Perpetual Comeback Mechanisms: A Comparison March 6, 2010
Posted by Weng in Me Complaining About Things, Rants, Street Fighter, Tekken.Tags: alisa, cody, dudley, game mechanics, guy, hakan, ibuki, Lets Get Oiled Up!, lili, makoto, new ultras, Rage, Street Fighter 4, super street fighter 4, tekken 6, ultra combo
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The ability to bust out epic comebacks is hardly something new in fighting games. In fact, they’re probably the things that generate the most hype and excitement, whether they be in casual games with just a small group of people or in the large-scale at a huge tournament like EVO. It’s that whole rooting-for-the-underdog phenomenon. That’s why Slumdog Millionaire and the Mighty Ducks worked as movies.
However, one thing that’s somewhat unique about the current ‘generation’ of fighting games is the inclusion of what I’ll dub Perpetual Comeback Mechanisms. Basically game mechanics and systems that increase the chances of said comeback occuring. These generally come in the form of advantages as you take more damage.
Historically, the King of Fighters series did arguably have this in some form. In some games when you reached critical health (as in, impractically critical) you were able to use your Desparation Moves (supers basically) without draining your bar and also had access to Super Desparation Moves, super-supers.
Also: when you lost a round/one of your characters, you were able to store an extra level of super bar beyond what you could previously. Your first character could only have a maximum of 3 super bars whilst your final character could have 5.
But whatever, I don’t play KOF, why bother rambling on about it when I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about. The major topics of this entry (as with ALL my fighting-game entries these days) are Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 6, and the Ultra Combo system and the Rage system.
And you thought Iori was prissy.
RAGE – Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
The Tekken 6 Rage system activates when you’re on about the last 10% of your health. Your health bar flashes red and your character gets cool red lines on his moves (or different effects if you’ve bought the character customization). More importantly, from a comeback point of view, all your strikes do far more damage. In a game like Tekken where strikes and juggle combos already do large amounts of damage WITHOUT RAAAAGEEEEE, it’s very possible to make big comebacks with two or three good high/low mixup guesses.
Conversely though, it only activates at such a low percentage of health that the opponent can afford to play extremely safely and resort to doing jabs that are difficult to punish or a quick low to just chip off that last dash of health. Successfully guessing and blocking correctly during the Ragers attempt to attack you with a high risk launcher move will also generally leave them in enough frame disadvantage for you to do a quick jab-string to finish them off.
Ultraman/lisks/Combos
Street Fighter 4′s ultra system works in a similar way. You have two gauges (3 if you want to be a pedantic douche and include your health bar. You know what I mean, two ENERGY BAR SUPER GAUGE THINGS) an EX/Super bar which is filled by attacking your opponent and an Ultra combo bar which fills as you take damage or absorb it via Focus Attacks. Once you’re down to about 50% of your health, you gain access to your ultra combo which is flashy and does large amounts of damage and what not.
These then vary in usefulness and damage and function depending on the character you happen to be using.
I personally believe that the Ultra combo system, despite it’s purpose as a Perpetual Comeback Mechanism designed to make the game ‘exciting’ in fact leads to the opposite in most cases due to the nature of the game itself. Street Fighter 4 is arguably the most defensively-skewed and orientated Street Fighter game ever.
The reversal window on wakeup to be able to time Shoryukens (or any move with invincibility on startup really) is massive. As opposed to requiring some degree of timing to ensure your move came out before you were vulnerable, it’s far more lax. Also, the dragon punch motion has a shortcut of diagonal-down-forward x 2 instead of being forced to input the proper Dragon Punch motion (f,d,df)
You can argue that making it easier just removes some of the physical execution factor of the game but it also means that the usefulness of meaty attacks (attacks on a downed opponent that hit quite late as they are waking up and have better frame-advantage as a result) essentially drops greatly.
“Whatever, you’re just shit. Why don’t you just fake out with a meaty, bait their Shoryuken and block-and-punish?”
Yeah, sure, that might work if there weren’t EX Focus Attack Dash Cancels. Essentially, for the cost of 2 EX bars, you can cancel the recovery of your Shoryuken making it totally safe, even if blocked. And if it’s not? You can dash out of your Shoryuken and connect the entirety of your Ultra.
