The Fighting Game Community Thread

I'm not much of a fighting game guy, in that I don't have the patience to learn and become comfortable with the complex mechanics that give them depth, but I do like the visceral rush that comes with playing the ones that are a little more simple like Smash Bros, Power Stone, MVC2, Injustice, even the recent Mortal Kombat games were extremely approachable and enjoyable from a casual perspective.

I had been holding out on Marvel Vs Capcom 3 because although it looked fun, I knew I wouldn't play it enough to justify the (already not that high) price tag. But I decided to pick it up during the Steam Winter Sale and was excited to see what I had missed. I got hyped by the character select screen, especially since I like quirky novelty characters and they seemed to occupy a third of the roster. I can't say I'm 100% sold on the heavy use of solid black shadow (I get that it's a comic thing, but I'm not sure it works as well here), but I do like the character and level designs in general. As I usually do when I play I fighting game for the first time, I went for the "training" mode first. I wanted to learn the main mechanics so I could attempt the other modes with a basic understanding of how the game worked. Unfortunately, this is one of those games where "training" means "Here's an empty room and a paralyzed opponent: Figure it out" and that is a big pet peeve of mine in fighting games. More unfortunate still, this is one of those games where you have to go through multiple button presses every time you want to check your character's move list. There's no option to keep a list of key inputs superimposed on the screen and you can't jump back to the list the next time you pause. However! There was a glimpse of hope! I saw that "Mission" mode had you use each character and use specific moves to progress; Surely, this was this game's version of a tutorial!

...Nope. Even though the point of the missions is to use a specific move (against another paralyzed opponent, no less), they still don't show you how to do the move. You still have to pause the game, choose "Move List", choose your character, then scroll down to find the move you want to execute, every single time. FFS, I still haven't figured out how to switch my character mid-battle, and I looked! This shit drives me crazy.

I gave up and pretty much button-mashed my way through 3 battles in Arcade/Easy mode which, to be fair, was still pretty fun. I like the mechanics and I love the characters but damned if this game doesn't make it difficult to take the first few steps. It probably wouldn't bug me so much if Injustice and Mortal Kombat hadn't done such a great job making learning how to play part of the game.

Or maybe I just suck at fighting games. I'm sure the beer isn't helping.