Wardens, Streetfighter, and Tekken, oh my!

I nearly wet myself when I stumbled upon the Gamespy Mines of Moria details and through that, that new classes. Most excited about the Warden being a medium-armored tank whose emphasis is on agility and anticipation. Which coincidentally, is one of my favorite ways to play my Burglar class thanks to the help of his debuffs, stuns, ability to blinding groups of enemies, crowd control, and then finishing them off quickly if they have the nerve to turn their back on me.

But what thrilled me the most is that the game play mechanics of the Warden were likened to Tekken; which I still play nearly every day on my PSP. That said, I was a manager of a video game arcade years ago (remember those?), and I got heavily involved in fighting game competitions -- most notably the Street Fighter and later Tekken series due to their extremely technical and logical combat systems. Sure you can get in there and press a bunch of buttons and possibly win; but when you know the mechanics of those games, they become completely different beasts.

Often we would hang out late after mall hours, lock the gate, and practice with some of our favorite arcade peeps. During the day, crowds would gather to watch the epic fights of the arcade staff vs the arcade patrons and most of them would inevitably come down to the last few seconds of a match. Winning often came down to whomever was brave enough to pull off a crazy last-second stunt and after a while, winning with style became much more important than winning at all.

Good times!!!