Hi guys.
"I will keep slugging away no matter how confused I am."
That's what I submitted. I like games with all different types of difficulty curves. And sometimes I like a game even before I have begun to surmount that curve. In fact, I am especially enchanted by games whose mechanics evade me at first.
Take King of Fighters 95. I liked this game back nineteen hundred and ninety five (the year) when I read about it in gamefan and they used to many screenshots and they really gushed a bit. Maybe some of you remember. It was at the coin ops of course so i took my wee little teenage self on me wee little skateboard downtown to where I could play it on an MVS box.
NOW then I put in the coins and I select a character because the timer is ticking you see and lo and behold I need to pick three. You see I thought this team battle was and option or something. An extra feature for those who have grasped the basics already. No sir I had to pick three characters. And what's more the characters designs and personalities seemed to communicate something that was all very murky and uncomfortable to my pubescent mind. These were not like the cheeky transparent stereotypes in street fighter. There were no gays in street fighter. Not open ones.
And then the game starts and there's all sorts of meter and announcer yelling. The game starts against the cpu and I flail about. The controls have that peculiar SNK feeling that works like the shifter in an old porcshe and my sexually ambiguous characters drop like little poof flies and soon theres a big pixely portrait of a guy who looks like a petty thug suggesting me to get lost or some such in chunky capitol letters. The shading on his arm muscles doesn't look so much like streetfighter. The bands of color that reflect light and shadow are so bold and deep. The continue timer runs out and the game goes back into attract mode.
I have a deep love for street fighter at the time but as I stood in front of that mvs machine I could see that King of Fighters 95 was an obtuse and impenetrable world to me. I played it more but never achieved even basic proficiency mostly due to the fact that it's never been that popular in the states. The important thing is that I still really like the game while knowing well that I couldn't really play.
Since then I've been through home versions, arcades in Mexico, online thru various emulator clients all trying to crack this king of fighters nuts. Never really go very good at it. :/
Last week I started using the ggpo service. It's an online play client for a limited but healthy selection of fighting games. And Imagine my suprise when I saw that KoF is by far the most popular game!
So I jumped in for the umpteenth time and guess what? I'm getting it now! With the new setting and source of competition I'm getting a real feel for the game and I'm actually enjoying playing it, instead of enjoying the fact that this street fighter alternative simply exists and romping the the single player mode once in a while. It's fun as hell. Anyone here ever remember me giving a game higher praise than that? FUN AS HELL.
Back in 95 I didn't skateboard to that arcade alone. My friends were there. They went with me, excited for the KoF game on the Neo Geo... they wanted to like it. And after we all sampled it, they declared it as junk. Not worth playing. I was the only one who knew that there was a good game under there. I wanted very badly to enjoy it and now I finally do.
This isn't normal but it's normal for me. I have gone thru this protracted lurning curve for several games:
Panzer General - got it. Took a many years of painful revisiting for this to click. And indeed a very good game.
Civilization - not yet. Last time I took a crack at this was about a year ago. That spell was about 20 hour worth of play maybe bringing my lifetime total up to 50. I understand what Im supposed to be doing but I still don't get why it's fun. I know this is one of the greatest of all time tho so I will go back.
Marvel vs Capcom 2 - Not yet. Another fighting game that just moves a little fast for me. A long long time ago a good player tole me I was "hopeless". Despite playing for weeks on end, I remain a marvelously retarded punching bag whenever matched against a human opponent. In fact I was openly heckled by a self professed "8 year old" just a month ago and powerless to talk and smack back (i honestly could back it up) i decided to give the game a little break like I have so many times before.
Virtua Fighter - Got it. After years of trying, I had my break thru with VF a little before four hit the arcades. It has remained one of my most enjoyed series to this day.
Rock Band/Guitar Jerk - Still not there. Okay I played Parappa and I was pretty bad at that. I'm happy to hog the mike but trying to flick that plastic guitar good enough to not assplode the band... ugh another day maybe.
Nectaris - Got it. As soon as I finally figured out why this was fun I ran off to play Panzer General again. I was so excited.
My
Sorry about the rambling.
My moral here is that sometimes you want to a game to be what it is not. You want to jump in and kick ass but that's at odds with what make it a good game in the first place.