street fighter

Using ‘Cost Per Hour’ to Determine the Value of a Game

Jett4 Comments

cost-per-hour

Over the past few years of following podcasts, message boards and reviews, there seems to be this weird metric that creeps into discussions in one way or another. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to it as ‘cost per hour’. It’s a metric that people directly or indirectly use to judge a game’s value based on how much it costs and how long the experience is. I will express it with the following formula:

Value = Cost of Game/Number of Hours Played

In a perfect world, where money directly translates into valuable experiences, these types of metrics could work as a means of judging a game’s value. However, this logic is flawed, because neither cost or value variables are consistent. You can’t make a blanket statement saying that Limbo is too expensive at $15 dollars because it’s only a 3-hour experience, because it might go on sale, someone may take longer/shorter to beat it, and subjective opinion may say that their time with it was totally worth that price.

The price you pay for that experience and the length of that experience are viable factors in determining a game’s value, but not the whole picture. However, what if we did take away all of the other factors? Is it possible to come up with a consensus cost per hour rate to determine whether or not a game is worth it? I take a few examples from my collection and crunch the numbers to find out.

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Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 4: Exploiting Weaknesses

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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, Part 3: Resource Management

Exploitation of Weaknesses

When I play the computer in Street Fighter IV as Akuma, regardless of difficulty, I can almost always land a Raging Demon. I don’t know what the guys at Capcom did about the AI, but 99% of the time when I input that command, the computer just stands there and eats it. Human opponents in general are tougher to fool, but virtually everyone has weaknesses of some sort. When I play an opponent, one of the very first things I check is my opponent’s ability to block a cross-up. It’s a tactic that most casual players don’t understand and won’t figure out how to counteract it within the span of one match. When I notice that my opponent doesn’t have an answer for that, or any other tactic that I throw at them, I will repeatedly use that tactic until I win or until my opponent finds an answer.

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Game Music I Love: Street Fighter II Soundtrack

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Back in the early 90s, you couldn’t walk by an arcade without hearing that intro theme music to Street Fighter II. Street Fighter II was revolutionary for a number of reasons. It became the blueprint that every 2D fighting game has followed ever since. It introduced a new layer of video game controls and complexity. It had what would become some of the most iconic sounds in all of video games (hadoken!). What it doesn’t get as much credit for is that it was one of the first games to introduce a new level of complexity in music while being as catchy and timeless as any of the best video game soundtracks ever.

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Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 3: Resource Management

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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.

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My 14 Years Without Fighting Games

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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?

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Street Fight Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 2: Punishing Mistakes

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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

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.

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Street Fighter Concepts That Made Me a Better Basketball Player – Part 1: Spacing

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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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25 Things About Me As A Gamer

Jett3 Comments

If I plan on selling you my voice and personality as the reason to regularly check in with this site, I probably should give you at least a few tidbits about me to start. If you’ve got a “25 Things About Me As A Gamer” that you’d like to share with me and the rest of the world, leave it in the comments section!

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