This is part two of what will be a continuous series on my foolhardy attempts to actually become semi-decent at fighting games. You can read last week’s entry here, where I lay out the whole plan. This edition: The stick arrives, and Chie continues to be Best.

So Wednesday evening, I’d planned to see Age of Ultron, but my buddy had to cancel on me. I was disappointed, but not that disappointed, because my Quanba Q4 was supposed to arrive Wednesday, so I’d be able to take a look at it as soon as I got home from the office. Given the fact that I’d been impatiently waiting for the chance to get my hands on the thing since I ordered it the week before, I was almost relieved to have my friend cancel on me. Work was slow, so I bounced out of the office a little early. I might have been a little excited.

I got home and sure enough, UPS had not let me down and had, in fact, left the box on the porch like I’d requested. I opened the box up and lifted the (12 lb!) stick out. I like everything about this stick—it makes satisfying clicks, the buttons feel good and are super-responsive, and you can, indeed, switch between PS3 and 360 modes as required. I was most curious about the effect it would have on my (previously terrible) attempts to do anything in Street Fighter IV, so I immediately plugged the controller into my PC and launched the game (as was pointed out to me last week, the game may claim to be Ultra SF IV, but it’s actually still Super SFIV).

SSFIV

Here’s the thing—I bought SSFIV on sale during some Amazon sale and never managed to get into it. Using the D-pad (my usual strategy for fighting games) didn’t work at all, and switching to the analog stick just didn’t seem precise enough for me to pull off anything more complicated than a quarter-circle (and even those tended to be a bit dodgy). This all lead to me being a little dubious about the game, figuring the controls were just going to remain impenetrable for me forever and I more or less had given up on ever learning it in any capacity.

Playing with the Quanba, I think the phrase “night and day” is somewhat appropriate. Suddenly moves I’d struggled with were actually coming out, which blew my mind. I picked a couple characters and set about learning their moves (I particularly grew fond of Sakura and Makoto, although I spend a little time with Ibuki and E. Honda (for old time’s sake)). I am still, as it turns out, fucking awful with charge characters—I must have spent a solid fifteen minutes fucking around with Chun-Li’s moves before giving up. I was surprised to see that on two separate occasions there were still some online fights to be had—I acquitted myself pretty poorly a few times, but had a particularly close match against someone playing Ryu (I almost had the bastard but he caught me with an ultra combo that hit just before mine did).

More importantly, the game transformed for me from something I’d bought and somewhat regretted into something that I’m now mildly obsessed with. The stick might have not made me good at the game (I need to spend a lot more time before that happens), but the game opened up for me in a way that I was not able to experience before. I really like this game now, and will probably wind up upgrading to Ultra SFIV to find a slightly more vibrant online community.

Dan can go fuck himself though. Even the CPU plays the motherfucker spammy. I spent an embarrassing amount of time stuck in Arcade mode against Dan. It was brutal. My dignity did not survive.

Mortal Kombat X

I was super-curious to see how the CronusMax did as a converter for my stick on the Xbox One—I’m very used to using a controller for MKX, but part of the whole point was to see how a fight stick potentially changed the game, so I fired it up.

It helps that I’m already… I wouldn’t say “good,” but at least “passable” at MKX. I’ve won some online matches (when the netcode has been good enough), and playing the CPU is usually pretty easy for me. Using the stick made some Fatalities a little easier to pull off for me, but that’s about it. I also learned that if you sit and play SFIV for a while and then switch to MKX, you spend a lot of time hitting back to block and wondering why it isn’t working.

The default layout of the controller has the block button on the bottom row, which I’m not wild about, but I haven’t bothered to change it to the top row yet. Sub Zero plays real nice with the stick, but the last time I fired up the game I didn’t bother hooking up the stick and just played with the fight pad. I think it is partially because having block on the trigger feels more natural to me at this point. I’ll spend a little more time learning the game on the fight stick, maybe, but it wasn’t the revelation that SFIV with the stick was for me. I enjoy the game enough with the regular-ass pad that I don’t think I’ll bother hooking the stick up for it all the time.

For real though Netherrealm, get better netcode. I had two matches which were more or less unplayable because the lag was so bad.

Killer Instinct

I figured I might as well fire up KI while I was at it, but I did not spend a ton of time with it. The combo system in KI seems to require quite a bit of effort, and I haven’t spent the time with it to get in its head. Also unlike SF and MK, my memories of the original KI are hazy, at best (we played a lot of it on the SNES at a friend’s house for a good 2-3 month stretch when I was in like…fifth grade?), so while I remember how the SF and MK systems work and can easily pick them up, KI is very much starting from scratch.

Also I kind of hate Glacius and he’s the current free character, so I wasn’t really that excited to spend time with it (I will probably wind up giving Lang my money so I can experiment with different characters). The stick made life easier in terms of getting moves to come out but again, it didn’t click the way SF did. I need to spend more time with this one before I feel in any way prepared to check out the online scene.

Persona 4 Arena

This game is fucking unreal. I’ve played a lot of ArcSys games in the past, but this one is super-fast and allows you to get away with button-mashing up to a point (like all ArcSys games, really). A ton of depth here if you’re crazy enough to go looking for it, I’m told, but I’ve had way too much fun making my own combos and pulling off the odd insta-kill to get too into things. I burned through the story mode with Chie (twice, as I got the bad ending for her the first go-round as I made the command decision to hunt beef bows rather than the perpetrator).

Unfortunately, the online scene is dead as hell. This is a real bummer, but the appearance of P4AU last year (was it last year? I don’t remember) basically ensured that was going to happen. Still, this game was fun enough that I’ve literally left the house in the middle of writing this post to go pick up a copy of P4AU in the hopes that I will find some online action (which will mostly involve me getting absolutely destroyed by everyone). Still, I kind of want to see the rest of the story mode because I’m a huge loser so I’ll probably run through it at some point. I don’t think there were any big mechanical changes between the two, so switching back and forth shouldn’t be a problem.

Chie is still the best, even in fighting games.

Initial Thoughts

So, with several days of stick-ownership under my belt, I’m finding it a much more comfortable way to play for the most part. Everything’s been easier to control, especially SFIV. At this point I’m most enjoying Persona 4 Arena, but by far the best discovery has been SFIV. It went from being a game I almost regretted ever spending money on to being a game that I’ve spent significant time with nearly every night. I can see myself picking up the upgrade to Ultra sooner or later, if only to expand my horizons as far as characters are concerned (and to find online matches more reliably, of course).

I need to spend more time with Killer Instinct—maybe drop some money to unlock a character or two—and see how that all shakes out. I’m really interested in the combo system there, but I don’t know that I’ve got the patience to learn it all. There’s a shitload of tutorial material to go through in KI, so I might see how I feel about everything after I go through that.

Overall, I’m glad I picked up the stick—it’s an absolute blast to play with, and it’s opened up games which had previously been damn near impenetrable for me. Next time, I’ll do a little more work with KI and see what the online scene in P4AU is like. I’ll try to have some thoughts written down in the next couple of weeks—next week will be about something else (I’m not sure what, but there are a few games which have been calling to me lately which I need to get back to and put some serious time in on). See you next week!