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Comment by secretsatan | Hacker News Reader

Pretty unrealistic Ellie could pull off a fatality despite not knowing how to use a joystick earlier

I was thinking that it was also unrealistic how quickly they stopped playing. At that age, discovering these things, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get away from the screen and would have played all night with minimal talking lol

If I recall correctly there was a close-up of a nearly empty coin cup a bit later in the scene, indicating they played many many games.

I seem to remember a lot of the 90s fighting games like mortal kombat and killer instinct had the finisher combos on the side of the arcade machine. Everyone wanted to do the finishers, but internet in your pocket did not yet exist.

They imply Riley has been playing a bunch and is shown teaching Ellie how to do the fatality iirc.

Wha? I recall learning things like this in 5, 10 minutes of play. Joysticks are intuitive.

I still have trouble.. I'm assuming they found some magazines somewhere that detail the moves so I'll give them that

Are you saying that you intuitively learned within such a short time of playing that e.g. pressing “←, →, ↓, В” or “→, →, ↑, ↑, Z” during the brief “Finish him!” makes Reptile perform a fatality? I find it hard to see the intuition here.

The creators talk about this in the companion podcast - the idea was that literature/media from these games still exists (which we can see as Ellie has the poster), and the only way you found out about fatalities anyway was via gaming publications/urban legends. Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error.

Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error

Good grief. There was no internet of course, and no gaming magazines in my home town.

People read instructions on the machine, and also, tried different things.

Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

Yes, that is how it was done.

Thanks for that memory. Someone at school would whisper a combo move and you'd pencil it down and eagerly rush home from the bus later that day to try it out.

We really were guessing different combos, in rural Iowa at least.

>Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

We grew up in alternate realities then. No one just guesses MK2 fatalities. Especially not in the 3 sec time frame you have to pull it off.

> Everyone I ever met ever, learned such gaming combos, with their friends, by trial and error.

To be fair, fatalities are not generally discoverable by trial and error, unlike combos. You have such a small window of time to enter them when they show up at the end of the match. The first time I encountered one, I had no idea what was going on and then a few seconds later it was over.

However, back then we had gaming magazines and books that revealed all the fatalities, so you could easily look them up.

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