Typically a Shoryuken is a high-risk move but in Street Fighter 4 it transforms into something that’s low-risk, massive reward. Even if it’s blocked, the FADC will let you dash in and put you in a position to force a 50-50 between teching a throw or doing ANOTHER Shoryuken.
Whilst I’m still ranting about how stupidly anti-offense SF4 is, they’re effectively killed crossups. If you jumped over your opponent as he was down, he’d need to block the right way or alter his SRK motion by reversing it to be able to Anti-Air it, BUT in Street Fighter 4 with the shortcuts and a degree of auto-correcting without needing to input the entire motion, you can essentially waggle the stick between db and df and press punch and get something to come out.
If it hits? FADC it, Ultra.
If it’s blocked? FADC it, get out of jail free
If you TRADE an air attack with a Shoryuken or Tiger Uppercut? You eat a full ultra, no need to FADC it and waste bar, Ryu or Sagat or whomever recovers BEFORE the guy who just got launched into the stratosphere and they eat a good 500 damage (most characters having 1000 health).
Every time this animation plays - I kill an entire litter of cute animals.
“Okay, whatever, defensive bias in game mechanics, risk-reward skewed, but that doesn’t make it a boring game does it?”
If only it were just that. My other problem with the Ultra system is that instead of facilitating a more interesting game, it leads to a more boring game. This is because some characters have ultras that effectively lock the opponent from doing anything. Ryu or Sagat have an ultra bar? Don’t even think about jumping at them. Ever.
They’re like EB Games – they always profit off a trade if they don’t screw you over straight up.
In no other Street Fighter game worth playing, ever, has a TRADE of a jumping attack against a Shoryuken actually been far far WORSE than just getting hit straight out. The trade was almost always the second-best outcome outside of just landing your jumpin. They took damage, you took damage, you were knocked down but at least they took damage.
It’s not only that really. Abel and Chun-Li (and to a lesser extent, Balrog) have Ultras that go straight through fireballs. Say goodbye to a large chunk of the zoning game too! Yaaay! NOT BEING ALLOWED TO PLAY THE GAME!
Then you’ve got Seth. Fucking Seth. Sure the usable version of him doesn’t do that much damage and takes a craptonne but his ultra is the DEFINITION of lockout.
He’s throwing fireballs at you. BUT you can’t throw fireballs. He’ll ultra through it.
He’s throwing fireballs at you. BUT you can’t jump over them. He’ll ultra your jump from almost ANY DISTANCE
I could go on for a long long time about it all how much I actually hate Street Fighter 4 but really, I’m meant to be comparing the two systems.
Yes, the Ultra Combo system DOES allow for the making of comebacks but at the same token also leads to overly defensive and somewhat boring games where the risk-reward skewing makes offensive play just far too risky to be at all viable. Hence you tend to reach a position in the end-game in rounds where both parties are too afraid to take action for fear of that game-breaking ultra. Instead of the end of the round being tense and exciting ala Justin/Daigo or JWong/Yipes, it ends up encouraging the opposite.
Conversely, the rage system doesn’t carry the same problems as SF4 where characters ultras vastly vary in terms of overall usefulness. EVERY CHARACTER benefits from being able to hit much harder. From a balance perspective there isn’t the same level of painful impracticality that some characters inSF4 face with their Ultra being nigh-impossible to set up.
For the players at least (and arguably, spectators), the rage system leads to an exciting round end between the Rager and the Ragee(?) There’s an incentive for one of them to go on the attack and an incentive for the other to play cautiously but there isn’t that same degree of lockout that SF4 has. Mid/Low attack mixups are gambles in Tekken regardless of whether or not Rage is in effect. Rage just heightens the worth of the guessing game for both players as opposed to fucking with the game dynamics of what is and isn’t allowed.
To use a football analogy to wrap this up: What’s a more exciting situation?
- A golden-goal situation where neither team dares to make an offensive manouver due to the high chance of a defensive stacking leading to a counter attack; or
- Extra time, an offensively minded team (say Brazil or Argentina) a goal down who need to make an immense offensive play to make the comeback and force a penalty shootout?
