. I wish Capcom would explain that better to beginners.
Because without 120hz u get hurts ha…
Humor me, through PM if you really don’t want to post it here. Or not. If I’ve truly erred, I can’t correct the error if I don’t know what it is.
EDIT - Unless it’s over what I said to axi. Because fuck that guy.
Asus monitor doesn’t make the window bigger. Plinking does, which makes wiring the Back button within reach worthwhile. Which is fucking retarded.
That’s the thing though, SF4 ISN’T a pick up and play game in my opinion. It’s easily the most complicated (sometimes unintentionally) SF game there is. SF2 was successful in part because it was simple in design. There were somewhat complicated aspects to it under the hood, but the main thing you had to worry about was what moves your character had and using said moves to beat your opponent. You could play that game without really knowing combos, even without really knowing a lot of special moves depending on who you picked, and still actually do okay against the computer and even other players. The pick-up-and-play factor was a huge part of SF2’s success.
Part of that had to do with the lack of internet and the competition being only as fierce as it was wherever you played the game, but I think the simplicity of the game is exactly why it’s so beginner friendly and SF4 is not. SF4 has a lot more mechanics, and then there are things that come up as a result of shoddy programming and design that don’t make the situation any better.
SFII only SEEMS like it was easier to pick up and play than SFIV because:
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SFII has no throw whiff animation + 1-button throws = someone can spin the stick and mash 1 button for a safe throw/hit option select if they get close enough to the other player.
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high damage + strict execution = noobs had a better chance to score a random and uncountered jump-in/sweep combos.
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high damage in general made it LOOK like you really did damage to someone, whereas in reality, you scored two-three random sweeps before losing to someone who was better.
Real talk though, SFII was really hard to even get decent at, because execution and spacing had to be precise. As a perfect example, pop in Ultra and do Ryu’s 3-hit combo of jumping roundhouse into low forward fireball 10 times in a row. Now pop in HDR and see how many times in a row you can get that combo, let alone getting the low forward to connect after the jump-in roundhouse.
So whenever I hear someone say SFII was easier to pick up and play, I’m pretty sure they are recalling fond memories of mindlessly mashing on buttons and spinning the stick and looking like they were doing good…but in reality, the game just made it look like you were doing well.
so you think people who jump around and mash should have a chance at tourneys
quick question all the players that are great now were at some point noobs and scrubs. How does the op think they got great? I’ll take a guess and assume it wasn’t crying on forums. Also keep in mind they vast majority of us will never be great no matter how noob friendly they make the game. That’s the way life is. Whether you’re talking about poker nba nfl or SF4 only like 1 percent ever reach the elite level
No, I don’t think that at all. I think that the game should include tutorials that explain to new players how things like counterhits work and how they’re used/beneficial, give feedback in plain English that newbies can understand in the training room/challenge mode when someone fails a combo telling them that they hit the button too fast/slow, and give practical demonstrations of how to do things like whiff punish.
Or are you giving an example of what I meant when I said that being willfully obtuse is somehow considered a valid form of debate on the internet?
Be honest: did you even read past the first sentence of that post you quoted?
Your example is terrible, you don’t need to know what a counterhit is in order to play the game decently against your friends or online. In fact, you can play the game for years and years and have fun without this knowledge.
Also, this whole tutorial and feedback for newbies wouldn’t work because, guess what, people usually don’t like to sit in front of their TV reading, listening or watching someone explain to them in detail what the game is about. They wanna just play the game! Some even want to magically acquires the skills they saw on EVO grand finals or something like that.
If newbies did like to spend hours, days and months watching and learning, they would watch/read some of the 2 millions tutorials that are already available on the internet about the game instead of complaining about the lack of “better in game tutorials” or something.
Capcom spending valuable development resources (time, work and money) creating that would be a total waste.
Okay, but I was mainly responding to the dude who clearly had no idea what the post he was quoting was about.
I’ve already said my piece about this topic and it’s clear that your opinion and mine are irreconcilable, so I won’t bloat the topic any further by repeating what I’ve already said (yet again).
No no no…you’re totally overthinking this. When I say that SF2 was easier to pick up and play, what I mean is, because there aren’t any subsystems in the game, all you need to worry about was pressing buttons and attacking your opponent. I’m not talking about how well you did or didn’t do against whoever, I’m talking about just the fact that the game itself is REALLY fucking easy to understand. Sure you can start talking about footsies and all that shit, one button throws, blah (your points were all true though) but grandma doesn’t need to know any of that and could still be reasonably good for a noob at that game.
SF4 has too many subsystems+sloppy controls. I have a harder time doing combos in SF4 than I ever did in SF2.
The simple fact that SF2 was initially designed to reside in a cabinet within the confines of a building that you had to chance upon or visit outside of your domicile means that it was made to be “less complex” and “easier” to get into. They were trying to make a game that was attractive to people who happened upon the game, and to reward them for putting a quarter in. Hence, the first AI opponent could be KO’d with very little effort, etc… If you wanted to spend more time, you could improve but the smallest details of play were left for those who spent thousands of hours…the pros, who basically discovered/created tricks that even the designers didn’t know existed. SF2 becomes more complex as the player becomes more complex.
The world is a different place now and games are persistent. They are constantly there if you want to spend your time on them. Even if you aren’t near your console, you can look up frame data on your phone for crying out loud.
SF4 designers knew this and designed around this, and were well aware of the rabid hardcore fighting game fans that would find every advantage they could with the system they were given. SF4 is casual friendly for about 10 minutes, and that’s all it should be. There’s such easy access to all the information you need to improve that once you go to play another person, not just because you’re waiting for the deli person to finish making your sangweedge like back in SF2 days, but because you want to compete and get better, you better not consider yourself a fucking casual player or you will quit within a week, probably within a day.
I think game got more popular from the console ports
arcades were no place for kids back then.
While one could claim that the SNES and Genesis versions were a nice warm up or replacement if you could not have access to the arcades (age restrictions, money, sanitation, notoriety, waiting queues etc), with the arrival of PSX, Saturn, 3DO, PC etc consoles could reproduce the arcade experience faithfully.
Consoles allowed players more time for training and inventing new tech.
then one could transfer those findings to the arcades or vice versa.
But that process was slow because there wasnt the internet and only specialists could discuss those things in detail.
but for SF4 that process is almost immediate. Advanced discussions are public now and information is readily available.
a newcomer today has it much harder than a newcomer 20 years ago. One needs to learn so much that it makes this game very overwhelming for most.