I spent a lot of time in elementary school being tormented by my peers, as I basically assume anyone you ask about their time in elementary school will tell you (this is part of my working theory that children are assholes and everyone has a miserable first six or seven years of schooling), but in spite of the constant bullying and social ostracism, I still found myself attending school events of my own free will.

These school events were held at a local skating rink, which is something that I don’t think even fucking exists anymore and there’s something that makes me feel slightly old. This was somewhere in the middle of the period of time that rollerblading was super-popular, but my family couldn’t afford rollerblades so I always wound up with rental skates (I would eventually get rollerblades of my own and promptly break my arm the first time out, which ended my rollerblading career before I could learn any sick stunts or tricks a la Jet Grind Radio). I tended to spend some time skating, but I would eventually convince my mother or a friend to spot me a few quarters (I also discovered an unattended $.75 at one point and took it and spent the next like six months wracked with guilt—I was raised Catholic, after all) so I could check the arcade cabinets, or more accurately, so I could play Mortal Kombat.

Obviously, since I think I only at most got a dollar’s worth of quarters (although thankfully this was still back when you could actually fucking get a game of MK for a quarter), it behooved me to play well to get the most out of my money. My brother and I spent a lot of time watching others play, picking up moves by osmosis and once, in our greatest triumph, pulling off Scorpion’s fatality against some kid who was probably an asshole which felt like the ultimate revenge (actually getting into a fistfight, which I managed to avoid doing for another few years, proved to be even more satisfying, but only because the same teachers who turned a blind eye to the bullying I underwent also turned a blind eye to my occasional outbursts of violence. The 90s, everyone!).

Later, a friend of mine would reveal his copy of Mortal Kombat for the Game Gear, and we spent a good deal more hours than you’d think possible huddled around the screen trying to beat the game, passing the console around as we died over and over again to fucking Goro, or got wrecked in a mirror match because we’d picked Sub Zero. We also spent time looking on the nascent internet for fatalities and the blood code (we got the blood code, but never did manage any fatalities on the Game Gear version—possibly because the d pad on the Game Gear was trash). Eventually this same friend would get a copy of Mortal Kombat Trilogy for the N64, and that’s when we really started to spend serious time fighting.

I could tell a similar story, of course, replacing Mortal Kombat with Street Fighter II Turbo, although SFII was strictly an arcade-only treat for us, generally played once a year when we’d go on vacation to Garden City, SC, which had not one but two arcades (one on the main drag and one out on the pier). I would inevitably spend some money in each playing various games including, obviously, Street Fighter II (There might have been an MKII cabinet in there too at one point but I don’t have a clear memory of it. What I have a clear memory of is getting my ass run by some dude who played Ryu really well, in spite of my horrible attempts to cheese him with Blanka). I downloaded a poorly-emulated copy of SFII for the SNES at one point, but never got super into it because it was poorly-emulated (I also hunted down a NES version (or I think it was an NES version. NESticle played it, at any rate) of the original Street Fighter, which for reference is god awful and you should not play it). My second year of college, the school finished building a massive “Student Recreation Center” which had a SFII Turbo cabinet that, as it happened, was free to play. I spent a lot of time there that year, and was disappointed to discover that the cabinet was broken when I got back from a year abroad. College kids: Also shitty human beings who will break things like goodass arcade cabinets because they are shitty).

Similarly, I got really into the Guilty Gear franchise at one point, and have copies of X, X2, and AC floating around somewhere. This is all without mentioning Soul Caliber 2, which was also a major time-waster, or buying whichever DoA it was that came out on the original Xbox. Also, the year I was abroad was the same year I discovered Melty Blood and played the everloving shit out of it using a Logitech gamepad which shared more than a few design similarities with the PS2 controller, except it was…chunkier and worse in every way.

