GAMES YOU HATE OR DISLIKE?

bahleted

author=slash
I'm of the opinion that fighting games should be more about the interesting parts - yomi, cleverness, and maybe reaction time,

Fighting games are literally about all of these. At any skill level, all three of these factors are crucial to ensure victory against anyone you're playing.

author=slash
not the physical limitations of doing specific movements that were designed for arcade joysticks and haven't aged well.

Aged well compared to what? That's the crux of the argument here; like I mentioned before, most of the advanced techniques associated with fighting games, zoning, mix ups, parrying, canceling, etc depend on the D-Pad control scheme. The main limitation of Smash is that it doesn't have the fundamental depth of other fighting games because of its lack of the classic D-pad control scheme.

It is almost quite literally the 'wheel' of the genre, and no matter how much someone might hate the wheel, until someone comes up with a better alternative, they are stuck with it because it works so well compared to everything else. I am not saying that it is unassailable and that its impossible for a better system to eventually supplant it. What I am saying as it stands, as it is now, it allows for the most flexibility, fluidity, and depth, and its also incredibly accessible for most players to use (a few people in here have trouble with it, and that's fine! But I'm not buying the idea that 'most people have problems with it'.), and until that 'wheel' is supplanted by something else (and people are welcome, and encouraged to try!), that is what is used.

author=kentona
I kind of take exception to the idea that prepping your fighter aka RPG elements and adapting to randomized stage elements or items isn't a "skill". Like "final destination no items fox only" - like, cutting out 60% of the game is "skill"? pfft.

That's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is that some of those factors are too difficult to standardize for tournament/competitive play, so generally they're avoided.

author=LL
You can insult players or you can acknowledge that several players feel cheated because they feel the game refused to respond to their input.

There is no 'refused to respond'. In almost every fighting game ever made, if you do the correct input to a move in a fighting game, it will respond appropriately. Every. Single. Time. Anything else is user error, period. Standing quarter circle forward+punch with Ryu will perform the Hadoken one million out of one million times until either the game deteriorates into dust or the person doing it dies of old age. The only case of 'I performed this technique technically successfully and it didn't respond' exists in esoteric glitches and rare overlap of variables.

The more and more I hear about this, the more it sounds like 'I can't do this, so it sucks, even though tons of other people can. It's bad!' and I know its being presented as criticism of design, but at it's worst it can sound pretty petulant and childish. It's like me saying that football is a shitty game and getting into the NFL should be easier because it's too hard for me to throw a spiral (even though it's fundamentally not difficult or impossible at all).

I'm not saying that fighting games or any other genre should do the same thing forever 'just because'. Like I mentioned before, alternative forms of control are tried in games, modes, mods, and settings all of the time. The fighting game genre is literally one of the most mechanically and structurally studied and analyzed genres out there (I'm not just saying this, look for yourself!), and the reason why alternative forms of control (for example) haven't been adopted in the mainstream is almost entirely because a superior method for the genre, the people who play it, and the depth of techniques employed by both the genre/players, largely does not yet exist.

Change is great, but it's usually not arbitrary, and it can be argued that it should only happen when that change is better than what has preceded it. For the arguments against fighting games so far, said better changes largely have not surfaced yet.

Literally millions of people of all ages and skill levels, throughout years and years successfully pick up and enjoy fighting games with no real issues. I am not taking anyone's opinion away from them, and people are free to like or dislike whatever they wish! However, to say that it (and anything else, really) is fundamentally, objectively, bad because you're bad at it is amazingly poor logic!

author=LightningLord2

author=Ratty524
EDIT: Just for clarification, I get your overall point about what you are saying to LL, but I don't think "playing the game wrong" is entirely the fault of the player. Consider that "wrong" styles of play are a result of a failure of communication between the game and the player to some degree.

That is exactly what I'm trying to say - it's actually not important for a game to be done right - the player has to feel that it was done right.

word. I played SF4 and MKX. Many of the inputs for special moves are similar yet I am able to pull of MKX special moves much more consistantly than SF4 moves. Heck I even nail all of the fatalities. Yet I have never managed to perform any character's ultra move in SF4 (not even in training mode). I managed to beat MKX AI on the highest difficulty while I struggle with even the easy AI in SF4.

author=LL
That is exactly what I'm trying to say - it's actually not important for a game to be done right - the player has to feel that it was done right.

