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20 Ways to Make a Fighting Game Shitty

by:Pox

2009/06/03

You have to understand something about me: I complain A LOT about video games and I AM ALWAYS RIGHT TO DO SO. In the history of forever, I have not been wrong once about any of my loud complaints. I'm the Neo of video game shittiness. I can see into the game's very fabric and understand all of its flaws within 2 seconds of popping the game into a console.

1 - 3D

All 3d fighting games are unplayable button mashers. This explains the success of Smash Bros, which is still 2d. Side-stepping clearly defeats the entire genre. You can't Hadoken anyone if they can just step out of the way. And to counteract this, they try to make moves that hit you all around and it's never clear if you can get out of the way or not. FAILURE.

GUILTY PARTIES:Mortal Kombat 4, Soulcalibur, Virtua Fighter, etc. etc.

No one wins.

2 - Falling out of the arena.

Only the most retarded person in the universe would engineer that into a game about beating the other person to a pulp. Apparently that's the staff of Soulcaliber.

GUILTY PARTIES:Soulcaliber 2

Why fight? The pit does 100% damage, it's clearly the best move.

3 - Too many moves

Welcome to Mortal Kombat: Deception, where each character has like 3 fighting styles, each with different moves. Are you kidding me? Characters are allowed to have exactly twice as many basic moves as there are buttons on the controller.

GUILTY PARTIES:Mortal Kombat: Deception, Soulcaliber 2

4 - Throws are hard to perform. .

You can know instantly if a game is shit when you have trouble throwing your opponent. This include having to press like 2-3 awkward buttons, having to be at a too specific range, having to be too slow etc.

GUILTY PARTIES:Mortal Kombat 2, Bleach: Dark Souls

5 - A.I. cheats excessively

No great fighting game is complete without an AI who blatantly cheats. No game is more representative of this than the SNES Mortal Kombat games. From anything to chaining moves that require you to hold down a button for several seconds, perfoming moves while FROZEN, being able to run forward and then seemlessly go into a move that requires you to press Back, Back, Back + A. They do it all.

GUILTY PARTIES:Mortal Kombat 1-3. Ultimate MK3, Mk Trilogy AND EVERY OTHER 2D MK GAMES I MIGHT BE FORGETTING.

Barely Photoshopped.

6 - Button mashing defeat pros.

Enter Soulcaliber 2. Mash any fucking button you want and it will perform amazing moves that take your opponent by surprise. Any noob will transform into a tornado of dangerous spinning blades and fists.

GUILTY PARTIES:All 3d fighters.

7 - Ambiguous Blocking

Soulcaliber 2 again! And pretty much every 3d fighting game. You never know when the fuck you can and can't block an attack. Is this crotch punch a low blow or a high blow? Can I block this roundhouse? Oops, guess not. But wait, I did it the other time. What's going on? Blocking is FOR NOOBS. Blocking is a way for people who suck to take it easy and learn the game. Blocking is not about split second guessing of which of your 10 different kinds of blocks you have to pick. And here's the one move that you can't block: throws. THE END. No exceptions.

GUILTY PARTIES:SoulCaliber

8 - Bad hit testing

Every shitty game has this where the sprites or the characters either can hit you without touching you or punch right through your skull without any results. And in no game will you see this better than in Soulcaliber 2, where you can actually watch replays of you ramming an ax through someone's torso with no ill effects. And get Mortal Kombat if you want to see the opposite in extreme conditions. You'll marvel as the computer kicks you with the back of their neck and sweep you while you're jumping.

GUILTY PARTIES:Mortal Kombat, SoulCaliber...huh..man I rag on those games a lot.

What...the...hell?

9- Too few characters

Ok this one is usually only found in the namelessly bad games that no one's ever heard of. But it also applies to another point: REMOVING characters. Don't do that. Don't put in a character and then remove him in later games. And don't make games where you have to start with one shitty character and beat the game with him to unlock the others. That SUCKS.

GUILTY PARTIES:Bunch of crappy games no one's ever played.

Now that's what I'm talkin' bout'

10- Slow gameplay.