This is all to explain that I have played a few fighting games in my day—as have a lot of people who owned games consoles, I’ll wager—but I need to stress a point here which is that I am generally fucking terrible at fighting games. I own them, and enjoy them, but with the exceptions of, I want to say, Mortal Kombat V and Guilty Gear X2, I never got any good at them. Maybe I was once decent at SFII, but I’m not sure if that’s one of those things you look back and adjust in retrospect or not.

With the recent release of Mortal Kombat X, and my first stumbling steps into playing Mortal Kombat X online and getting completely fucking bodied at every turn, I started to think to myself (as I historically have done any time a particularly interesting fighting game comes out) about getting Seriously Into this whole fighting games thing. Not in the sense of “I’m going to run out and join fighting game tournaments,” because I don’t have time for that and neither does anyone else—but in the sense of “hey let’s do some research on hitboxes and frames and shit and get a proper fightstick and see if we can’t at least have some dignity when we go online in these things.”

And obviously, because I’ve put it upon myself to produce content on this here website every week (when possible), and because I need more shit to talk about on the podcast I do with my brother, and mostly because it seems like it will be a good time, I’m going to take all this information and shit and turn it into a regular (or semi-regular, because I’ve got other projects to work on too—like the Pathologic playthrough, and cleaning up/expanding that Twine experiment I did, and a bunch of other stuff) feature here. So let’s quickly go over the games and the equipment and you can all tell me what a terrible mistake I’ve made already:

The Games

These are all games I already own, and mostly picked up on sale (with the exception of MKX). I tried to pull something from everything, although in terms of “indie fighter” I still don’t have anything (Skullgirls, maybe? Or I could try hunting down a copy of Melty Blood but honestly it’s not like that had online matches).

• Mortal Kombat X (Xbox One)—The latest and greatest.
• Killer Instinct (Xbox One)—Support your local Lang! I haven’t bought any of the content packs yet but I’ll get around to it.
• Mortal Kombat 9 (PC)—So I have Mortal Kombat I can play when my roommates are using the TV, mostly
• Ultra Street Fighter IV (PC)—Steam took the amazon code for my broken GFWL version of SFIV and changed it alchemy-like into USFIV. I’m not gonna complain. This also runs at an average 112 frames per second, which is insane
• Divekick (PC)—I mean of course this is on the list. OF COURSE IT IS. I certainly didn't forget to put it on the list and have to come back and edit it in like two hours later, no sir! Incidentally, I went 4-0 in the ranked matches and have decided to retire on top.
• Persona 4 Arena (PS3)—Because Chie is the best, and it was on sale last week for like $7.

I also have a copy of Blaz Blue: Continuum Shift for the 360 somewhere, but I haven’t found it and am unsure whether or not it’s still at my parents’ house. So we’ll have to wait and see about that one.

The Controller

Based mostly on Jason’s excited reaction on the recent Mailbag, I went with a Quanba Q4. “But that doesn’t work on the Xbox One,” you helpfully point out. True! Which is why I picked up a CronusMAX usb converter which, from the research I did, seems to solve the problem with little to no input lag to speak of. Is this a complete horseshit claim? I guess we’ll find out together, won’t we?

The Plan

The controller shows up Wednesday, assuming UPS does their fucking job right for once in their miserable goddam lives. The converter is actually slated to show up tomorrow (Monday, for those of you playing at home), because that shipped through Amazon and that shit is timely. That gives me three or four days to sit down and put the Quanba through its paces, get a feel for how it works, and pick one of the games listed above to start delving into (I will probably wind up dicking around with every game I’ve listed, of course, but I’ll try to pick one to focus on). Come Sunday, I’ll report back to y’all on how the great, stupid experiment is going. After that I think I’ll probably try to stick to bi-weekly updates, if only to give myself the opportunity to write about other shit that isn’t fighting games now and again (I picked up Dragon Age Inquisition again after a three-month hiatus, so I’ll probably have some thoughts on that soon, and obviously there’s Pathologic calling my name in the night when I think I’m alone).