One of the reasons I was quite keen to get my hands on Evercade Alpha, the latest product from my place of work, was to give Getting Into Fighting Games an honest go. I’ve attempted to do this a few times — I even bought Street Fighter 6 on launch — but have always ended up bouncing off for one reason or another, and the notoriously impenetrable nature of the genre hasn’t helped matters.
This evening, I sat down and had a few goes at Street Fighter Alpha. And I actually had a good time! I won’t say I was especially “good” at it, and the intricacies of the genre still elude me somewhat, but playing with good quality arcade controls on the Evercade Alpha made the whole experience feel a lot more accessible and intuitive than ever before.
I think one of the things that confuses me most of all about fighting games is how each character has an absolute shit-ton of moves that you can perform: with six buttons and an eight-directional joystick, that’s already a lot of possible moves, and then add command inputs or charge moves into the mix and you have an overwhelming variety of possibilities. My biggest question when pondering fighting games from afar has always been “how the hell do you decide what to do when?”
I don’t have an answer to that just yet, but even with just a few games of Street Fighter Alpha I started to feel things becoming a bit more intuitive. I moved away from my SNES-era strategy of only ever using the heavy attack buttons, and found success with some speedy jabs and good use of projectiles — which are much, much easier to pull off with an arcade stick, if anyone were still in any doubt about that. I felt like I had a reasonable grasp of “the basics” with Ryu, and I gave Rose a bit of a go, too. She’s rather more complicated to use, from the looks of things, but I actually had my overall best performance out of several shots at the game using Rose. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to “main” her just yet — I’m nowhere near the level where I even contemplate having a “main” — but I’m definitely intrigued to try her out a bit more and get to grips with what some of her moves actually do.
Because I think the answer to my earlier question — “how the hell do you decide what to do when?” — comes with experience. The more you play a character, the more you understand what each combination of button and direction does, and that, in turn, gives you a better idea of what might work well in different scenarios. You’ll get a feel for the different moves’ reach, power level and vulnerability to countering, and, over time, you’ll (theoretically) be able to make snap tactical decisions in the middle of a match.
I’m nowhere near there, yet. But I’m actually looking forward to spending some time learning. I don’t have any grand designs on being a competitive player or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to play at least a couple of fighting games to a level beyond basic button-mashing. And, so far, Street Fighter Alpha has felt surprisingly accessible, with its relatively limited roster and fairly straightforward mechanics. Plus the art style is great — and only gets better later in the series. (But the later Alpha games also get considerably more complicated!)
So yeah. That’s what I’ve spent my evening doing. I was going to play some Super Mario RPG, but by the time I’d finished wrapping Christmas presents earlier, the amount of time before “I should probably go to bed” had elapsed to such a degree that playing some short-form arcade stuff was probably a more sensible idea. So that’s what I did.
And now, I should probably go to bed.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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