I started playing Street Fighter 4 back in 09’ when the console versions of those games were released and played fairly consistently throughout that year. However, whenever I played online, I always felt that the matches were either a stomp, resulting in a win for me, or for my opponent, and every so often I would have a close match, that felt like I won because of dumb luck. The same went for whenever I played in arcades, I always felt that my opponents have always seemed way more comfortable with their characters than I was with mine. I eventually dropped off on playing Street Fighter almost entirely when I started college, but came back to play whenever time had allowed. But as of recently, I’ve started playing Street Fighter and fighting games again ever since SF5 was announced and want to get back in and actually be comfortable playing.
My question is when and why did you start feeling confident and comfortable with Street Fighter or any fighting games for that matter?
I’ve only been playing “actual” Fighting Games for 3 months, but I can talk about my experience with Smash Bros.
It definitely took me several years to find characters that fit my style, get comfortable with them and get decent with them.
Just try to keep it fun and you’ll get comfortable, it simply takes time. Play with friends aswell so that you don’t feel lonely, I know that I get that feeling a lot.
I’ve been playing fighters since the late 90’s. But I only started taking them seriously enough to actually know what I’m doing since 2013. So I became comfortable with fighters when I decided to put in the effort to learn how to actually play one and not just mash. All it takes is time, effort, willingness to learn from better players. And have a good attitude about learning. And have fun with it.
I have been playing for years. Started on the Golden China. Its what my jut country imported because our racist government caused so much crap for us that Nintendo wanted nothing to do with us. But I was so young it was just smash buttons and win or lose. When playing Street Fighter 2 one of my cousins accidentally did Ryu’s Haduken and we spent a whole day trying to recreate what happened. And from then we slowly started figuring out other special moves for the rest of the cast. But it was then smashing buttons. Stressing out a special. Smashing buttons. Win or lose.
When the PS1 rolled around. I had some mates who had Tekken. And we would spend ages playing the game. Same for Mortal Kombat and any other fighters people had at the houses. Accidentally linking some combos and just repeating them as we would. But it was still just to waist some time.
When the original Xbox came out I had Dead or Alive. And some others. But I had no friends because at that time I moved to a different area. And nobody in the area played fighters. So I played a lot of the single player game. And found the game rather hard. So I put in time to learn some sort of strategy and found ways to beat the opponents. I didn’t realize I was teaching myself spacing and timing. And how to counter.
Then it was the 360. And no friends to play fighters with. So the whole generation I let the genre slip by. Except the odd game of Soul Caliber when friends from out of town visited. When The PS4 was released, the local second hand game shop had a massive sale on PS3 games. And I picked up SF4. The game felt so weird to me. So I You-tubed it to see if I should keep playing. And I found out about Evo and more importantly, Maximilian Dood. I watched tons of his vids and realized how competitive the scene was. And as a violently competitively person I picked up MKX for the Xb1. And googled some tutorials. That’s when I really started practicing and realized the work I put in with DOA had really helped. And I destroyed all the newer mates I had made over the previous few years. And it brought back so many good memories off all the old mates and the times we spent playing games. I found a tournament was happening in a month. So I trained even harder. I placed in the top 8. And got completely embarrassed when I had to play another gamer who had also practiced. That’s when I found the local FGC group on Facebook and have been setting up jam sessions with the new crew.
Only after finding like minded competitive people and really analyzing what I do have I felt comfortable with fighting games. It was a long time. And while I was winning more than loosing right from the start. I was never trying. I think its the fact that I take it seriously now do I feel the comfort. Because that’s what it means to me. And its forced me to make new friends. When I look back at it, I was always a fighting game player. But the people I played with didn’t bring it out in me. I will never change the past for anything. But I do wish I tried harder earlier. On a side note. I have friends that wont play me now. Because I just roll them. And they are comfortable with the way in which they play.
I suppose a lot of my comfort with fighting games also comes from the fact that I do martial arts. From Judo as a kid. To Olympic style wrestling. Then Muay Thai and boxing now. Along with submission wrestling. And from that I have learnt a lot about how to read a situation. Its not exactly the same in a game. But I find it definitely helps understanding the dynamic of fighters. And planning strategies.
And holy junk. I just looked up and saw that wall of text. I’m just ending it here. Haha.
TL:DR. I felt comfortable when I found people that take it as seriously as I do. And in playing better people I could implement spacing and such things I had learned from actual martial arts.
I feel like the most important thing for feeling comfortable with a game is knowing what you’re doing. I guess that kind of sounds like circular reasoning or something, but I think it’s true.
If you pick a character, play that character a lot, and use training mode it’s not too hard to get there. Any time you lose to something, go into training, record what you lost to, and find something practical you can do to fight it. Alternatively, ask around online or look around on youtube and try to find a solution. Once you have a plan, try to add it to your real gameplay and see what happens. You might not get it right immediately, or even not for a long time, but once you get there you’ll know exactly what to do in that situation from now on. When you know exactly what you’re doing, there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable on lose confidence.