Textual Constipation January 25, 2010
Posted by Weng in Addictions, Rants, Tekken.Tags: American-Indians, Armor King, ego boosting, Julia Chang, tekken 6, Wang, writers block
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Writers’ block is a horrible thing. It’s a somewhat boring name for a painfully boring ailment really. When you feel the need to put some finger-to-keyboard and NOTHING comes. A better name for it would be to say you have an ink-jam in your Mental Pen, then you could go on MSN, make a horrible typo and go “My Mental Penis blocked”
I burnt all my half-way decent concepts last week, leaving me somewhat empty at the moment. Whatever, I won’t blog for a while. No biggie. Sadly, that’s only the start of the problem.
It’s like a cancer, it gradually spreads through your brain and burrows itself deeper into your psyche. First, you can’t think of a broad blog topic idea, then you can’t think of a new tag-line for your blog, THEN you can’t think of a new, shit, barely-witty pun for your own nefariously nerdy purposes.
As I’ve probably made very clear in my thousand-word rants on them, fighting games are kind of my quasi-passion. Like a musician, the passion is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring, bound by wild desire. You just fall into a burning ring of fire that you go down, down, down, as the flames get higher. But that is a blog-idea for another day (thanks Evan, totally stealing your concept when I’m in the mood.)
Anyway, in the arcade version of Tekken 6, you can buy data cards that you permanently associate with a particular character. You can then collect currency and customize them, dress them up in amusing ways and what not. But arguably, most importantly, they track your win/loss record data so you’re essentially playing with your ego on the line. Not only are you in a vicious brawl to maintain your $2 credit input, but you’re also playing for percentages. If the monetary input wasn’t enough of a play-to-win motivation, the permanent record scarring surely is.
Being the kind of person that loves his shitty puns, all my cards need some kind of ridiculous name to them. CoolzInferno is fine as the kind of generic online username that’s been straddled to me like a parasite since early high-school, but if you’ve got a million letter slots to play around with a witty card-name, why not use it?
Hence and therefore, I currently have 2 cards I mainly use Armor King – a dude in a jaguar mask wearing armor, and Wang Jinrei – an old Asian Pedophile/Kungfu Master:
Cougar Patrol~!!!
Touch my Wang
Both exercises in Bad Punnery 101. Armor King obviously having an animal head on him, cougar being a cat as well as attractive-older-woman, works on so many levels! Then you’ve got Touch my Wang or “Touch my VVang” as I needed t0 call him. His name is Wang Jinrei, the CARD ITSELF is called Wang Jinrei by default when you first get it. BUT, if you try using the word Wang when you edit the name, it censors it out into ????, so the VV is a necessary censorship bypass thing.
Then I decided to try main a new character, Julia Chang, a character that no-one likes, simply because no-one likes her. Whether you’re a decent level player, a pro or even a below-average scrub, there are always sighs along the lines of “Why the fuck would you use Julia?”
These are often for different, but similar reasons depending on who says it, but there’s a general air of pariahdom surrounding Julia.
There’s even a hilarious many-page-thread about Julia’s pariah status on the Julia forums of the largest Tekken messageboard, Tekken Zaibatsu (that eventually descends into a discussion of how she’s hotter than all the other Tekken girls who are massive slutty-ho-bags or teenage-upskirt-loli-pedo-bait or the “Spider-Witch whore Zafina who doesn’t make scientific sense.”)
So I learnt Julia, got her ridiculously painful juggles moderately down-pat, learnt her tricky bullshit, read her Frame Data. Bought myself a data card from Timezone, got to a respectable 7-2 winrate against run-of-the-mill competition, but she was nameless. Unlike with my other two cards, where the pun flashed itself in my brain out of the blue (like the Delta Goodrem song), nothing came. (that’s what she said, hurr hurr)
The other guy was waiting on me to finish setting up the card, there was a queue of arcade-goers waiting on blood to be spilt, for someone to fall so they could rise to take their place and like a Hydra spawn a new head to subdue the Heroic Champion…
Nothing.
Just her name, staring at me, complete with her plain-jane Costume 2 – her decked out in spectacles, a denim jacket and jeans. Julia Chang.
Curse your Genericness!
I’ve attempted to brainstorm with other people. Nothing. I’ve attempted to brainstorm other concepts, blog-taglines for instance. Nothing stuck, there was nothing that served as a Master Baiter to lead people to read a small mountain of text. I need Linguistic Chemotherapy, it’s clearly malignant, not benign...
