Fighting Games and Accessibility

{sidebar id=1}Fighting games are notorious for their elaborate combos executed by quick button presses for maximum damage. Players can range from those counting individual frames for a perfect execution to the button mashers who just love to see their characters do something neat every once and a while.

Now for some, doing a rudimentary quarter-circle forward punch move (a Hadouken, for example) could be difficult or even impossible. However, certain trends are starting to surface that are helping disabled gamers to play fighters.

Handicaps have been in fighters' versus modes for a very long time, and luckily they're not going anywhere. Changing the handicap usually changes things like increasing the amount of damage you do, reducing the amount of damage you take from your opponent or lower your opponent's starting health points.

The handicap setting can be fine tuned to each individual's liking until you fight a sweet spot that fits you just right. To go along with this, there are plenty of difficulty levels to set your AI opponents at when playing alone.

Remapping buttons to fit your needs is also something that is becoming the standard. No matter what kind of controller you are using, games like Super Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 include a completely remappable button scheme. SSFIV even allows you to map a single button to all three punches or all three kicks (required to perform an Ultra Attack).

In conjunction with this, some fighters are starting to use less buttons overall. In particular, Tatsunoko VS Capcom (Wii) and Marvel VS Capcom 3 (Xbox 360/PS3) use a four-button layout instead of the traditional six-button layout. These games have three attack buttons consisting of a low, medium, and high attack, and then an assist button, allowing you to swap with your teammate or call them in for an assist attack. Both of these features combined are helping pave an accessible route for fighting games.

Finally, and most importantly, fighters are now introducing shortcuts to those complicated special moves that helped define the genre. BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger introduced a "Beginner Mode" that mapped some of your special moves to directions on the right analog stick.

Super Street Fighter IV for the upcoming 3DS also has a shortcut system in place, called "Lite Mode". If players so choose, they can map four moves to the boxes on the touch screen. Then, with a simple tap, your character will perform the move. You can map any move you want to these four buttons.

A good video demonstration of this, as seen on Kotaku, can be viewed here.

Even the long-awaited Marvel VS Capcom 3 has a "Simple Mode" in the game that uses shortcuts to help the player. In this mode, players can perform combos by tapping a single button repeatedly, instead of doing separate inputs for each hit. Special moves and Super moves are also mapped to a single button (and sometimes a direction), making them play not too different from the Smash Brothers series.

Overall, I'd say a once nigh-unplayable genre for some gamers has become a lot more accessible in recent years. Some of these fighting games, especially the VS series, can be very fast so it's nice to have these options within the games. I'm glad to see that the genre is evolving and I can't wait to see where it will go from here.