Before I get started, let me bring those of you who are unfamiliar with the game Catherine up to speed. Feel free to skip the following paragraph if you're already hip to the game.
Released in North America this past July, Catherine is the story of an embattled 32 year old man named Vincent. Like many men his age, Vincent is in something of a rhythm. He has a decent, if not high level or glamorous job. He has his own place and he has a long standing relationship with a woman named Katherine. She is thinking about marriage. Though he cares deeply for her, he isn't. The arrival of Catherine, a sweet, care free, built-for-pleasure blond complicates things when she seduces Vincent, unaware of his relationship with Katherine. Through a series of block puzzles and conversation trees, the player guides Vincent through the frightening, guilt-laden emotional minefield of sex, infidelity, love and commitment.
So with that said.....
One of the things that makes the concept behind Catherine so compelling to me is that I love art as discussion. Whether it's a game or a film or a book, I love stories that are essentially crystallized discussions about a part of the human condition. Those that know me personally know that love, commitment and fidelity rate high on my list of essential human concepts. Factor in my passion for games (particularly those of the quirky, Japanese variety) and Catherine should have all my synapses firing. But through 4 chapters, something is really bugging me.
Just an FYI there are NO SPOILERS ahead.
I think we can all agree that the best pieces of contemplative art pose questions without agenda and avoid giving the audience the feeling that there is a "correct" answer. While great works have been created that are not so impartial, and are no less great for being so, they constitute a "statement" as opposed to a discussion.
Catherine most definitely postures itself as a discussion. If it were a simple statement about love and fidelity it would task the player with escaping one of the women or definitively trying to earn the "right" woman's affection. Instead, the game gives you a choice about who to end up with and no, it's not a Fable style "bright 'n' shiny" or "dark 'n' spiky" kind of binary choice.
There are four endings for both women, varying from not-so-good to "perfect" depending upon the decisions you make in the game. After certain key choices, the game even presents the player with a pie chart showing a percentage of what players chose their first time through. All of this serves to make the player feel as if the game is a sort of interactive, impartial discussion about love, marriage and fidelity.
The problem is that the facade of impartiality breaks right down with the character of Katherine, Vincent's long time girlfriend and would be fiance. She is, in my opinion, an insufferable type of human being. It's as if the creators polled unhappily married middle-aged men, asked them what they hate most about their wives and used that as a metric when creating Katherine.
Every negative stereo-type associated with "the woman who just wants to tie you down" is made manifest by her. She is cold, subversive and has a knack for passive-aggressively deriding every little thing Vincent does. From his laundry habits, to his social schedule and even his commitment to work overtime when needed, there doesn't seem to be anything about Vincent that she actually likes. She seems to have only two motivations for opening her mouth and those are chiding him for some inane little thing, or not-so-subtly advancing her agenda of marriage and children. In 4 chapters, I can't recall a single warm, kind or loving thing she had to say.
Before going any further, let me share a little bit about where I am coming from, since it may appear to those of you who played the game that I am reacting to the character in such a way because I have had bad experiences with women or am possessed of a fear to commit.
Hi! My name is Vincent and I am 32 years old and recently divorced. That's correct! I share the protagonists age and name! Before you point to the "divorced" bit let me break that down for you. Similarly to Catherine's Vincent, I met my wife in school, we went our ways after, and eventually we reconnected. My now ex-wife was, and IS, a wonderful person and a great friend. We certainly had our problems, but her secretly hating me, as Katherine seems to feel about Vincent, was not one of them. She loved me precisely FOR what I was, not in spite of it.
Despite our issues, and the eventual ending of our union, I would recommend marriage to anyone. If love is a driving force in your life, like it has always been in mine, there isn't a better decision you could make in my opinion. And as an Atheist, I come to that without any sort of religious motivation. Seriously, marriage rocks!
Vincent, or any real-world man who doesn't hate himself would be patently stupid to marry Katherine. Women like her are the reason so many men see marriage as "the end of their life".
Perhaps I am being a bit harsh, but after 4 chapters of trying to be open minded, this is how I felt about the character. I have met plenty of folks, male and female, who don't agree. If I'm being honest though, I've spoken to more women who agree than men. Take that as you will.
