you seriously have to watch this video of this guy playing tetris

[tegan]

Outside of maybe Smash Bros., fighting games have gotten really intimidating. Every once in a while something like Skullgirls or Persona 4 Arena comes along and I get drawn in, but end up never actually playing the game because I know that my experience will consist entirely of playing a mediocre story mode and then immediately getting my butt handed to me if I play against anyone else.

[Twig]

Side note: I wish I was around people who loved to play Smash Bros. again. Everyone I know here is all "STREET FIGHTERRRRR". People who live just south of San Francisco, come to meeee and let's play.

[SecretAsianMan]

I would love to see Divekick at EVO.  They said they're going to try and release by then, which would be amazing.

 

If you don't know what Divekick is, it's a really simple fighting game.  Simple as in there are only 2 buttons: dive (which actually makes you jump) and kick (which makes you, well, kick).  Every hit does 1 million damage and every character has 1000 hp so each round is basically whoever gets the first hit.  There's more to it than that, but it's hilariously fun.  Their booth was right next to the Double Fine booth at PAX East and whenever I came by DF to stalk Chris there was a huge crowd around it.  It looks like a fake game, but it's actually a rather clever twist on a fighting game that strips out a lot of the complicated stuff to just get down to the fun.  I think one of the developers said that he wanted to take the climactic final few seconds of a match (like in the above EVO video) and make a game that felt like that all the time.

 

[TheLastBaron]

I think Super Smash deserves a lot more credit than it gets for being so accessible yet at the same time being just as deep as most other fighting games (Meele that is).  I never got that into it, that is I only ever played it as a normal person would, some of my other friends got super technical with it which is basically what happens to every game you play once you play fighting games competitively (and why I can't play fighting games any more).  If you want you can just play around with friends and it's super fun, or you can play with people who are crazy good at doing stuff like wavedashing or techs and it's also super fun.  Compare that to other fighting games where if you have to know a whole bunch of moves and combos just to not get crushed and it's a pretty impressive achievement.

[Sno]

I've been somewhat skeptical of Divekick, i'm not convinced i would find much value in it, but what they're trying to do is actually fairly interesting. (Trying to emulate the metagame and the tactics of a fighting game, but in a design that is so brain dead simple that literally anybody could play it.)

Speaking more generally, i don't think fighting games need to be a horribly difficult thing to get into. There's kind of this myth of the big combo, the idea that you can't get anywhere in a fighting game if you can't bang out a 16 hit combo with perfect technical execution. In truth, fighting games are vastly more about strategy and theory. A solid understanding of how you should respond to different situations gets you a hell of a lot further than combo execution.

Either way, they are that kind of game where you need somebody to mentor you along. The genre has just consistently been phenomenally terrible at explaining itself. There's so many examples of simple mechanics where familiarity is taken for granted even though they are not intuitively or visibly surfaced in gameplay and are actually completely invisible unless the player is specifically told to look for it.

I am bad at fighting games though, and i feel like if i can figure them out and get something out of them, the barrier probably isn't actually that high.

Speaking of Smash, weirdest thing happened, Melee is going to be at Evo.

[TheLastBaron]

It's been at Evo before, this time it's because the last game slot was open for a fundraiser and I guess most people donated for Meele, which is cool.

[Twig]

My issue with fighting games isn't the combos or whatever; it's the method of input. Quarter-circle magic bullshit is so unappealing and annoying to get used to (and it hurts my thumbs after a while, and I have no desire to pay mucho money for an arcade stick) that I just give up and quit.

 

Divekick seems marginally interesting.

 

There was also one that purported to emulate Dragonball Z style fights, but had a really simple solid-color-character style, and overall just simple, basic mechanics. It looked fun, last time I saw it? I wish I could remember what it was called.

[TheLastBaron]

Back when I played there weren't commercial sticks (except I guess that X-Arcade thing that used to be a thing) so most people either made them or bought them form people who made them.  I made one and it was pretty cool and also not expensive, just took some switches which are cheap and a controller to get the board from.  I think a lot of people today use pads, which I find weird as pad players used to be like second tier.  getting used to the input is definitely a challenge, for the first year I played at arcades I couldn't consistently dragon punch.  I originally used a Dreamcast pad before I made a stick and stick movements are a lot easier with an actual joystick instead of a controller analog stick. 

[tegan]

As Jenm Frank once said, the strength of Smash Bros. is that you don't have to know how to play fighting games, you just have to know how to play the game that your character is in. If you play Metroid or Mario or Sonic or whatever, you already have a good handle on how that character is going to act. It plays and controls a lot more like a platformer than a fighting game.

