Ramblings of the Queen of KOF

It should go without saying that this article will have spoilers, but here's a warning right at the top should you need it. The Phantasy Star series, to me, were games I would start, but never really play. I took popular opinion of the Phantasy Star series being "SEGA's not-as-good Final Fantasy," as gospel and as such never gave it the time of day. That is, until a couple years ago when NerdJosh , known mostly for his prowess in a wide range of fighting games, shared a pivotal scene from Phantasy Star IV; the death of Alys. Without any context, I felt moved. And from that moment marked Phantasy Star IV as a game I needed to get around to if just to understand the context of that scene. Alys the Hunter From the beginning of the game, Alys is in your party and protects you, the player, from having to deal with a lot of the nuances of Phantasy Star's combat. She's strong, starting several levels higher than the rest of your party, has a wide va...

Notice: This guide assumes a certain degree of knowledge from you, the reader. To get the most use out of this, you'll need to be familiar with the basics of playing a fighting game. Foreward This is everything I have. Every technique, trick, and piece of execution wizardry I've picked up over the last decade of playing and loving fighting games with every fiber of my being. As the games continue to change and my interest wanes as I get older, I feel a compulsion to share what I've learned and what I love so that these techniques don't die out. While I would like to and intend to hopefully do more specific game-specific breakdowns of titles like Garou and KOFXIII, this piece will focus on the fundamentals of execution as it pertains to performing anything in any game. The tools I will lay out here, once practiced, will allow you to clear any execution hurdle ever thrown in front of you. I'm covering charge buffers, step-by-step instructions on how to charge par...

Outrun is one of my all-time favorite series. I love the original, love the more modern titles, you just can't go wrong with Outrun. It's one of my chill games I play when I'm stressed and reminds me of when I'd turn off my beaten path between my home and school to go driving for a while down unknown roads, through unseen valleys and every nook and corner the hills of western Virginia had to throw at me. Tunnels made of overgrown tree branches that opened into fields and no one else existed in these moments besides me, the explorer. To me, outrun worked best when it was just about capturing these feelings of peace and exploration. I will say, Outrun is a game whose development I've been known to romanticize. Yet, one of Yu Suzuki's core design philosophies has always inspired me. I'm paraphrasing here, but he once said something akin to "good games have rough edges." Outrun, even the original, has rough edges. The controls have never been much...

I have a lot of games. Like, a lot. Usually the first thing someone says after they come into my house and sit on my couch is, "That's a lot of consoles." On average there are 12 different consoles setup at the family TV spanning over 30 years of gaming. And that's not even mentioning a similarly big portable collection with everything from original Gameboys and GameGears to NeoGeoPocket Colors, PSPs, Vita, DS, GBA, the list goes on. That's a lot of stuff to store, maintain, and organize... Making up purpose A collection, or a mess of "stuff"? I can't really speak for why anyone else collects, but for me that internal reason that I tell myself has shifted and morphed a few times. When I worked at GameStop, it was a matter of exploring through discounted titles from aging consoles. It's hard to imagine now that the series has picked up, but I originally bought Yakuza 3 for, well, free. It was less than $10 on GameStop's long-standing B...

This answer will be long, but I'm going to try to lay it out as thoroughly as I can because this is a common complaint with multiple potential responses. So, moves like the shoryuken or hadoken, or "motion moves" as I'll refer to them for the rest of this, have been around for ages in a variety of games from fighting games to beat-em-ups to even recently making their way into Smash Bros. But what value do they serve over, say, mapping that same action to its own button? Let's stick with the Shoryuken and then look at it as it is found in Street Fighter, Smash Bros, and then Shadows over Mystara(SoM), a beat-em-up. The purpose of the move is the same in all three games. A fast reversal move that is strong as a ground-to-air attack, an attack from the ground that is at advantage vs an opponent in the air. Now let's take a look at the motion for each game. (I'll try to use proper notation for every game, but keep in mind I'm a KOF player. lol. Nu...