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GeekNights Tuesday - Thebes
Tonight on GeekNights, we review
Peter Prinz's Thebes, an updated version of Jenseits von Theben. Thematically, it's Indiana Jones: the game. Mechanically, it implements that theme to a startling degree. Dig deep. In other news, Street Fighter 5 sort of came out, and the weebs are ridiculously butter about the Fire Emblem Fates translation and localization.
The GeekNights Patreon is going strong, and Rym + Emily reviews are coming your way! We're presenting Atari Game Design at PAX East on Sunday!
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I love this game, and the theme / mechanic / component integration is a big part of it.
But when is a Ryu not a Ryu? There are some funny videos going around of character model swaps, specifically Ryu being swapped onto the new scantily clad girl (R. Mika?) and doing the ass slap character animations.
Listening to this episode felt like validation. I complained about the timing questions and vague instructions from the first moment I ever sat down with Street Fighter 2. I was all of 7 years old. Let me be clear, I gleefully consumes a ton of shitty games and media as a child, I was not some critical prodigy by any stretch, but I'm proud of 7yo me for calling out those issues.
Scott's inability to understand what motion to press and when to hit the button or let go of it is stupid. Anyone can figure this out within 20 seconds. Street Fighter 2 was my favourite arcade game in primary school because I was rewarded for execution instead of the easy as shit Mortal combat down, down press any button.
The instructions were on the freaking cabinet. Fireball, has a joystick motion ranging from down and ending at forward then + P. You press the punch button at the end of the motion. It takes maybe 2 minutes to work out that the game activates a move once you let go of a button, just by holding it down. Kind of like in a platformer you check if you jump higher by holding down the button longer.
Talk about hidden information, in Counterstrike, how the fuck was I supposed to know that switching to my knife while reloading cancels frames and allows me to get an edge over the people I played? No one, I figured that shit out by myself. How do I get Mario to jump to the top of each pole at the end of the stage and the higher I jumped, the more points I got, no one but wow trial and error taught me. That is exactly what you want to hear from someone who thinks they are a critical prodigy at 7 years of age. Yet you wait to be accredited by some nobody on a podcast who barely knows how to play a game which has proved relevance for multiple decades. If Street Fighter was shit, it would have no community and be irrelevant or have super niche audiences like most fighting games.
Removing the Trials mode was whatever because no one found that useful. Training mode is still there so you can program an opponent character to do whatever you want and practice counter hitting, punishing missed hits or combos.
Single player was useless in prior version of the game and all it is in this game is a very quick mode to get to the story as realistically all you want to do is play multi-player local or online. The servers weren't ready which was trashy of Capcom on day 1 but they seem to be fine and are the best of any fighting game I've every played.
Sure I agree that the game wasn't released in its full state but if Street Figher is your game and you go to an arcade or group once a week, it is definitely worth the buy. Otherwise if you want to play a full game buy it after March / June / July whenever they have the rest of the updates coming. The game will be iterative so balance and bug fixes will be regular instead of releasing multiple versions. This also means there are no arcade versions of the game but the arcade or bar that holds the competitions will run a PC (or PS4) to run it.
I'm yet to see or head about the Ryu taking the place of R Mika character, that would be pretty funny.
Another silly thing that Capcom are ignoring is fixing player 2 champ select's Chun Li breast jiggle, it was reduced on player 1's side because they were getting media attention for the black of breast support, seems kind of stupid if player 2's animation is completely separate from player 1, but I haven't seen the code or know why it would need to be completely different rather than just flipped.
As a game for Street Fighter players it has completely replaced Street Fighter 4 within days rather than fragmenting the player base. The game has been used in money tournaments already but due to the trashy FGC community and the anti eSport sentiment they aren't getting anything more than energy drink and regular peripheral advertisers (still doing better than Valve).
Go find a person who has never played fighting games before. Put them in front of a joystick, and pick Ryu or Ken.
Now show them a picture. The picture only has three arrows on it and a button.
You are not allowed to give them any additional instructions.
See how long it takes for them to be able to consistently perform the hadouken. NOBODY will figure it out within 20 seconds. You are making the same mistake that all people in the fighting game community make. You have learned these things intuitively and reflexively. They are so natural and assumed that when giving a tutorial you wouldn't even explain them. Like when teaching someone to drink water you wouldn't explain to them that the water is supposed to go down their throat. You assume they know what drinking means, but they don't. They know NOTHING.
I've played Street Fighter 2 irregularly since it came out when I was around 10 years old. I still can't do a shoryuken with any level of consistency. Some of the questions I asked on the podcast I know the answer to, but some I legitimately do not know the answers to. When I ask other gamers I know who are not in the FGC, they have no fucking clue. When I ask those who are pro at fighting games, they can't understand the question.
I dare you to find me some tutorials online that actually explain all these things correctly. Text, YouTube, whatever format. With the help of one person on Twitter I was able to find one very long video that had a decent tutorial on the hadouken in the middle of it, but then he proceeded immediately to gloss over the shoryuken. This so-called beginner tutorial video actually began with a discussion on area control.
