Thesis Defense!

Today is the big day when I finally get to defend my thesis. In recognition of that, I will now give a short summary of various common fighting-game slang. Someday, when I'm too old to play fighting games, I can look back at this and remind myself about all the useless knowledge I accumulated in my youth.

poke - Any move that may be performed quickly with a recovery time that leaves you relatively safe from retaliation is a poke. Pokes are commonly weak attacks, like jabs and shorts from the SF games. They can also be long-reaching attacks that recover fast enough that your opponent has little hope of retaliating. Hibiki's mid-slashes from CvS2, for instance, are also pokes.

stuff - To 'stuff' an opponent's move is to interrupt that move with one of your own. For example, he or she throws a heavy punch in your direction, and you react immediately with a jab. The jab interrupts the move and causes some damage as well, while you're safe. You've just stuffed the heavy punch.

priority - A move's priority dictates its ability to go head to head with your opponent's moves. A move with low priority often loses to other, comparable moves. A move with average priority tends to trade hits with comparable moves. A move with high priority tends to win over comparable moves. For instance, you throw a roundhouse kick at your opponent at the same time he throws his roundhouse kick. However, your kick has higher priority than his, and so your move stuffs his move and he takes damage, while you take none. If your kick had equal priority to his, then you would've just traded hits.

abusable - A move is abusable when its priority heavily outwieghs those of other, comparable moves, making it almost a sure bet that when you use this move, you will either trade hits with the opponent, at worst, or completely take him to school, at best. Abusable moves also commonly exhibit a short recovery time, which means performing such a move leaves your opponent with little or no window of opportunity to retaliate after you're done. Abusable moves can be used over and over against most poor and average players, and they won't have a clue what to do about it, aside from calling you names like "b*tch", "wh*re", and "cheap-a$$ mother-f***er". Which of course points towards another common abusable commodity in gaming: language.

So there you have it, a short summary of four commonly used fighting-game terms. With that said, I hope at my thesis defense to be able to stuff any poking question my committee may have, which probably means I need to get my priorities straight and start rehearsing through my powerpoint presentation, or I may wind up taking a lot of abuse very soon.

Cheers!