FROM MASHER TO MASTER: THE EDUCATED VIDEO GAME Enthusiast’s FIGHTING GAME PRIMER (SUPER BOOK EDITION) PRESENTED BY BY PATRICK MILLER SHORYUKEN.COM ///////////////// ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ///////////////// Shoutouts to the BEARcade, my old home away from home, and all the people who loved it (RIP). To Allen S. and David A., the Ryu and Ken to my Akuma; and Vince, my Satsui no Hadou Dan. To Mike Zaimont and S-Kill, for helping me make this thing make sense. To Ponder, Inkblot, jchensor, and all the other OGs and 09ers alike who read my drafts and gave me feedback. To Jesse and Christine and Simon and all the other newbies who let me experiment on them. And to every single family member who gave me another stack of quar- ters or played games with me (Dad, Nina, Bing, Jewel, Wijay, Jovy, Boots, Doy, Bong, Heidi — this is all your fault). ///////////////// CONTRIBUTORS ///////////////// Illustrations by Mariel Cartwright (Chapters: 1, 3, 5, 7) @kinucakes & Jonathan Kim (Cover, Chapters: 2, 4, 6, & Conclusion) @personasama Layout by oddpress This ebook is freely available for download at www.shoryuken.com, so if you paid for it, you got ripped off! I decided to release this ebook for free because I wanted to make sure that anyone even remotely interested in learning how to play fighting games could do so without worrying about money getting in the way. If you feel like you got enough out of reading this that you want to give back, I’d ask that you do these two things: Share the book with everyone you know who might be interested, and find a way to support your favorite fighting game heads. Buy a t-shirt, organize a tournament, donate to help an underrated player make it to Evo. Support your local FGC! (And, heck, if you offer to buy me a beer at a tournament, I won’t say no.) This ebook is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer- cial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit here. All screenshots captured in gameplay of Super Street Fighter II: HD Remix, Street Fighter IV, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 by Patrick Miller. “Street Fighter”, “Super Street Fighter II: HD Remix,” “Street Fighter IV,” and “Marvel vs. Capcom 2” are all registered trademarks of Capcom Co. Ltd. ///////////////// TABLE OF CONTENTS ///////////////// INTRODUCTION: WHY YOU SHOULD LEARN HOW TO PLAY STREET FIGHTER CHAPTER ONE: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FIGHTING GAMES CHAPTER TWO: BEGINNER EXECUTION CHAPTER THREE: SIMPLIFYING STREET FIGHTER CHAPTER FOUR: INTRO TO COMBOS CHAPTER FIVE: ELEVEN TIPS FOR NOT SUCKING AT STREET FIGHTER CHAPTER SIX: DON’T WANT NO SCRUBS CHAPTER SEVEN: INTRODUCING STREET FIGHTER IV CONCLUSION: THE WARRIOR’S PATH Introduction: Why You Should Learn How to Play Street Fighter ///////////////////////////////////// Remember Street Fighter II? Of course you do. Ryu and Ken, Hadoukens and Shoryukens (or “doukens” and “all-you-cans”). You probably played a bit of it an arcade, once, in the early ‘90s. Maybe you really got into it, or you know someone else who did. If you’re like most people, you played it a few times, thought it was neat, and then moved on with your life. If that sounds like you, well, I am compelled to offer you my sincere condolences, because it turns out that Street Fighter II – or, rather, its genre of one-on-one fighting games – are quite possibly one of the finest activities a person could devote their time to. Fighting games have long been dismissed by philistines as “button mashers”; that all you do is wildly jerk around an arcade stick and press buttons haphazardly until something happens. This is what people who are not good at fighting games say – probably because “speed-chess- poker-magic-the-gathering-rock-paper-scissors-fighting” is kind of a mouthful, and frankly, most of the people who think fighting games con- sist of mindless button-mashing never got deep enough into a fighting game to get to the speed-chess-poker-etc part to begin with. But that’s okay. You’re here now, reading this, and that’s what matters. You might be reading this simply because you want to learn how to become reasonably competent at a fighting game. That’s a pretty good reason! But I am calling this book “The Educated Video Game Enthusi- ast’s Fighting Game Primer” because, well, I know plenty of Educated Video Game Enthusiasts who ought to learn more about fighting games, but don’t have a clue as to how to go about doing it. (This book is actually 1 an extended version of an earlier article called “The Educated Gen- tleperson’s Fighting Game Primer”.) Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably big into video- games; maybe you’re a devoted enthusiast, maybe you’re a journalist, maybe you’re an academic or amateur scholar of some sort, maybe you even make your own videogames. If you are significantly invested in the production and consumption of videogames as a medium, on a personal or professional level, you ought to know something about competitive fighting games as a matter of basic literacy. Learning how to beat another person in a fighting game involves understanding elements of game design, psychology, programming and basic machine input/output, human physiology, motivation, and several other serious bodies of human knowledge — and then applying them to go beat down your buddy’s virtual avatar. You must train yourself to understand complicated situations and react to them with complicated physical movements within fractions of a second. Perhaps most importantly, you must learn how to get better at something: How to absorb good behaviors and discard bad ones, how to push yourself, how to practice, how to diagnose problems and fix them. I think it’s a good thing for people to do, period. MMA legend Renzo Gracie once said “Fighting [games] is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul 1.” As someone who works in and around the games industry, I can di- rectly trace whatever career success I’ve had (for which I am incredibly grateful) to my early love of fighting games. Studying Street Fighter felt, to me, like seeing the Matrix as ones and zeros for the first time. Now, I can understand that not everyone feels the same about Street Fighter as I do — Street Fighter eventually led me to pursue actual fighting as another all-consuming hobby, so clearly I’m just kind of wired to like that kind of thing — but I maintain that a functional understanding of competitive fighting games is a worthwhile asset for any budding professional in the games industry. The most fundamental thing that sets games apart from other ar- tistic media — books, film, whatever — is that games demand a physical 1 He didn’t actually say the “games” part, but I like to think he would have, if he were any good at Street Fighter. 2 interaction between the text and the player. These days, we’re seeing games do all kinds of interesting things, from experimental narratives to designs intended for wildly different control schemes to engines so powerful they accurately model the way light works in real life. But amid all that, we’ve found it very challenging to develop games that express sheer joy at the level of the physical input itself. Fighting games require you to be proficient at the physical aspect in order to enjoy them, and as such I think they really do address the essence of the videogame as a medium. Moreover, the process of playing a fighting game against another person can essentially be considered “game design, in reverse”. Playing a fighting game means you’re studying a game down to individual pixels, animation frames, processor cycles, and its player (your opponent) down to behavioral patterns, tics, and state of mind — all in order to make the game as miserable as possible for the other person. Your job is to take the tools the designers have given you — charac- ters with moves — and turn the game into a sheer mess of broken parts that no one ever wants to play again. “Look at what you’ve made, de- signer,” you say, “Do you think this imbalanced, hackneyed crap is worth pouring my life into? Try again.” Your opponent is merely a canvas upon which you may paint with your brush of pain; the designer who dared suggest that this game was worthy of your time is the audience. (Of course, your opponent is trying to do the same thing to you, and somehow, both of you have a good old time and the game developers make some money.) Perhaps it’s not quite surprising why established fighting game veterans seem to be breaking into the industry; all they’d have to do in the office is, well, the opposite of what they do in the arcade. And it’s not just about crushing people beneath your heel, either. A great fighting game only gets more and more fun as you put more time into it, no matter how old or outdated it is. It is something that can teach you more about yourself, and connect you to people in ways other games or hobbies can’t. It’s a thing that can make you feel better about yourself as you meet your goals and set new ones. It can actually make 3 you a better person. So read this book. Maybe you’ll be bitten by the bug, maybe you won’t.