If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching the tutorial mode in action asap.
Me, from another thread: “Fighting games have always appealed to me since I was a kid mashing on a MvC2 cabinet in the comic book shop next to my father’s store. They’ve always been way too difficult, expensive and intimidating for me to learn how to play properly but now I finally feel like I’m getting it largely thanks to the SRK community.”
I’ve been reading/watching videos on Skullgirls since last night and I cannot even begin to express my excitement. Not only for the game itself, which looks incredibly tightly designed, but for the tutorial mode. One of the biggest barriers between me and, it seems, all FG newbies, is the complete lack of instructions provided with the game. Even to this day, I’m still struggling to figure things out. Most of what I learned is from lurking the SRK forums and wiki and, as much as I appreciate having an actual resource to learn from, there’s a serious disconnect between reading instructions and actually playing. Without anything or anyone really guiding my practice sessions, it’s up to me to figure out even how to learn the game and as a result, my progress has been slow and painful.
I’ve seen the tutorial in action in videos and it’s already revolutionized my progress. I incorporated the tips and methods from the blocking tutorial in my practice and I already feel like I’m a million times better at blocking. And that’s just from watching it - I can’t imagine how much quicker this process is going to be once I actually get my hands on it.
My girlfriend is a great example of this as well. After I picked up MvC3 and built a makeshift arcade stick, she showed interest in playing the game. She had very minimal video game skills to begin with and behaved how one would expect: button mashing, panicking, asking me to slow down my attacks so she could figure out what to do. etc. So I took her into training mode and began to teach her how to play properly. However, being a newbie myself, I could only clumsily impart the wisdom I’ve gained from SRK and what I’ve discovered on my own so her progress has been even slower and more painful than my own. Not to mention I’m the only one around for her to battle with and although she enjoys the game somewhat, having your ass handed to you over and over again while you struggle to figure out what’s happening isn’t very fun. It’s also not fun to beat someone over and over again with no real competition (I’m really not at the point where I can play competently online yet). However, this tutorial seems like it’s going to feel as if Mike Z is sitting beside you, instructing you. I don’t know for sure but I anticipate that after spending some time with the tutorial, the great learning curve softener that it is, the gap between our knowledge will be negligible, even non-existent and the game will be fun and satisfying for us to play together again.
I couldn’t claim to have a good grasp on the demographics of the FG community yet but based on what I’ve read here, the FG community in North America is relatively quite small compared to how many people play competitive video games. I can also tell you if it wasn’t for my nostalgia for the mysterious allure and the influence MvC2 had during my childhood, I would have given up on fighting games before I even started. I’m pretty confident that given enough exposure, this game is going to not only revolutionize the learning of fighting games but video games in general. FGs will no longer be thought of as this impossibly difficult mountain of challenges that only basement dwellers with no lives (whatever that means) can ever play competitively. SFIV may have re-popularized the genre, but compared to the potential I see in this game for enticing new players, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
p.s. I know newbies are generally called “scrubs” in this community but I’m not using that word for now because its seems to have a lot of pejorative connotations. I might be wrong (in fact I probably am) since I might just be remembering years-old posts from the Domination 101 forums from back when live arcade play was the only way to go and good players probably had to take a lot of shit from bad ones. For now, though, I prefer to avoid it since I’m not talking about raging button mashers accusing others of “cheapness”, rather an enthusiastic beginner.
