Right Where It Should Be

As you might expect, I've been playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can lately. This means that, in reality, I'm playing as much Street Fighter V as I possibly can between the hours of 9:30pm and whenever I go to bed, M-F, when the kid is asleep enough that loud button presses won't wake her and my wife has had enough of television for the night and wanders off to read. Lucky for me, this tends to be prime time for the online fighting game crowd, so I can be soundly shown the business end of a fireball to the face like The Jesus intended.

But my League Point woes aren't what I'm getting at today, nor is this going to be some sort of poor man's review of the new game (but I like it!). Think of this more as an apology for an insult I never actually made.

See, Street Fighter V has come under a lot of flack over the past two weeks since its release for being shoved out the door in something of an "unfinished" state. For God's sake, reviewers have found, there's no Arcade mode in it, and the main reason for one to play it is to willingly subject yourself into the online meat grinder of Ranked matches which, for many of us, is like throwing your 9 year old sister into an NFL training camp. As the betas have gone on over the past few months, I was getting the sinking feeling that it was going to be a pretty bare bones package myself, and when it finally came out, it was hard not to felt a little let down on how thin the content was from a single-player perspective.

After two weeks of it, though, I'm switching my stance on this, and feel that the internet has been looking at this incorrectly. Not wrongheadedly, though, because there are definitely niceties that one could say should have been included in a retail release of a brand new Street Fighter game. But really, everything you need is right there, in as unobtrusive and unpretentious a manner as possible. It's, actually, straight to the point with almost zero filler, which most big budget games can't claim themselves.

Mode by mode, it's actually very easy to break this down. First, the main complaint is that there isn't a robust Story mode in the game yet, and that the included Story mode is laughable shallow. Now, in 2004, I played Guilty Gear XX and was downright flabbergasted at how complex and compelling it's dopey anime Story mode was, and wished that every fighting game from then on would have something so compelling. But this was still a side interest to me playing against other people and getting better at the game. Sure, I found myself as into Guilty's mythology at the time as I was any given Final Fantasy, but not so deep down, I wanted to learn the game and learn how to play it well, not learn how to cheese the computer so I could get the next phase of text boxes. There's a really big difference there. I get that there are people interested in playing a Street Fighter game so they can finally learn how Nash came back from the dead or to vindicate their Ryu/ Ken slash fiction dreams, but as Street Fighter IV was such a tournament success over the last few years has shown, this crowd seems more of a niche of a niche when it comes to this genre.

The Story mode that we're given, then, cuts through the bullshit. People that are into this stuff don't want to have complex nail-biting bouts with smart AI opponents, they want to beat the next guy to see the next story beat, and SFV gives them just that: idiotic computer opposition that a new player can pound on and an old hat to practice combos with. They don't need to be hard, they just need to be there, and they need to match up with the still art and dialog that bookends the fight. Though this isn't much a consolation to someone used to current Mortal Kombats or the Persona fighting games' Story modes, but the amount of art/ dialog that SFV is giving is at least that much or more than any and all versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III. If anything, it should act as the appetizer that it is for the Story mode update that's coming in June, giving people incentive to return to the game later, as their revenue model for the game clearly shows they want them to.

If the loose "plot" of the game is made to get through as quickly as possible, then, it's clear as day that SFV was developed for people to play competitively (and probably, as the speculation has gone, to make it more of an eSport draw), which means that it's going to have to send you online. But what does someone do between matches? Well, for now, it's a fair assumption that players will be sitting in the Training mode practicing combos and testing situations to be ready for the inevitable fight request, and if you've been playing like I have, you'll know that these can happen anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes apart, making the Training mode the ideal spot. Soon enough, though, and I have already felt this, the average player is going to get sick of hitting a punching bag, and will want something with some stakes involved, even if they're fairly low.