Going into the game, I was positive that in my first play through I would patently ignore Catherine and marry my long time girlfriend. Sadly, the game doesn't make that entirely possible, as you have no choice about whether or not Vincent cheats on Katherine with Catherine. He just does (another quibble I have). But after seeing what Katherine was actually like, I still felt that Vincent's infidelity was inexcusable (as infidelity ALWAYS is) but I also felt like I understood where it came from.
And this is the exact point at which the "discussion" breaks down. If the player feels in any way that Catherine is some kind of respite from Katherine, it's not a discussion about marriage vs freedom any longer. I really applaud the creators presenting a more realistic, grey shade picture of infidelity than is typically portrayed in the popular arts, really I do. But in this context it has the side effect of opening the door for us to see Catherine as a hero figure, saving Vincent from a terrible life of being nagged to death by someone who doesn't truly understand or love him.
And boy is it a feat to make ME of all people feel that. I mean, if I met a girl who looked like Catherine in real life, I would say she had "3 miles of bad road" written all over her. On the surface, she's the kind of apex predator that a man normally stays far away from if he wants an actually rewarding relationship. But not only does the game paint her as sweet and gentle as can be, they made her competition a buttoned-up shrew of a woman. Nothing like making the decision for the player!
But I am still early in the game, so I suppose there is still time for Katherine to prove to me that she wants to marry me because she loves me so much rather than because she is getting tired of her mother nagging her about it. While initially I was intrigued that the game could make me even consider Catherine, I realized quickly that they only achieved it by making me hate Katherine. While the game as a whole is made from more sophisticated stuff than most, that very vital element is kind of a cheap parlor trick by the standards of other artistic mediums.
A good piece of contemplative art relies on the presence of a "maybe". Maybe A or Maybe B? Do I sacrifice my life and the lives of people I love to save an entire planet, or do I protect myself and those I love at incalculable human cost? Cliche as that for instance may be in the game world, at least I can see the "maybe" in it. But what's so "maybe" about Catherine?
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Where Have All the Hammerdins Gone?
I have decided to take a small break from recounting my recent road trip across the country. I plan on getting back to it very shortly but right now I have something else fluttering about my mind and I don't think it will go away until I give it a voice.
The tune that has been incessantly blaring in my head of late is the slow death that the traditional RPG is dying today. WAIT! BEFORE YOU WALK AWAY LET ME ASSURE YOU THIS WILL NOT BE AN ELITIST RANT ON WHY HAND HOLDING SUCKS AND HOW MUCH I HATE PEOPLE! I SWEAR! HONEST!
Ok, now that a few of you sat back down, allow me to make some things clear about exactly what I mean when I say that the traditional RPG is dying a slow death. The key piece here is in how I define the term "traditional", as that is not a terribly specific, pre-defined industry term.
What is "Traditional"?
First off, I can tell you what I do not mean by the term "traditional". It is not a synonym for JRPG, single player RPG or fantasy RPG. Many games that could be described in these ways do not qualify, in the definition I will furnish, as a "traditional" RPG, though some do. I don't want anyone reading this and thinking I am about to evangelize the golden age Square JRPG's of the SNES era and claim that everything since has been bunk (but geez were they GREAT!) If anything, Square has been instrumental in poisoning the well.
Within the context of this article, "traditional" really means "adhering to the core gameplay philosophies of the genre". While I couldbore dazzle you all with a detailed breakdown of said philosophies, I will instead summarize these ideas into one easy to understand one. The traditional RPG experience is about the systems of chance, experimentation, choice and consequence present in the game that the player interacts with in order to develop their character. It is the presence of these systems that typify "traditional" RPG gameplay. They need not be the entire sum of the gameplay, but they do need to be present and pervasive.
There was a time when every game within the RPG genre made these mechanics central. RPG's in the 80's and most of the 90's were judged largely upon two things. One was the quality of the narrative. The other was the depth, challenge, diversity and balance of the games' system for customizing and progressively empowering your character(s) over the course of your quest.