Heck, can YOU who says it is so easy to learn even answer the questions I have? Let's start with the shoryuken. The inputs for the shoryuken are as follows:
forward, down, down-forward, punch.
I move the joystick from neutral to forward. How long can I leave it on the forward position before moving it to the down position?
When moving the joystick from the forward position to the down position, is it ok if it passes through the neutral position? Is it ok if it passes through the down-forward position on the way there?
How quickly do I need to move the stick from the forward position to the down position? How slow is too slow? Is it possible to do it too quickly?
After I finally get the stick to the down-forward position, I have to press a punch button. Can I press it at the exact same moment the stick arrives in the down-forward position? Can I press it after the stick arrives in the down-forward position? If I can press it after, how long after? Can I return the stick to the neutral position before pressing the punch button?
Imagine I press the following inputs.
forward, down, down-forward, forward, punch.
I was trying to do a shoryuken, but I moved the stick too far, and an extra forward snuck in before the punch. Will a hadouken or a shoryuken come out? Keep in mind that the time between the down-forward and the punch was still very short. Had I not moved the joystick too far, but still pressed punch at the same time, a shoryuken would have registered. Because that extra forward instruction snuck in there, does a hadouken come instead?
You think you are such a big shot know-it-all when it comes to fighting games. Can you answer these questions that nobody else on the entire Internet has answered? If you can, please write a tutorial like this for every single thing in the game and become the hero for gamers everywhere.
For example, I wouldn't be surprised if a chess tutorial started with the relative value of the pieces, or a discussion about check and mate, before diving into the specifics of how each piece moves, castling, or en passant. A complete beginner in Bridge would have to learn the basics of trick-taking games and partnerships before bidding and signaling.
As for your specific questions regarding timing, extra inputs, etc: Yes, you can buffer charges or other special moves while airborne (eg. Zangief's 360). I do not know for sure the specific answer for the extra-forward-input question on a SRK, but I can almost guarantee it would be a fireball if you flubbed the input in that specific way (F, D, DF, F + P). In SF4, if you flub the input (unintentionally or intentionally) in specific ways the game will still interpret it as a SRK; SF4 has "Input Leniency", which SF2 also has for some charge moves and SRK motions: http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2010/jan/11/understanding-input-leniency-street-fighter-4/
I am a little surprised no one has experimented and published the specific frame data for timing inputs on different special moves, outside of charge times (55 frames for most characters in SF4).
Zangief's move is a full 360 on the stick, and is a move I have never been able to execute intentionally. Only a couple times while button mashing.
I make the 360 on the stick, how fast do I have to do it? Can I do it clockwise and counter-clockwise? If not, which one? When do I press punch? Which direction do I start from?
A lot of the problems in street fighter are due to the fact that the input joystick is also the stick you use to move. If you try to do Zangief's 360, depending on which direction on the stick you start from, you are going to unavoidable walk, crouch, and jump! Just like Guile walks backwards when trying to do a Sonic Boom. How the fuck do you avoid that?
Let's say I am Zangief, I want to jump towards you and then do the 360 move upon landing. I jump and then do the 360 on the stick while in the air. I do it very quickly. I'm still not going to land for awhile. Can I press punch while still in the air, and then he'll do the move as soon as he lands? Do I have to wait until he lands to press punch? Do I have to time the 360 so that the punch happens to coincide with the moment he lands on the ground? Exactly what are the timing windows on these things?
Again. I dare anyone to answer these questions or show me a place online where they are answered satisfactorily. I don't even need answers for Street Fightver V. Give me answers for Street Fighter II. Google doesn't have them.
You have a few options with Zangief's 360 (or... guh, 720), but the "easiest" (haha) way is to do it while you're jumping in, or performing the input in the middle of a standard attack/focus attack dash cancel (SF4), so you won't be forced to jump. It's hard, and you'll have to practice it a lot.
Thing is, most professional players have simply built muscle memory, and spend lots of time feeling these things out. As a result, they don't have the concrete answers, they just know how to make their hands do the work. And that makes the genre impenetrable to new players who, in spite of putting in work, still might not have concrete answers and are confused.
The game's training mode shows you the input however it is a tonne of practice until you have muscle memory for a move, at any time in any direction as soon as your brain wants to do it.
One of the main reasons that nobody can describe these moves properly is due to everyone learning by fostering muscle memory for a specific move. This makes it hard for people to just pick up straight away.
The closest correlation I could muster is a golf swing. Half the people at a golf course are practising for their entire visit. Possibly another one is when I learned how to hold a Gillies needle driver for stitching soft tissue together. It's not like an easy mode clamped needle driver but requires you to apply just the correct amount of force, too much and you bend the needle, too little and you can pierce the tissue, it felt very awkward to begin with but after a week or so I was efficient with it, more so than the more common needle drivers.
