I love fighting games. I cut my competitive video gaming teeth on fighters. My gaming ‘hobby’ became serious ‘competition’ with Friday afternoons, History Class, and Street Fighter 2 when Reggie would bring his Super NES to school and the teacher let us have the second half of the period to ourselves. That was 16 years ago. I am sure that many of you have similar stories. We can all pretty much agree that a fighting game is almost the perfect competitive game. Two players, one screen, one machine. For the arcades as long as the machine and screen are in good working order, there is no worrying about frame rate, whether ‘your’ hardware can run the game, or connection speed (for now).

A lot of the information here will not be new to the seasoned Fighting Game Enthusiast. For those others, I hope the information here is entertaining if not useful.

For consoles, all that matters is whether your comfortable in your couch, and if you have the proper equipment to play the game. By proper equipment, I mean a good game and a good joystick. The game is easy enough: Soul Calibur, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter (or Capcom in general), and Guilty Gear. Choosing a good fighting stick, that’s where the problem starts. If you intend to really delve deep into fighting games, then you have to learn to play with a stick. If your playing a console port of an arcade game, you want to make sure that you are ready for the arcades when you go to meet your friends on a Friday Night Fight Night. Playing on a pad will hinder your ability to pull off some mad combos, and will make that transition for console to arcade that much more difficult. What your looking for in a stick is comfortability, functionality, and durability Being comfortable and functional is easy enough. Just get a stick that is big enough to reach all the buttons and has all the buttons to play just about any game with. Durability gets a little tricky. Buy a cheap product, you’ll get cheap results. For people like me, who use their stick constantly, things break down. The ability to quick swap parts in and out of a controller are important. Easily modable with HAPP or sanwa parts. With the right converters these sticks should last me forever. Stay away from the limited edition fighting game Hori sticks, like the Tekken, or Capcom Fighting Evolution stick. Those have the parts soldered directly into the PCB and are not as easily modded or repaired when something breaks. The HRAP/HRAP2/HRAP3 are made with Sanwa/HAPP quick connect parts for a quick ‘swap out’ if something breaks. Best site to order from – http://www.play-asia.com/

I have heard good things about the x-arcade controller, if you like the ‘American’ style tear-drop controller. Not my cup of tea. I prefer the Japanese ball type with the arch button style. You can get the x-arcade here – http://www.xgaming.com/

If Hori sticks or X-arcade are not your cup of tea, there are plenty of custom builder sites out there. As small as a single controller to as large as an entire cabinet – http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm. In fact, you just might make your friends jealous if you show up with one of these intow:

I am a Virtua Fighter player. My personal sticks are these and one other shot of my youngest making me proud:

Then you could get as fancy as my friend Gerald in Los Angeles, who just built himself a Head-To-Head Cabinet:

Ok. So I have the game. Check. I have the controller. Check. Do I have friends to play with? For some of us, this is a problem. I have plenty of friends to play against, but none who are very good. This last weekend, once again, reassured me that I have to look elsewhere for great competition in my favorite games. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing with my friends, but they suffer a severe scrub disease. One of the biggest problems I have with my friends is they are button mashers, and they refuse to learn the in’s and out’s of a game to transcend beyond the level of scrub-dom. I hate button mashers. Why is it so difficult for some people to learn button buffers, combinations, and good overall defense? The worst thing about it is, once you learn that there are only so many things that can be done by mashing the buttons, and you learn all the counters for those button mashable combos, it’s time to move on to bigger and better competition. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but arcades have just about gone belly up here in California. I am sure that it is the same elsewhere in the US, Canada, and possibly Euro. Seems that the only place where an arcade is more than just Dance Dance Revolution and Crusin’ USA is Asia. For all of us that do not live in Asia, do not have an active arcade, and are desperate for good competition, I give you the Internet. Fighting games have a long way to go before we reach netplay bliss. Connection Lag and Frame Drop seem to be the biggest problems for good competitive play. The closest thing we have right now for lag-free netplay is GGPO for the PC. GGPO plays a multitude of ROMs and uses a custom build of Final Burn Alpha. The GGPO site is dodgy at times. It’s there, trust me. For those that want more than just general internet play, we have to find out friends and competitors via forums, bulletin boards, and message systems. For those that are looking for specific sites, here is a brief list of the top sites to visit on the net:

• Soul Calibur – http://www.soulcalibur.com/ – It’s the official Soul Calibur 2 site, however it has awesome information on Soul Calibur 3 as well as a very active forum. The community is good, local tournaments galore. The only problem that I see, is that most people do not like SC3 as much as SC2. Play is play, I guess.

• 2D Fighters – http://www.shoryuken.com/ – This is a great all around site. They just started up a fighting game wiki too, which will be awesome given enough time to mature. The forums are awesome, the community is great, and things really start to come alive around EVO2K time.

• Tekken – http://www.tekkenzaibatsu.com/ – This is the best source for Tekken. Great strats in the forums. Stay away from the general topics though, people there are tools.

• Virtua Fighter – http://www.virtuafighter.com/ – Smaller community, yet tons of information on the site. There is a forum to meet local VF fighters in your area, take advantage of it. Learn VF and all your fighting game dreams will come true. The FAQ section of the site has a wealth of information including frame data.

• Great General Site – http://www.sirlin.net/ – Sirlin was a guest on the Bridger and Harlock show (my old radio show) a while back. The theory about fighting games is rich and deep, and this guy has captured it into print perfectly. He is the author of many a great article, including a book called ‘Playing to Win’ (he recently posted the entire book as a free e-book). There are short articles on the subject that should be read by all. Give this guy mad props for his contribution to the fighting game community.

Being a refugee of the arcades, and a veteran fighter I hope that my little rant has helped someone on these forums. If there is something I missed, or something you would like to add (other than ‘you suck’), feel free. My Virtua Fighter 5 player group in 2007. I am in the black Nike warmups, kneeling in the center:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Games, Street Fighter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.