The idea here was pretty simple but compellingly unique: instead of dictating the capabilities of the hero from the start and having them remain static, let the player decide what the hero looks like, what they are good and bad at, what type of weapons and equipment they use and what kinds of amazing powers they will wield. Then give them some rules and a framework to work within, as well as a wide variety of challenges and obstacles and then let them figure it out.
The end result was an experience that rewarded creativity, planning, problem solving, resource management and out of the box thinking. Learning and mastering these systems and investing time and effort into a successful character capable of carving a unique path to the end of the game was a truly challenging and rewarding experience.
Things Take a Turn.....
I'm not really sure when or why these changes started to occur, but they did. Little by little, these systems have been made less and less sophisticated. RPG's today offer fewer choices, less depth and less player input in crafting their character than they ever have. Discerning the genesis of this shift is best left for message board flame wars. What I find more interesting, and more threatening, is that it happened right under the noses of the stalwart RPG faithful and seemingly with our consent. As a result, the few RPG developers with enough resources to produce a AAA product have decided that they no longer care to "make 'em like they used to". And the sad truth of it is: we deserve it because we just keep giving them our damn money.
I could fill a book with examples from the past 10 years, but I don't need to. For a perfect example of the good and bad of this phenomenon, one needs look no further than the progression of gameplay systems in the popular Blizzard property, Diablo.
Case in Point
WARNING - the following paragraphs may contain acronym-alicious terminology, math and/or multifarious other forms of nerdery. I will try to keep it readable for all, but you have been warned.
When Blizzard released Diablo 2 in 2000, it was a watershed moment for action RPG fans. The game expanded upon its predecessor in every imaginable way, setting new standards for replayability, combat, itemization and character building in the Action RPG (ARPG) genre. With it's clever mix of fast paced, visceral combat and cavernously deep character planning and customizing, Diablo 2 (D2) and it's subsequent expansion, Lord of Destruction, became enduring classics. 11 years later, people are still playing them while while eagerly awaiting the release of Diablo 3.
We stand now, days from the beginning of the closed beta test for Diablo 3 (D3). The development process has been quite a bit different from that of D2. Actually, that may not be entirely true. The process may be quite similar, but the way in which the fans experience the development process has changed radically. We have twitter feeds to follow, developer interviews to watch and tons of message boards to exchange info and insults on. Sure, we had the Internet back then but that was Web 1.0. Now we have Web 2.0 socially-connected-everythingness! Dev teams and fan sites have near constant contact and the result is a front row seat to major design decisions as they happen. Sometimes this is awesome for both the fans and the developers. And sometimes it isn't.....
There's no need to draw this out, the development team on D3, headed by the always quotable Jay Wilson, has made some very controversial decisions in the past few months and with each one, Mr. Wilson has done his best to explain why these crazy calls (each crazier than the last) are going to make D3 a better game. In another era, we wouldn't even be hearing about internal play testing and design decisions, but in this one, we can do a Google search and find 20 minute long interviews with the project lead discussing his thought process. Here are some of the monumental changes that Jay and his many supporters in the player base feel will evolve the Diablo franchise:
-Players will no longer be allowed to distribute their character's attribute points (strength, intelligence, et al). These will now be distributed by the game automatically.
-Players will no longer detail a specialization for their character on a skill tree. As you level, all skills will become available to you.
-Players will no longer assign differing numbers of skill points to different skills to decide how relatively powerful each of their skills are. All skills will level in a uniform manner as the player character does.
-Players will no longer decide upon a set of skills and stick with them. Instead the player may choose 6 skills to hot key and switch these out freely whenever they choose.
-An in-game, player-to-player auction house will be established where, for the first time legally, players will be able to use real world currency to purchase gear and items if they do not wish to take time to earn or find during normal gameplay.
If you know the first thing about RPG's, you are, at this moment, scratching your head. Unless your idea of an RPG is Final Fantasy XIII. In that case, you can probably stop reading about now.
You read correctly. Blizzard has entirely automated the lion's share of character development and differentiation (one of the cores of RPG gameplay) for their decade-in-the-making sequel to the most successful ARPG of all time.
