Trigger Happy
64
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
