It sort of comes with the territory that when new players enter a particular scene they have a frustrating and often incorrect attitude towards certain things. On the internet, of course, you’ll have to be wary of your handful of trolls, but when it comes to Super Street Fighter IV pulling in new players to the fighting game scene they can’t possibly all be trolls.
So with new games comes combo videos showcasing combos in that new game. There is a particular thing that should be known about combo videos though, and that is that they are made as a source of entertainment. The keyword in that statement being entertainment. A lot of the time I’ll watch a combo video and read a comment stating how impractical all the combos in theĀ respective video are.
Impractical? Of course they’re impractical, that’s sometimes sort of the point. If every combo video were meant to show only the most practical combos, it would be videos filled with nothing but Ryu doing his crouching medium kick cancelled into a fireball. In Street Fighter IV, it’s easily the most practical and useful combo. Flashy? Not even a little. Practical? Hell yes.
2-hit combos aren’t flashy, but making a video of only practical combos would be boring. This isn’t to say that 2-hit combos aren’t flashy or entertaining; James Chen’s Ode to the 2-hit Combo easily proves this wrong.