My fighter's blog - "You don't understand"

     "You don't understand."

    If you follow my blog, firstly I want to say thank you. Secondly, you've probably noticed that I've been writing less and less (and less). That is partly because I have returned to working full time, but just as big a reason was the release of Street Fighter 6 on June 2, 2023. I have spent nearly as much time playing Street Fighter as I have working, and I get the withdrawal shakes if I go too long without getting my fix. (I'm only slightly joking.)   

    I've addressed fighting games several times in previous posts, but its time to divulge my all consuming obsession with them. I played lots of fighting games in my childhood (Tekkens 2 and 3 were particular favorites of mine, I even once claimed to have the world record for longest combo in a fighting game [I once hit 10k hits on a combo loop in practice with Jun, but I doubt thats a record, just something I liked to brag about as a preteen]) but it wasn't until college that like turned to love. In 2009, while working at a local video store, Hastings (RIP), I met a fellow gamer named Hola Bird. (as always in my blogs, i refrain from naming names to protect those who claim to be innocent) Hola Bird told me of his obsession with Street Fighter 4, and suggested that we play some time. 

  I have mentioned this dear friend before, referring to him both as Ken Masters, and Hello Pajaro. His screen name is Hola Bird, and that is how I will refer to him going forward. 

    I told Hola Bird of my success at fighting games in my youth, and assured him that I was no scrub when it comes to fight games. He replied simply, "No, you don't understand." 

    When he came to play fight games that very night, the exhibition of just how much I did not understand began.

    That night, Hola Bird showed me my very first fight stick. For those of you not in the know, a fight stick is like the control portion of an old arcade cabinet cut off and boxed up to fit in your lap. (since this introduction to these fabulous oversized controllers i have bought 5 or 6) He trounced me time after time as I fumbled on my dual shock controller to perform a simple Hadoken. 

    By the end of the night I admitted, "You're right, I didn't understand."

    That one night of gaming turned into a 5-nights-a-week routine. As time went on we slowly added members to our little fight crew, until there were nearly a dozen players at our weekly game night. Each time a new player showed up, they'd receive the same warning, "You don't understand."

    There really is a difference between playing Street Fighter and playing Street Fighter. If you don't have a friend to show you the way, you just won't understand.

    I had my Hola Bird, and I'm perfectly happy to do the same for anyone. Just remember, you don't understand what you are getting yourself into.

It's EVO Baby!

 This last weekend,in fabulous Las Vegas, a myriad of combatants will clash in a test of fists and wills. Fists and feet will fly, tears will be shed, and many an enthusiastic fan will scream himself hoarse.

A fabulous shot of the champion getting embraced by the man he beat in Grand Finals.

I’m not talking about the next UFC cage match (though there probably is one of those happening too), I’m talking about Evo. The only esports event that I follow closely. There are some other events I'll tune into, GDQ (games done quick) is always a fun watch, and the LCS (league championship series) draws a massive crowd. But for me, it has to be Evo.

The Evolution Championship series (Evo) is the biggest fighting game tournament in the world (there are over 7000 competitors this year, and a grand prize of ten thousand dollars.  People travel from all over the world to compete at games that basically breaks down to PUNCH THE GUY IN THE FACE!

I don’t know what it is about these games that appeals to me so much (particularly because I play them so terribly), but I’m happy as a pig in shit to just sit and play for hours, then go online to watch videos of other people playing that same game.

It really is like watching a sport. There are sponsoring labels, and players who Don that merchandise as proudly as any NASCAR driver.

Ravenous, I dig through the back pages of back pages, constantly on the hunt for some new combo or piece of tech to get the slightest edge over the competition.  I’m slightly ashamed to admit I know more about the frontrunner of the is years Evo than the current state of the Seattle Mariners.(Long time reader(s?) will know that I’m a big Mariners fan too.)

What brought me to this lowly state?  Well, 20 years ago next month, I met a man who would eventually set me down this path. A man named Hello Pájaro (As always, names have been altered protect those who claim to be innocent).

He was one of the very first people I met when I spent my disastrous freshmen year of college at MSU (for more on that flavorful experience click here.) And we became fast friends. We of course lost touch when I set fire to my college career, but to our mutual surprise, we ended up working together at the same store.

