you're godlike

a girl is there

castle gate fire bombing run

lk's "you lose to throws and mids?? hold my nuts" clip is really funny if you think of it this way bc it simultaneously extols this as something really skilled to do while downplaying how good it actually is

yup, and that was something i was only lightly aware of at the time. i think crucially this is something people recognize in localized ways in almost any game but there's never been a clear discussion of what it really means broadly and people treat the most abstract cases as "random"

in a sense hold moves are the easy mode version of this since they kind of simultaneously work as cancel strings and delay timing mixups, which is easier to use than feeling out a delay from nothing. but as a result these ambiguous situations are just the heart of uni pressure for most characters

Getting stuck causes players to explore the world.

Dying causes players to think about what they're doing.

An "impossible" situation causes players to learn how the game works and eventually achieve the impossible.

We need to be able to design *some* games around these fundamental ideas.

i do think serious elden ring pvpers should give tekken a shot but this is more of a rhetorical point about this aspect of games using examples that might be more familiar to people than melty blood

and that lack of precision makes it more of a key of philosophy than something you can just explain to someone and they can imitate it identically. but part of the power is that you don't have to imitate it identically at all, it's a "self" that goes into the game

and so it gets treated as this mysterious high-level thing when it's actually incredibly potent and relevant even for beginners, it's just that people have understood it so poorly for so long that they "forget" about it as they become better at doing precise timings

or maybe "being late on purpose when people thought you would be on time"

i recognize that you're not really looking for an explanation but i would describe the concept in general terms as "unreactable waiting" and i think it's been poorly understood in english fg circles for the entire time i've been in them. there's little vocabulary for and recognition of what it is

and aigis and zato mixups that can't just be "finessed" are really strong, but that's also why they cost tons of your special meter. what's more powerful is being able to convince people to defend wrong the first time and have more resources to get better conversions and tempo from it

mhm really good players know all about it and use it and compliment you for doing it but it's like never EVER talked about widely. frame traps, spacing traps, whiff punishes yeah yeah yeah but this is like. this is something else.

I feel like there's a stigma about getting opened up by mids and a kind of a lexical gap talking about timing mix-ups, where like even if you just go a layer above a frame trap like representing a gap to just wait a couple frames and try to punish movement or reset pressure.

saaaame, i do two at once and always do the deeper one on the left