Let me just start out by saying up front that I’m not the best at fighting games. Gone are the days of button mashing yet I can’t seem to stop grappling people. So maybe I still button mash. *cough*
I love Tekken, though. It first debuted in 1994 and was published by Namco Bandai. It is Namco’s best-selling franchise and ranks at the thirtieth best-selling franchise of all time. The first Tekken game I ever played was Tekken Tag Tournament for the Playstation 2. The year was 2004 and I was at my friend’s boyfriend’s house, and I don’t remember why his roommate let me play, I just know that that’s when I fell in love with it. I practiced for as long as I could but I didn’t have a PS2 of my own. Cut to 2007, I had just moved to Springfield and my boyfriend has most of the Tekken games. I spent a lot of time playing and getting my butt kicked (he’s extremely good at Tekken) but nothing would prepare me for playing Tekken with other people through XBox Live.
A few years go by and neither of us had gotten to play for years at this point so when we got Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 at Entertainmart we were ecstatic. We gathered our friends around and held our own tournament. I recognized that I needed to get better so I took some time to play it through myself. When I wanted a change of place I’d play online. Not ranking because I tend to get overly competitive *cough* but just with other people. I was not prepared for the amount of cheap moves I would experience. People will use the most easily spammable moves or the characters with the most easiest spammable moves. They will also not balk at the chance to pin you up against the wall and spam said moves. Needless to say, I learned that I really need to practice.
Not all of my experiences were bad. For instance, everyone was surprisingly nice, which is a nice change of pace from the usual “you suck” messages you’d get when playing online. I even had a few close matches with a few people. Even if you suck at it, like I admittedly kinda do, you can still have fun as long as you don’t take it seriously, which is really what it’s all about, having fun.
