YummyTreeSap

A few disjointed thoughts that are disjointed because it's almost 5:30 AM and I haven't slept yet like a dingus:

This is never an easy question to answer because mechanics vary between fighting games quite a bit. A lot of people will suggest learning on something like Super Street Fighter II Turbo because it's mechanically pure and thus will force you into learning the fundamentals instead of relying on some of the crutches modern games give you, not unlike the argument people give for why you should learn guitar on an acoustic. I can sort of understand the logic behind such a sentiment, but I tend to just be of the mindset that you should play whatever interests you the most and whatever you have the most fun playing. Fundamentals are cool and all, but sometimes you just want to turn the amp up and peel the paint off the walls.

There are tons of informational videos and websites for any of the games you're likely to pick, so I don't think any route you choose is a bad one. Some games are certainly more complex than others, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable, even shit that's incomprehensible to me like Guilty Gear. Just dive in, mess around, and remember to have fun instead of getting too tied down by the "learning" aspect of it all.

Patrick Miller, who has written for Giant Bomb in the past, wrote a good book that goes over the fundamentals of fighting games. It uses Street Fighter II HD Remix for its examples, which here in 2017 might not be as easy to play since I imagine a lot of people don't have their previous-gen consoles still hooked up, but we are on the Internet and it's not hard to find a way to play Super Turbo if that's what you wish to do. In any case, the stuff it talks about is pretty universal and very good. I definitely recommend it. You can find it here, though I believe it makes you sign up for Shoryuken's newsletter before they send it to you.

Feel free to ask me any questions if you've got them, about specific games or general questions or whatever. Depending on what you decide on getting and what you get it for, I'll always be down for some fighting.

I don't really like any of the choices here? I mean, I'd be willing to let them take a break from studio stuff for a while to allow them to work on it, but that also seems like a pretty low priority. I don't think it's something that should even be floated around until Jason isn't the only staff member with production duties.

I'd say Tekken 7 is pretty average regarding the amount of single player content it has. It's not invulnerable to criticism, of course, and I wish it had a tutorial mode or something like the lab in Tekken Tag 2, but it doesn't seem to be a completely barren single player experience either. The story mode is short but good enough, and the ancillary endings for each character are amusing for what they are. Even if it'd be just as easy to go to Youtube, the fact that they included all the cutscenes from the previous games and made brief summaries of each game's plot is really neat. I find most of the customization items to be pretty worthless, but I'm nevertheless somewhat compelled to unlock them and the treasure battle mode in which to do that is pretty good.

Single player content just isn't an important concern for modern fighting games. It's barely why people go to them except for the few games that still have some mainstream appeal, and the older we get the less fun we find it to play fighting games against AIs that read your inputs and don't even in the slightest bit prepare you for fighting against real people. NetherRealm's maybe been the one exception to this, though their games tilt in that direction a bit too hard for me in the sense that their single player modes are the only thing I like about any of those games. And ArcSys does visual novels, which is about as interesting to me as having no story mode at all.

One thing that baffles me, however, is when I see people compare this unfavorably to, say, Tekken 3, a game whose single player content was no more in depth than unlocking stuff by beating the game more times than anybody today would want to do, and, like, some game modes you never wanted to touch. That's hardly single player content, it's tedious busywork.

Oh cool, I didn't even know you still had the Stadium server up; I thought the Lagoon server fully replaced it. I... uh, don't think I like Lagoon very much. Probably going to go back to Stadium.

I'd like to consider getting into this game, but it feels completely impenetrable to me. It seems almost entirely dependent on deck building but gives the player absolutely no guidance on how to actually start putting together a deck. I guess perhaps this is a moot point for people who are already experienced in card games, but for someone like me who's comparatively new to these sorts of games, it feels overwhelming in a way that just immediately turns me off of the game instead.

The only time this has ever truly bothered me is when they've done weird shit in the past like skewing the gameplay and studio shots to technically optimize use of frame space (but distorting everything in the process) or having the staff wide shot rotated 90°, which thankfully seem like habits of the past.

As a brief side note, people were complaining a lot in Vinny's Murder Island stream for having his shot over the kill feed, so appeasing everyone will never happen. I tend to sympathize with that view and am pretty strong in favor of keeping studio shots and the gameplay feed separate and non-overlapping. That said, even if it doesn't bother me all that much, I don't disagree about GBEast being able to use some of that space better.

The new Slowdive album is indeed really good. It's been a great year for bands/artists coming back after a long hiatus: Slowdive, Gas, Feedtime, The New Year, Oxbow all put out pretty great albums. Haven't heard the ATDI or Jesus & Mary Chain albums, but I never really liked ATDI much and I didn't like the JAMC single I heard but maybe the rest is good?

The best comedy movie, and maybe best movie, is clearly Local Hero.

If he's going to Toronto, Detroit and Chicago, it's unbelievably unhelpful to tell him to go to a much worse city nine hours away or more from any of those three.

@tekzero: Square gates are absolutely fine and in many cases preferred. I'd say that they might feel a little unnatural at first but I see no reason you shouldn't be able to get used to them, especially if you're pretty new to sticks. Personally I like knowing that the vertices of the stick are all in four pretty important directions: both potential directions for a crouching block and then jumps forward and back. Square gates make it harder to gauge where the cardinal directions are, which might result in some input errors for a while, but you get used to it. People tend to say you shouldn't "ride the gates," anyway, but I absolutely ride the gates. In any case, it's a cheap fix if you absolutely hate the square gate.

That Hori stick is pretty good.