By the end of his first week, he was my favorite person to see at work. The one buddy that makes working retail not only bearable, but even occasionally enjoyable. By the end of his first month, we were hanging out outside of work. Twenty years later, he is like an uncle to my children. (The weird, distant uncle, but still)

At evo this year, there was a blind entrant. And he won several matches.

One fateful night, early into the bromance, he asked me if I ever played fight games.

“Oh yeah”, I scoffed. “I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty good.”

This, dear reader, was a lie in two parts. Firstly, I love to brag (just ask my wife about any time I’ve been proven right), and secondly, as I quickly discovered, I’m not as good as I thought.

I invited him to play one evening after work. Food and fight games we declared. I invited this man into my home, I fed him. And how was my hospitality repaid? He kicked my ass. Beat me like a red-headed stepchild. Completely wiped the floor with me. He’s never really stopped wiping the floor with me. No matter what I try, no matter how much time and effort I put into training, I can never get more that the occasional win over Hello Pájaro.

I think that is what my entire obsession boils down to at this point. I don’t want to be a world champion. I don’t expect to win against every opponent I face. But just once, I want to wipe the floor with Hello Pájaro.

Esports - the dream profession of many a nerd

     I have written before about how much video games have changed from their inception. But there is another whole new kind of beast that is really just starting to make a splash in mainstream America, and that is Esports. 

    Video games have evolved with our culture. They've gone from vector graphic quarter-eaters that could only be found at arcades and pizza joints to something easily accessible in nearly every American household. Located in the pocket of every smart-phone owning citizen.   

    With this evolution came something that used to bore the pants off of me. Watching other people play video games.

One of Several Major Fighting Game Tournaments - Capcom Cup - draws a huge crowd, and only the top 32 players worldwide win a chance to play.

    Used to be a sort of personal hell, standing in line at the arcade, or waiting for my older brother to finish his turn so I could get my chance to get Luigi through those side-scrolling obstacle courses. (I was the younger brother, by default I was always P2) Video games were always boring to watch. But now, it's like watching a sport on TV that you used to play in your prime. And just like watching sports on TV, the more you understand about the game, the more you can appreciate the skills of the really talented players.

    I've played a lot (a lot a lot) of video games. But there were only two games that I have ever played that I would consider myself competitive in. The first was a game called Quake (released by Id software in 1996) but as I was maybe 14 when I peaked at that game, I don't have much to tell. I was a painfully awkward,  light-shunning gamer that stayed in my basement racking up frags and cursing LPBs that haunted my favorite servers. Less revealed about this time in history, the better.

    The other game I played competitively (though truthfully not very well) was Street Fighter 4. The street fighter series has a long popular history dating all the way back to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember playing a lot of Street Fighter with neighborhood kids back in Kindergarten. That's over 30 years ago.

    I had stopped playing Street Fighter in grade school. But I was reintroduced to the game by a friend I met in college. This friend, Ken Masters (as always names have been changed to protect those who claim to be innocent), played street fighter at a level I truly didn't know existed, the Esports level.

    

Ken looking good after college

    It's a game where you try to punch the other guy more than he punches you. How competitive could it be right? As it turns out, very very competitive. There is a mountain of information to sift through once you decide to look very close at these games. To really play Street Fighter the way it's intended, you cant even use a standard controller, you need a fight stick. (kind of like the setup you see on arcade cabinets sized down to fit on your lap) And then you need to study frame info, spacing, throw tech strategies, negative inputs, counter hits, and a bunch of other stuff I cant even remember anymore. 

    The professional players in this game have memorized mountains of data and probably do more math than half of NASA.

    I learned what I could and reached a level that I was able to keep up with most of the other players in my play group. And one fateful winter, Ken and I decided it was time to go play in a tournament. We decided to take a road trip to Calgary to participate in Canada's largest fighting game tournament, the Canada Cup.

    The good news is that we got to explore another country and had a blast doing it. The bad news is we played Street Fighter. We were destroyed. I mean still-to-this-day-embarrassingly blown out of the water. There is even a YouTube clip on the internet (which I will not link or give any hints as to how to find) of our team getting pwnt by a semi-pro Canadian player while the commentators talked about how god-awful we are at this game.

    Going back to the High School sports analogy, it was like going from playing on the junior varsity team straight the Olympic Trials. We got owned that hard.