I ask you, would an Arcade mode really suffice? If you've already seen your character's story, which is mostly what Arcade modes are for in these games, then be honest with yourself and say no. Arcade mode is just there to pass the time between matches, and will loose their teeth the second you see the credits roll once. A Survival mode, though, with various levels of difficulty, is a better answer. Most nights so far, I'll fire up the game, head into Survival on Hard difficulty (which I still haven't completed, by the way), and see how far I get in the two or so hours that I'll play the game. Hard Survival mode has 50 opponents to get through, which means that I'll plow through a dumb AI opponent, cater to a fight request with an actual online player, and then go back to another AI opponent or two. Either the whole few hours have gone by and I'm too tired to keep it up, or Hard mode finally wins this war of attrition and my Ryu poops out around fight 30. Either way, I'm covering both bases: waiting for and then playing online competitors --why I'm playing to begin with-- and ultimately working toward a long term endgame in a 50-man kumite. 10-12 fights in Third Strike's Arcade mode doesn't fill that same void, and when I was playing SFIV, I would just spam focus attacks in the Arcade mode until someone pulled me out of the monotony with a fight request. Survival mode is much more fulfilling.

But yes, there are problems with all of this, and problems that are squarely on Capcom. For the first week, the servers were an overloaded shit show, which really hampers all of my enjoyment under this kind of mindset. This makes things especially lousy since you can't earn any in-game currency if the servers are down, making playing Survival and finishing it on any difficulty setting feel anticlimactic. I wish there were better combo training modes, too, like the ones found in Street Fighter IV. I have a feeling that stuff is going to come eventually.

The tools are there, though. If the servers are running well, everything is right where it should be. I'm not going to call anyone out online or talk shit about a review outlet for dogging on the game as a complete package; their opinions are their own. But as a Guy The Plays Fighting Games, this enough for me, because what's there is everything that I would be doing with any other game. Man, if only the entire universe just knew that I was so right about this and everything else, knowaddamsayin'?

[For All] The Good It's Done

If you're going to read this, you need to be ready to excuse the frothing temper tantrum of an old man...

So, the last time we talked, we got into some of the main reasons Street Fighter IV was not only good for fighting games, but good for the games business as a whole.

Today will be different. Today, we get some things off our chest.

I am not a Street Fighter IV hater, but over the course of the last seven years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I never want to play it again. In fact, at my normal weekly Street Fighter gathering, a guy convinced me to jump off of Third Strike to play him in SF4. Fair enough, I thought; you took your beatings from me, so I'll give you that same courtesy. The second the menu screens faded into memory, I knew that this was not the experience that I wanted to re-live. Going through them piecemeal will help to explain things a bit more clearly.

First, get a load of this:

What you're seeing is a roster of 44 characters, many of whom share a distinctly similar method of playing the game at its core level. This is a bloated mess. I give Capcom its due credit in that it balanced a roster of such preposterous size well enough so that more than only a fourth of the cast is viable (like in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2), but for a one-on-one game like a mainline Street Fighter, this is straight up too much. A glut like this will scare off new players, while more the more seasoned are only apt to find one or two main characters and stick with them over time. Sure, that policy isn't exactly new or bad for pro-level competitors, but smaller rosters give more incentive to become skilled with a larger section of the cast, making tournaments more enjoyable for spectators to both watch and participate in for the hope of a counterpick overcoming impossible odds. The best we really got with SF4 was this, which is honestly pretty great, but this is about as rare as finding a turtle that shits out solid gold ingots on your front porch.

On a more fundamental level, SF4 had a real problem with movement. Dashing was slow and didn't cover very much ground, and matches tended to feel like a crawl going from previous Street Fighters to this. I personally cannot stand it, but I give SF4 a pass here. The reason here is purely speculative, but after reading an interview with the Soul Caliber people a few years ago about how they slowed down SCV's gameplay to accommodate for the advent of network play, I got the feeling that Ono and the teams at Capcom and Dimps did the same for SF4. Since arcades weren't exactly common around the world at that point and online play did much to rebuild the FGC, I call that a hell of a net positive. Still, as a Third Strike player, I can't help but feel as though SF4 moves like two people throwing rocks at each other in a fish tank, which is certainly not for me.

Here is the great offender, though:

At around 2:30 in this video, legendary Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara demonstrates the absolute gulf between those of casual, and even competitive interest, and the very, very small population that will play this game at the top level. Go to any Street Fighter IV tournament video on the internet, and you'll find something roughly similar: a string for normal and special moves broken up by the occasional dash cancel. To the layman, it's just a guy hitting buttons. To the trained eye, it's ridiculous in its timing and stupid in execution. It is the 1-frame link.

