Chris

Idle Weekend April 22, 2016: Getting Ready to Rumble

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Idle Weekend April 22, 2016:

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Getting Ready to Rumble

With both Weekenders starting a love affair with Street Fighter V, this week is all about coming to blows with fighting games and the real-life combat sports that inspire them. The depth, heart, and complications of controlled violence—in real life and its digital formats—offer a great deal for us to wrestle with.

Discussed: Street Fighter V, fencing, boxing, MMA, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, The Billionaire's Vinegar, Gang Leader for a Day

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So did they patch this training room thing into Street Fighter V recently or something? Every time the Giant Bombcast has talked SFV since its launch one of the things they've brought up was how it had nothing to get new players into the game or, later, totally inadequate non-interactive tutorial stuff.

 

Also, the thing about games is that no matter how story-focused they are, what makes them a game and not a movie or a book or whatever is that you are interacting with them in some way. So while I am perfectly content to get immersed in something with little to nothing in the way of mechanics, if the interaction that -is- provided is getting in the way (and very slow move speed would certainly qualify for me), then that's a problem that needs to be brought up, just like one's enjoyment of a movie might be hindered by it being displayed at the wrong aspect ratio or with muffled sound or something, or a book by it being riddled with typos or in a ridiculously tiny font.

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From what I heard, SFV was rushed to market because it was needed for some tournament, and people are skeptical that it will ever get things like a training mode. Most people I know have gone back to SF4.

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I understand that advertising something doesn't equate to an endorsement, and that Rob was likely just reading the copy provided, however this week's ad read for trymylola hit a couple of red buttons for me that I wanted to bring up.

 

When a company emphasises a product's naturalness in it's marketing that company is almost always appealing to wrongheaded, and sometimes dangerous, notion that natural == good. In this context I'm fairly sure it's entirely meaningless too, and in fact I couldn't find any definition on their website as to what "100% natural cotton" specifically means (although it presumably excludes ghost cotton, zombie cotton or other supernatural cotton variants from their list of ingredients).

 

Worse than this, however, is what I would consider to be fear mongering comments such as "The FDA doesn't require tampon brands to disclose a comprehensive ingredients list" and that the product contains "no bizarre additives or harmful chemicals". The implicit suggestion being that other brands of tampon are dangerous despite my understanding that they are necessarily FDA approved. Combine this with more scare mongering statements on the website like "No research has been conducted on the long-term effects of artificial fibers in tampons" and assurances that the product contains no GMOs (and the absurd claim of having "No chemicals") and we have what looks like a really unpleasant company that makes money from the baseless fears that it spreads and legitimises.

 

Sorry if I'm living up to my handle, it's just this sort of thing makes me sad.

 

Anyway, video games.

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That sort of fear-mongering is pretty much standard advertising practice, though that obviously has no bearing on whether it's a "moral" approach to advertising.

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I enjoyed the discussion on fighting games. I just take them so totally for granted that it's really interesting to hear Rob and Danielle's perspectives.

 

I looked at Wikipedia's list of fighting games, and I counted over 150 that I've played, and it's definitely not a comprehensive list. That's a lot of fighting games, so you'd think I'd understand them pretty well (and maybe not totally suck at them, ha ha), but their insights into what makes these games tick was totally fresh to me.

 

Not that either of them needs more games in the backlog, but I think having kinda broken through with SFV will make it so they can understand and enjoy basically any good fighting game. Even going so far back as SF2, all the ingredients they talked about are there. 

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Thanks for reading my letter! (Sorry, I'm way behind on podcasts.) I really enjoyed the discussion (and like Danielle, I was totally convinced by Rob's line of reasoning). :)

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What I've always loved about Street Fighter is that it's possible to be quite good without using hardly any special attacks. Mastering reach and timing are a huge factor in success at that game. In contrast, I've found that some games that are ostensibly more newb-friendly, like Mortal Kombat, place special attacks much more front-and-center to the point where I don't think it's possible to be competent without them.

 

I really enjoyed the perspectives as well. Like Rob, I used to fence competitively as well, and for some reason never made the connection that the similarity was one reason I'm so fond of Street Fighter, but it totally is. And as Danielle mentioned, it's really cool being able to play as fighters with fighting styles totally different from my own. I remember back in the day with SF2 in arcades, as fighter power fluctuated over the constant balance passes that game underwent (which at the time meant ROM updates for the stand-ups), I mastered a good number of the fighters in the game, each with a totally different fighting style. Zangief, Dhalsim, E-Honda... though none of them hold a candle to Chun Li. She is the best and if anyone says otherwise then I'm sorry to say that they're horribly misinformed.

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