The Big Mortal Kombat Gameplay Write Up Pt. 1 – Why it Rules

And no, jerks, it’s not the gore, the graphics, or the fatalities…Well, maybe a little There’s an obvious truth that, aside from Smash Brothers and probably arena fighting games based on popular properties like Naruto, there is nary a more popular mainstream fighting game than Mortal Kombat. It appears regularly on year-end bestsellers lists, and […]

Cloud Strife is the Greatest

WARNING: THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR FINAL FANTASY VII and REMAKE. DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU There’s a moment in my life that I think about almost every day. I was finishing up my student teaching in winter of 2016, a pretty turbulent semester at a middle school with a thankfully tolerant group of kids. […]

The FGC Ban Catalog: Why It Exists

Update 8/10/22: The original Google Doc is no longer accessible publicly. It will be not be made publicly available again. A combination of personal requests, dead links, and a philosophical change are behind why that decision was made. That said, I will leave this post up because it is indicative of my thought process at […]

It Is That Deep

It is the ubiquitous phrase you see used across social media whenever someone posts about something that offended them: “It ain’t that deep.” Naturally, it implies that whomever was offended is simply looking way too far past the intent of whatever was posted and is overreacting. The most common place you’ll see this is on […]

The Continued, Puzzling Elevation of Infiltration

A few years ago, I was living with my brother and his wife, and it was difficult for me and my sister-in-law to connect. She was born and raised in the Chinese province of Sichuan, living in its biggest city, Chengdu, right up until the prior year when she and my brother moved to the […]

The Slippery Slope Arguments About FGC Issues Are Pointless Punditry

When did everyone become a pundit? I don’t mean the strictest definition, which is a so-called expert in an area giving their opinion to the public; I mean more so in how every argument is longer about defending or arguing for anything on principle, but defending or arguing for what the reaction would be by […]

Fighting the Rot in the Fighting Game Community Pt. 2 – Star Players and Power Imbalances

A couple weeks ago, I published the first of multiple blog posts which looked to examine how the fighting game community (FGC), as a whole, was uniquely served to set up situations of abuse and harassment, largely in response to a wave of incidents that have come to light in the recent month. The initial […]

Fighting the Rot in the Fighting Game Community Pt. 1 – Cronyism

Last time I wrote for the blog, I was covering my trip to the Evolution tournament in Las Vegas and the positives and negatives of that trip. As I was writing that piece, I found myself having to frequently amend it as the days went on because it seemed like there was a new scandal […]

Road Diaries – For Evo, It’s Always a Step Forward and Two Steps Back

Evolution 2019 was, as usual, the biggest tournament of the year so far, and once again I made the trip up to Sin City and the Mandalay Bay resort/casino in order to participate. Ever since I was first aware of the greater fighting game community, I always recognized Evo as it. The I-Ching. The sum of […]