What fighting game(s) did you guys play to make you hate fighting games so much?

[DrOswald]

The fighting game genre is overdeveloped. Which is to say, fighting games have become so advanced and entrenched in expected mechanics they alienate newer players. There are many levels of depth, but they are extremely shallow on the surface level.

This is why people hate fighting games and continually make the provably incorrect claim that they are all about button mashing and memorizing long button combos. Because that is what the games are until you get to an advanced level of play. That is what any regular joe is going to experience going into any fighting game these days.

This is not something unique to fighting games. Hell it isn't even something unique to games. All art is like this. It always leads to a crash back to simplicity. it is a cycle. Simplicity to complexity to overly complex to crash back to simplicity.

This is because a genre that is impenetrable generates no new recruits, and eventually the old guard has to cycle out for one reason or another. Eventually there are not enough people remaining to make the art profitable, and it loses funding and it crashes back to a more simple form that newbies can enjoy.

In fact, I think the only reason we have not seen a simplicity crash back in the genre yet is because of the existence of Smash Bros, which supplies the genre with a trickle of new recruits, and the fighting game tendency to make their female characters sex dolls, which supplements the revenue generated by the game (for actually being a good game) with sex driven purchases, and motivates people to learn fighting game mechanics because they might as well play the game that came with the T&A they wanted. But I do think one will come eventually.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

And Seth was hilariously bad, as his attacks would outright ignore mine, and some how hit me when I was using my longer attacks outside of his range. It was great, and my first game of it, and I immediately turned it off. Not dealing with that bullshit.

Certain attacks have invincibility, such as Shoryukens and many EX specials.
Your limbs have hitboxes even while they're extended for attacks.
Put the two together and yes, Seth can EX command grab your leg when you kick.

That's part of how a lot of 2D fighters work, and you can do it too. There's also 'priority', but I don't know much about how that applies to Street Fighter.

You know, it wasn't even Seth, who is a boss and not who I was thinking of. It was some fat guy doing spins, that when I kicked at him, he'd hit me instead, and was able to spam the entire match. It was absolute garbage, because when I did play it, he never came out of that spin, and none of my attacks could effect him while he was in it, and so I will forever shit on SF4 for that one match.

And, I know now that i've said it all i'm gonna get is, 'lol ur bad', but his attack would hit me when I was out of his range. I just wasn't gonna put up with learning how to play a shit game.

MVC3, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, Skullgirls, Guilty Gear, Soul Caliber, DoA, Tekken. Not one of them hand you that kind of shit on a platter and expect you to stick around. While characters in those games have some bullshit range and attacks too, somehow it feels less blatant for the most part.

Then again, I've never liked Street Fighter, in any of it's incarnations. (I thought 2 was abysmally boring.)

Attacks have 3 "phases".

Startup - the part where someone pulls back their fist in preparation for a punch

Active - the part where people can be hurt from your punch

Recovery - the part after "active" has ended where the attacker is stuck in a recoil-style animation and is unable to do any other actions for a (very small) period of time

Also, lots of moves can have invincibility during those periods. You must memorize which move has invincibility and during which period if you wish to hit someone with such a move.

What you do to punish the spin you're mentioning is wait for the (very, very long) active phase of it to end and then time an attack so that it will make contact with his body during the "recovery" period specified above. It might seem obtuse but 5 minutes in training mode will avail you of the timing you need to pull that punish off every time and after that you will never lose to it ever again.

The reason why it was hitting you, btw, is that you were trying to hit it during the "active" period which for that specific move happens to be also invincible, therefore your attacks were going through him. You simply can not hit moves which are invincible, they're there to provide chars with a defensive option to stop the attacker. What you have to do is predict your foe is gonna do that move, block it, then punish its "recovery", since all of those invincible moves tend to have punishable recovery. It's the core of the mindgame of fighting games; "do I hit him or do I block and call out his invincible move?". Getting this mind game down is the first step to doing well in fighters.

It's still a shit system and game. Because that's basically telling me, 'unless you already know what super special moves have invincibility, trying to counter is fucking stupid and wrong'. Dark Souls isn't even so obtuse in how to hit dudes.