1F link combos aren't exclusive to Street Fighter IV by any means, but they are as common in upper-tiered play as a low forward to a fireball in every fighting game in two dimensions. It's the process of attacking an opponent, and then quickly throwing out another attack that will connect before the opponent's animation resets from its hit stun. It's 1000% more difficult in execution than it is in explanation. Being so rife with them, SF4 players studied less of the fundamentals of spacing and gameplay to rifling through spread sheets of frame data to see what move connected to what.

Worse, this practice of overworking led to diminished returns in use. SF4 has insane damage scaling, which is the the game's way of making each subsequent move in a combo do less damage than it normally would outside of a combo. Basically, it means that if I hit you with three hard moves in a row, you won't be down to 50% of your health. SF4 took this to something of a hilarious extreme in the wake of this 1F link nonsense. That Daigo combo up there? Check out how much damage it actually does. In most Street Fighter games --including the newly released Street Fighter V-- one could logically do the same amount of punishment in a jumping hard punch, a low hard punch, and then a dragon punch. A lot less work for the same result. In that respect, I never wanted to put in the work it takes to do these goofball string combos. I never felt the need to.

So, Street Fighter IV, you're a swell game, but you're a swell game that needs to take a break from the spotlight, and I'm glad we have a new Street Fighter to take your place. I realize that this is all just my personal beef with what amounts to a very good videogame, but that's why this is my blog and not yours. So there.

The Good It's Done

From the perspective of a good eight years, it looks like Street Fighter IV and its children were monumental successes from the jump, and this is mostly true. Though sales for each subsequent upgrade and physical re-release couldn't have stayed steady, it's ubiquity in the fighting game space has lasted almost as long as as Street Fighter II --though without coming close to matching its monetary glory.

But that's ok, really. Success isn't always measured in dollars and cents, even in the rapidly changing development landscape and risk-averse console generation that Street Fighter IV found itself in. Yes, it did pretty well at the market --one source says roughly 8 million units by the end of it's string of releases-- but it wasn't one of the mega hits of the last ten years like singular released such as Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy.

I believe that this kind of monetary thinking is defeatist compared to the good that Street Fighter IV has done. Now that we're on the threshold of Street Fighter V's release, I think it's a fair time to assess IV's importance, because "important" is exactly what it is.

As I said last week, Street Fighter IV was designed specifically to appeal to an older, returning audience, so I don't really see the point in reiterating that here. What is worth mentioning was it's development and the embryonic period of its growth. It's now a well-publicized story that producer Yoshinori Ono had been working for Capcom since Third Strike (he was a sound designer) and wanted to make a new numbered game in the series for quite a while, which had been shut down by his superiors time and again. Capcom, a company known for taking a concept and drilling into the ground like a Seth McFarlane gag, had seemed to have bled as much money as it possibly could from the Street Fighter franchise. The PlayStation 2 era was basically keeping it in hospice as the publisher was content to release Anniversary compilations and quick cash-ins like Capcom Fighting Jam. The former did ok, trading more on nostalgia than innovation. The latter did lousy. Nobody wanted to play it, and now it's a laughing stock.

When taken collectively, though, there was a lesson here in these two releases in what the market could bear and who was buying. By the time the Xbox 360 was released, online play and an ephemeral downloadeable marketplace had become a viable concern, and one that the old guard like Capcom took notice of relatively early. 2006, then, is the year that Street Fighter punk broke. Whether it was a way of testing the waters with online infrastructure or to just cash in and bankroll another game in the newly-super expensive HD era, a port of Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting had made its way to XBLA. It's release, in hindsight, has become almost hilariously important to the landscape of fighting games.

The reason why, in short, is that it caused a seismic chain reaction of events outside of the scope of this particular writing, and this is something that I'll cover some day. What's ultimately worth mentioning are twofold: A) it had online match support, although this wasn't brand new for fighting games or even Capcom (the Anniversary's Third Strike port for the original Xbox could connect to the internet, as could a few Japan-only Dreamcast games) and B) it sold better than the company's expectations; much better, apparently. But, because this is the video game industry, there was a certain level of uproar. The online component of the game was its biggest criticism, and any review that you might look up from the time straddles the line between "hey, this is still a good game with bad connectivity," to "they should have never released it in this state." Still, in a single, inexpensive release of an old game, it reiterated to Capcom what Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Jam had already told them: people are willing to pay for old, well-made games, and almost as importantly, they wanted these old games online.