The stick can be held forward for as long as you want you can walk up to your opponent by just holding forward then complete the rest of the motion and press the button but forward must be the last input before the machine receives down, down forward, forward + punch. Yes.
However the time frame to execute the special function would make it quite difficult which is why on the majority of images the shoryuken ends up being shown as a "Z" motion.
Yes for SF4 iterations (hence why there is a shortcut to doing this move by just tapping diagonal twice then pressing punch will always launch the move, not sure if this works in SFV). However the motion you describe is is inefficient and can often cause inaccurate motions when trying to do the inputs in the time frame waiting for the inputs. Just remember the diagonal in the "Z" to connect the 2 portions of the move forward - diagonal - down - downforward + punch. Practising this motion gives the most repeatable results as forcing the the other options often leads to not registering "down", going too far past "down" or most importantly not executing the input within the time required. It's not possible to do it too quickly but often trying to do the move in haste will cause incorrect / imprecise inputs.
I can't tell you how long too slow for the entire move but all normal moves have the same time time frame.
As I stated above you can keep your stick in the forward position for as long as you want but the rest of the move and punch must be within the acceptable normal move time frame. I don't know what that time frame is numerically, not sure that it's been measured, just an internal approximation by repetitive attempts at doing the move. You would be surprised at how long this time frame is, the game is really looking for precise / smooth input rather than speed. Speed comes in with time just like all muscle memory. Yes.
As long as you let go of the button, in that you are tapping the button, don't hold down the button. You can release it after definitely.
The release should be around that time, I can only guess at it being less than 0.5s which is why the move still comes out if you complete to a quarter-circle and press the button.
Again I can only guess, I don't know, but muscle memory lets you do this
The line of questioning is silly especially the time frame.
I don't know the time frame for how long I pull down on my AK47 and then veer right then left to get the AK spray controlled in Counterstrike but I'm sure you probably knew how to do this when you played a lot of Counterstrike. You never measure the time or the distances moved by the mouse, your hand just did it right?
It's the same thing. No. When a button must be triggered (released), the machine is expecting to match it up with the joystick input direction described. If you were playing any of the Street Figher games before Street Fighter 4, the hadouken would always come out.
With Street Fighter 4, they have allowed some leniency with the shoryuken message as a result one or the other may come out based on how fast the punch button was released after down-forward was registered by the machine. I personally found this hard to deal with as doing fireballs ended up being far harder to do after moving forward on the screen. Practising to get the shoryuken punch to be released at the down-forward part of the motion regularly, you can properly execute shoryukens and not get them when you want a fireball. Nope. I stopped playing them with any regularity after highschool (16 years ago). I don't have time for that I'm studying and working plus I don't play competitively on these games anymore, just whenever someone wants to play them at my house or if I'm at my friend's party or get together. I can't reliably do the more complex combos on Akuma (my main character in SF4) anymore because I'm completely out of practice and I never really devoted all my time to that game.
I don't even have to go play SF to know that I have a natural inclination to hold the button. Why the fuck should I release it? I'm punching you in the face! Of course I'm going to hold that punch button until I'm done, just like I hold Mario's jump. It's common sense! If I can make myself stop doing that, I might increase in skill level dramatically.
Also, the game should allow me to hold the button. Bad design. It makes sense to most people that pushing the button is what makes something happen, not letting it go! Nothing should ever be triggered in any game by releasing a button.
The exception is for moves that actually charge up. Not charge up in the Street Fighter sense, but in the Super Metroid Charge Beam sense.
The reason that you may wan to hold the button (although I don't use the technique but I know some pros do), is press the button to do the initial punch, then do the motion of a special move, let go when the stick reaches the correct point - this triggers another punch and a special move combos off of the first punch (if frame data allows).
It was so bad that they would walk up, put a coin in, and I would literally walk away before they were done selecting characters. I'd sacrifice my quarter rather than get manhandled. This behavior confused them. They tried to pull the old "you can't get better if you don't play people better than you" bullshit, which I knew was just a weak attempt to get me to stick around and get pummeled.
Weeks later, after they got bored because others started not playing them and walking away, one finally answered my question. They would go online before a game was released, find out the characters and moves, practice them on their own controllers while watching a video to get the timing down, learn which frames of animation left characters vulnerable, and basically know everything from day one.
THAT is not fun. Doing research for weeks and practicing on a controller not plugged into anything for the sake of wrecking some other person's $0.25 isn't pleasurable, it's studied sadism. Fuck that noise.
Hmmm.... I wonder if I could do some Ranked Queue before bed...
That's pretty much what training mode is. If it's your main game then I think it's fine but if you play more than one type of game, it is a heavy deterrent. Execution in League isn't that steep a curve though. I've also won many games with the wrong masteries and runes due to making better decisions. Also the team aspect and team management is more important than any 1 v 1 play. Dynamic Queue is actually more fun that old solo queue.