That's fine, but if there are tons and tons of players who already feel that it was done right, at what point are desires mutually exclusive? If someone feels that Street Fighter is too complicated, but other players are just fine with it, there's a serious argument to be made that SF just isn't for me and I should find another game, and not to deconstruct a model that does work for tons of fans to cater to the lowest denominator.

author=MotoKuchoma

author=LightningLord2

author=Ratty524
EDIT: Just for clarification, I get your overall point about what you are saying to LL, but I don't think "playing the game wrong" is entirely the fault of the player. Consider that "wrong" styles of play are a result of a failure of communication between the game and the player to some degree.

That is exactly what I'm trying to say - it's actually not important for a game to be done right - the player has to feel that it was done right.

word. I played SF4 and MKX. Many of the inputs for special moves are similar yet I am able to pull of MKX special moves much more consistantly than SF4 moves. Heck I even nail all of the fatalities. Yet I have never managed to perform any character's ultra move in SF4 (not even in training mode). I managed to beat MKX AI on the highest difficulty while I struggle with even the easy AI in SF4.

I think it's fair that you feel that way, but there is a trade off here. While MKX is an easier game because of the control scheme is simplified, it trades off depth and the ceiling for technical maneuvers. Because SF4 uses the D-Pad scheme for control, it is more difficult than MK's traditional 'dial a combo', but in return it's a much more technical, in depth game.

MK is a good game for what it is; but what ends up happening is that a lot of players who reach the lower ceiling for it get bored and desire more depth.

For me it's not really a matter of feeling cheated as it is more like "was it really integral to the balance of the game for this move's motion to by QCFx4+P or HCB, F+HS, QCFx2+S" or whatever the fuck some of the nonsense super move inputs are in Guilty Gear. (Doesn't help that GG's input reader is stricter than most of it's contemporaries) Really, I don't hate joystick motions, but a lot of them don't need to be as complicated as they are. It's also pretty silly to see long-time veterans still lose matches due to input errors - especially the mistakes arising from the Hadouken/Shoryuken motion overlap.

Motions were quite a sticking point for me when I attempted to design my own fighting game a number of years ago. Unfortunately, the Smash Bros. method can't be easily applied to traditional 2D fighters for two main reasons:
- Many characters have more than four special moves, each of which also have 2 or 3 variations each.
- The existence of first-frame active/invincible moves like the Shoryuken. Removing the invisible start-up time from the motion has potential to create some serious goofiness (see: tag-team attack spam in Project Justice). On the flip side, changing the frame data so that it's NOT first-frame active/invincible kills one of the primary utilities of these moves.

I can't quite remember what I ended up doing, and unfortunately I lost some of the design documents to a computer virus. I probably just stuck to the simplest motions I could, like a lot of doujin games do (i.e. replacing Dragon Punch motion with double-tap Down). I'm not really sure what I'd do if I were to ever attempt the project again.

e: so has anyone here tried Rising Thunder, yet? I haven't.

I'm sorry LL, it really just sounds like you don't really know what you're talking about. Just say you're not really a fan of fighting games and that's totally okay.

EDIT: Double post, my bad!

author=LightningLord2

author=Liberty
You do realise there's single player modes in most fighting games, right? Combos are ~fun~.

Only for the user, not the one they're used on - they're fine and a valid skill test for single player action games, but an extended series of actions that allows no counterplay has no place in a competetive game.

Actually they might be a decent breather in an otherwise intense setup. I mean the only real difference between a combo that takes x seconds and does y damage and an attack that takes x-n seconds and also does y damage is that the first one gives a moment to think about what to do next.

EDIT:

author=Feldschlacht IV
No offense to anyone here, but I feel like my posts are being ignored. By all means, I'm not attacking anyone who isn't into fighting games on a subjective sense, and I am open to discuss criticisms of the genre, but I guess not with people who don't really understand the genre and want to simplify it to the detriment of everyone but them.

Especially considering the shit certain "dumbing down" of modern jrpgs get by loads of people.

author=slash
I just think that generally, fighting games don't benefit from, like, double quarter-circle or Z inputs. It doesn't feel like Smash has a lack of complexity or depth in its moveset - each character has a base set of 18 moves, jumps, shields, and dodges, but none with an input more complex than one direction + one button. Obviously you can't make a direct comparison because Smash has a different design at its core, but... I guess I just don't see what we'd lose.

Ryu in Smash 4 gains a huge advantage with multiple inputs because without them he has to "charge" up his attacks to get any different variants to come out which is bad for timing or combos. Smash has a feature that allows you to customize your moves (faster/weaker falcon punch for example) but you can only use one of them at a time, and it's cumbersome to use at tournaments since you have unlock all of them or set them in options. But if they were somehow interchangeable on the fly imagine what that would do for different situations of the game?

I don't think smash should use those particular inputs, but there are features and mechanics that exist in the game that are very handicapped.