I've finished Elden Ring and it still takes up almost all my free gaming time. I've started a new save because I want to do everything in it, a 100% save file. I'm still hooked, still absolutely smitten by what is an absolute masterpiece by a gang of masterpiece makers. I've spent a week invading other players, having fun at other people's expense. God, I love it so much.

If there's anything that can stop me playing it, it's Street Fighter. Let's see if that's enough, with the new content dropped this week.

Happy Street Fighter Christmas!

What is likely to be the final patch for Street Fighter V was released this week, adding a bunch of balance changes to the cast of characters that will likely be how these characters play for the REST OF TIME, due to the nature of how patches are distributed. If you boot up a day one disc on an offline PS4 you can play with the base version (with invincible dragon punches and a top-tier Nash) but all of the previous iterations are gone. If you want to play an older version of Street Fighter V (and if you're a Urien main I can imagine you would) - you simply can't. The game can only be patched up to this, the latest and supposedly final version of the game.

Everyone has been given a bit of work, be it some substantial nerfs to a few of the strongest characters to a few long-awaited buffs to the weaker ones, there's a lot to learn in this six year old game since the patch dropped.

I absolutely love it.

My absolutely favourite time in a fighting game's lifespan is just after a new version drops, or as it tends to be these days, just after a balance patch is released. There's this initial period, maybe the week before, where everyone drops off a little. Y'know, there's no point putting time and effort into learning stuff if it is going to change when the new patch drops! Then, mega-excitement kicks in when the patch notes drop BEFORE the patch goes live! With this recent Street Fighter V update, it was SEVENTY NINE pages of poorly translated notes on all the tweaks made to the game and it acts as a tremendous aperitif before the main course. Reading all these nonsensical paragraphs about how the 'hurtbox has been slightly extended' or, my favourite note "Can now be cancelled with Dangerous President", which sounds like an average week during the Trump presidency.

This starts a tidal wave of hypothetical situations. People begin theory fighting, trying to work out what these changes mean and how they can be applied. Loads of analysis based on prior knowledge of characters and what these new numbers can mean for them. All of this, of course, is meaningless until the patch drops.

Then its party time.

Once the patch drops, the entire community around the game comes to life. Everyone is part of some huge voyage of discovery. Video content explaining changes, Twitter is full of clips of new combos. Finding stuff that doesn't work any more and new stuff that is now possible. People talking about how cool their character is now and just as many lamenting the fact that their main has been hit by some brutal nerfs. Discord servers are active again, full of people sharing new techniques that they've found. A game that you've been playing for years suddenly gets a brand new lease of life and the community around it that you're part of reminds you of how awesome they are. It's like a two week long celebration of the game, full of things that will inspire you to get stuck right back into it, especially if you've been slacking for a few months.

I've gotten really lucky with this Street Fighter V patch. My beloved main, Alex, who has always been a bit of a low tier hero, has been truly blessed with some buffs to his abilities and alongside the general changes to the game in general and a few nerfs to his bad matchups have led to people saying that he's really strong now. If this really is the final patch for Street Fighter V, he's going to be strong forever.

On the other side of the spectrum, Urien mains are furious. He had a version of his 'Dangerous Headbutt' move that was fully invincible, so you could use it to get out of almost all tricky situations. I say 'had' because its no longer invincible! An essential part of his arsenal for what, at least five years, is no longer available and, most likely, for the rest of time. I have to admit, that's pretty funny.

I know it isn't just fighting games that get patches but the combination of how much impact they have on the game and the extremely dedicated and passionate community around these games is what makes this post-patch period so exciting and so much fun. If it really is the last one for Street Fighter V, it's been one hell of a run.

Training Wheels.

This feeds quite nicely into another thing I've spent the last week or so messing about with. I'm TERRIBLE at King of the Fighters XV. KOFXV has its own unique flavour that is quite at odds with the stuff I'm most comfortable playing (three different ways to JUMP?! No thanks!) and is a series that relies on quite a bit of 'legacy skill', meaning that where Street Fighter games are all quite different from one another, there's a good chunk of baseline similarity with the basics you need to be good at KOF in all of the games, so old heads are always going to have a leg up and KOF part-timers like me are going to be eating dust.

I jumped online, played a few matches, got absolutely pammed by a few people and, with all the other games I've got on the go, quickly realised I didn't have time to get myself up to an acceptable standard. However, I have spent a ridiculous amount of time in training mode.

"But training mode is where you get good?!" I hear you say. You're right but this entirely depends on how you're spending your time there! I spend my time in training mode doing the fighting game equivalent of learning to run before I can walk. Instead of learning basic fundamentals of the systems, the neutral battles and movement, I'll dive into the aforementioned fighting game community on Twitter and YouTube and find some outlandish, high level combo and try to recreate it. All stuff that I shouldn't even be trying to attempt until I've got a bit more of a handle on how to play the game but man, I find it so, so satisfying to just test my execution ability and pull off a challenging combo.

