Getting cheesed out in a fighting game can be one of the most discouraging and painful experiences ever. I should know because cheese made me quit a lot of fighting games in the past, all of which I regret leaving now.
You see, after years of sage wisdom gathered from watching some of the greats play at the top of their game against the cheesiest playstyles, I realized something. I am the problem.
What Is Cheese in Fighting Games?
Before I get ahead of myself, I need to explain what exactly I mean by cheese. No, we’re not breaking out the charcuterie board for this one. I meant a different kind of cheese, the type of cheese that’d make your eyes water and singe your eyebrows off. Cheese is slang within the fighting game community that refers to cheap tactics used by players to score wins. In real fighting terms? These are the low blows, the eye jabs, and the good ol’ pocket sand.
But real-life dirty tactics are way different from cheese in video games because, my fellow scrubs, Cheese isn’t cheese, it’s strategy. Fighting is just as much a mental game as it is a physical game, and that’s why we can experience the thrill of fighting from the comfort of our gaming chairs. Each type of cheese is a mental test by your opponent to see how you react, and I am here to tell you to stop running away from the cheese. I am here to tell you to embrace the cheese.
Grab City
Street Fighter 6 is a game filled with micro-interactions that look insignificant from an outside perspective, but mean the world for the best in the league. There are spacing traps, frame traps, anti-airs, wake-ups, and the dreaded grab. Grabs in this game are notorious for how tedious they can feel on the receiving end. Once you’re knocked down by your opponent, they have free rein to just keep grabbing you and knocking you down until you tech the grab.
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This is why grappler characters like Zangief, Potemkin, and recently Blitzcrank from 2XKO are considered noob killers, because most of the people new to fighting games don’t understand the base rock-paper-scissors interaction: blocking beats attacking, grabbing beats blocking, and attacking beats grabbing. Without cheesy grab loops, the entire interaction would be broken, and people can just block without fear.
Going Infinite
So you want to learn how to do an infinite? Infinites in fighting games are just that: combos that go on forever. They’re not fun to watch, nor are they fun to experience firsthand, but to the trained spectator, it could be one of the greatest displays of skill that any fighting game player could make. Let’s take, for example, the biggest offender in all of fighting games when it comes to infinites: Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom.
UMVC3 has several characters that can launch you, and you could just let go of the controller at that point because the game was over. Characters like Dante, Doctor Doom, and Zero could combo you to death with combo counters breaking into the hundreds. While tedious to watch and experience, I firmly believe that infinite combos are fine as long as they require the highest caliber of technique and execution. It is a feature that I am praying they don’t pull out of Marvel vs Capcom 4…if it still exists.
Unblockable Setups
In fighting games, what you do when you’re down matters just as much as when you’re standing up because of okizeme, which is just a fancy word for your getup game. Of course, getting off the ground is a layered endeavor. You have to decide whether to block low, block an overhead, or break a grab…but then there are nigh impossible block situations that your opponent can put you in. One of these situations is the taunt setup by Tekken’s own local psychopath, Bryan Fury.
Bryan is probably the best example of a fair unblockable setup, considering the amount of skill you’d need to hit his infamous taunt jet upper. This move requires frame-perfect inputs that are only possible after weeks, months, or even years of practice to do consistently. Then there’s also Hwoarang’s recently patched out ki-charge setups that guaranteed you'd die in two touches.
But the common factor among all these cheese tactics is that, at the end of the day, they’re still part of this huge rock-paper-scissors strategy that we have going on. Sure, they can be annoying to deal with the first few times you get cheesed, but still, that cheese is skill expression. You know what else is skill expression? Showing everyone you know how to counter the cheese strat. And that’s where all the fun is.
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