Time for another guest column, kids! I’ve had some family obligations crop up recently, as well as a dire need to make some deadlines with my other writing, so Hate Speech is going intermittent for a while. I’ll still be posting articles from time to time, but, in addition to that, keep your eye out for these guest pieces as well as some other types of new content coming your way. –Hates
When I was asked to do this piece, the first thing I thought was Day9 or djWHEAT should be doing this. Then I realized that with fighting games there is such a different pacing that the tactics for casting have changed to fit the format. Continued after the break...
When I first sat down to write this week’s column I had something rather different in mind than what you’ll see here. I’d been called out and challenged to list my grievances with certain community issues, events, and so on.
It was to be my own version of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, though streamlined and updated for the modern digital era—a focused laser-beam of bitching—but then all hell broke loose. My topic slipped its tethers, busted out of its cage, and got water on itself while eating after midnight. I knew immediately that I was in serious trouble, but that’s just how hype rolls. . .
I wrote a little while ago about some big-picture stuff regarding throws, and the responses to that column got me thinking about some of the other things that really piss people off, like ring outs, time outs, backdashing, turtling, spamming the same moves over and over, and so on.
As I thought about these things, I got all tingly inside. Human misery is such sweet, sweet nectar, after all. Of course, you don’t need to be a soulless minion of evil to appreciate the finer points of playing dirty. In fact, it’s something to which we should all aspire.
MLG and NCR falling on the same late-March weekend spiked the salt level here at 8wayrun.com to the point where it became comparable to the Dead Sea, but that was hardly the whole story. In fact, the most interesting result of MLG’s cartoonishly evil attempt to undermine SCV, the fighting game community, puppies, kittens, and classic American values like the nuclear family, was that we were treated to a side-by-side comparison of radically different games (patch versus pre-patch), different styles of doing things, and, ultimately, a truckload of entertaining SOULCALIBUR content. So, bearing that in mind, let’s consider what we learned.
I came across Namco’s official patch notes while sorting through the “incoming” pile here at the Hate Speech News Desk, so this week I’m setting aside my regularly scheduled diatribe in favor of the hot-button issue. Of course, this may also be my last column ever, too. Like many of you, I took one look at the information in the patch notes and realized that life is no longer worth living.
My perfect, beautiful, wonderful game—one about which I’ve never complained, ever—is now irreparably ruined and soiled. As such, my plan for the day is simple: post this article, make arrangements for bequeathing my cherished collections of celebrity bobbleheads and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and then driving my car off of the Golden Gate Bridge so I can go out like a boss.
