Tagged events

It's good to be back. Frosty Faustings has pretty quickly become one of my favorite offline events thanks to Vortex Gallery. I've really come to appreciate how side events get stream time and support, but there's only so much time and space for events.

That's where After Hours comes in. VG gives people the space to host events in the 24-hour venue, and to help the events get greater reach online. You can sign up for my After Hours events here.

Here's what I'm running After Hours this go around:

Ehrgeiz — God Bless The Ring
Friday, January 30 at 11PM CST

I got way into Ehrgeiz in December 2025. This wasn't the first time I tried to grasp the game, but I struggled to move comfortably in that game a couple years ago. Once you get into it, though, Ehrgeiz is a seriously frenetic game that's packed with options.

You have 4 buttons (and some shortcuts): High, Low, Special, and Guard. You can press High+Low for extra attacks. Jump in Arcade was a combo of Guard+Special, but is its own button on the PS1 version. Even Throws are done by holding G and pressing H+L.

Specials are generally unblockable, but depending on their function, you have answers; a dedicated projectile dodge can be done by double-tapping G while moving, and you have the ability to Blade Catch by pressing G just before getting hit.

Okay, I need to explain the guard button tho

You actually block standing in neutral, but will run when moving unless you hold Guard, causing you to walk. Guarding in neutral will crouch. You have unique Walking, Crouching and While Rising attacks. Guard also has other functions; in addition to the Dodge and Blade Catch, you use Guard to break throws at the right time. But you can't mash Guard; when you input G, there's about a half-second where you can't activate it again. So you have to be careful about how you move and attack in order to break throws and use other strong options.

Guard is also how you get up off the ground. This is in stark contrast to other games, where mashing directions and buttons gets up faster. Pressing directions causes you to roll around before using a getup attack or getting up with Guard.

There are also Just Frame attacks, and Interrupts. By pressing Special before an attack connects, simiarly to Blade Catch, you can counter a normal move. It deals little damage, but is good for stopping pressure by cutting strings short. Both Interrupts and Specials take away from your meter, which you start out with and cannot regenerate.

Sound complicated? Well, I'm glad it is. It's kind of stunning that a 3D fighter featuring Cloud Strife, Tifa, Sephiroth, etc. can have such thought-out mechanics! It makes me excited to see people discover how it works in real time.

Fatal Fury Special
Saturday, January 31 at 9PM CST

All your favorite characters are here! Terry, Joe, Andy, Mai, Kim, Geese, and even Krauser! An SNK classic, Fatal Fury Special is a game I've been meaning to put time into. By all accounts, this game is beloved in Japan. There are arcades that train hardcore at Garou Densetsu Special, or GaroSpe for short, and travel cross-country for big tournaments.

Fatal Fury Special very different from Street Fighter 2, the most immediate point of comparison. One defining mechanic is the Backdash. A mainstay of modern fighting games, FFS backdash is a uniquely powerful tool. Every backdash has a few vulnerable frames (3 for most characters), but they can also be special canceled. This prevents you from always option-selecting to beat backdash, but not everyone has a true reversal, and there are ways to catch backdashes depending on your distance, especially with fireballs.

Not just that, but Fatal Fury Special has a pretty different game feel from SF2. Button speed is a bit slower, but with more plus frames, so you can create some strong pressure and combos. Stun is present, and some characters can take more stun than others.
Another way you can mess with positioning is crouch-walking, which every character can do by holding down-forward.

What's maybe the most surprising, though, is that this game has buffers. You have a 5-frame buffer on normal moves and throws, and a 7-frame buffer on backdashes. If you want to do something, you generally won't have trouble doing it, but that's not accounting for the opponent moving and attacking to mess up your timing! It does make combos very reliable, as well as reversals.

There are also Desperation Moves, which can be used as long as you have low health. These can transform how you play the game, like for Duck King's Break Spiral, a terrifying command grab with an input of 4123692BC, or Wolfgang Krauser's Kaiser Wave, a huge fireball done with a strict [4]9AC input.

Suiko Enbu: Fuunsaiki
Sunday, February 1 at 5PM CST

This is one I've been sitting on for a while. The absolute madmen at Data East made a weapon-based anime fighter. You might think these are direct opposites - Samurai Shodown and Guilty Gear - but no, they make it work.

Suiko Enbu: Fuunsaiki is the final version of a game that went from arcade to consoles, adding Mizoguchi of Fighter's History fame to the PS1 port, and Yungmie to this version.
You may already be wondering how two characters known to fight with their bare hands
are able to work in such an environment, so let me explain.

Suiko Enbu is a 6-button fighter, like Street Fighter, and it has proximity throws. You can press MP+MK to drop your weapon on the spot, new to Fuunsaiki; in arcade and PS1 Suiko Enbu, this faked a dizzy (don't worry about it). You can also opt to throw your weapon with HP+HK, which stuns instantly on hit, but leaves you entirely without your weapon for the rest of the game. Round 2, Round 3, no weapon.

Instead of being borderline helpless without your weapon, your moveset opens up, with characters often gaining as many moves as they lose, as well as the ability to chain normals together (and repeating lights). This is why Mizoguchi and Yungmie are good - they're always unarmed, so they always have chain combos. However, other characters are weilding some impressive weapons, including spears, tonfa, axes, and more, so being unarmed isn't all that.

Impressively, Suiko Enbu is one of the first games to include multiple different juggle states, which are designed to link together for combo variety. There's two standard "launch" types, one straight and one with a unique spinning animation, which can go into other types of juggles. Then there's ground-bounce and wall splat, the latter of which requires you to be close enough to the wall to stick. This is closer to Blazblue and other anime fighters in the nebulous late-2000s-early-2010s bubble than 1996, and Fuunsaiki is the version with the biggest emphasis on long combos. You can even air throw people mid-combo, like in Melty Blood!

Being a weird, Japanese-exclusive Saturn fighting game has limited Suiko Enbu: Fuunsaiki's perception among fighting game fans. It's one of the games I'm most excited to dig into ASAP. That said, there is (or was) a small scene for the game in Finland, and you can see real VS gameplay here.

PS1 Casuals

Thanks to MiSTer FPGA and the advent of Duckstation Rollback (and Arkadyzja), there's a lot more interest in random PS1 fighting games. They're good-looking games, with awesome music, and often innovative design that hasn't been touched on since.

I'd love to run casuals in a lot of different games, including:

• 1 On 1
• Bloody Roar 2
• Destrega
• Evil Zone
• Fighters' Impact
• Genei Tougi: Shadow Struggle
• Kamen Rider V3
• Zero Divide 2

See you there!