Two games were quickly placed into development around this time. The first was Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, lead by longtime fighting game tournament player David Sirlin and his team at Backbone Entertainment, and the Ono-produced Street Fighter IV for Japanese arcades and home consoles. Both were released in 2008, though the console versions of SFIV didn't arrive until early 2009.

As companion pieces for each other, it was clear that those hard-earned lessons learned in the PS2 era were becoming axiom. HD Remix broke records for day-one downloads, and acted as the perfect appetizer for SFIV's eventual home release a few months later where it quickly became a million-seller. Again, like the releases of the PS2 era, both traded on nostalgia mixed with refinement. But for any number of reasons --new systems, a larger cast, nicer graphics, whatever-- Street Fighter IV had longer legs, its release igniting the real renaissance in for the genre. Licensed products featuring the game and its cast were finding their way back to the shelves, and gaming sites were featuring match videos and interviews with creators with increased frequency. A new numbered Street Fighter was a big deal again, something it hadn't been since the late 90s.

I don't know how long Street Fighter IV was in development, but we can assume at least two years, getting the game past the proposal stage around the latter end of 2006 (close enough after SFII Turbo XBLA launched). That's about a year after the launch of YouTube, and roughly close to the launch of GGPO, two mutual monumental steps for both fighting games and videogames as a whole. With the latter, stable online fighting games were now possible with some clever latency masking. Though it wasn't as widely adopted by companies like Capcom, it was a clear step in the right direction to build a fighting game's netcode, and had to be noticed. The former, well, you know. SFIV's release a few years later was the absolute perfect timing for an ultra-competitive throwback genre to re-enter the mainstream. Online tournaments matches for training and glory were now a nightly ritual for even casual fans. Tournaments large and small were now being archived on the internet for people to study like playback tape at a high school football practice. Tournaments themselves went from tiny grassroots gatherings set up on forums to big, consistent business in terms of attendance and prize money.

The sum of these parts is that Street Fighter was doing what it did best in its 90s heyday: people were coming together again. Whether it was for competition or camaraderie, players could meet, play, argue, and learn from each other, and had further tools to do so on their own. This is Street Fighter IV's greatest legacy. Now that we're on the precipice of a new numbered Street Fighter in a few days --again, a big deal-- it was worth pointing it out, if only briefly.

A Thing of Beauty

On Saturdays, I like to do what's become known in my house as "long cardio day." This means that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the boring 30-something that I am and then, and then, do another 30 minutes on the elliptical machine. 60 minutes of cardio! That's long, man!

But life, as it does, is starting to wag its finger in my face about that. Minor and subtle aches creep into my legs more often than they used to these days, which is something I once thought was major problem and is now just one of those normal things you accept. I used to think that I was an 80 year-old guy trapped in 28 year-old's body. Now, I'm just some dude.

Whenever I actually stop to give these little pains some real thought --which, kind of never happens, I guess-- I'm always reminded of my time in college training in Kyokushin karate. Mostly, I'm reminded of how often I would come home from practice with my bell rung because I never kept my hands up during fights with one of the Japanese students (whom were goddamn Kyokushin wizards). "Minor aches and pains" were often sore shins and bruised chest muscles from taking a few training beatings. We're talking 2000-2002 here, which means that MMA was still very much a niche thing, and it wasn't as easy to find a gym that taught hard-contact fighting as it might be today. Dumb-lucking into it on my own college campus at such a time was kind of spectacular. I stopped training in martial arts after I graduated from college because I was broke and couldn't find a suitable Kyokushin replacement in the Cleveland area (though it was the broke thing, mostly), but these are times I remember fondly; ass beatings notwithstanding.