Once you do that enough times, you’ll feel confident with the whole game. Of course, your strategies might be flawed, so you have to revisit what you’re doing all the time, but if you have a plan it really helps with feeling lost during a match.
I usually go through phases with every fighting game I play and it’s the same every time whether it’s street fighter, gg, marvel… I pick a main and serious hype ensues, then I move on to another character again and again until I’ve played most of the cast. Then I settle on one of my initial characters after all that time and actually start the training mode grind/online climb. By that time I generally know every characters strengths and feel very comfortable with my “main.” In other words the more time I spent executing my characters bnbs and making execution second nature the more I was able to focus on mechanics, footsies, and becoming better overall. Ex: I spent 2 years messing around in street fighter 4 before I made myself stick with one character and master them to the best of my ability. In those 2 years I never broke 1500pp, now that I’ve actually put the effort into training mode my online experience has been much better.
Tldr- I finally stuck with one character until I didn’t have to worry about execution and could focus on spacing, aa, footsies etc.
I played casually during the PS2 era, just button mashing. Played pad, didn’t know about the FGC or anything just played FGs sometimes. Makes me feel old, I’m only 19.
09 decided to pick up SF4, got heavily into it and looked online for help because I was still at the “Jump-in and sweep over and over again” stage with Ken and wanted to know why some people were so good. Started learning about frame data, combos, the universal ins and outs of fighting games. Levelled up a hell of a lot now and sit around the 3k-4k PP mark consistently, I can fight some pros on even ground and take a game if I give it my all. I’d say I’m about 8 years deep into fighting games now and I only got truly comfortable at Arcade Edition, just before the v2012 update. So it took me around 5 years to truly get comfortable with fighting games, but I think you just continually get better unless you allow yourself to peak and stop improving yourself.
The learning experience really paid off though, I like to think I have naturally bred talent at all fighting games now because I understand their design philosophy and what to look for/practice immediately. I can pick up other fighting games now very quickly. I picked up Xrd and I’d learnt most of the basics within 4 days and was already playing at a decent level, the only problem I had was remembering all of the character options because learning roster-wide movesets takes a while for my bad memory. I picked up 3S without even needing training mode, I just hopped straight online and played footsies immediately, I did suck at SA cancels at first because of sloppy inputs.
Offline is a different story, I recently attended my first offline event at a local Comic Con and played like a complete newcomer. I was nervous, so anxious to not lose I ended up bodying myself with stage fright. I dropped simple combos, and I couldn’t even chain jabs or anti-air. I still need to get comfortable offline for sure, I really didn’t expect offline to hit me the way it did.
Played a hell of a lot of Tekken, Street Fighter and DoA as a kid, not really doing much outside of mashing buttons with my friends. Then I picked up Guilty Gear, BlazBlue and Mahvel 2 in my early teens and actually wanted to learn them, which resulted in me buying my first arcade stick (a shitty Mayflash stick, but it was something). I was still pretty scrubby because I was trying to learn proper execution on a stick, but after a while- I don’t really remember when- it all just clicked with me and felt natural. I didn’t really get into SF4 until Super came out (I was playing a lot of BlazBlue at the time), but that was a huge part of me getting into FGs on a deeper level too. I didn’t really get super comfortable with fighters until 2012ish, when my execution was improving and I was hitting up my local arcade more often to play against real people.
Man, hard to believe it’s been that long. I’m 18, so I’m considerably younger than most of the vets on here, but writing this still makes me feel old! :lol:
I’m bit of an Online Warrior. When STHD came out on Xbox live I fancied myself an alright DeeJay. I Bought my first fightstick when SFIV came out. It was the SE which I promptly swapped the internals to Sanwa parts solely because others said the MCZ parts were trash. So for a while I’d just play online casually with ST and SFIV. Never had an inkling of any FGC. I only recently started going to several bi weekly locals for SSBM, a game that I had played since release and am quite fond of, and I am fairly comfortable there. However SF is a different beast and I suck at it now because I haven’t touched a SF since I played casually and now I want to get a bit competitive. So I suppose I am comfortable with a sort of fighting game, but throw me in the deep end at a SF event and I’ll probably have nerves and the shakes but I’d do it none the less. I hope to learn more than anything how to play street fighter only to hold my own and have fun because it is no fun getting bodied every match you play.
That’s dope, man. I’m 23 and can’t even break 1000PP, but I’ll use my 5 year dormancy from fighting games as my excuse haha.
But I totally get the offline part. I remember getting super anxious when playing people in person. I remember always choking and making really stupid mistakes whenever I was sitting in the vicinity of another player.
(I’m very New BTW). So I have been playing Super Street Fighter 2 turbo for 1 and a half years… I got more comfortable after half a year when I got a Fight Pad. I was playing Melee earlier though.