I guess I don't play fighters with much invincibility frames in them, because that sort of obnoxious shit is what kills any enthusiasm I have for a game. I mean seriously, 'check out my invincible attack, instead of interrupting me and landing a few hits, you have to wait until i'm done before you can hit me, if my recovery is long enough to give a damn.'

 

[Username Redacted]

I'm trying to say my piece in the least dick-ish way possible so please keep that in mind if you continue reading. The people who're complaining about Boss Seth in SFIV don't make me question their skill at fighting games (if someone says they're bad at fighting games I usually take their word for it) rather it makes me question their ability to recognize patterns and/or their problem solving skills. Seth as a character is powerful because he has a ton of tools (invincible reversal, projectile, command throw, teleport, etc.) that in the hands of a competent opponent can make him formidable indeed. Boss Seth however does not really abuse his tool set. From full screen the character will almost always throw a Sonic Boom or use far standing heavy punch (stretchy arms). Both of these attacks are easily avoided. When he's closer Boss Seth is waaaaaay too enamored with using his focus attack and Tandem Engine (rarely pokes with normal attacks; will occasionally gamble with Hyakuretsukyaku <- lightning kicks). We'll get to the former in a second but in general the latter can be avoided or mitigated by back-dashing. With the focus attack ANY character with a decent, long reaching armor breaking attack will beat him up and take his lunch money (e.g. Guile's Flash Kick). It is quit possible to kill Boss Seth using almost nothing but armor breaking moves and essentially letting him kill himself. Characters like Rose (Soul Spiral), Cody (Ruffian Kick, Zonk Knuckle) or Guile (Flash Kick) are example of characters that can easily abuse the shit AI that runs Boss Seth.

In general my metric for cheating AI is unpatched vanilla Dead or Alive 5 as the computer in that game can actually beat the best players in the game because it is inhuman in its ability to use the games counter system. UMvC3 is sort of a different beast as the AI in that game will just do things that would require inhuman reactions but that aren't strictly speaking impossible or requiring the computer to be an input reading whore.

 

[Lufia Erim]

I'm trying to say my piece in the least dick-ish way possible so please keep that in mind if you continue reading. The people who're complaining about Boss Seth in SFIV don't make me question their skill at fighting games (if someone says they're bad at fighting games I usually take their word for it) rather it makes me question their ability to recognize patterns and/or their problem solving skills. Seth as a character is powerful because he has a ton of tools (invincible reversal, projectile, command throw, teleport, etc.) that in the hands of a competent opponent can make him formidable indeed. Boss Seth however does not really abuse his tool set. From full screen the character will almost always throw a Sonic Boom or use far standing heavy punch (stretchy arms). Both of these attacks are easily avoided. When he's closer Boss Seth is waaaaaay too enamored with using his focus attack and Tandem Engine (rarely pokes with normal attacks; will occasionally gamble with Hyakuretsukyaku <- lightning kicks). We'll get to the former in a second but in general the latter can be avoided or mitigated by back-dashing. With the focus attack ANY character with a decent, long reaching armor breaking attack will beat him up and take his lunch money (e.g. Guile's Flash Kick). It is quit possible to kill Boss Seth using almost nothing but armor breaking moves and essentially letting him kill himself. Characters like Rose (Soul Spiral), Cody (Ruffian Kick, Zonk Knuckle) or Guile (Flash Kick) are example of characters that can easily abuse the shit AI that runs Boss Seth.

In general my metric for cheating AI is unpatched vanilla Dead or Alive 5 as the computer in that game can actually beat the best players in the game because it is inhuman in its ability to use the games counter system. UMvC3 is sort of a different beast as the AI in that game will just do things that would require inhuman reactions but that aren't strictly speaking impossible or requiring the computer to be an input reading whore.

I actually liked UMVC3 on the highest difficulty. The opponents would actually block almost everything. ALMOST. The few times it didn't, was your openings to go Ham. It was a bassically a glorified " hit-comfirm" practice.

