NeoEmpire Interviews James “jchensor” Chen

NeoEmpire took a little time to get to know James Chen a little better in an interview posted today. He talks about his long, long history in the fighting game community, his role as a commentator, MK9, and MvC3.

Gaming for over 2 and a half decades and a player around since fighting games inception back in the days of Street Fighter 2, in all those years seeing everything, everyone and every game come and go what was your favourite period?

Being as old school as I am, it’ll probably surprise everyone when I say my favorite period is right now. Yeah, there are issues with the scene being “too friendly” and lacking the proper drive and such, yeah the games may be more catered to the casual player and not the hardcore players, and on and on. But never before has the scene been this large and this available! The ability to have streams for people to watch from all around the world, to spread the knowledge, joy, and excitement of the Fighting Game Community to anyone willing to tune in is amazing. Back in the old days, we were excited if we got 60 people in a tourney and it was a struggle to record the matches and make them small enough for 56k modems to download at a reasonable pace. Now, we have tourneys that are regularly 200+ people that are streamed LIVE to the world. It’s really hard to say there’s any time that’s been better than that.

Continue reading on NeoEmpire…

  • RaHavic

    James you are the man bro. Being around you at CEO and seeing how much (just by looking at your face) you care about this community and the people in it just makes me want to stay a part of this for the longhaul. Thank you James Chen, and one day there will be a hall a fame for you to be the first inductee into.

  • DoomCanoe

    jchensor for president

  • Goatbot

    Arguably the Number 1 commentator out there and all round nice guy. This guys an FGC legend of the highest degree and the interview makes for a pretty interesting read.

  • boogityboy

    I totally agree with his comment on the over-saturation of new games in the market. Problem is the younger gamers today get burnt out on stuff really fast and demand something new constantly. Just look at the demand for dlc content the week after a new game is released. They want new characters, new costumes, new levels, content patches etc. and cant just be happy with the game they are given to play.
    Honestly this is what made me stop playing heavily in the fighting game scene almost 10 years ago. Seems like everytime you turned around there was a new street fighter, a new tekken, etc in the arcade and it just killed the scene and started all the game hate wars which split the community quite a bit which continues til today. Back then we had street fighter, tekken, MK and virtua fighter fans arguing over who’s game was better. Now we have the communty split even more shouting which VERSION of each game is better or sucks or whatever.
    The community may be larger as a whole but the attitudes contained within just plain suck more as well.

    • Goatbot

      Yeh without a doubt its hard to keep up with all the games that are out and being played now or coming out soon. SSF4AE, Tekken 6, MvC3, MK9, Skullgirls, 3SO, Tekken Tag 2, SFxT, BB:CS2. I mean to really master 1 character is a game in itself and takes up a lot of time.

      I dont like how certain games have become too friendly for the new player but if youre going to water down the market with too many fighting games then youre watering down the amount of time people have to play each one so they cant just focus all their time in one anymore. If its too hard to master in little time then theres too much risk from a business perspective that the game will only hit a very niche crowd and not appeal to the masses. Watering down of difficulty and higher input leniency is a result of the watering down of the market with too many releases.

      FPS is supposedly too saturated a genre but I think FG has more games coming out at the moment. In a way its bad but at the same time its good for the community because it means devs will listen more to the FGC to try and help keep their games at the top of the pile so the games we do choose will only get better which is why AE and 3SO came about for consoles.

    • ChampionshipEdition

      Yeah, but this was always inevitable you know.

      FGs as a sport are not like other sports. If you play baseball or even competitive chess there’s not a new version of baseball or chess out every six months. Hell, if you play Starcraft, there’s at least a ten year wait (lol?) between refreshes.

      But FG’s are video games and new video games have to be made and sold. There’s no way around that.

      The FGC is not old. It’s still a new thing just like other e-sports. If you even want to use the term e-sport. The parameters of what the FGC even is are not set in stone. They’re not even understood yet.

      It is understandable but also kind of funny that we think there’s an “OG” fighting game community and OG veterans when the glory days we talk about were really merely ten or twelve years ago. There are brands of candy bars older than that. We’re not talking about baseball where we debate the merits of legendary players and games from 50 years ago.

      • boogityboy

        10-12 years ago? More like 20 years ago. The fighting game had a “community” in local arcades with games like the original MK, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, and of course Street Fighter II. I was an 8′ on the Break kid growing up in New Jersey and while there was only an occasional small tournament every once in a while, there was still a large group of us who showed up everyday to play each other, learn from each other, and such. That’s a community, just not a large one. It just wasnt until much later in years with the advent of mainstream internet did it all get connected together, but it doesnt mean there wasnt a community before that point.
        Fighting game communities are much much older than you think.

        • Good Game Player

          the fighting game community has been connected via the internet since the beginning. many people who posted on the alt.games.sf2 newsgroup back in the early to mid 90s are major players in the scene today. james chen, seth killian, the cannon bros, etc.

          • boogityboy

            which was around 4-5+ years later and what I pretty much stated :)

  • Kimicario

    Very good interview, and made me respect James Chen that much more because of it. I especially liked reading about what he had to say about the new flood of fighting games coming our way.

  • Vicioushellsing

    I also agree I am worried that too many fighting games are coming out. And every time a new game comes out it hurts the community of the other games. usually only temporarily but you notice a hit in players. I am curious as to the effect SFxT will have.

  • lilotaku

    James is a good guy and great for the community. He has great insight in the games he commentates, but also entertaining as well which is just as important. I would definitely approve of James commentating the majority of the SF4 and MvC3 bouts at Evo.

