{"id":441,"date":"2013-11-20T17:27:48","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T22:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/?p=441"},"modified":"2013-11-20T17:49:18","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T22:49:18","slug":"taking-a-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/taking-a-dive\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking a Dive"},"content":{"rendered":"

So last night I was part of<\/del>\u00a0mostly spectated a discussion on Twitter about the game Divekick<\/a><\/em>. This may or may not have been caused by statements I made earlier that day suggesting that Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall<\/a><\/em>\u00a0was, perhaps, a bigger success at taking a core fighting game idea and turning it into something broadly accessible by simplifying it.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a>
Screenshot from “Divekick”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The resulting conversation… well, you can start at this tweet<\/a>\u00a0and read your way down (and down, and down, and down) if you’re interested in how it went. I tried to keep my contributions to a minimum.\u00a0Why? Because I could kind of tell up front that having a 140-characters-at-a-time asynchronous argument with\u00a0Divekick<\/em>‘s creator\/director was going to head off the rails fast and, with all apologies to the brave soul that is Joel if he’s reading this, it kinda did.<\/p>\n

I decided today that I wanted to get my thoughts out there in blog form, not to protect myself from argument, but so that I could maybe try to articulate what I felt in greater than 140 character chunks. If you’re interested in what I think on the matter, then feel free to check after the break:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So let me get this out of the way: I haven’t played\u00a0Divekick<\/em>. I cannot in any way talk about its quality, playability, or anything else related to actually engaging it as a game, other than an understanding of core mechanics that I’ve seen through watching it played\/reading up on the game. I want to follow that up with saying, however, that I don’t think the game-qua-game<\/em> (with all apologies to Forum 3000)\u00a0what I was trying to address on Twitter with the comparison to\u00a0Bara Bari Ball<\/em> (which I\u00a0have<\/strong> played, if only briefly, when Noah demo’ed it at No Show in 2012).<\/p>\n

I really have no interest in\u00a0Divekick<\/em>, to be honest. While I’m not a competitive player, I’ve played fighting games since I (and they) were very young, so one of the core appeals of the game — the reduction in complexity of inputs — didn’t appeal to me. I was okay grappling with more complex systems. More to the point, the game’s fiction — characters in particular — represents a laundry list of parody elements that I just don’t care about, and\/or find annoying. Seth Killian as the last boss is a clever little twist, especially given\u00a0Street Fighter 4<\/em>, but something about “Stream Monster” gets on my last good nerve especially given the role stream watchers had in, say, what happened on\u00a0Cross Assault<\/em>. The dig at Marn in Mr. N’s “I’m gonna be a millionaire in e-sports!” win quote just made me want to throw up my hands and walk away.<\/p>\n

\"Mr.<\/a>
Mr. N’s “e-sports” winquote<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maybe it’s because I’ve got such a mixed reaction to a lot of FGC tropes, but to me Divekick<\/em> comes across as a love letter to the FGC, a game that is basically a distillation of everything the FGC thinks is important — stylistically, mechanically, culturally even — into a game that is relatively simple to\u00a0control<\/em> but not, as Heart mentioned in that Twitter thread I linked earlier, not particularly simple to “win at.” And a lot of that FGC stuff is just stuff I don’t like, or don’t want, and it’s not in any way limited to FGC-ish games either: I once complained to Ramiro Corbetta that I didn’t like how the win screen quotes in\u00a0Hokra<\/em> (a fellow Sportsfriends title to BBB<\/em>) echoed competitive sports culture at its worst, as to me they sound a bit mean-spirited and taunt-y (and my hatred of taunt mechanics in games is well documented).\u00a0And “love letter to the FGC” is fine, if that’s what you want to make. Skullgirls<\/em> is not in precisely the same boat, but it’s got similar roots: a known FGC name wanted to design a game that was, in some way, a response to something in fighting games culture, though in Skullgirls<\/em>‘s case it was more about addressing a lack or correcting an imbalance.<\/p>\n

Now, the comparison I drew is to\u00a0BaraBariBall<\/em> which, if you’ve never played it, is basically a mashup of sportsball and\u00a0Smash Bros.<\/em> with a pretty retro visual aesthetic:<\/p>\n