 

[Redryhno]

It's still a shit system and game. Because that's basically telling me, 'unless you already know what super special moves have invincibility, trying to counter is fucking stupid and wrong'. Dark Souls isn't even so obtuse in how to hit dudes.

I guess I don't play fighters with much invincibility frames in them, because that sort of obnoxious shit is what kills any enthusiasm I have for a game. I mean seriously, 'check out my invincible attack, instead of interrupting me and landing a few hits, you have to wait until i'm done before you can hit me, if my recovery is long enough to give a damn.'

Yeah, but DarkSouls you have to memorize what enemies you have to/can dodge/parry/block, and even then, if they've got a different weapon, you have memorize something completely different because their moveset is different. Then there's the recovery where you've got more chances to hit them if you did the dodge/block than if you'd just dodged/blocked.

It's the same system really, just a different perspective.

The fighting game genre is overdeveloped. Which is to say, fighting games have become so advanced and entrenched in expected mechanics they alienate newer players. There are many levels of depth, but they are extremely shallow on the surface level.

This is why people hate fighting games and continually make the provably incorrect claim that they are all about button mashing and memorizing long button combos. Because that is what the games are until you get to an advanced level of play. That is what any regular joe is going to experience going into any fighting game these days.

This is not something unique to fighting games. Hell it isn't even something unique to games. All art is like this. It always leads to a crash back to simplicity. it is a cycle. Simplicity to complexity to overly complex to crash back to simplicity.

This is because a genre that is impenetrable generates no new recruits, and eventually the old guard has to cycle out for one reason or another. Eventually there are not enough people remaining to make the art profitable, and it loses funding and it crashes back to a more simple form that newbies can enjoy.

In fact, I think the only reason we have not seen a simplicity crash back in the genre yet is because of the existence of Smash Bros, which supplies the genre with a trickle of new recruits, and the fighting game tendency to make their female characters sex dolls, which supplements the revenue generated by the game (for actually being a good game) with sex driven purchases, and motivates people to learn fighting game mechanics because they might as well play the game that came with the T&A they wanted. But I do think one will come eventually.

Uhh...I'm gonna have to call bull on most of what you're saying here. I didn't get involved in fighters until a few years ago. Hated them since I was a kid and was a button-mashing pleb. I've gotten better and have a couple of mains in a couple of different games since then, so it's not about alienating new players, it alienates those that don't want to learn and be stomped into the ground while playing against better players than themselves. The way you're talking up fighting games is like Dark Souls level challenge hype, when the challenge is honestly about the same as it really is in reality between the two.

You learn through doing, it's not a genre that you can just pick up and expect to win. And Newbies have always been able to get into fighters, Mortal Kombat hasn't ever really reached a competitive level, it's always been a bit of a pub game, Smash with no items is a good primer while also being incredibly competitive. I don't want simplicity in the genre, I want it to be complex, because it means that much more when you pull something amazing off. If anyone can just button mash and do the same, it's not a game anymore, it's a badass fauxmulator

 

[Chaos Isaac]

Stuff Said Here!

You don't actually have to memorize what the enemies in DKS do, generally playing reaction based is entirely possible, albeit more difficulty. And you naturally tend to learn what a enemy does, or at least have a decent chance to move due to everything's wind-up animations.

Yes, it's similar, but i'd say learning Dark Souls is actually far easier to get into and learn to play then most fighters. And Dark Souls is purposefully obtuse and difficult. Meanwhile in fighter-land, there's so much going on, and a lot of it that really is either badly designed or so shittily taught to you, that it doesn't matter to most people.

And... complexity doesn't mean good. You enjoy it and all, but too many fighters have delved too far into it, that players already entrenched in it, are the only ones who can enjoy it fully. Those players are typically also the ones who can break into other fighter systems.

 

[Redryhno]

Stuff Said Here!

You don't actually have to memorize what the enemies in DKS do, generally playing reaction based is entirely possible, albeit more difficulty. And you naturally tend to learn what a enemy does, or at least have a decent chance to move due to everything's wind-up animations.

