Up until the rumored announcement of a Namco and Capcom, I didn’t think I would ever own Tekken anything. From my few times playing Tekken games, the gameplay just didn’t appeal to me.
With that said, I now have the limited edition Tekken 6 bundle with fight stick in my house. Huh?
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This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing, Part 2: Punishing Mistakes
Resource Management
The goal of Street Fighter is to completely drain your opponent’s health meter before they can do the same to you. You achieve this by attacking your opponent. How you attack your opponent or defend yourself can vary wildly depending on what the health situation is. The easiest health situation to discuss resource management I can think of is when your opponent has a major life lead over you. When your opponent can finish you with one or two hits, you need to play much more conservatively in order to stand a chance of winning. Conversely, if you have a major life lead on your opponent, you may be able to win by “chipping them out” on wake-up with a projectile attack to avoid the risk of eating a last-ditch super move that could turn the tide.
I really wanted to like BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, and based on what I knew of the game going in, I thought I would eat it up. Instead, it sat on my shelf because I couldn’t grasp the gameplay. The pacing was a bit slower than I expected. I had a hard time understanding the game’s mechanics. It also didn’t help that every character played completely differently from each other, which meant there wasn’t much in the way of transferable skills. Some of this wasn’t the fault of the game; part of it was a fault in the user. I realized that my Street Fighter knowledge wasn’t as applicable with this game, and that the amount of investment it would take for me to be good at BlazBlue I would rather dedicate to Street Fighter IV instead.
This week, BlazBlue hit store shelves. I have a lot of reasons for just leaving it there. However, a couple of things are tugging at my heart strings (and wallet) to give the series one more shot.
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Music might be the most overlooked aspect of video games by game creators and game players alike. Unless its the star of the show in a music game, music is often perceived as audio wallpaper. Game makers generally aren’t as successful in implementing music as they are with other elements of their products, such as graphics and gameplay. Nowadays, licensed music and slapped-in “Hollywood-like” orchestral scores are the norm. With the advent of voice chat, custom soundtracks and other diversions, game players in general I think are paying less attention to game music than ever before, too.
I’m still paying attention though. I grew up in an era where video game music had its own distinct sound due to technological limitations. An era when the Super Mario theme was still hot and new. Where the awesome work of game composers shone through the primitive beeps and bloops. Game music has evolved dramatically over the years, but we as gamers have had our ears blessed with some truly great music.
I wanted to take the time out to write about some of my favourite pieces of video game music in a series of posts. There are some amazing tunes that have not only had an impact on my gaming, but my life as well in some way or another. There were more obvious choices I could have gone with to start this series, but I wanted to give credit to a game that has recently eaten up a lot of my time (and my brains). Besides being super fun to play, it has some of the best video game music I’ve heard in a while.
Back in 1995, I didn’t think I would ever quit fighting games. I was still riding high on the Super Street Fighter II rush, mashing away on the Super Nintendo port at home. It was around this time that my mom was taking night school out of town, which meant that my dad, brother and I would spend our time waiting for my mom to finish class at the local mall. At the time, this mall had an awesome arcade, and I would regularly play (and get smoked) in Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Mortal Kombat 3.
Never did I think that a series of factors would ‘make’ me fall out of fighting games for 14 years. What happened?
Because I write In Third Person solely as a personal outlet of gaming nerdiness, I don’t pay much attention to my analytics. Even if no one in the world were to ever see this blog, I would continue writing in it anyway, just to get these gaming-related thoughts out of my head and onto something a bit more tangible. Well, as tangible as the Internet can be. If you or anyone else decides they want to read my musings, power to you.
And read my musings you have. Sure, my traffic may not rival the Craigslist posting your mom put up to promote your family garage sale, but there are a consistent number of people that frequent my site, according to my numbers. Thank you to everyone that has ever read my blog and a special thanks to everyone who checks in regularly.
Whether you’re a regular reader or just found my blog on a whim, I’m going to present to you the five most popular posts on my site. I was actually kind of surprised by the results. Click through to find out what the hottest content is on In Third Person.
This is an on-going series where I discuss the thinking involved in Street Fighter that I’ve applied to basketball. If you want to see earlier entries in the series, hit the link: Part 1: Spacing
PUNISHING MISTAKES
One of the most common mistakes in Street Fighter is a poorly-timed projectile attack. For instance, if I’m Ryu, and you properly react to my fireball, you can jump over the fireball and kick me in the face before I can do anything to defend myself. In Street Fighter, when your opponent makes a mistake, you want to punish them for their mistakes by hitting them with the most powerful attacks as possible.
As far as I know, I am currently not a father. I’m not done living the “free” adult life at this point in time. However, at some point I would totally love to be a father. I don’t really think that much about it, but when I do, I often think about how I would introduce video games into the life (or lives) of my future little ones.
For many years, I’ve been an avid basketball player. I’ve played in a few leagues, on a few school teams and participated in a few basketball camps. I am by no means the next LeBron James, but I had the skills to make some noise on almost any given local court. Over the last few years though, finding the time to hit the court has been extremely difficult. During my basketball downtime though, I got really into Street Fighter IV on a serious level. I began to really pay attention to the concepts behind the game and how to use them to my advantage.
This year, my life has really settled down and I now regularly play basketball again. While I’ve had to work hard to get back into game shape (I lost 20 lbs and counting since I started playing again in April), and I’ll never have the raw physical talent that I did in my prime, I do have something now that I didn’t have before: Street Fighter knowledge.
Oddly, I’ve been able to apply much of the thinking involved in playing Street Fighter into my thinking of basketball. Has it made me a better player? I think it has. I’m not saying that Kobe Bryant should dust off his E. Honda to get better, but having that parallel helps me see basketball in a different way, allowing me to play the game smarter. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to apply these concepts in a one-on-one basketball situation, because adding in more players will make this more difficult to explain than it should be. I have at least four parts to this series ready to go, with more possibly in the future.
I don’t need to set this up any more. Here is part one of Street Fighter concepts that made me a better basketball player.
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I used to hate mobile gaming with a passion. Before I go into my little rant, let me say that when I mean mobile, I don’t mean dedicated portable gaming systems like the DS or PSP. I mean mobile like cell phone games. I looked down upon that entire segment of gaming. I hated the lack of graphical horsepower. I hated how weird it was to get games on your phone. I hated the poor quality games. I hated the controls. I don’t think any game controls well on a number pad. There was a point in the early-to-mid 2000s when analysts were predicting the cell phone market would expand tremendously, and I scoffed at that notion for all of the problems I mentioned above. Up until the release of the iPhone, I was absolutely right.
In Third Person 