Let's hear it for progress?
The Aftermath
The first thing you need to understand is that these decisions were not made and announced all at once. They were made gradually and trickled into the drip-drop information i.v. that the hardcore fiends keep themselves tapped into from dusk 'till dawn. This was certainly a good thing for Blizzard because each of these announcements incited mini-riots on fan sites all over the web once they were brought to light. But as many times as that happened, Jay Wilson stepped up to defend and explain his team's decision.
To his credit, Jay Wilson seems like the kind of guy I would have a beer and a game of Dominion with. He really looks and talks just a like a complete RPG nerd, and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way. Normally, that is exactly the kind of dude I would want designing my next RPG or D&D campaign. But despite the good will, I initially had trouble getting behind the spin he was putting on these decisions.
Essentially, the "Jay Wilson Defense" goes something like this: "Over the decade of people playing Diablo 2 it became clear that system "X" was broken or frustrating for the player. We tried to fix it for Diablo 3. After many iterations and redesigns we did extensive internal testing, during which we just couldn't find a solution we were happy with. Therefore, we decided to remove system "X" from the game entirely. We think the result is a better game."
Now, admittedly, what Jay says about D2 is true, but if you ask Jay how the player will influence the strengths and weaknesses of their character in light of all these changes, he will quickly remind you of the different gear and items you can equip.....the gear and items you could already equip before the removal of all these other methods of customization. So we are being told that the only remaining method of customization is suddenly a viable stand in for the all the methods of customization it used to work in tandem with? Hmmmmm.
When challenge them about how these changes may limit the amount of control the player has on how their character develops, Jay or his message board supporters respond by championing how free and nonrestrictive the new system is and that you can do anything with your character now. Meanwhile I'm thinking, "Yeah, everything except, you know, change their attributes, decide which skills they have access to at what point in the game and which skills are their strongest ones.
I try not to be a cynic but it has been hard to stave off the feeling that Jay and company are trying to sell me a car without the engine while calling it the next big thing. Common sense tells us that no sensible automobile enthusiast would swallow that line, but one trip to the official Diablo 3 community site says otherwise.
Believe it or not, the same people who mapped out character builds down to the last skill point for over a decade in Diablo 2 are mostly overjoyed about these changes. According to them, planning out a character build is "tedious". They find having to stick with their character decisions "punishing". They won't even debate with you whether or not the few character choices that remain have long term consequences. They flat out concede that they don't and they love it. That bears repeating:
There are no long term consequences to any of the decisions you make in developing your character in this Role Playing Game and the players think that's awesome.
Apparently, everything I know is wrong.
So Now What?
Diablo 3 is only the most recent example of how developers are removing/ommiting large chunks of character building and other core gameplay elements from their RPG's. The Mass Effect series, Dragon Age 2 and Final Fantasy XIII are also part of the new "less is more" school of RPG design. There have even been talks of the ever-hardcore Elder Scrolls series getting streamlined for the fifth game in the series, Skyrim, which hits stores this November. The easy conclusion to draw would be that companies have decided to dumb down their products in exchange for the opportunity to to sell to the masses. But as averse as I am to this growing trend of "streamlining", I think evil CEO's and shareholders are just convenient scapegoats, not the real issue.
The real issue is that RPG gameplay conventions suck.
Ok, let me rephrase. The execution and implementation of traditional RPG gameplay elements has not improved in any significant way during the last 2 decades. If you go back and look at many of the great traditional RPG's and ARPG's made in the last 20 years I am sure you can find a gameplay element in each that was either imbalanced or not fun. Maybe it was equipment management, currency, character building or the exploration of dungeons/towns, etc.
Without mentioning exact games, I can say that I have made equipment choices that had next to no bearing on the outcome of combat and I have wandered around boring, generic villages for hours exchanging pleasantries with retired fishermen and belly dancers alike, until I finally find the one person who I need to speak with to trigger the next event. I have often spent more time in menu screens contemplating character skill decisions than I have actually using those skills, only to have those choices be nearly inconsequential to my party's success. If I could convert all the gil/munny/G/rupees I have pointlessly stockpiled by the end of all the RPG's I have played into dollars, I would make Warren Buffett look like Antoine Dodson (pre-Bed Intruder).