Ok, then. Look at this. I mean, really, skip to the 54 second mark of this video and gaze upon this poetic thing of beauty:

Really quick, I'm not a violent guy. I'm very even-tempered, and my full time job requires that I maintain that kind of disposition. But, man, this combo. This is a pre-programmed chain (the Street Fighter games call them "target combos" now) that originated in Tekken 4. No, I don't mean the dumb uppercut/ sidekick thing at the end, I mean the four kicks and punches that came in such a succinct and brutal manner beforehand. Tekken 4, in all honesty, is a piece of shit in Tekken terms, but this combo is not. From a fighter's perspective, it looks like it was made in a laboratory full of mad Kyokushin geniuses. In a stand-up fight in a ring, these four hits, aligned in such an economical symphony of body movement, is at once startlingly efficient in its systemic ways of butchering an opponent as it is fluid in its seemingly simple mechanics. I can't not talk about this combo.

Piece-of-Shit-Tekken 4 came out at a time in my Kyokushin training when we were taking a break from learning the often useless perfunctory of katas so we could focus on why most of us were in the class: to train for and compete in tournaments. What makes it unique compared to its far superior predecessor, if only to two or three males in Bowling Green, OH at the turn of the millennium, was its copious inclusion of Kyokushin tidbits. From an attract mode kata to story mode implications to combos like this one, the ghost of Oyama's style looms heavily over the game, and it was impossible for someone training in the form to miss it. Naturally, we even tried to replicate what we were playing while sparring, at least as best we could. In the game, the combo in question isn't entirely useful compared to other ways of closing the distance and finishing someone off. IRL, though. if I can get off that first kick to your head, even blocked, then you would remember it. It is as gorgeous and perfect as the Spring sun upon a flowered meadow. I swear to God I'm not joking about this.

So let's break it down, movement by movement. It certainly looks simple enough to perform, and it's relatively short length is deceptive in the damage that it would deal to a human body, but that's part of the beauty. The reality, here, is that these are all pinpointed movements to shorten the space between you and the target before quickly attacking individual locations on the body to cripple them and end the fight.

It starts before the high round kick with the left leg to the head. In the video, right-handed Kazuya deftly switches his stance to the left while inching forward (or "kosa," and if he were rounding the side of the opponent subtly to do it --which would have only made to make this combo that much fucking crazier-- it would have been a "sabaki" movement). This looks like he's just taking a step forward with his right leg (and, in a way, it is), but this takes planning and forethought in a real fight to dope an opponent into letting their guard down to pull it off. From here, the kick comes to the side of the head, as roundhouse kicks are meant to do, but isn't intent on going through the target as roundhouse kicks normally should. While certainly designed to hurt, the kosa movement and then kick scoots Kazuya forward for one of two mutually useful effects: either it hits the guy in the head to daze them, or gets their hands up to block the kick. The payoff of the latter will come soon.

It's here that we need to take a quick second and swoon like the child I am at Kazuya's form with this kick, because that leads us into the next movement. Like most Japanese fighters, the mechanics of his round kick form a motion that resembles a person running: left foot forward/ left hand back/ right foot back/ right hand forward. This is intentionally taught, because to get this seemingly easy concept down in execution takes a substantial amount of practice. And for good reason, too, because if you're doing it right, you'll obtain the maximum amount of force for the kick. But we just discussed that force wasn't the point of this particular attack, though it would certainly be handy here.

Now the left hand comes as the left leg returns to the floor. However, Kazuya didn't wheel his hip backward after his left kick like most people would after the connection. Instead, he drops his foot to the ground after the strike snaps to use it as his final movement forward so as to ease into the range of the left punch, which was already in the chamber. Though it's just a guy kicking and then punching, doing both from one side of the body in succession is something of a counter-intuitive movement without having practiced it extensively. But carefully looking at how Kazuya pulls it off makes it deceptively seamless. The reality of it is simple body mechanics, like the rest of the combo: as his hips are turned for the kick, placing the foot down and forward after the strike readies the already-cocked left arm for quick release.

Most novice or intermediate opponents probably know that this isn't a common movement, this punch off of the kicking leg's side, and indeed it subverts the typical left/right/left/right techniques that are common to a student's early training. It's actually hard to notice without slowing down the video or pausing at the right moment, but the eventual punch goes slightly downward into the collarbone or top of the chest, implying that this wasn't meant to be the real breadwinner of these four movements, either (although the dummy in the video is just bending backward for effect). But imagine this combo like a four syllable word or phrase, and where the emphasis is placed is a decision for the speaker. One could really get some force out of that punch, but judging by what you see from next two moves that follow, it doesn't feel totally necessary.