Writing about writer’s block to get over writer’s block, totally not actually helping at all. Subsequent to the major-writing aspect of this entry, I self-plagiarized, brainstormed, and stole and modified the tagline of my older incarnation of this blog. SO, writing about writer’s block is step one in the process of getting out of it. Much like with Alcoholic’s Anonymous, you need to admit you HAVE a problem to be able to solve it. Yaaaaaay~!!!
One day, I shall go to France, start up a company manufacturing chicken stock cubes and call them Coq Bloqs.
Mindgames 101 – Pavlov’s Holiday in Wisconsin January 21, 2010
Posted by Weng in Psychology, Street Fighter, Tekken.Tags: gaming, plagiarism, pretentious wankery, Psychology, Street Fighter 4, tekken 6
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NB: This blog entry is essentially common knowledge to anyone who plays ANY fighting game at any competitive level. However, in typical Me fashion, it’s distilled into a long, overly-verbose, text-wank form. Also, I’m not a national champion/demi-god so Your Mileage May Vary in terms of how useful this will be.
In previous entries (which were written yesterday), I alluded to the multi-faceted and onion-like depth and layers behind a decent fighting game, or Real Time Rock-Paper-Scissors Chess on Crack. This entry is a brief glimpse into the Rock-Paper-Scissors portion of the equation.
How is throwing a Shoryuken akin to RPS? A key goal in any fighter, whether it be Tekken, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, arguably even something like the WWE series, are mixups. Mixups are situations where the offensive player has the ability to force the defending player to guess correctly, if they guess wrong and choose the wrong option, they take damage, and generally stay in a negative position.
On a very basic level in Tekken, for example – you have the dynamic between throws and high, low and mid attacks.
If the attacker does a throw – the defender can counter by ducking/crouching, or otherwise, teching (escaping) the throw. The throw-tech itself is another guessing game, as the defender has to input the correct button to escape the throw which can be one of 3 different inputs depending on which throw the attacker uses, and the window is generally quite small so you may only have time to input one ‘guess’.
High attacks can be ducked/crouched under, or blocked standing. But if blocked standing, they generally leave the attacker relatively safe from counter attacks.
Mids will hit crouch-blocking opponents, but can be blocked standing.
Lows hit standing opponents and have to be crouch-blocked.
This in itself is a form of RPS with stand-blocking beating mids, tying with highs/throws and losing to lows. Crouching beats highs, throws and lows but loses to mids (generally the attacks that start the large juggle combos).
So, essentially, existing inbuilt move-strings in Tekken often include some form of a high/low mixup which forces a correct guess/reaction. Then by stringing together various attack strings (2 strings, one sentence, great construction), you can eventually land an attack that allows you to land your larger combos.
The old Latin maxim of scientia potentia est – For also knowledge itself is power – is amazingly relevant to the domain of fighting games (or arguably any competitive game). If you understand your character’s moveset but your opponent doesn’t, you are in an amazingly advantageous position.
One way in which I personally like to abuse this is very similar to two concepts in Psychology – Pavlovian/Classical Conditioning and the Wisconsin Card Sort (hence the pretentious title of this entry).
To give a heavily abridged explanation of both concepts:
Pavlov was a dick who, through rewarding good behaviour, and punishing bad behaviour in dogs, found they could be trained to react in a particular manner through this method of positive reinforcement/negative punishment.
The WCST is a test used in clinical neuropsychology to diagnose mental illnesses. It involves sorting cards via various rules which are suddenly changed mid-way through the task with measurement of how long it takes before the subject picks up on the rule.
To translate this to a fighting game, essentially, you ‘train’ your opponent in a certain way. Repeat a particular offensive pattern a few times, see how they react. This is essentially the ‘training’ component, if they aren’t using whatever tool their character has to get out of your offense (which you SHOULD understand if you have character knowledge), continue to abuse it. When they eventually catch on, change the rules.
One example of this I’d almost a person signature of my game is what I dub Stomp-Slide Shenannigans, with M.Bison in Street Fighter 4, the dude with the pimpin’ hat.