But was any of that fun? Well of course it was.....to ME! I'm a crotchety old RPG player who hates myself! But as it turns out, most people don't hate themselves nearly enough to pay $60 for 30-100 hours of self-induced torture. Go figure. And here I thought masochism was "in" this season!
It isn't to say that traditional RPG gameplay is inherently bad. Quite the contrary actually, at least in my opinion. The problem is that it hasn't gotten any better since MC Hammer. No one has been trying to figure out how to make exploring a town as engaging as fighting a dragon. No one stepped in after Final Fantasy VII and said, "Hey, maybe letting players turn all their characters into gods who can cast/do anything isn't as cool as it seemed on paper." No concerted effort has been made to make in-game currency have value to the player. As a result, these gameplay elements have festered over the years, becoming the very things players hate about RPG's rather than the reason to play them.
Average Joe gamers, and even hardcore RPG gamers are kind of over dealing with broken systems and they have dealt with so many that very few them have the desire to sink countless hours into another one only to find out its as broken, imbalanced and inconsequential as all the ones before it. Which brings me full circle to Diablo 3.
People have had 11 years of practice for Diablo 3. If Blizzard were to release a game with systems anything like Diablo 2's or its many clones, and it wasn't both revolutionary and flawless, players would have the system's loopholes figured out inside of a week. With the character development decisions trivialized, the game would devolve into yet another workman-like slog through RPG tedium. Fully aware of this possibility, the team chose, as so many other dev teams have, to stop trying to fix the "Old Yeller" that RPG character creation has become and just put it out of its misery. They decided to sacrifice many of my favorite RPG elements upon the altar of fun. While it's difficult for me to admit it, I think it's for the better.
That said, in my ideal world, developers would have been searching for ways to truly improve and tighten these gameplay elements all along, so that this eventuality could have been avoided. Truthfully, they weren't given much of an incentive. After all, we did keep forking over our money. We kept buying the same games, with the same flaws. Then a game like Mass Effect comes along and says, "to hell with these antiquated battle systems and let's make this a shooter/RPG!" and the crowd goes wild. Is it a "traditional" RPG? Heck if I know, but it's a damn great game. Who knew?
I think Diablo 3 will be a great game too. For better or worse, it won't be a thing like Diablo 2, or even its spiritual successors, Torchlight and Titan Quest. In the end, Jay Wilson isn't trying to sell us a car with no engine so much as he's selling us a Dodge Viper with an automatic transmission and launch assist. While I still hope someone out there can figure out how to bring the tried and true RPG elements of yesteryear into the 21st century without marginalizing them, for now I'm more than happy to settle for just having fun.
Death to the Hammerdin! Long live fun!
The tune that has been incessantly blaring in my head of late is the slow death that the traditional RPG is dying today. WAIT! BEFORE YOU WALK AWAY LET ME ASSURE YOU THIS WILL NOT BE AN ELITIST RANT ON WHY HAND HOLDING SUCKS AND HOW MUCH I HATE PEOPLE! I SWEAR! HONEST!
Ok, now that a few of you sat back down, allow me to make some things clear about exactly what I mean when I say that the traditional RPG is dying a slow death. The key piece here is in how I define the term "traditional", as that is not a terribly specific, pre-defined industry term.
What is "Traditional"?
First off, I can tell you what I do not mean by the term "traditional". It is not a synonym for JRPG, single player RPG or fantasy RPG. Many games that could be described in these ways do not qualify, in the definition I will furnish, as a "traditional" RPG, though some do. I don't want anyone reading this and thinking I am about to evangelize the golden age Square JRPG's of the SNES era and claim that everything since has been bunk (but geez were they GREAT!) If anything, Square has been instrumental in poisoning the well.