Yes, it's similar, but i'd say learning Dark Souls is actually far easier to get into and learn to play then most fighters. And Dark Souls is purposefully obtuse and difficult. Meanwhile in fighter-land, there's so much going on, and a lot of it that really is either badly designed or so shittily taught to you, that it doesn't matter to most people.

And... complexity doesn't mean good. You enjoy it and all, but too many fighters have delved too far into it, that players already entrenched in it, are the only ones who can enjoy it fully. Those players are typically also the ones who can break into other fighter systems.

And generally playing fully reaction based is going to get you killed by the environment or things you weren't aware of in an enemy's skillset. The Darkroot Hyrda and Quelaag for instance, both have safe spots where nothing can really hit you that they throw at you, but stay there too long, and they'll one-shot you with their special move that only appears when you're sitting in their butts for a certain period of time. The hydra even is set up in a place where if you just want ot fight him, you have to find the sweet, no-aggro spot to fight him. Seath has his crystal where he takes no damage until you break it, along with strafing around in an area will get you killed because he'll just breath and a pillar of crystal will just analize you, you have to constantly run around, stick him in the butt a couple times, then run away because he can turn and breathe on you alot faster than you'd think. Hell, even Gwyn has it coded to go aggro as all hell when you Estus too close to him. You don't get to play full reaction all the time in that game, it's all about how fast you learn and adapt to the enemy/situation at hand.

It's the same in fighters, most games are only at most five minutes long, and most moves have a tell and knowing what tools you have at every point to combat your opponent. They're about learning and you'd honestly be surprised how bad the lower ranked people are, there's button mashers, people that main but don't know much about anything else, and the people that just play to have fun. It's not the game and the mechanics holding anyone back, it's only themselves and their willingness to learn through trial, error, mistakes, and triumphs. If you can pass college Algebra, you can probably at the very least be competent in any fighter. Unless you get in at the ground floor of every game, chances are you'll never play against the best players when you first start out, you'll be fine if you just TRY. That's all fighters are about, after all, being competitive and not giving up just because of a shitty tutorial.

Now, if you don't like them, that's fine, nothing against you, I don't like racing games or hack'slash-like games, but the reasons you're putting forth are not really true of the games so much as the people trying to play them.

 

[AncientSpark]

Speaking about fighting games as a sort-of fighting game player myself, I think a large part of fighting game complaints, especially those talking about lack of feedback or overwhelming AI difficulty or button mashing, largely comes down to one truth that is counter-intuitive to a lot of non fighting-game enthusiasts: Fighting games are fundamentally based off of unreactable moves.

Shoryuken recently did an article on this: http://shoryuken.com/2015/05/21/human-reaction-times-and-fighting-games-or-why-blocking-isnt-always-easy/ The gist of it is that even top reactions usually number around 16 frames, which, in terms of fighting game moves, is incredibly slow. Even many overheads, which are designed to be slow moves in the first place, number within that range. So what happens with almost everyone is that people don't immediately process a move is coming out until it's active, in which case it's too late to respond.

And this can explain many "false" complaints that comes at fighting games. The lack of feedback occurs because the mind cannot immediately react to when a move comes out, so it appears to many players that a game is almost random in how it works. Attacks that out-prioritize others or come out with notable properties (like DPs) are difficult to understand when they occur too fast for most humans to react to the stimuli. Similarly, AI difficulty comes about because of this. One person earlier in the thread swore that SF4 Boss Seth's moves "came out faster" than their moves, which might as well be the case, but during the game, it's impossible to recognize this on reaction. And this leads to people believing button mashing is more effective because when you're button mashing, you turn off the inhibition of relying on your reaction speed and simply start acting proactively (albeit randomly).

This simple fact is actually incredibly counter-intuitive to how people generally treat gaming in general. We're used to the action games where the game is designed to have big enough tells to react to or strategy games where damage doesn't occur so fast as to inhibit thought processes. Even the other "twitchy" genre, FPSes, don't have as much of a problem in this aspect because, while reactions are a problem in that game, there's also generally only a few things to react to and only a few options available to each player when in a twitch-situation, compared to fighters where you might have upwards of 20+ options. (In such a FPS, you're only asked to know one piece of information that's very very obvious: is there an enemy in front of me? In such a situation, this allows you to shortcut your reaction time a little.) People go into fighting games expecting to be able to react to situations like they can react to other games because that's a normal assumption to make and then become confused when their reactions don't provide them all the information that they need to learn and enjoy the game.

