The games of 2023

Monday, January 8, 2024

My games of 2023 are fighting games, largely Street Fighter 6. "Fighting game" describes a genre of video game in which players (usually two players) control avatars participating in a head-to-head martial duel. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the towering franchises in the space—with mainstream sales figures and pop-culture recognizability—but the concept has been around long enough (Street Fighter II first came to arcades in 1991) to have inspired thousands of distinct iterations.

About a decade ago, I attempted to get into fighting games as a hobby, but found them too complex and reflex-dependent for me to play with any seriousness. It didn't help that in the 2010s, fighting games were still difficult to play over the Internet. Online gaming was extremely mainstream by then, but it took almost another ten years for network programming to catch up to the demands of the gameplay, in which each individual frame of a character's animation is gameplay relevant. (Other types of online games are more tolerant of various forms of fudging, where the game state is imperfectly shared between all the people playing and the results are more or less believable by the players when the system guesses at an outcome.) If you're interested in the technical facts, there's a fun explainer about fighting game "netcode" on Ars Technica: "Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode."

Nonetheless, I continued to dabble in the intervening decade, especially when clever game designers sought to make the fighting game experience more accessible while borrowing something interesting from the underlying gameplay design. The "fighting game offshoot" niche was abuzz in early in 2023, when a solo developer released a turn-based fighting game called Your Only Move Is Hustle (a.k.a. YOMI Hustle) after three frenzied months of development, baking in all the complexity of a fighting game while also making it time-agnostic. It's a two-player, head-to-head game in which you and your opponent pick moves in secret, and once both players lock in, your respective stick figure characters perform all manner of slick action movie animations. Punches, kicks, blocks, acrobatics—all the buildup and catharsis of action movie choreography in a $5 video video game.

I played YOMI Hustle intensively for a couple of months, egged on by the fact that a small handful of the game's fans were showing up to watch my very occasional Twitch stream. During one of those sessions, a viewer prompted me to try one of the first modern fighting games with excellent netcode, Guilty Gear -Strive-. I wasn't sold, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it would at least be an interesting failure, so I did exactly that and tumbled headlong into the niche of fighting games.

I was rewarded with a deep collection of community-built resources for Guilty Gear—players had documented how everything worked and what to learn in order to improve. I was learning combos, I was diving into the intense lingo. ("That's a setplay character; that's a good option if you want oki; if your opponents starts to tech you should shimmy.") I bought not one, but two fighting games-specific controllers, and I was playing in ranked matches where you gain points for winning and lose points for losing. I was trying in a dedicated way to become a better player.

That experience intensified even more when Street Fighter 6 came out a few months later, the latest entry in the long-running franchise (and a pop culture touchstone for lots of today's middle-aged, game-playing people). It surfaced a long-forgotten memory of visiting a corner store with my older cousins, putting my quarter on the cabinet, and eventually playing a game of Street Fighter II amidst a crowd of rowdy, shouting teenagers. SF6 has superb mechanics, it's a technical marvel, and the character designs this time around have been fun. It's also quite important to me that the scene is mature and inclusive—the majority refuses to tolerate the toxic behaviors somewhat common to other competitive games.

And so, fighting games are my Game of the Year. In 2023, I played more than a dozen games in the genre and had an incredible time with all of them. Sometimes I played "seriously" with an eye towards dedicated improvement, and many I've played to simply admire the art and design.

Playtime isn't everything, but I think it shows the extent of my capture; that the genre is working such comprehensive magic that I've chased the experience across many games:

...and even more that represent plenty of time in aggregate: Samurai Shodown (2019), King of Fighters XV, Pocket Bravery, Cyberbots, Soulcalibur VI, and throwing all the way back to Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (for which I entered a tournament and didn't come in last).