Within the context of this article, "traditional" really means "adhering to the core gameplay philosophies of the genre". While I could
There was a time when every game within the RPG genre made these mechanics central. RPG's in the 80's and most of the 90's were judged largely upon two things. One was the quality of the narrative. The other was the depth, challenge, diversity and balance of the games' system for customizing and progressively empowering your character(s) over the course of your quest.
The idea here was pretty simple but compellingly unique: instead of dictating the capabilities of the hero from the start and having them remain static, let the player decide what the hero looks like, what they are good and bad at, what type of weapons and equipment they use and what kinds of amazing powers they will wield. Then give them some rules and a framework to work within, as well as a wide variety of challenges and obstacles and then let them figure it out.
The end result was an experience that rewarded creativity, planning, problem solving, resource management and out of the box thinking. Learning and mastering these systems and investing time and effort into a successful character capable of carving a unique path to the end of the game was a truly challenging and rewarding experience.
Things Take a Turn.....
I'm not really sure when or why these changes started to occur, but they did. Little by little, these systems have been made less and less sophisticated. RPG's today offer fewer choices, less depth and less player input in crafting their character than they ever have. Discerning the genesis of this shift is best left for message board flame wars. What I find more interesting, and more threatening, is that it happened right under the noses of the stalwart RPG faithful and seemingly with our consent. As a result, the few RPG developers with enough resources to produce a AAA product have decided that they no longer care to "make 'em like they used to". And the sad truth of it is: we deserve it because we just keep giving them our damn money.
I could fill a book with examples from the past 10 years, but I don't need to. For a perfect example of the good and bad of this phenomenon, one needs look no further than the progression of gameplay systems in the popular Blizzard property, Diablo.
Case in Point
WARNING - the following paragraphs may contain acronym-alicious terminology, math and/or multifarious other forms of nerdery. I will try to keep it readable for all, but you have been warned.
When Blizzard released Diablo 2 in 2000, it was a watershed moment for action RPG fans. The game expanded upon its predecessor in every imaginable way, setting new standards for replayability, combat, itemization and character building in the Action RPG (ARPG) genre. With it's clever mix of fast paced, visceral combat and cavernously deep character planning and customizing, Diablo 2 (D2) and it's subsequent expansion, Lord of Destruction, became enduring classics. 11 years later, people are still playing them while while eagerly awaiting the release of Diablo 3.
We stand now, days from the beginning of the closed beta test for Diablo 3 (D3). The development process has been quite a bit different from that of D2. Actually, that may not be entirely true. The process may be quite similar, but the way in which the fans experience the development process has changed radically. We have twitter feeds to follow, developer interviews to watch and tons of message boards to exchange info and insults on. Sure, we had the Internet back then but that was Web 1.0. Now we have Web 2.0 socially-connected-everythingness! Dev teams and fan sites have near constant contact and the result is a front row seat to major design decisions as they happen. Sometimes this is awesome for both the fans and the developers. And sometimes it isn't.....
There's no need to draw this out, the development team on D3, headed by the always quotable Jay Wilson, has made some very controversial decisions in the past few months and with each one, Mr. Wilson has done his best to explain why these crazy calls (each crazier than the last) are going to make D3 a better game. In another era, we wouldn't even be hearing about internal play testing and design decisions, but in this one, we can do a Google search and find 20 minute long interviews with the project lead discussing his thought process. Here are some of the monumental changes that Jay and his many supporters in the player base feel will evolve the Diablo franchise:
-Players will no longer be allowed to distribute their character's attribute points (strength, intelligence, et al). These will now be distributed by the game automatically.
-Players will no longer detail a specialization for their character on a skill tree. As you level, all skills will become available to you.
-Players will no longer assign differing numbers of skill points to different skills to decide how relatively powerful each of their skills are. All skills will level in a uniform manner as the player character does.
-Players will no longer decide upon a set of skills and stick with them. Instead the player may choose 6 skills to hot key and switch these out freely whenever they choose.
-An in-game, player-to-player auction house will be established where, for the first time legally, players will be able to use real world currency to purchase gear and items if they do not wish to take time to earn or find during normal gameplay.
If you know the first thing about RPG's, you are, at this moment, scratching your head. Unless your idea of an RPG is Final Fantasy XIII. In that case, you can probably stop reading about now.