 

 

 

Every time I play Smash Bros. with someone, I insist on playing at least one round with the following rules:

 

Initial damage set to 300%

Knockback set to 2.0

Stock set to 99

Only item is the bumper, set to high appearance rate

 

It's basically the best way to play. Every match takes at least fifteen minutes and there's virtually guaranteed to be at least one instance of somebody bouncing between two or three bumpers for a solid ten seconds before flying off the stage and everyone in the room falling over laughing because of it.

[SecretAsianMan]

I don't think Divekick will become a big hit or anything like that, but I do appreciate the "less is more" design.  It's the same reason I liked Smash until it got more complicated later in the series and people picked it apart the same way they do other fighting games.  I appreciate how much nuance there is in such games, but sometimes I just want to hit a guy and have it be fun and hilarious.

[Nachimir]

The few developers I talked to about Divekick recently saw it as very much as a parody game (and were totally in favour of and supportive of that). I don't think it'll ever have a serious following at traditional or "serious" games events, but I know of at least one other public event that's thinking of featuring it.

[Patrick R]

Divekick almost reminds me of

, with the way the game is built around these brief encounters based on very simple mechanics, but the one-hit kill makes defensive play the focus.

[Reyturner]

I basically just really like watching people be lords of video games. Check out this Street Fighter tournament footage:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1ey4-ewyQ

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online actually included this as one of the challenges.

 

So then someone did this:

 

 

The few developers I talked to about Divekick recently saw it as very much as a parody game (and were totally in favour of and supportive of that). I don't think it'll ever have a serious following at traditional or "serious" games events, but I know of at least one other public event that's thinking of featuring it.

 

Hopefully Divekick will find its place as a palette cleanser between rounds at EVO or as a cross game / cross scene Celebrity Deathmatch side show: Daigo vs. DeMusliM or something like that.

[Reyturner]

dooblay post.

[Dewar]

The few developers I talked to about Divekick recently saw it as very much as a parody game (and were totally in favour of and supportive of that). I don't think it'll ever have a serious following at traditional or "serious" games events, but I know of at least one other public event that's thinking of featuring it.

 

I think, while it started as a parody game, they've been putting a lot more work into it to make it an honest to god fighting game. It was pretty clear from some of the Giant Bomb videos that someone who'd played a lot can do some pretty fancy things with just two buttons. They've also talked about having professional fighting game players in to playtest it. I could see it regularly featured at EVO, though as one of the lower tier prizes.

[Nachimir]

Interesting to hear; I'd really like to play it.

The Nidhogg comparison seems apt in that case too, as it has a lot of depth for such simple controls (no more than a NES pad, and includes disarms and sword throws as well as movement and stabbing).

[tegan]

Remember the timed demos in Super Smash Bros. Brawl? Turns out some speedrunners took that as a challenge.

 

[TheLastBaron]

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online actually included this as one of the challenges.

 

So then someone did this:

 

 

The point of that was never that the parry was super hard to do, it was that doing it under that much pressure with 0 margin for error with perfect timing was impressive and a crazy moment.  I can (could) do the ironman infinite in MvC2, that doesn't mean I can do this in a high pressure game. 

 

 

Similar thing with speedruns, you can practice a game and be able to pull off all the glitches and get good splits, but unless you can pull everything off in a full run/race you wont get a good time and being able to is what makes it so impressive.

[Reyturner]

The point of that was never that the parry was super hard to do, it was that doing it under that much pressure with 0 margin for error with perfect timing was impressive and a crazy moment.  I can (could) do the ironman infinite in MvC2, that doesn't mean I can do this in a high pressure game. 

 

 

Similar thing with speedruns, you can practice a game and be able to pull off all the glitches and get good splits, but unless you can pull everything off in a full run/race you wont get a good time and being able to is what makes it so impressive.

 

Don't worry, you don't need to convince me that Daigo is good at video games. I just thought it was amusing. 

[SecretAsianMan]

I read somewhere that Daigo actually found it difficult to do at the time because he usually coordinates with the sound but he couldn't hear because of all the screaming and was somewhat surprised he pulled it off.

[TheLastBaron]

Thats actually a reason why pads are becoming more popular, they're harder to hear than the typical sticks people use.  I know a lot of SSF4 players use pads, well by a lot I mean there are top tier players use pads which used to never happen.

[Zeusthecat]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DNCVSiDbRBY#!

 

Mesmerizing.

 

Edit: I thought it was supposed to put the embedded YouTube video into the post by me pasting the URL. Did I do something wrong?

Edit 2: Tried your suggestion Patrick and also tried using Firefox and keep getting the same results, oh well.

[Patrick R]

If you use Chrome you have to use the "Paste as Plain Text" button in the editor.

[toblix]

If you use Chrome you have to use the "Paste as Plain Text" button in the editor.

PC gaming, am I right?!

[miffy495]

Only post the script at the end of the URL, not the whole thing.