@shivermetimbers: Lol you put the words "fighting games" in your thread title so you've summoned up some nice essays from myself and @nnickers (who got the definitions of digital and analog swapped around :P)
I got into fighting games when Super Street Fighter IV came out my freshman year of college. One of my friends and I just started playing it and trying to outdo each other which turned into hours long sessions of just going back and forth. Then when we weren't playing I was doing research into advanced techniques. This then turned into us transitioning between many games over the years and we still play fighting games pretty regularly albeit much shorter sessions. So I'm no Brad Shoemaker who was there when MK3 was first put into his local arcade when I was a kid.
I've always found the Netherrealm games incredibly sluggish. Never really played a ton of them but I see where you're coming from now in terms of this thread. The MK and Injustice games rely a lot more on poking and when you manage to land a poke you do a huge combo. The loop is way different than most 2D fighters and to me not as satisfying.
Addendum to the controls thing from earlier: not everyone is a maniac like me and needs a stick. I played for a couple of years without one when learning the ropes and a gamepad is just fine but for me personally I hit a barrier as to what I could realistically do with my hands on a Xbox 360 controller lol.
Nnickers mentioned this as well but I'll double down since that's what we seem to be doing anyway :P. If you or anyone who's reading this thread has a PC and even the faintest interest in fighting games the Steam winter sale kicked off today. While not traditionally the first platform you think of when it comes to fighting games, there's a small community for pretty much every game on PC (in a weird Discord or otherwise).
If I had to recommend games from the sale if you want to give it a shot they'd be:
USFIV - $7.49 - Huge cast of characters, doesn't require big combos. SFIV is what I started out on and it's a great game for helping understand the fundamentals of 2D fighters. Easy transition into faster paced games.
Dragonball FighterZ - $23.99 - Lots of fast moving high flying action but without a lot of the complicated inputs that make Arksys games impossible to play. No half circles or dragon punch motions here, everything is a quarter-circle. Movement is pretty different from most other 2D fighters but it's very fun.
There are A LOT of fighting games on Steam but I wouldn't dive straight into something like BlazBlue or Guilty Gear because those games rely on a pretty decent understanding of fighting games to begin with.
On the 3D side there's Tekken and Soul Calibur which both had good entries in the last year or two but that's a whole other can of worms.
The GB community has a strong fighting game lineage (the SSFIV forum was the most active forum on the site for a couple of years) so if you want someone to play with all you have to do is yell the words "fighting games" into a void and you'll be accosted with people wanting to teach you about them.
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