How players compensate for this is usually through prediction and knowledge, but this makes it even worse for newer players relying on off-line to learn, because prediction means very little vs AI opponents. Yes, you can compensate partially with things like learning how to position and learning the basics of your character, but after a certain point, reacting to AI behavior feels very random and punishing to those newer to the game. This leads them to then conclude that the game is all about memorizing, because, again, players cannot inherently react to frame-specific behavior. They instead latch onto feedback that is immediately obvious on the screen or how they feel the game is going, things like combo potential or whether they feel the enemy was "cheap" or not.

And that's a big problem with fighting games. The whole fuel that even drives fighting games as a whole, prediction, is not available to most people and it often goes too fast for people to learn about it. It's not even a solid concept; for example, if someone adamantly doesn't recognize how to dodge an enemy attack in an action game, they can still look it up to learn about how to dodge it when they get frustrated because that's a more binary behavior. There's at least one right answer and it's clear when that answer works or at least partially does. Prediction in fighting games is not like that at all.

BTW: If you want to try the FGC reaction test with Millia linked to in the article, but you aren't familiar with Guilty Gear, the overhead attacks you're asked to block are the forward flip and the diving moon-looking attack.

 

[SweetShark]

First of, I will NEVER hate a videogame for my inability to be good at fighting games.
However I will admit this: After I played some matches in the game Skullgirls, I said to myself "Yep, this is futile. I suck balls."
But I digress, I love fighting games because of the characters and crazy stories I read about.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

And generally playing fully reaction based is going to get you killed by the environment or things you weren't aware of in an enemy's skillset. The Darkroot Hyrda and Quelaag for instance, both have safe spots where nothing can really hit you that they throw at you, but stay there too long, and they'll one-shot you with their special move that only appears when you're sitting in their butts for a certain period of time. The hydra even is set up in a place where if you just want ot fight him, you have to find the sweet, no-aggro spot to fight him. Seath has his crystal where he takes no damage until you break it, along with strafing around in an area will get you killed because he'll just breath and a pillar of crystal will just analize you, you have to constantly run around, stick him in the butt a couple times, then run away because he can turn and breathe on you alot faster than you'd think. Hell, even Gwyn has it coded to go aggro as all hell when you Estus too close to him. You don't get to play full reaction all the time in that game, it's all about how fast you learn and adapt to the enemy/situation at hand.

It's the same in fighters, most games are only at most five minutes long, and most moves have a tell and knowing what tools you have at every point to combat your opponent. They're about learning and you'd honestly be surprised how bad the lower ranked people are, there's button mashers, people that main but don't know much about anything else, and the people that just play to have fun. It's not the game and the mechanics holding anyone back, it's only themselves and their willingness to learn through trial, error, mistakes, and triumphs. If you can pass college Algebra, you can probably at the very least be competent in any fighter. Unless you get in at the ground floor of every game, chances are you'll never play against the best players when you first start out, you'll be fine if you just TRY. That's all fighters are about, after all, being competitive and not giving up just because of a shitty tutorial.

Now, if you don't like them, that's fine, nothing against you, I don't like racing games or hack'slash-like games, but the reasons you're putting forth are not really true of the games so much as the people trying to play them.

I've never seen the Hydra or Quelaag do a special one-shot move. (Though I know Quelaag has the back off AoE burst, while powerful, not necessarily instant death. And she telegraphs it so if you're paying attention, you can see her doing something weird.)

As for the Hydra, you can just run down there, dodge/block the attack, and throw magic/arrows/melee it as it's there. You don't need to hide in a special spot.

Seath is actually kinda brilliant, as it let's you run up to this crystal, which kinda has been hinted about through the game and his palace. (That he found a way to get immortality, and low and behold, when you get close to it he comes flying in to end you.) And even if you don't catch onto it, he can break it, or you can break it on accident with a wide swing. (Which I did my first time.)

