Trigger Happy
Since fighting games broke into 3D with Virtua Fighter, the physical contact of these lightbeam warriors has grown ever more convincingly thudding and solid. The stunningly graceful animations, meanwhile, are developed with a technique that films real martial artists and digitizes the results as movement code that can be applied to the imaginary game characters. This is known as “motion capture.”
But herein lies a problem. Beat-’em-ups boast ever more complex control methods, with at least three buttons beside the joystick, and baffling combinations of button hits and circular shapes made with the stick unleashing ever more spectacular and lethal activity on screen. These preset special moves, also known as “combos,” actually require the player to memorize a string of ten button-presses; there might be hundreds of such strings in a game. This is the Achilles’ heel of the genre, for you cannot design on the fly your own strings of moves that have the same speed and fluidity as the preset combos. You must learn the sequences the programmers have built in to the game—and, okay, there are hundreds of them, but that does not constitute freedom.
Not only is it (understandably) impossible to perform a move for which there is no animation, but
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