Fighting Game Resource Pack

Welcome to Coffeeling's Resource Pack for Fighting Game Beginners. This is a resource collection for learning to play fighting games at all, and for learning King of Fighters 13 and/or Street Fighter 4 more specifically. Even if you are not a fighting game beginner, there are a lot of useful resources especially for learning KOF13.
Guilty Gear-related content will be added slowly but surely. Vampire Savior, 3rd Strike to come maybe someday. Please ignore folks lambasting about balance and just play them, the games feel really amazing to just do stuff in.

Link spam to follow, so take cover :P

Two very good videos for starting your fighting game journey if you have never played them before:
First, James Chen on how to get comfortable with a fighting game before you fight other people by limiting your moveset to a small number of "comfort moves". The examples are for Street Fighter, but the principles apply 100% to King of Fighters as well.

Learning Street Fighter for Beginners:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7M_y8uAfas
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0lOJZCmCXA
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiVdAvqSjvI

The other useful video to watch after Chen's one is the first episode of Airdash Academy by Novril and Specs, to give you the ideas people use when looking for good comfort moves from the get go:

Airdash Academy Episode 1: Starting Points
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWfk3tOJjaQ

SHORYUKEN.COM's PAT MILLER HAS WRITTEN A FANTASTIC BOOK ON LEARNING FIGHTING GAMES. READ IT!
http://shoryuken.com/2014/07/07/learn-how-to-play-fighting-games-with-our-free-beginners-guide-ebook/

So now you have a set of tools, but the question remains: Wat do?

Some answers:

A few looks into what the neutral game/"footsies" that people talk a lot about are about. These are written for Street Fighter, apply together with DandyJ video to get insight into KOF:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0cFs5mHQC4
http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/185451/ground-game-guide
http://imgur.com/a/mIjvt
http://sonichurricane.com/?page_id=1702

Juicebox's take on what footsies are. Best explanation of whiff punishment there is. Basically how to use counterattacks and placed moves properly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQQCan5oo90



Why comfort moves help improve reaction times in fighting games and get you to actually playing instead of mashing buttons:

Reaction Speeds In Gaming
http://kayin.pyoko.org/?p=2047



Game system tutorials - or how does this game work again?

The Beginner's Incomplete Guide to KOF by DandyJ is a classic, and worth rewatching time and time again.
It pretty much details the heart of KOF gameplay, which the characters then spice up. Also has a lot of ideas on what kinds of moves to look for when finding your initial comfort moves for your KOF characters.

The Beginner's Incomplete Guide to KOF
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye3KVgI1LvU&fmt=18

A comprehensive KOF13 game system tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5s2kfth_cQ

Klaige's breakdown of the workings of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core+:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbcHwCuZr4E

VesperArcade's Street Fighter 4 tutorial is easily the most comprehensive one on the Internet, good for fighting games in general:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_nS5Jj3pHY&list=PL744144A71C67D816



General attitude you want to play with / figuring out what you want from the game/genre:

My take on proper mentality:
If you end up deciding to become very good at fighting games, it is good to approach learning them as you would learning an instrument, because that is the level of dedication they take to become really good in. Basic competence can be achieved just by playing for fun when you've adopted a correct frame of mind as described in James Chen's/Airdash Academy's videos, but becoming really really good is going to take practice. You do not need to be really really good, though. If you're having fun with friends that is valid in and of itself. Few of us get paid to play these things, so if you're not having fun or otherwise enjoying yourself, look into what's wrong. It's a leisure activity, after all.

If you want to be good, the first step is to abandon measuring yourself with points or win/loss rate. Those just lead to frustration, and respond slowly to actual improvement. Sometimes improvement makes you lose more for a while, even. So throw those away. Focus on what you think you're doing well and what you need to improve at, ask others' opinions of the same. Practice, see if you can do better at something. ie. improvement isn't "I got more points", it's "I'm playing against this guy who's better than me, and now I block a bit more of his mixups than I did last week" or "I can antiair more jumpins than I did yesterday" or the like.  Focus on that. The points come as a side effect. And always remember that you usually have an out to nearly any situation. It may be hard to find and hard to do, but you usually have one. This is especially true in KOF13.
Competitive games are full of situations which ask one player to level up first to deal with something easy to do, hard to counter (=good offense at that level of play, say throwing fireballs against noobs) that then turns into something where both players need to be skillful (throwing fireballs against a veteran).

So You Want to Learn KOF:
http://dreamcancel.com/2012/03/10/so-you-want-to-learn-kofxiii/

Playing to Win
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw



Other generally useful things:



Short jargon dictionaries, though lacking in KOF-specific terms:
http://shoryuken.com/glossary/
http://www.reddit.com/r/SF4/wiki/glossary


KOF13 team building basics by yours truly:
http://pastebin.com/uNi1JvZ6



Other tutorial videos:

Juicebox's tutorials are excellent for getting a feel for characters, what they can do and a bit of what you can do against them.
http://www.youtube.com/user/JuiceboxAbel/videos

Beyond Technical has a lot of videos about learning SF4, a lot of their lessons can be applied to KOF as well with just a bit of tweaking.
http://www.youtube.com/user/BeyondTechnical

Klaige's IAD TV has a lot of useful, long videos about Guilty Gear:
https://www.youtube.com/user/klaige/videos



General online resources:

Forums, though most are pretty quiet. Even so, they have a lot of useful stuff to read. Ask politely, and help will be given sooner or later:
http://dreamcancel.com/
http://orochinagi.com/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/222940/discussions/

Shoryuken.com has forum sections for both SF4 and KOF13. There's also a dedicated fighting game newbie section:
http://forums.shoryuken.com/categories/newbie-saikyo-dojo
http://forums.shoryuken.com/categories/king-of-fighters-xiii
http://forums.shoryuken.com/categories/super-street-fighter-iv-arcade-edition

Dream Cancel's KOF wiki is at least my goto source for information:
http://dreamcancel.com/wiki/index.php/The_King_of_Fighters_XIII

A frame data google doc for checking move properties. Not relevant for you for now, but an excellent resource for later:
http://tinyurl.com/kofdata

Some KOF streams:
www.twitch.tv/juiceboxabel (teaching, though about half retrogames nowadays)
www.twitch.tv/cafeid (A cave of monsters in Seoul, South Korea. Long streams of high level gameplay)
www.twitch.tv/mexikof (KOF from Mexico, one of the big countries of the game)
www.twitch.tv/asreynald (Usually shows long sets between Reynald and Mr.KoF, two very good players from SoCal)
www.twitch.tv/kingsofco (Kings of Colorado is a new KOF scene, they stream practice sessions often. Watch!)

Guilty Gear Streams:
www.twitch.tv/joniosan (Xrd from Mikado arcade, long streams almost everyday)