Am i the only one who can't stand fighting games.

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Yes you are the only one in the whole world. These threads will never stop appearing will they?

You are never the only one.

Nah, you're never the ONLY one.

YOU ARE NEVER THE ONLY ONE!

When someone asks "Am I the only one...", it is a fucking expression.

But it is an expression that has become universally loathed on this site due to its abuse. These responses aren't going to quit coming.

Even Mr. Carter has made a comic strip relevant to this very issue.

OT: I am terrible at fighting games but I enjoy watching others play them. People who are into them have typically played them since they were young and have just gotten the knack of that hand-eye-coordination talent early. A friend of mine told me that difficult combos are exciting to pull off, it feels good to see someone of equal or even greater skill fall to your own.

So while I'm terrible at all fighting games (if you don't count SSBM among them like I do), I do appreciate their appeal and I love watching the fights between two of my friends. To each their own.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Yahtzee has a great quote regarding fighting games: "I just don't see the fun in playing a game where you can spend countless hours learning and memorizing every supermove and combo and yet still get your ass handed to you by someone who's just mashing random buttons." And that's true. Fighting games are the only games where you can actually win by just rubbing your palm across the buttons and waggling the thumb stick in random directions

*sigh*

No comment gets made more often about fighting games, and yet no other comment is less true. It's also a belief that not only undermines the genre but turns people away from it when they take it as fact. It ranks right up there with whining about repeated move spam.

Literally every fighting game these days has been designed well enough to allow people who even have a partial idea of what they are doing to beat any button masher, period. In fact, outside of maybe Tekken and Soul Calibur, most fighting games these days don't even support mashing at all. If you mash in SF4, MvC3, BlazBlue, KOF, etc. pretty much nothing will happen except you'll stand there like an idiot throwing out single random moves.

While it's certainly possible that the pure randomness of a masher will win a round here and there against someone who knows what they are doing, they will not win anything more than just that, a single round here or there, assuming the person they are playing against has any idea what they are doing. If someone loses more than that to a masher then, quite simply, they are not as good as you think they are or as good as they tell you they are.

 

[RJ 17]

Yahtzee has a great quote regarding fighting games: "I just don't see the fun in playing a game where you can spend countless hours learning and memorizing every supermove and combo and yet still get your ass handed to you by someone who's just mashing random buttons." And that's true. Fighting games are the only games where you can actually win by just rubbing your palm across the buttons and waggling the thumb stick in random directions

*sigh*

No comment gets made more often about fighting games, and yet no other comment is less true. It's also a belief that not only undermines the genre but turns people away from it when they take it as fact. It ranks right up there with whining about repeated move spam.

Literally every fighting game these days has been designed well enough to allow people who even have a partial idea of what they are doing to beat any button masher, period. In fact, outside of maybe Tekken and Soul Calibur, most fighting games these days don't even support mashing at all. If you mash in SF4, MvC3, BlazBlue, KOF, etc. pretty much nothing will happen except you'll stand there like an idiot throwing out single random moves.

While it's certainly possible that the pure randomness of a masher will win a round here and there against someone who knows what they are doing, they will not win anything more than just that, a single round here or there, assuming the person they are playing against has any idea what they are doing. If someone loses more than that to a masher then, quite simply, they are not as good as you think they are or as good as they tell you they are.

Then there must be a LOT of shitty players out there, because back when I was still playing MvC 3 if I started losing to someone who clearly knew what they were doing (i.e. air combos involving switching out to both other characters and finishing it off with a super move, just in general having a very strong grasp of the game) I could often fall back on button mashing which I'd say gave me about a 75% chance of winning the fight. That said, when I do resort to button mashing, it's not purely random. Given that I have a general idea of the moves and inputs, I am able to "direct" my mashing and pull off some truly ridiculous crap. Hell, I was getting my ass utterly stomped in one game, all I had was Amateras(spelling) with half a life bar against Wesker with full health, Doom with full health, and Dante with about a quarter of his life gone. Begin the button mashing and Amateras apparently went into god mode and stomped those three into dust. After that game the guy sent me a message saying "GG, you're amazing with the dog." to which I admitted "Yeah, would have been nice if I actually meant to do any of that." To which he promptly rage quitted and understandably so: he had just gotten defeated by a button masher despite him clearly being the more skilled player.