Those are the worst. You know that game where it takes like half a second for the fastest attack you can do? And where you can mash the keypad as much as you want but your dude won't move until 2 seconds after he's understood that you want to jump? This turns a fighting game into a game where you have to predict the future and time a jump 2 seconds in advance.

GUILTY PARTIES:Street Fighter, Killer Instinct, Primal Rage...pretty much every damn game on the SNES before MK3.

11- Impossible special moves.

Special moves are SIMPLE. Down, Down, A. There, special move. Not "hold right, left, left, down, down+forward, forward + x, release right". What the fuck is that? And this goes for finishing moves too. I think Primal Rage had the WORST ones. I never got to do them as a kid. EVER. ALso you can't use "up" as a command. That's for jumping, quit it.

GUILTY PARTIES:Primal Rage, DBZ games.

GIVE ME A BREAK ARRR

12- Too few characters

Corners are the bane of all fighting games. If you've ever been cornered by the AI in Mortal Kombat, you know what I'm talking about. You're 100% FUCKED. And they start you in the ring two backflips away from certain death, where all your teleport moves just bring you back into the corner and where all your attempts to jump to freedom are met with an uppercut or a jump kick. MK 2 is the supreme champion of this.

GUILTY PARTIES:MK games.

Just quit already.

13- No half-naked chicks.

If your fighting game doesn't have a half-naked chick, shame on you. Even smash Bros wised up and included Zero Suit Samus, which is basically "blue naked Pamela Anderson".

GUILTY PARTIES:uh...Clayfighter, Primal Rage, Smash Bros on the 64

Greatness.

14- Can't play as the boss characters

This tells you one thing: they made a boss character, he's awesome and super-strong. They planned all his moves, all his sprites and everything is done, but, guess what? EAT SHIT because they don't want to spend one day making him a playable character, even if you have to use a cheat.

GUILTY PARTIES:MK2

Any fight that I win is a fair fight.

15- There isn't one character who's clearly better than the others

That's your Pikachus, your Noob Saibots, your Chun Lis and your Kiliks. You know, that guy who has that one move that's easy to do but that always works? That one character with the really unfair range or speed advantage? That rules.

GUILTY PARTIES: I don't know and I don't care.

Stand over there while I poke you with my 8 foot stick.

16- All the special moves are the same.

What's the point then? It's like if Mortal Kombat characters all had the same 3 moves: the freeze, the teleport and the fireball. No, fuck that. You play Scorpion because he can throw a harpoon and says COME HEEEEEEERE. You use Kirby because he's cheap and you can just drop like a stone on your opponents while they fight each other. If you've ever played the SNES DBZ fighting games, you'll know that every character has the SAME special moves, except for one or two who have one more that is just better anyway. The hell?

GUILTY PARTIES: Dragon Ball: Super Boutoden 1,2,3.

17- No Combos

Combos are RAD. The bigger they are, the better. As long as there's a way to get out of them in a semi-fair manner. Enter: Bleach, The Blade of Fate, for the nintendo DS. You haven't been combo-ed before someone drops 200 hits on you. Now we're talking. A fighting game without combos is a sign of one thing: that game is SLOW and OLD and PROBABLY ON THE NINTENDO.

GUILTY PARTIES: MK1, MK2, Yi-Ar Kung Fu...

And it can go well into the 200s

18- No Cheats

This goes for every game ever. You can't make a game that doesn't have a bunch of cheats that let you do stupid things like play with a big head or 5 times more blood. For all its flaws, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was really a champion of crazy cheats. Since the game is virtually impossible to finish with like 25 out of the 27 characters, you get a lot more replay value by cheating.

GUILTY PARTIES: I dunno

Unrelated

19- Random Hazards

Nothing pisses anyone off more than losing at Smash Bros because they get shot by a spaceship or killed by a tornado. What the hell? I don't want to play Battlebots, I want to prove I'm a better fighter than my opponent. Not a LUCKIER fighter.

GUILTY PARTIES: I dunno

20- I don't win every time.

There's nothing people love more than winning. So games I don't win at every time are shitty. Fortunately, no such game exists yet.

GUILTY PARTIES: None ( so far )