Saturday, July 11, 2009

A casual perspective on fight game terminology

God bless your hearts for listening to me when I get technical on fighting games, but I doubt anyone understands me. Really, only two or three people really understand the jargon I use when I start talking about fight games, so how about I enlighten some of you on some of the important terms, jargon, and mumbo-jumbo you'll commonly run into?

Frames: This refers to a measure of how long a specific animation of a character lasts. Instead of measuring a passage of time, it measures the frames of animation that makes it up. Active frames refers to the part of the animation when the attack actually hits. Start up frames refer to the frames before the active frames actually kick in. And finally Cool down refers to the frames before you can do anything else. Basically, you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can start moving around or blocking, which is where we have the term...

Punish: We use the word punish to refer to capitalizing on your enemy's mistakes and counter attacking. Say for example you throw out an obvious uppercut that I block. Since you have to wait for the cool down on that attack, I'm basically going to punish you for your mistake of throwing out such an unsafe attack, preferably with a super move!

Whiff: Basically, an attack that misses. It's pretty straight forward.

Invincibility: This is usually a period of time during a character's attack where they're completely untouchable. Ryu's dragon punch is infamous for this, as it usually beats a lot of attacks because he's invincible while he executes it, and if an enemy tries to attack him, their attack will miss, and they get a face full of fist.
In fact, people commonly refer to moves like this as DP's, or dragon punches, even if they aren't even uppercuts. DP just refers to a move that has a healthy amount of invincibility.

Super Armor: This is a little different then invincibility. Instead of a move letting a move pass through them, the character will absorb the attack instead, and continue on with the attack. A lot of bigger characters usually have moves that have super armor due to their strength and size.

236, 214, and other combinations: This is the universal way of demonstrating how to execute special attacks using number notation on an arcade stick. Here's how to imagine it...
7 8 9
4 5 6
1 2 3
5 stands for an arcade stick in neutral. As you can see, 236 means quarter circle forward and 214 is quarter circle back. If you see 63214, that's half circle back. Once again, we just refer to 623 as DP's, cause it's faster. These number are, for the most part, universal in understanding among fight game communities.

360s and 720s: In almost every fight game, there is a character who works by grabbing enemies and tossing them around like ragdolls. It seems like every big grappling character's biggest throw command moves involve moving your joystick in 360 degrees and the corresponding attack button. Even stronger versions are usually 720 degrees, or two spins.

Cancel: So you know moves have cool down, right? Well, some moves can strategically "cancel" into another, that is, to cancel the cool down animation altogether and segue into a new attack. Ryu has an old cancel where you go from his crouching medium kick and go straight into his fireball once it hits. So instead of kicking and waiting for the kick to finish, Ryu throws out a fireball as soon as the kick connects.

Link: This requires more skill then canceling. Linking a move means knowing exactly when the animation for an attack ends and doing another attack that will presumably connect if your timing is good.

Stuff: Used as a verb, this is when an attack completely beats out an attack if they both happen to meet each other at the same time. Taking Blazblue's Tager as an example, he has an attack called sledgehammer that moves him forward as he swings his arm, and this will stuff just about any attack that comes his way. Tager will usually use sledgehammer to move across the screen safely without having to worry about incoming attacks.

Jump in: Refers to any generic attack where you try attacking while jumping on top of your enemy. Why jump in? Because you must be blocking high in order to actually block it. Which leads to...

Overhead: A character's unique attack that also must be blocked high. Overheads are usually unique attacks so a player can try breaking someone's guard without having to jump in on them. A lot of newer players have the wrong impression that blocking while crouching will somehow magically stop everything, while in reality, we have overheads to stop this kind of train of thought.

Turtling: A strategy where the user runs away and blocks any incoming attacks. This usually involves a lot of waiting and baiting and punishing any aggressive attempts. It's basically playing it safe, but is very boring to spectate. Lots of competitive players frown on turtling.

Rushdown: The opposite of turtling, where you throw caution to the wind and pressure the opponent with lots of rapid attacks, whether they connect or are blocked. The enemy can't fight back if they're blocking, right?

Spam: Repeating an attack endlessly. The reasoning is that "if it works, then use it!" usually accompanied with "I don't know how to do anything else." For example, Akuma from Street Fighter can just hang back, turtle, and spam fireballs the entire match. Good Akuma players can employ different strategies (Akuma is usually a rushdown character), but spamming fireballs is basically a one track strategy that can be punished quickly by decent players.

Flow chart _____: Going off of spam, this is a relatively new term coined from SFIV and Ken. Flow chart Kens were notorious for using his DP at every chance, even if commonsense dictated that it'd be easily blocked. Flow chart characters are usually people who have fallen into a routine they're comfortable with but are also predictable and the chart usually consists of a number of basic technique everyone uses liberally, but is repeated ad nausea in this case. Here is the chart that started it all. Jin Kisaragi from Blazblue is starting to gain popularity as a flow chart character as well.


That's all for now! Hope you found this enlightening!

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