I'm not saying that you're wrong. A truly skilled player in MvC3, for example, has a much higher chance of winning than a button masher. What I'm saying, though, is that it is indeed a knock on the entire fighting genre in that it is the only genre in which button mashing - no matter how rarely successful - CAN be successful in the first place. Try button mashing in a shooter and you'll get your face blown off many times. Try button mashing in an RPG and the game will slap you and say "What in god's name are you doing?!" Try button mashing in a fighter, and a lone doggy can curb-stomp 3 of the (arguably) best characters in the game into the dust.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Yahtzee has a great quote regarding fighting games: "I just don't see the fun in playing a game where you can spend countless hours learning and memorizing every supermove and combo and yet still get your ass handed to you by someone who's just mashing random buttons." And that's true. Fighting games are the only games where you can actually win by just rubbing your palm across the buttons and waggling the thumb stick in random directions

*sigh*

No comment gets made more often about fighting games, and yet no other comment is less true. It's also a belief that not only undermines the genre but turns people away from it when they take it as fact. It ranks right up there with whining about repeated move spam.

Literally every fighting game these days has been designed well enough to allow people who even have a partial idea of what they are doing to beat any button masher, period. In fact, outside of maybe Tekken and Soul Calibur, most fighting games these days don't even support mashing at all. If you mash in SF4, MvC3, BlazBlue, KOF, etc. pretty much nothing will happen except you'll stand there like an idiot throwing out single random moves.

While it's certainly possible that the pure randomness of a masher will win a round here and there against someone who knows what they are doing, they will not win anything more than just that, a single round here or there, assuming the person they are playing against has any idea what they are doing. If someone loses more than that to a masher then, quite simply, they are not as good as you think they are or as good as they tell you they are.

Then there must be a LOT of shitty players out there, because back when I was still playing MvC 3 if I started losing to someone who clearly knew what they were doing (i.e. air combos involving switching out to both other characters and finishing it off with a super move, just in general having a very strong grasp of the game) I could often fall back on button mashing which I'd say gave me about a 75% chance of winning the fight. That said, when I do resort to button mashing, it's not purely random. Given that I have a general idea of the moves and inputs, I am able to "direct" my mashing and pull off some truly ridiculous crap. Hell, I was getting my ass utterly stomped in one game, all I had was Amateras(spelling) with half a life bar against Wesker with full health, Doom with full health, and Dante with about a quarter of his life gone. Begin the button mashing and Amateras apparently went into god mode and stomped those three into dust. After that game the guy sent me a message saying "GG, you're amazing with the dog." to which I admitted "Yeah, would have been nice if I actually meant to do any of that." To which he promptly rage quitted and understandably so: he had just gotten defeated by a button masher despite him clearly being the more skilled player.

I'm not saying that you're wrong. A truly skilled player in MvC3, for example, has a much higher chance of winning than a button masher. What I'm saying, though, is that it is indeed a knock on the entire fighting genre in that it is the only genre in which button mashing - no matter how rarely successful - CAN be successful in the first place. Try button mashing in a shooter and you'll get your face blown off many times. Try button mashing in an RPG and the game will slap you and say "What in god's name are you doing?!" Try button mashing in a fighter, and a lone doggy can curb-stomp 3 of the (arguably) best characters in the game into the dust.

As I said, skill is relative. Picking certain characters or knowing certain combos doesn't mean someone is able to really play the game. Underneath character choice and basic move knowledge is understanding of the fundamentals of play. Since this is a thread that started with SC, it's perhaps most apt to use an analogy to that series. SC uses a block button. Using it is a pretty fundamental thing. No matter which character you use or how amazing your offense appears to be, if you don't press the block button to stop yourself from getting hit you will lose. Obviously for all of the appearance the player you describe had of being a capable player, once pressed they obviously didn't possess a strong enough fundamental grasp of the actual game beneath what they saw on youtube and learned in the combo trials. To your statement, yes, there are a lot of players out there who actually are terrible at fighters yet think and say they are good because the idiosyncracies of online play and, sadly, a lack of proper teaching tools in the games themselves don't tell them otherwise. (This is often what leads to the second most common complaint about fighters, move spam being unbeatable, when their random "strategy" that used to get them wins just doesn't work anymore).