For that, we're going back to basic body mechanics. With clever movement, Kazuya is now re-positioned back to his original right-handed stance. This happened concurrent with the punch, which readies his hips with ample amounts of torque for the back right leg to throw a devastating low round kick. This is a somewhat short ranged move that the first two attacks placed Kazuya in perfect range for. In the gym, the kick would strike on the side (or top) of the opponent's thigh, with the point of impact being the bottom of Kazuya's shin --something harder than the fragile arch of his foot-- into the meat of the leg. But that's the nice guy way of doing things. In a combat situation where Kazuya's life might depend on it, he would nail the other schmuck on the side of the knee to try to blow out the joint which, if it connects, is about as cruel as it sounds. Even if that's not the case, a full-speed kick like this to the quad is a real bruiser, even if it's not the most common way of turning someone's lights out like a roundhouse to the back of the head might be. The low kick snaps back to ready Kazuya's hips for the final blow.

Now, if you grew up watching martial arts movies as a kid, you easily condition yourself into thinking that real hand-to-hand fighting has a secret vocabulary of enchanted movements. When it comes to actual training, though, this gets demystified for you pretty quickly once you get passed learning specific techniques and logistical movement. From there, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get your body able to do things that opponents flat out don't see coming or can't react to. Basically, once you move out of the newbie stage, there aren't any secrets anymore.

Except one.

I'm writing this on a Monday. Before I had my kid, Mondays were often the day of the week that meant an apology note should be sent to my liver. Maybe even a large, though tasteful, bouquet of flowers. I would do terrible things to my liver on the weekends, and if I were still training in Kyokushin, Mondays are the days that I would pay for them the worst. The liver, you see, is located on the front right side of the body just outside of the abdominal region, but not quite to your profile. It is soft, and easy to target. It will also make a grown man crumple to his knees when given the right kind of shot, and it's a shot that takes even less effort depending on how much this grown man drinks. The liver is the great, mythic hot spot in a martial art that doesn't typically allow punches to the face during open tournaments; it can do the most amount of real punishment with comparatively minimal effort in terms of energy consumption (round kicks to the face, unsurprisingly, take a lot out of you). At the risk of sounding even more meatheaded than the rest of this blog already has, one good smack to the liver hurts like a motherfucker. It's the best.

A good left hook would do it, and our buddy Kazuya had built the previous three movements to carefully worm his way there. Though painful, the first two attacks set up a perfect sleight-of-hand misdirection to take the opponent's defense away from the tender right side of their body: a blocked high round kick gets the arm up, which will try to defend the left straight punch, which wouldn't even see the fast low round kick coming at that range (which is gravy here), opening up to a perfect drill to the chops. Conversely, if the first kick really lands, the subsequent techniques would render a body limp enough that no kind of arm flailing would sufficiently block that last hit. The opponent crumples in a heap before him, and this fight's over. After taking my share of liver punches, I can tell you with perfect confidence that this is the natural conclusion.

I cannot stress enough how difficult it can be to make your body do these things with this kind of fluidity. But after a certain amount of practice and a little bit of forethought, it's an amazingly economical way of beating the snot out of someone. It's a stone cold beating with absolutely zero wasted movement. Each technique is at the ready even during the first step, and it simply needs the correct speed and follow-through to put someone on the floor. I could never get all four shots off at the speed in which video game Kazuya pulls it off, but it was good enough for me to try, and strangely spectacular to have video game Kazuya show me the way. The Japanese guys in class eventually sniffed it out and nailed me for it. But like I said, those guys were Kyokushin maestros anyway.

Curiously, further Tekken games would alter this perfect sonnet of human movement to make it less realistic; the final blow blasting an opponent backward like they were being pushed out of a helicopter. Judging by how this combo video follows up the movement with the (dumb) uppercut/ sidekick connection, it seem like that was probably the most balanced way of handling things with the total amount of damage that it can incur. But that's just video games. This is a perfect combo.