You read correctly. Blizzard has entirely automated the lion's share of character development and differentiation (one of the cores of RPG gameplay) for their decade-in-the-making sequel to the most successful ARPG of all time.
Let's hear it for progress?
The Aftermath
The first thing you need to understand is that these decisions were not made and announced all at once. They were made gradually and trickled into the drip-drop information i.v. that the hardcore fiends keep themselves tapped into from dusk 'till dawn. This was certainly a good thing for Blizzard because each of these announcements incited mini-riots on fan sites all over the web once they were brought to light. But as many times as that happened, Jay Wilson stepped up to defend and explain his team's decision.
To his credit, Jay Wilson seems like the kind of guy I would have a beer and a game of Dominion with. He really looks and talks just a like a complete RPG nerd, and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way. Normally, that is exactly the kind of dude I would want designing my next RPG or D&D campaign. But despite the good will, I initially had trouble getting behind the spin he was putting on these decisions.
Essentially, the "Jay Wilson Defense" goes something like this: "Over the decade of people playing Diablo 2 it became clear that system "X" was broken or frustrating for the player. We tried to fix it for Diablo 3. After many iterations and redesigns we did extensive internal testing, during which we just couldn't find a solution we were happy with. Therefore, we decided to remove system "X" from the game entirely. We think the result is a better game."
Now, admittedly, what Jay says about D2 is true, but if you ask Jay how the player will influence the strengths and weaknesses of their character in light of all these changes, he will quickly remind you of the different gear and items you can equip.....the gear and items you could already equip before the removal of all these other methods of customization. So we are being told that the only remaining method of customization is suddenly a viable stand in for the all the methods of customization it used to work in tandem with? Hmmmmm.
When challenge them about how these changes may limit the amount of control the player has on how their character develops, Jay or his message board supporters respond by championing how free and nonrestrictive the new system is and that you can do anything with your character now. Meanwhile I'm thinking, "Yeah, everything except, you know, change their attributes, decide which skills they have access to at what point in the game and which skills are their strongest ones.
I try not to be a cynic but it has been hard to stave off the feeling that Jay and company are trying to sell me a car without the engine while calling it the next big thing. Common sense tells us that no sensible automobile enthusiast would swallow that line, but one trip to the official Diablo 3 community site says otherwise.
Believe it or not, the same people who mapped out character builds down to the last skill point for over a decade in Diablo 2 are mostly overjoyed about these changes. According to them, planning out a character build is "tedious". They find having to stick with their character decisions "punishing". They won't even debate with you whether or not the few character choices that remain have long term consequences. They flat out concede that they don't and they love it. That bears repeating:
There are no long term consequences to any of the decisions you make in developing your character in this Role Playing Game and the players think that's awesome.
Apparently, everything I know is wrong.
So Now What?
Diablo 3 is only the most recent example of how developers are removing/ommiting large chunks of character building and other core gameplay elements from their RPG's. The Mass Effect series, Dragon Age 2 and Final Fantasy XIII are also part of the new "less is more" school of RPG design. There have even been talks of the ever-hardcore Elder Scrolls series getting streamlined for the fifth game in the series, Skyrim, which hits stores this November. The easy conclusion to draw would be that companies have decided to dumb down their products in exchange for the opportunity to to sell to the masses. But as averse as I am to this growing trend of "streamlining", I think evil CEO's and shareholders are just convenient scapegoats, not the real issue.
The real issue is that RPG gameplay conventions suck.
Ok, let me rephrase. The execution and implementation of traditional RPG gameplay elements has not improved in any significant way during the last 2 decades. If you go back and look at many of the great traditional RPG's and ARPG's made in the last 20 years I am sure you can find a gameplay element in each that was either imbalanced or not fun. Maybe it was equipment management, currency, character building or the exploration of dungeons/towns, etc.