There's also a question of mindset. What do you think was the mental state of the person you were playing once you started to turn the tables on them? What was your mental state once you stopped playing not to lose and actually started doing whatever you could to win (including "directed" mashing, which is completely different than what most people talk about when they say mashing)? Anyone can crack under pressure just as anyone can excel under pressure, and no genre makes this more obvious than fighting games because they are so pure an outlet of the physical/mental link.

As for your belief that mashing can't/doesn't work in any other genre. I see what you're saying but it once again hinges on exactly what you mean by mashing. Unlike in other genres, pure random mashing does work in fighters rarely, purely due to the nature and design of the genre. In your case, however, you seem to be implying mashing built upon some knowledge and a foundation of understanding of how the game works. In that vein, I think there are plenty of parallels in other genres. In the shooter realm, you have things like the shotgun in Gears of War or the n00b tube in CoD where, as long as you have some ability to move and aim, the power of the weapon alone is actually specifically designed to give the less skilled a chance to compete. Or even in an RTS, for example, you have developed strategies akin to a zerg rush. Quick, fairly painless and easy to learn and execute, but with high reward even for someone not overly skilled or knowledgeable. Not exactly mashing, no, but given your personal description of mashing, I think they fit well enough.

 

[daveman247]

I would loove to love these games (Especially the newest mortal kombat)

But the move memorisation is just too much for me :/

 

[RJ 17]

Snip-Snap!

All of your points are perfectly valid and I'm not trying to argue them. But just as how every gaming genre has it's built-in flaws, the fact that truly random button mashing (as opposed to my "directed" mashing) can garner any amount of success - no matter how rare - is one of the built-in flaws of fighters, which is what I tried to say in my previous post.

The problem with comparing button mashing to things like the newbtewb or shotgun is that - while all three things can definitely be equated to "I have no real skill so I'll do this" - they are fundamentally different. Specifically by the fact that both the newtewb and the shotgun are built-in parts of their games while button mashing isn't. I just can't imagine a developer making a fighting game saying "And just for the people who just can't get a hang of things, lets make it easy for them to push random buttons in a chaotic manner and be able to beat-ass." That is, developers don't make fighting games while including "button mashing" as a valid strategy. They know it's going to happen, it always does in fighters. But they hope that people will take the time to learn the moves and the combos. The guns, on the other hand, ARE built into their games. Developers specifically put them in there so that they can be used.

Am I saying that all fighters suck simply because people can get away with button mashing? No. In fact I actually do enjoy fighting games...not as much as I used, to, but I bought MvC 3 and still play it from time to time. Truth be told, however, I much prefer watching two people who know what they're doing very well fight each other in a fighting game. I introduced a friend of mine to MvC2 on the Dreamcast...having no idea what he was doing but absolutely loving the game, I beat his ass over and over again. This guy's name is Nick Plott, currently one of the top Star Craft players in North America (yeah, I actually went to high school with a gamer celebrity). I bring this up because this guy is a ridiculously amazing gamer able to learn and adapt at an astounding rate. Within a week he was already beating my ass in the most amazing ways, knew everything about every character, and within a month he was already winning tournaments at the local arcades. I could be thoroughly entertained watching him play MvC2 all day long. But then again I could be thoroughly entertained watching him play just about anything.

Tangent aside, the summation of my statement is that the biggest knock against the fighting genre is that button mashing can trump skill, even if it doesn't happen very often. But like I said: ALL gaming genre's have their pros and cons...that's why different people like different types of games.

 

[Argtee]

I like arcade-y fighting games like Street Fighter.
Even if you do suck, you can still kinda get by.

Then there's BlazBlue...
[sub]I...don't want to talk about it...[/sub]

 

[Fappy]

I like arcade-y fighting games like Street Fighter.
Even if you do suck, you can still kinda get by.

Then there's BlazBlue...
[sub]I...don't want to talk about it...[/sub]

But that's why its so fun! When you pick up a new character its like you are playing an entirely different game!