Curb-Stomping - For Real Men
Basically, it starts with Bison’s headstomp, where he flies up and stomps on your head (hence the name) that has to be blocked high. After that, Bison can fly to either side of the opponent and land, or do a flying punch followup thing if he’s close to them, that also has to be blocked high. Alternatively, he can land either side of the opponent and THEN do something.
The Stomp-Slide is named as it involves mixing up his EX Head Stomp, which has high priority, knocks down the opponent, but costs super-bar and his Slide. His slide, which has to be blocked low, is basically him magically sliding across the ground and knocking down the opponent if it lands. But if it’s blocked, it’s generally very punishable since it takes a fair while to recover.
The magic of the Stomp-Slide revolves around the fact that the other person may have no clue what you’re doing and otherwise, you’ve got a craptonne of options anyway.
1: Start with an EX Headstomp, preferably after they’re already knocked down so it’s much harder to avoid, if it connects, they’re knocked down again and you can then do ANOTHER EX Headstomp, repeating the loop. (Now I think about it, this really would be easier to explain with a diagram)
2: If it is blocked, you can then fly to either side of the opponent and land, or do the hands followup. Most are probably aware Bison has the hands followup. This is the OPPOSITE of mind-fucking with the fact that they don’t know what’s going on. You want to be playing RPS with rules they don’t understand as yet.
I generally fly to the OPPOSITE side of the opponent, thereby forcing them to switch the side they are blocking on. You hold back from your opponent to block, so if they blocked left, they’d now block the next attack right.
3: THEN, from the opposite side of the opponent you slide, which forces them to block low AND on the opposite side to where they were previously. Thus, they’ve had to both change blocking height AND direction. If the slide connects, you get ANOTHER knockdown and can potentially start the loop back at 1.
#3 is helped a lot by the fact that people often try to do a counter attack AFTER the headstomp to catch you and the slide generally catches that.
The thing that ‘makes’ the trick, is the fact that the slide has different recovery depending on the distance you do it from. Hence, people generally attempt to counter-attack AFTER it’s been blocked, however, if you do the slide from it’s maximum range, you actually recover before the opposing character, something you’d only really know if you played the character, and definitely not know with little experience against Bison, and if you were getting destroyed by stomp-slides (which DO take off large chunks of health)
Assuming they learn to block the stomp/slide crossup, LET them start a block string on you or throw out an attack after your slide, block that a few times, REWARD their behaviour by letting them out of the offensive situation. Then, when there’s a clear pattern that they ARE attempting to counter-attack after a safe slide, Take it to Wisconsin.
Change the rules, react in a different way and punish their followup with an attack with invincibility or a very fast normal attack. Bison’s EX Psycho Crusher and EX Scissor Kick are both perfect for this as they have invincibility on startup and the charge requirement can be buffered into his slide. Or, if you want to be mega-risky, do his Ultra attack which starts up much slower and is VERY punishable if blocked but also does a craptonne of damage.
Or instead of sliding, do the punch follow up, which is safe if blocked and has to be blocked high (and does good damage if it DOES connect). Essentially, you’ve got a million and one options that your opponent may not even comprehend, and that’s JUST off the one move.
To give a brief-ish Tekken example to kind of show the relative transferability of the concept, Julia Chang, a relatively-boring-character-designed American-Indian chick has a jab string that can end in a mid, a low or a delayed mid.
Julia Chang: Non-Descript to the Max
People generally in Tekken block high due to the fact that launchers that lead to large damage combos GENERALLY come from mid attacks that are unsafe on block. So, abusing that with Julia’s block chain, end it in a low which should catch them, then end it with a low again.
If they block low, start ending it with the mid. They’ll then probably start trying to hit you AFTER the mid followup is used a few times, so change the rules AGAIN and use the delayed-mid which feints the final mid hit, comes out slower and catches counter-attackers. OR you could just do the first hit of the block chain after they’ve been trained to block mid, then attempt to throw them, which will catch a standing opponent, even if they are blocking. If they aren’t expecting it, they probably won’t be able to escape it.
Essentially, you have a move you want to use, they have a counter to it, you have a counter to their counter and it all goes around in circles until you can get back to the original move you want to use. And this is pretty much a giant rehash of this much better article.
Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, it’s all there is to it, really.