I played and beat all of the bosses by walking about blindly and fighting them. A bit of thinking on your toes and you can generally beat everything in dark souls. (Which is not the same as memorizing.) The bed of chaos would be the one maybe i'd give 'cause of the insta death nature of that fight.

Plus, you know, the co-op aspect that can let anyone finish the game if they can't beat a boss by themselves. (Either learn as a summon, teach as a summon, or summon a badass who'll kick major ass in your name to help you out.)

That's not relevant in a fighter, well, not as much. You can pick up any character, and find out that they're special focused, or a puppeteer, or a fast combo focus, maybe a grappler or decent all-around, and have no fucking clue how to play any of them starting asides this button may do one type of attack out of however many said fighter has. Oh, then you try to learn the special moves of the individual, which chances are give you a name and a vague pattern of buttons and directions may be way to sensitive to pull of reliably to your average player. (And this is really a personal complaint of mine, I find mashing the buttons for a special move to be more effective then carefully and quickly inputting it because of how shit most games take them.)

Oh, and then you learn that their ultimate is a fucking counter when you finally manage to pull it off, and completely blow it because you had no way to know that, and thought like all of the other ultimates, it'd attack a dude of it's own volition.

Then you finally learn how to play that character, oh you can pull of all of their moves, and it turns out they're worthless past newbies because character b or c has faster moves, better range, more i-frames, more damage, and less stupid specials that are harder to avoid, and as such, are on a higher tier. (All these examples here, are problems i've seen and encountered.

And the funny thing is, I don't even dislike fighters. I like to play them, but I sure as hell do recognize their bullshit, and honestly don't consider most of them to be good enough to be truly 'competitive'. I have learned how to play some of them, and other's I tried but dropped it 'cause it sucked. (Street Fighter 4, top of this list.)

Also, seriously dude, a lot of the time it is the game/mechanic holding people back. They're generally too convoluted, and yes, while repetition and too much time spent learning can get you somewhere, but the games never really try to get you into them. Sure, plenty of people just want to play for fun, and not learn the intricacies but personally as someone whose tried to learn and basically been told to go home by the game itself, I can assure you it's not 'just the players'.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

What can i say, i do like fighting games!

Ever since i played Way of the Exploding Fist on my Commodore 64 i've been a fan. I'll give anything a go and when i think i'm just button mashing i will step back and try to learn some moves. The only thing i don't like about them is the massive combo chains that, while impressive, spoil the fun for the other player.

 

[Lufia Erim]

What can i say, i do like fighting games!

Ever since i played Way of the Exploding Fist on my Commodore 64 i've been a fan. I'll give anything a go and when i think i'm just button mashing i will step back and try to learn some moves. The only thing i don't like about them is the massive combo chains that, while impressive, spoil the fun for the other player.

Honestly, the only games i can think of with massive combo chains are marvel vs capcom 3 ( which is broken), blazblue ( which has a burst mechanic) and Killer instinct ( which have combo breakers). People put a little too much emphasis on combos imo. Usually people get comboed back to back, but that's because their defense isn't good, less because the game allows massive comboes.

 

[joest01]

Tekken 5 on psp, Virtua 5 on PS3, P4A on PS3.

Of the games listed the one I enjoyed and actually finished many times was Tekken. But I never felt I was particularly good at it. I basically abused the uppercut of the boxer dude. Also in ad hoc games with friends. Virtua I invested a lot of time in the JKD guy and started to get the hang of him. But I just never felt the actual connection between my inputs and what the character does. And yea, P4A was more for the characters, but I couldn't get into it.

Then, checking reviews online I stumble upon reviews of Injustice and they say its pretty accessible. So I got it and man, the worst of the bunch. Silly dial a combo's for the most basic moves. You have to precisely dial 3 buttons to throw a batarang fer chrissake.

And I am not even opposed to dial a combo games. I play the crap out of Ninja Gaiden and Bayonetta. But there the izuna drop actually makes you feel like you launch the enemy, pummel them and then crash them down.