The Life and Times vol. 6: One frame links

Yohou guys? Whats up? It's been a long time but here we are once again in another installment of fifthStitch's life and times. Today's feature: One frame links and fighting games!

AND CHUN LI'S LIGHTNING LEGS!

But before anything else, a quick recap of whats in and what's not in my humble little life:

• So I'm still in college, big whup. I'm still in the process of finishing my thesis, and by God's grace, I've been able to finish quite a significant percentage of it (still a long ways to go though, sigh)
• Went to Kuala Lumpur a few days ago. Bought me some cool new AstroBoy shoes. No anime lover should be caught dead without any AstroBoy merch (unless you really hate the robotic boy wonder of Japan; hey, isn't he regarded as the first anime character or something like that?).
• Celebrated my birthday last Monday, if by celebrating you mean bumming around and not doing much other than playing games and watching stuff. To be fair, the day ended well, since I got to meet with the Song of my Soul and the Beat of my Body (damn, that last one sounded wrong XD oh well, she wouldn't know...)
• The Music of my... erm... Manhood? (crap, she's gonna kill me) gave me an awesome Katanabrella (that's Katana + Umbrella for you word chumps out there). Been scaring the beans out of people whenever I brandish it around like a real katana in public transport. Love it. Thanks Rhyme of my Rhythm! (hey, that last one wasn't so bad! Alliterations are fun!)
• Ad Continuum is still on hiatus, although I'd probably be reviewing my figures so I could at least have some creative outlet. Anyone interested in reading such?
• I've been living a humble life, and have resolved to do so.
• I also wrote three short stories some weeks ago. I think they're my best so far. Check them out in my Psychosis blog.
• I'm resigning from my teaching job to focus on my thesis. Just when I was getting the hang of teaching; I think my previous (and last) term as a teacher was my best so far. One heck of a challenge too, especially for my integrity and faith.

Whew, that was quite a number of updates there! Now back to one-frame links. For those who don't know what one-frame links are, form my limited knowledge, it's a term used in fighting games to describe moves that are freaking hard to pull off in succession. If you're even remotely familiar with fighting games (if not, you may, um, skip to the next paragraph maybe? Or not read this post at all, but please don't do that!), you'd notice that each time you attack an enemy with any move, it stuns them. Sometimes, this stun (called hitstun) opens enough of a window to land another attack, which could lead to another moment of stun. Time in fighting games is measured in frames (there are 60 frames to a second in, say Super Street Fighter 4). So the amount of hitstun is measured in frames, you with me so far?

THIS WOULD CAUSE A LOT OF HITSTUN YES?

What the... Anyway, back to one-frame links. The speed of moves are also expressed in frames. For instance, jabs in fighting games are usually from extremely small number to quite a small number of frames, while more forceful punches usually take more frames to come out. Of course, jabs cause less hitstun and damage than forceful punches (called fierce punches in fighting game lingo), so you can see the trade-off right there.

To say however that a move comes out in a number of frames will cause you to be kicked in the butt by most fighting game pundits. Moves have three parts after all (and I kid you not when I say, yes, all three parts are important knowledge to know if you want to step up your game): startup, active, and recovery. Start-up is the number of frames it takes for  your move to actually come out the moment you press the button to the time when it actually hits. Active on the other hand, is the amount of time your move actually hits. If your opponent is within the range of your attack during this time, he or she will get hit, simple as that. Recovery on the other hand is like recoil, its the amount of time it takes for your character to go back to it's neutral position. Your move is only actually going to cause damage during its Active frames, Start-up and Recovery are there to show that your character's fist doesn't teleport directly to your opponent's face.

Look at the visualization below, painstakingly drawn in Paint by yours truly. Cause I love you, that's why.

ZE CONCEPT VISUALIZED FOR YER

VIEWING PLEASURE

So where do one-frame links factor into this wonderfully complicated and overdrawn discussion that is probably not going to be relevant to my blog post anyways? Whenever you attack, you cause hitstun. On some moves, this hitstun is long enough to allow you to recover. Take Ryu's Close Jab. That move causes 11 frames of hitstun, which means you can recover while your opponent is still haplessly stunned. In fact, you have 5 more frames to launch another attack, hopefully, this new attack's Startup is short enough so that you will enter it's Active frames while the opponent is still stunned. An example of this would be Ryu's Crouching Medium Punch, which starts up at 4 frames. This is a two-frame link (the difference of 5 and 4, then add one), which means you have 2 frames to initiate the next move or else it will not properly combo. Look at the visualization below, again, because I love you:

MAKE SENSE OF IT... JUST DO... THIS IS

WHY I DON'T HAVE A LIFE...

So next time you punch someone, observe how long they flinch. See if you can punch them again before they're done flinching. And no, I'm not talking about in a fighting game ;)

Anyway, so now we finally go to one-frame links. One-frame links are, as you can imagine, moves where-in you have exactly one frame to connect attacks together. This means you don't have any margin for error AT ALL (in fact, I don't know why they call it this way, to me its a 0-frame link, but I don't wanna be kicked by fighting game pundits in the butt). In the example above, you can either launch the attack the moment you recover, or "wait" a frame before you launch your attack. With 1-frame links, you are not given that luxury. And oh, before I forget - why did I enclose "wait" in quotation marks? Well, unless you're one of the Speedsters, you can't really intentionally "wait" 1/60th of a second can't you?

THE FLASH: WILL ALWAYS BE BETTER AT YOU IN

FIGHTING GAMES. AND COOLER...

So what's the point of this long-winded (and technically painful) discussion? Nothing really, just to tell you that I'm really addicted to fighting games right now, 2D and 3D (Soul Calibur 5!!!), and that one-frame links are all friggin difficult. But more of the former than the latter. Obvious isn't it?

Well, off to play more Street Fighter, see you in the next volume of the Life and Times! Till then, may you never drop your 1-frame links.

Chun ~~~ <3