Street Fighter IV, from my radio show

I was trapped in my shower earlier today.

At one point the water from the showerhead was far too hot to bathe
with, so I stepped out of the way and dipped the dial into the cold
side. After a minute at a comfortable temperature, the water became
ice cold. I gently nuzzled the dial towards the warm side again, and
the water became impossibly hot. I had never felt water so hot outside
of my own nightmares.

As I waited in one corner of the shower for the hot water to run out,
still covered in patches of unrinsed suds, I thought about my first
time playing Street Fighter 4. My brother gave me the controller, and
I asked him how I should start playing the game. Should I jump right
into arcade mode, or should I go to the training room first? He told
me to go to trial mode. There, the game would educate me on the most
important moves for each character, and then challenge me to string
those moves together into deadly combos that I could use in mortal
combat.

Of course, as time went on, these challenges became more difficult. I
discovered that simply performing one attack after another was not
enough to create a seamless combo. Very often, I would have to input
the button sequence for an attack JUST BEFORE the previous attack was
finished, and every once in a while I would have to launch the attack
just after the initial attack was completed. Only once in a while did
my actions on screen directly match my own button inputs.

I thought about the temperature dial in my shower - about how the
water was scalding even though the dial was pointed far away from the
hottest point, how it became cold a minute after I had touched the
dial, how I was still waiting for the water to return to normal - the
incongruity between what I was seeing on the temperature dial and what
I was feeling on my skin.

Is Street Fighter 4 like my tardy shower? Or is that a noob question?

The fact that there are exceptions to every rule in this game makes
the fact that some people are so damn good at it that much more
impressive, but it's also kind of maddening. With Street Fighter's
ultra-streamlined online matching, which allows you to briskly take on
challengers even while playing arcade mode, comes the crushing,
repeating realization that I'll never be half as good as half of the
people I meet online.

I was surprised to learn that most normal people don't realize the
differences between a game like Street Fighter and a game like Mortal
Kombat. I mean, I guess I shouldn't be too harsh - at any given point
when spectating either game, you're likely to see two people facing
each other with their respective life gauges at the top of the screen
and a countdown timer in the middle. I guess I can't fault people for
failing to see the difference between TOUCH OF EVIL and ABBOT AND
COSTELLO IN THE FOREIGN LEGION, either, since both movies are in black
and white. DERP DUH DEE

Street Fighter was developed with the idea that in the end the best
player would win. Mortal Kombat was developed with the hopes that, in
the end, someone will be crushed to death.
Street Fighter isn't a joke, man. Street Fighter is serious business.

I asked my little brother why I was having such a hard time
successfully completing a combo.

"It's Negative Edge," he said.

I looked at him the way a cow looks at an oncoming train. Was that
supposed to be an answer? I felt like James McAvoy when Angeline Jolie
told him to CURVE THE BULLET. Negative Edge? Who had the audacity to
come up with such a term, and what does it mean?

Fighting games were built by overzealous fans. The idea of the combo
came from the realization that a flurry of attacks one after another
could effectively stop your opponent in their tracks and keep them
from attacking. It wasn't a purposeful decision - it was a GLITCH.
Combos, air combos, juggles, cancels, most of the tools that the
greatest players use all started as accidents of programming. Over new
iterations of Street Fighter and other fighting games, these glitches
became facts of life and common vernacular among fighters as
developers tried to keep up with players, giving them freedom to
exploit the features that added depth to their games while making sure
these games were not actually broken or unbalanced.

Capcom's philsophy of fan appeal is much different from Nintendo's.
When Smash Bros. Melee came out, some fighters discovered that a
lateral dodge from the air would allow a character to slide across the
ground, allowing them to perform powerful stationary attacks while in
motion. This came to be called wavedashing in some communities, and it
became a fact of high-level play. In tournaments across the world,
players who thought they were pretty good were trounced time an again
by those who discovered and mastered the art of wavedashing.

When Smash Bros. Brawl came out, lateral dodges were removed, and
wavedashing was no more. Nintendo deemed the comfort of new players
more important than the freedom of advanced players.

Which is more important? Accessibility or depth? Is it possible to
have both? With Street Fighter 4, Capcom managed to create a system
with depth while at the same time targeting a much wider demographic
than in the past. In my week of playing the game off and on, I was
unable to verify the result. All I know is that a lot of people like
to play as Ken. Like, a LOT. My brother wanted to rename the game Ken
Fighters 4: Clash of the Ken Masters.

Honestly, I believe that Street Fighter 3 had the perfect balance of
accessibility and depth. If only Capcom had marketed it nearly as
well.

P.S. The term NEGATIVE EDGE refers to the idea that a special attack
can be executed not just by the press of a button, but by the release
of a button as well. As it turns out, it's a very useful thing to
know. If that's so, then why is it not in the manual, and why is it
named after a kind of inground swimming pool?