    I stopped playing Street Fighter shortly after my daughter was born. That was a pretty good reason to spend less than 7 hours a day practicing face punch, but mostly it was an excuse to get out. I was never all that good, and I was waaaaaay overly competitive. I rage quit a ton and I had a tendency to throw things and scream at people when I lost. Sad to say, I burned a lot of bridges and ruined a lot of friendships over this game.

    To everyone I've ever played with, know that I mean this sincerely:

    Sorry for what I said while playing Street Fighter.

Video Games have changed. It's good and bad.

     Christmas 1989, I was only 4 years old, but I can still tell you what I got for Christmas that year. That year, my brother and I got a Nintendo Entertainment System from my parents. (I think mainly my dad, my mom is still upset over how much time I spend playing video games.) It came with the standard 2 controllers, the Nintendo gun, and the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt Combo game. The rest of my life growing up under my parent's roof was spent arguing with my mother about me playing too many video games. (see above statement)

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make playing cards. They release their first video game in 1977.

    Buying video games back in the day was a risky business. There was no internet, and it was usually months before you could find any sort of reviews in print. (In Print!!!) There were lots of horrible games made. Games were released with catastrophic bugs in the code, or unintelligible game play, or sometimes just way too hard. (check out AngryVideoGameNerd on youtube for some extra-vulgar examples) 

    I had several of these titles on my shelf, stacked in the back corner of the entertainment center gathering dust. Every once in a while I would pull one out, blow out the dust, (remember when you had to blow on your video games to make them work?) and play around for a few minutes before remembering why it sucked so much and putting it back in the pile. There was a game called Dino Riki that we had for decades and I never once beat the first level. (and I'm sure I just called someone's favorite childhood game trash)

    Hundreds, if not thousands of video game companies rose and fell over the next several decades, but now the industry has settled into almost the exact format of the movie industry. We have powerhouse studios, and anything else created is considered 'indie'.(think 20th Century Fox vs Electronic Arts) The other, and largest influence on the video game industry, was the widespread availability of high speed internet.

Picture taken shortly before someone's mother got laid.

        I got in fairly early on the internet gaming craze. I played hours and hours and HOURS of Quake online. (that's Quake 1 mind you. low resolution, dial-up internet, and the peak of my FPS gaming affinity) I had a 15K dial up modem, and the bane of my existence were the LPBs (low-ping bastard, this used to be a cutting insult) from big cities that were the firsts to get broadband internet. Growing up in Butte Montana meant it was years (it felt like an eternity) before that same technology became available to us.

    When it did arrive, it turned out to be a bit of a curse. (to me personally.) My first truly high-speed connection to the internet was my freshman year of college, right out of High School. I failed out that year due to Halo and a little internet game called Gunbound. (for the whole sordid tale, see my first post)

    After failing out of school, I nursed my wounded pride with a little game called World of Warcraft. Here is a game so great, so all-consumingly fun, that it is exactly that - all consuming. WoW was, and remains to this day, the only thing I have ever been truly addicted to. There were years of my life when I would spend all day at work thinking about what I was going to do in WoW that night, and every waking moment not spent at work, playing WoW.

You owe me two years of my life back Blizzard.

    I was able to kick the habit years ago, but my wife and I still get cravings to play it. Thankfully, however, we have horrible internet at our place, and we cant run WoW on two computers simultaneously. (we tried 😔)Here is where (I think)the development of video games is both good and bad. The internet has become such an integral part of video games, that it is no longer possible to have a game that does not require internet. 

    One of my favorite parts of opening a new video game was opening the game manual and reading through your upcoming adventure. Game manuals went away a decade ago. Manufacturers decided it was much cheaper to simply put these manuals online. Now they have gone a step further. Now it isnt unheard of to leave the store, take your new game case home, open it up, and the only thing inside is a code to download the game.

    I live in a rural area, so far out of town, that the only 'high speed' internet available to me is microwave internet. (I'm in line to get starlink, but my order isn't expected until mid 2023) For those of you unawares, that means my internet connect comes from a signal a mile down the road. Days when it's raining, snowing, or just too windy, I have no internet. When I do get internet, I have to share my bandwidth with all my neighbors. It is so bad that I can't even stream a movie on Friday or Saturday nights.

    So when a new game comes out, to me it means two days worth of downloads before I get to play once. I really miss the days when the entire game arrived ready to play in the box you only had to pay for once. And industry insiders, if you are reading this, let me tell you, we all feel that way.