That's right. Never really played a Street Fighter game, except for the occasional button-mash in the arcade many years ago. At least, I assume this. Some of the characters are familiar, but I don't know if this is from playing the game or simply from pop-culture exposure.

I've played other fighting games though, and I suck at all of them. I never bother to learn moves, so it's just button mashing, and so I play for as long as that works before quitting. Usually not very long.

What's always intimidating about fighters is how obsessive and meticulous they can make some players. The insistence on fight sticks for "faster response time" when the difference is in milliseconds, "frame data", where you actually have to take into account how many frames of animation each move takes, and the dozens of stick/button combinations you have to memorize in order to fight effectively. So because of all that, I just never really bothered learning the fighting genre.

But lately I've become more interested, and decided to pick up Super Street Fighter IV. I know that I'll never be anywhere near "great" at the game, but I've finally made peace with that. All I guess I really expect is to be able to hold my own.

Surprisingly, I think it was Guitar Hero that convinced me I could do this. Guitar Hero was a game where I could actually feel myself improving. When I started that game, I was convinced I'd never be able to finish a song on Hard. By the time I got bored, I was doing pretty well on Hard. It was the first game in a long time where "practice" gave me tangible results. So I'm thinking that a game like Street Fighter IV could benefit from a similar approach.

Last night was my first attempt, and it was mostly just to get a feel for things. I looked up a couple moves, read the instruction manual, focused on one or two aspects, and just spammed those in training and then in Arcade on Easy. To be fair, I mostly still ended up button-mashing, but occasionally I would try deliberate things like blocking or doing specific moves. Of course I reached a point where the opponent was blocking everything I threw at it, so that was the wall for me. Now I have to focus on figuring out how to counter those blocks. Learning to recognize which attack the opponent is doing is also going to be a priority.

Which I think is the approach I'll be taking here, and which I'm sure is the approach everyone takes: fight until you can't do something, then learn how to do it. The important thing will be taking things one step at a time. Right now, I'm bad at everything, and can't really defeat anything. But instead of worrying about all the things I can't do, I'll focus on one thing I can't do, learn it, and then move on to the next thing I can't do.

We'll see how long the experiment lasts.