  • King Rizz

    I like James but his comments on MK compared to MvC3 leads me to believe he honestly knows next to nothing about the game nor does he care to learn.
    Now I like MvC3 for all the things it does right and I agree when he says the game has yet to be fully fleshed out, however I disagree on the comparison between MK and MvC3. Just look at the tournament results. In MvC3 we’re seeing the exact same results in terms of what teams are being used, team synergy, and overall effectiveness of skilled players using particular teams. Granted, there is much to be discovered among the rest of the cast, however since it is a tourney season players will just use what they know works. However, a deciding factor among those decisions are the capabilities of the DHC glitch and a character’s effectiveness with X-Factor (particularly lv3). Even the commentators at ECT brought up the overuse of DHC teams and Phoenix teams (even worse combined, lol). These gimmicks alone really limit what is possible in this game for a hardcore competitive scene. It doesn’t matter how much depth there is to the rest of the cast when all you need are the same 12 characters in set teams relying on the same gimmicks. If it works THAT well, why bother exploring any further when nothing else works as well? Sure, bring up how Spiderman or whoever can snuff out a D. Phoenix transformation, but are we seeing that? No, because using those characters compromises the greater strengths of more capable teams.

    Now lets look at MK’s recent tournaments. Yes, at the beginning we saw a lot of the same characters and NRS’s debuffing of those characters could have led to their decline in popularity, but look at how many players have been placing with different characters in each tournament. For the first time we’ve been seeing phenomenal play from Liu Kang, Jax, Sindel, Sektor, and Jade. More than half the cast is more than viable and more players are doing amazing experimentation with characters once thought ‘low tier’ (there are players now doing scary scary things using Sheeva of all characters). Now most of this is due to the constant patching. He claims it hurts more than it helps, but if thats the case than why are we seeing such huge variation among results? What we have is a very vocal minority who believe the patching hurts their playstyles, yet we’re seeing the opposite from the majority of players who are getting favorable results from trying new things and experimenting with new combinations. If anything, this game has yet to be fully explored to the 70% he claims. Now there’s no way to prove what percentage MK or MvC3 is at without approaching MIT professors, but I can see that Jchen’s view is no where near the actuality of it. Why does he state this then when results show he’s absolutely wrong? As with any under performing student he’s just not paying enough attention.

    • Windsagio

      you can’t be surprised tho’, Chen is pretty much famous for pulling wrong ideas out of his ass at random, especially when games are relatively new.

      He is however a nice guy, so… so I dunno what.

  • KimSunIL

    ^PJSalt

  • wolfeagle 847

    A few years back James wrote an excellent article on “plinking”. Anyone have a link or a copy, etc…?

  • vagabond999

    Great interview, thanks for sharing Keits.

    Massive respect for James Chen. James: don’t let the 10% of haters in stream chat affect you, most of us really appreciate your commentary, many just don’t speak up. I think most of the kids in chat (who hate on most ‘serious commentators’ btw) are usually crying for the likes of DSP to get on stream to entertain them. I’ll let people draw their own conclusions from that.

    I genuinely think we’re lucky to have such a good spread of quality commentators in the FGC who are willing to give their time to commentating and adding hype to stream viewers. Not to mention the insights into the games we learn from them.

    I hope Evo gives all of these guys time: Seth Killian (the best), JamesChen, UltraDavid and of course the awesome hype machine Skisonic.

    Regarding the FGC, I wish the England scene was as great as in the US.

  • vagabond999

    Regarding the issue of over saturation in the fighting game market, I’m happy to be in a time when we’re getting all this quality product. If the SF, Marvel and MK games were BAD, then I’d be concerned. But all of them are great games respectively.

    I have to wonder though, with the release of SFxTekken. How on earth will the Evo line up be next year? Will there be 3 premiere games? SF4 AE, Marvel 3 (or whatever update their is) and SFxTekken?

    Be interesting to see if the SF4 series survives as the premiere title. I have a feeling it will.

  • And One

    I’ve also thought that there has been an over saturation of fighting games recently.We’ve seen this before in the 90′s when the fighting game genre pretty much imploded. I also think the tournament scene may be headed that way also at this rate. It seems like there’s a major every weekend. East coast, West coast, mid-west, Germany beat down, Alaska throw down, Santa’s northpole ho-ho down, etc,etc… Seriously though, some of these “important tournaments” are happing on the same weekend.How much fighting game “goodness” do we need?! Nobody wants to see Mike( scrappy doo) Mcdougle win A.E. or Mvc3 at a tourney only to go to another tourney and get hopelessly beat down by Daigo or J.Wong and people on stream saying
    ‘this guys trash! Where’d he come from?! Oh my bad, he won that tournament called Bagel hut slap down”. I hope these get spread out more so this doesn’t get over saturated either.

  • Thunda

    “Bagel Hut Slap Down”
    “Santa’s North Pole Ho-ho down”

    lol Epic win #18

  • Necrophile

    Seems to me like players WANT new games to come out often.

    1 year after SSF4 came out seems a lot of people were bored with it already. A lot started proclaiming that Super was dead, and even pros like Jwong attended Major tourneys without practicing Super seriously.

    And Super was a good, balanced game. Yet people were HAPPY to play the new game MvC3 and Super attendance dropped in tourneys.

    So… you can’t blame the developers for cranking a lot of games out for $$$. The players themselves want more games.

  • cerz

    You can have my kids James Chen. You’re the best.

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