<story><title>Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)</title><url>https://janezhang.ca/work/tekken/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BaculumMeumEst</author><text>One thing that&amp;#x27;s very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don&amp;#x27;t capture all the strategic implications of move properties.&lt;p&gt;The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.&lt;p&gt;But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching &amp;amp; fast enough move to punish it.&lt;p&gt;At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.&lt;p&gt;Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the &amp;quot;unsafe&amp;quot; blockstring can watch their opponent&amp;#x27;s character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move&amp;#x27;s recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!</text></comment>
<story><title>Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)</title><url>https://janezhang.ca/work/tekken/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JKCalhoun</author><text>I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90&amp;#x27;s (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy.&lt;p&gt;(To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?)&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;rant \&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it&amp;#x27;s my kind of game though.)</text></comment>