Thread by @The_Opponent, At some point in the last four years, I suddenly became competent [...]

At some point in the last four years, I suddenly became competent at fighting games. After struggling to understand them since 1993, I& #39;m now confident enough to try any fighting game against another player with no prior experience in them. How and when did this happen?

I have only one theory, and I don& #39;t even know if it& #39;s a good one. First, some history.

I have two older brothers, both of whom have always been good at fighting games unlike me. Our first was Street Fighter II on SNES. They figured it out naturally and I never did.

I played it (or tried to) about as much as they did, but for whatever reason, I could never do any of the cool stuff they were able to. Maybe I couldn& #39;t read the manual at the time, being too young. If I even did, I certainly didn& #39;t understand any of it.

And so it went on for two decades. My brothers (including my younger brother, born in the late 90s) all got into the newest Street Fighter games, all of which evaded me. We even played Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 and the SNK fighting games on SNES, and I had even less success there.

This continued on throughout the years. For every console we got, my brothers played whatever fighting games they had that interested them, incidentally all Capcom: X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom 1 and 2, Capcom vs. SNK 1 and 2, Street Fighter III...

It wasn& #39;t until Tatsunoko vs. Capcom that I finally got the opportunity to hear what I& #39;ve been needing to hear since 1993. I don& #39;t remember how I found this, but I credit this video for teaching me what I needed to know to get started on fighting games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2iyi2pEwSY">https://www.youtube.com/watch...

It& #39;s specific to this one game, but having basic systems explained to me one at a time is exactly what I needed. Especially how combos worked, always escalating in a logical order. I never noticed any of this just watching people play for many years.

Of course, this video was published in 2010, before tutorials became a standardized feature in modern games. Ultimately, it wasn& #39;t enough for me. I still didn& #39;t have the confidence to play fighting games of my own volition, and I never managed to commit these lessons to memory.

So practically, I was only a few steps ahead where I started in the SNES era. But it was the early 2010s, so I watched a lot of YouTube, including reviews of infamously bad fighting games. I thought they were funny at the time, but they never went into why exactly they were bad.

By chance, I saw this video. Team Best From Now& #39;s review of Survival Arts changed my life, and I& #39;m saying this with no exaggeration. A game that the the internet had written off being analyzed with serious rigor completely rewrote how I perceived games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIDeOYfj6YU">https://www.youtube.com/watch...

I could never have imagined that something that looks like Survival Arts could have unique mechanics. What other games have people passed on have hidden depth like this? I wanted to learn more, but I lacked the means. I needed fundamental skills, and I still didn& #39;t have them.

In 2014, @Flynn_Jeux and @DankPasta2099 got into Street Fighter The Movie The Game on a whim. They recorded a series of matches and it was some of the funniest gameplay I& #39;ve ever seen. I decided to get into it casually with them. I lost more often than I won but still had fun.

Finally, at MAGFest 2017, we decided to hold a tournament for it. It was just for fun, but we had a decent turnout, because the game had gained somewhat more notoriety at the time. After it ended, @TMNT_TF came up to us and showed us his Ken gameplay.

What we saw was beyond what we could have imagined. Ken flying round the screen cancelling Tatsus repeatedly, super moves we didn& #39;t know existed, the works. It was then he told us about "poverty games", of which this was one of his favorites.

And that& #39;s the final piece I had to hear. Poverty games, those that got little to no mainstream attention, have small but devoted communities. With such small but knowledgeable playerbases, there is no pressure to become a high-level player or even to compete.

I named Street Fighter The Movie The Game my all time favorite fighting game. At long last, I had a sincere drive to learn a fighting game. I started to actively apply the lessons on fundamentals that are all over the internet and adapt them to games that are actually popular.

All of this to say: Street Fighter The Movie The Game is considered to be a "bad" fighting game, and there& #39;s no denying that it suffers from lack of polish and testing. People might look more favorably on it today, but only because of the effort of its community to make it shine.

But I& #39;m a film major, and there& #39;s a saying that I learned early and took to heart: There& #39;s much more value in studying bad movies than studying good ones. No one sets out to make a bad movie, so you should learn why the gap in intent and result are so big.

To put it another way:

Source: https://obscuritory.tumblr.com/post/170912761764/i-have-never-played-a-game-that-i-didnt-see-some">https://obscuritory.tumblr.com/post/1709...

I& #39;ve often explained why I love Street Fighter The Movie The Game as being a game that challenges what should and shouldn& #39;t work in fighting games in 1995, and that it subverts your expectations on what& #39;s possible in the genre.

It was staring me in the face for years, and only last night did I realize. I learned how fighting games work and their fundamentals because I spent years studying what happens when they& #39;re not done the proper way. From there, I intuited how certain things are "supposed" to be.

There& #39;s a lot of details I didn& #39;t include in this story, but the net result is that after 27 years, I have no problem picking up any fighting game and at least trying out all the characters in the hope that I& #39;ll find one I like before I run out of patience for the engine.

But most importantly, I am fully devoted to the poverty fighting game scene. Fighting games bending the rules and unintended consequences of mechanical experimentation is what I like to see, and that& #39;s something you only get when you look the other way from the Evo main stage.

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