street fighter

time-lapse synapse line-snap

  • Reading time:1 mins read

okay okay

okay

after three decades, simple things are starting to make sense to me

(as they will do, eventually)

it differs per move per character, so you really need to spend time getting to know a character’s eccentricities,

but generally normal moves will combo across or up move-strengths, but not down

so, like

light kick to medium kick or light to strong or medium to strong—but not strong back to medium or medium back to light, right

and to link them cleanly, generally the time to hit the button for the next move is after the first move connects but before your animation returns you to neutral

so this clip, it’s just a calm down-the-alphabet of lp, lk, mp, mk, hp, hk, leading into her overpowered antiair move once the final normal move launches the opponent

top-to-bottom, left-to right

light, light, medium, medium, heavy, heavy, special move

light leads to light leads to medium leads to medium leads to heavy leads to heavy leads to whatever special move works and makes sense

using this understanding in context is another kettle of cats, but thus is life

pack-out game

  • Reading time:2 mins read

it’s funny, i keep saying how much more street fighter 6 feels like an snk or a sega game than what i associate with capcom

and city of the wolves—though the thematic lineage is clear, maybe real bout more than mark of the wolves, the physical vibe is… off, somehow, and in some ways reminds me more of cps1/2-era capcom than mvs-era snk

the play dynamics have more of those “mean” teeth that i used to avoid so much, in favor of snk’s more slippery texture and freewheeling dynamics

every move has such a narrow input window, such a huge punish window, and 2/3 the range i expect; every mistake is so costly yet so difficult to avoid

although in theory cotw retains much of that snk mobility, in practice it feels way more nailed-down and confrontational than sf6; it’s harder to get the opponent to fuck off and give you space to figure things out

the stress of which exacerbates the narrow margin of error to decisions and inputs

it’s kind of discouraging to engage with, like it shuts down every attempt to hold a conversation and tells you to mind your business (says the famous social butterfly azurelore), compared to the transparency and flexibility and radical effort toward diverse and confident inclusion practiced by sf6

none of this is necessarily bad; it’s just kind of alienating by comparison, toward anyone who falls outside a kind of narrow specific attitude about what sort of conversation they want to entertain

and that’s a conversation i personally am not hard-coded to entertain with ease or enthusiasm

there’s much about cotw that does fascinate me, that feeds the parts of me that push me toward the media that i enjoy

it’s just, i find it a little frustrating that the central design of the thing seems to keep looking at me oddly and asking what i’m doing there, like i strayed into the wrong turf

stumbling in the door

  • Reading time:4 mins read

mentally i tend to lump in the first season of sf6 dlc with the starting roster, in part because i didn’t pick up the game until after ed hit; in part, because they are all part of the original plan for the game

like, capcom had only announced four characters when the other 18 leaked in one lump

structurally much of the base game is clearly built around the knowledge that at least rashid, aki, and ed are meant to be there—they’re just delayed a bit, for reasons

same as kofxv with its first season, or what’s happening with cotw, talking about 22 base characters—albeit five of them being dlc

emotionally the sf6 roster also kinda feels weird without the energy of rashid, aki, and ed—they feel like core characters as much as the other seven new guys, plus juri, deejay, and cammy

i get the sense that, like kofxv, they lightly carved out the least-crucial characters to hit the launch date

i mean, akuma is easy to push back because of the way he’s always served as a sort of elite post-game bonus element—but i can see figuring they needed all eight original world warriors on day one as a security blanket, and wanting to show off as many of their new creations as possible…

so it’s mostly that zone between sfii:tww and the new cast, where there was room to trim

i can see keeping in cammy and deejay again for familiarity, even as they have been totally redesigned—leaving just akuma and the three select sfiv-v characters

and then i can see swapping out aki for juri

like, if we’re talking an 18-character launch roster, and feel constrained to use eight of those slots on the sfii cast in order to reassure the easily-stressed and elder Gamers, to balance off and provide symmetry for the eight new guys, that just leaves two other “wild card” slots—which, if we go with the super sfii guys again serve to defer to relative familiarity, while showcasing the game’s ability to make the old altogether new again

i can then see that same totally justified “we need people to accept this immediately” impulse to pivot with a frown and say, “okay, juri is probably our single most popular character of the last 20 years; how can we squeeze her in at launch?”

and if we’re gonna tinker with the symmetry to make sure foot-girl is there on day one, then aki makes a natural sacrifice. even if she’s an important new character, there’s so much conceptual overlap, right?

like, juri has always been dlc until now and i can see how at first thought she likely was a strong candidate to hold back along with akuma and the two sfv characters—but she’s just that strong a draw, swapping her into the launch roster makes that much stronger a first impression and sales pitch

anyway, the season 1 dlc is clearly all scrambled up in the initial development of the game. it’s not extraneous tacked-on content, it’s the rest of the game as originally planned.

season 2 is where shit starts to get wild, as they start to build and riff off the now-established base

there’s this clear “act break” of sorts between [launch+s1] and s2, and the energy is so different, so much more confident as of last summer, just a few months after i finally got on-board

it’s almost like a soft reboot of a now-proven success, restating the original pitch with new flair and spark

so, long way of saying, i tend to kinda forget that rashid, ed, and aki technically aren’t launch roster. since they are so clearly of a part with the rest of the game and elements of its *core* roster. it’s just, part of that base core had to be held back a bit to get the game out the door at all 🤷🏻‍♀️