and as we go back through the FGs of yesteryear, from forgotten gems to infamous trainwrecks to even just some well known Good Shit, a picture starts to form that, like... the rules may be fake? they're not real. games that did things "wrong" are some of the most legendary entries of the genre - ThreadSky

armormodekeeg.bsky.social • 90 days ago

and as we go back through the FGs of yesteryear, from forgotten gems to infamous trainwrecks to even just some well known Good Shit, a picture starts to form that, like... the rules may be fake? they're not real. games that did things "wrong" are some of the most legendary entries of the genre

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midori-ryuu.bsky.social•88 days ago

There are a few things that showed up a lot in old games that I really think the genre is better off without, like moves that are unsafe on hit. Even if they don't ruin the entire game, they're still a drag and I can't see them as anything but a flaw.

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

and it leads to these super funny situations, right, where we'll load up Soulcalibur, and then just gush about how it is one of the best fighters in history and isn't kusoge in the slightest, and then a minute later we're laughing our asses off at Lizardman ringing people out at round start

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

or someone will dig up some old obscure-ass game, like, let's say, Hinokakera Chaotic Eclipse, and we'll go in with basically no expectations and come out like "that game's fucking awesome I wanna play it with more people"
which are honestly some of my favorite parts of being involved in this

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

and sometimes you get the true essence of "kusoge" - a game so fucked up it's fascinating, like when we spent like six fuckin' hours on Super Variable Geo for the Super Famicom discovering terrifying amounts of frame advantage and all the cool and exciting ways "blocking on wakeup" can fail to work

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

and it ultimately has all put a very strange idea into my head:

if things like overpowered strategies, exploits, bad balance, bugs, etc. really are what make a fighting game "bad"...

then the act of playing and learning a fighting game will, frequently, make it "worse"!

midori-ryuu.bsky.social•90 days ago

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

playing fighters at a high level brings strange, edge-case interactions to the forefront. stuff that nobody thought to try becomes stuff you'll see in every tournament. if we players truly felt that every game needed to follow rules to be good, we'd have dropped so many games as we learned them.

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

so, clearly, we as a whole don't love fighting games just for their potential as perfectly fair & balanced competitive experiences, nor do we prioritize games doing "nothing wrong" over "something right".

what truly makes fighting games "good" is just such an odd thing to define. and that's neat.

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

I view this as true of all fighting games. Viable complexity and diversity of strategy is what makes a good fighting game, and every serious player is an optimizer trying to win more, to reduce the state space by making themself more likely to win. The game designer is in this way opposed to players

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

It's why I think it's a philosophical impossibility to design a "simplified" competitive game that's also enduringly competitively interesting. The combination of designed and emergent complexity is the only thing standing between the players and the game being "broken." You /need/ complexity

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

I agree with a lot of what you have to say here but this is where my own philosophical understanding diverges. I think fundamentally what makes a kusoge is the lack of definition if it's core gameplay relative to the mechanics in it. This is what often leads to exploit and bad balance. (1/3)

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

There are many great games that have strong definitions for what their core gamplay that fall into kusoge because they either push that definition to an unblanceable extreme which narrows the gameplay loop at high levels of gameplay, or that 'missed something fundamental' when balancing (2/3)

jenalysis.bsky.social•90 days ago

This is surprisingly true. The games that do best against this are the ones that allow the most intacharacter expression

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

Truly a person of culture. God I love Lizardman what a dope.

bookwormlover.bsky.social•90 days ago

One of my favorite parts of the stream is when a game becomes unbearable to play, and so they decide to play something else.

That Spore fighter which never really amounted to much and then went “Fuck it, we’re playing KOF ‘95”

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