This is one of my favourite things in all of fighting games. People complain about a lack of single player content in some of these games but as long as there's a training mode for me try stuff out, I'm happy as a pig in shit. There's a long list of games that I have absolutely no intention of ever 'learning to play' - Dragon Ball FighterZ, Melty Blood and Guilty Gear Strive sit high on this list - and yet, I've put countless hours into all three just sat in training mode trying cool stuff out.

Tekken 7 is a particularly silly one. It is a game that relies on some very specific techniques that are basically mandatory to learn in order to even be competitive when playing against other people and some of my time should be spent practising that stuff. However, none of it is anywhere near as satisfying as picking Kazuya (a character I don't even play as!) and just repeatedly trying to do combos involving his Electric Wing God Fist move. A move that can only be performed if you press the final directional input and button press on the same single frame of animation.

So, seeing as the game runs at 60fps, that's a move that needs to be inputted perfectly to ONE SIXTIETH of a second. Even high level pro players don't always bother with this stuff (although it is a work of art to see the players who can do it consistently) but that doesn't stop me trying it over and over and over again just for the thrill and satisfaction of nailing one.

Anyway, DNF Duel has a beta test this weekend and you can bet your arse that, despite me having absolutely no other interest in that game, I'll give the training mode a solid go.

Another Reminder.

Be sure to read articles before you dive in and miss the entire point of them, because you've decided they're having a pop at one of your beloved Sony AAA titles when in reality they're making a fair and actually relatively obvious point that is worth discussing.

I know that the well has been poisoned by about a decade or so of writer's knocking out a bunch of fake outrage articles and the knee-jerk reaction is to instantly assume that these things are just a bunch of needless picking at scabs that don't exist to get clicks from people complaining about it, but not all of these articles are! Some of them are actually good!

Have a read of this. So, the tweet there is a bit antagonistic, which didn't help matters but the article itself raises the clear point that Sifu and Ghost of Tsushima do a great job of showing a culture through the lens of cinematic experiences while Ghostwire: Tokyo shows a culture through a lived experience. Both can be good! Both can be interesting! Saying Ghost of Tsushima comes across as a bit of a hodge podge of Eastern tropes lifted from cinema - even if it won some culture award and even if Japanese gamers absolutely loved the thing and EVEN if the Kurosawa estate said they liked it - is still true and isn't (or at least, shouldn't be) an attack on the game itself.

Interesting articles can't happen if they're drowned in a mire of reactionary outrage pieces but they also can't happen if they're all treated as if they all are reactionary outrage pieces. Chill out, actually read stuff and consider that good critics are going to write criticism and that doesn't mean your favourite game is any lesser for it being written.

Although to be fair, Tsushima's English lip synch to Japanese dialogue is pretty amateur hour stuff.

Recommended: Street Fighter V

Six years ago Street Fighter V had a notoriously shitty launch and only got worse. The game itself was brilliant and always has been but a series of PR disasters that followed a barebones, barely functional launch just created a bad smell that has followed the game around even to this day. There are people out there who, despite everything that has happened in the last three years (at least!) of the game's life, still associate it with the disastrous launch and regard it as being a bit of a shite game.

They couldn't be more wrong.

There's never been a better time to get into Street Fighter V. It's content complete now, what you're getting is the finished product. There's a bit of a soft reset of the game taking place post-patch, so if you're picking up a character, everyone is learning the new stuff too and it is unlikely that there's going to be significant changes moving forward. No need to relearn things, no need to expect buffs and nerfs in the future. What you see here, is what you're getting forever.

Although it suffers a bit from "fighting game tutorial" and by that I mean "it doesn't have one" there's so many resources out there you can use to help you improve. Hell, I'm one of them. If you're reading this and you fancy getting into Street Fighter V, let me know! I'll happily give you some pointers. The recent patch has also got the online space a bit more active again (although it was far from dead, due to crossplay between PC and PS4) so you'll likely have a bit more joy matchmaking against people of your skill level.

Street Fighter V itself is a brilliant fighting game and a great one to learn, as the complex, meta stuff like frame data is fairly straightforward and consistent. The V-systems allow for some great character variety and are a strong comeback mechanic, which evens the playing field at a beginner level and deepens the strategy at a higher one.

For my money, it's the best fighting game of the last generation. It just took a while to realise its full potential.

OTHER STUFF WORTH LOOKING AT THIS WEEK IN ONE SENTENCE.

Elden Ring - I've been absolutely hooked on invading people for the past week, so if you think you're done with it I can't recommend diving back in and getting involved in some PVP.

Earthworm Jim 2 - Just released on Nintendo Switch Online, this is a fun and really varied action platformer with - get this - some genuinely funny moments and actual jokes.

Kirby & The Forgotten Land - I've only played about an hour of this but so far it is a brilliant blend of enjoyable platforming and exploration, creative and fun objectives and buckets and buckets of charm.