10 Secret Ways Video Games Make You Feel Like A Badass

10. Input Buffering (Giving You Benefit Of The Doubt)

If you’ve played any prominent fighting game, you might’ve heard of the term “input buffering” (no, it has nothing to do with using a cloth to scrub off the Wotsit dust from a friend handling your neon yellow joycons).

Input buffering is effectively when you queue up another input before the previous one has registered. In Street Fighter 4, for example, if you want to punch, then immediately dragon punch, you could input the dragon punch command before Ryu’s first animation has finished, and he will automatically dragon punch immediately after.

Think of it like... inputting moves faster than the game can play them. You speed demon, you.

However, in a lot of games, this kind of rapid input can sometimes lead to sloppy execution - but fear not! Some very kind developers make up for this by allowing “close enough” inputs to queue up as valid buffered inputs.

So, even if you don’t pull off the exact motion you wanted to, the game’ll say, “oh, hey, at least you tried”, and award you a buffered, queued attack anyway.

You know what this means? You can NEVER blame your controller again, you monster.