Without mentioning exact games, I can say that I have made equipment choices that had next to no bearing on the outcome of combat and I have wandered around boring, generic villages for hours exchanging pleasantries with retired fishermen and belly dancers alike, until I finally find the one person who I need to speak with to trigger the next event. I have often spent more time in menu screens contemplating character skill decisions than I have actually using those skills, only to have those choices be nearly inconsequential to my party's success. If I could convert all the gil/munny/G/rupees I have pointlessly stockpiled by the end of all the RPG's I have played into dollars, I would make Warren Buffett look like Antoine Dodson (pre-Bed Intruder).
But was any of that fun? Well of course it was.....to ME! I'm a crotchety old RPG player who hates myself! But as it turns out, most people don't hate themselves nearly enough to pay $60 for 30-100 hours of self-induced torture. Go figure. And here I thought masochism was "in" this season!
It isn't to say that traditional RPG gameplay is inherently bad. Quite the contrary actually, at least in my opinion. The problem is that it hasn't gotten any better since MC Hammer. No one has been trying to figure out how to make exploring a town as engaging as fighting a dragon. No one stepped in after Final Fantasy VII and said, "Hey, maybe letting players turn all their characters into gods who can cast/do anything isn't as cool as it seemed on paper." No concerted effort has been made to make in-game currency have value to the player. As a result, these gameplay elements have festered over the years, becoming the very things players hate about RPG's rather than the reason to play them.
Average Joe gamers, and even hardcore RPG gamers are kind of over dealing with broken systems and they have dealt with so many that very few them have the desire to sink countless hours into another one only to find out its as broken, imbalanced and inconsequential as all the ones before it. Which brings me full circle to Diablo 3.
People have had 11 years of practice for Diablo 3. If Blizzard were to release a game with systems anything like Diablo 2's or its many clones, and it wasn't both revolutionary and flawless, players would have the system's loopholes figured out inside of a week. With the character development decisions trivialized, the game would devolve into yet another workman-like slog through RPG tedium. Fully aware of this possibility, the team chose, as so many other dev teams have, to stop trying to fix the "Old Yeller" that RPG character creation has become and just put it out of its misery. They decided to sacrifice many of my favorite RPG elements upon the altar of fun. While it's difficult for me to admit it, I think it's for the better.
That said, in my ideal world, developers would have been searching for ways to truly improve and tighten these gameplay elements all along, so that this eventuality could have been avoided. Truthfully, they weren't given much of an incentive. After all, we did keep forking over our money. We kept buying the same games, with the same flaws. Then a game like Mass Effect comes along and says, "to hell with these antiquated battle systems and let's make this a shooter/RPG!" and the crowd goes wild. Is it a "traditional" RPG? Heck if I know, but it's a damn great game. Who knew?
I think Diablo 3 will be a great game too. For better or worse, it won't be a thing like Diablo 2, or even its spiritual successors, Torchlight and Titan Quest. In the end, Jay Wilson isn't trying to sell us a car with no engine so much as he's selling us a Dodge Viper with an automatic transmission and launch assist. While I still hope someone out there can figure out how to bring the tried and true RPG elements of yesteryear into the 21st century without marginalizing them, for now I'm more than happy to settle for just having fun.
Death to the Hammerdin! Long live fun!
Friday, August 12, 2011
EVO Roadtrip Day 2 - Chicago, IL
Day 2 of my country spanning trip to Las Vegas and Evo 2011 was, in many ways, the true beginning of my journey. Sure, driving from New York to Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh is a pretty substantial amount of travel but due to planned stops for sight-seeing, food and gaming, I never had to really buckle down and go into all out "road trip mode". But my route from Pittsburgh to Chicago was far less meandering. No famous restaurants, no arcade stop-overs just 8+ hours of driving interrupted only by a quick refuel. Day 1 felt like something of a field trip. Day 2 was going to feel like a sojourn.
And so it did. I had pulled out of the hotel parking lot in Pittsburgh at around a quarter to ten and by the time I was standing in the next hotel parking lot in Chicago it was a quarter to seven. Aside from a delicious breakfast pastry I scored from the Potomac Bakery in Pittsburgh before departing, I had only had water, some nori waffers and a granola bar to eat and I was starting to feel like it. After checking in to my hotel room, I literally dropped my bags just inside the door and hopped right back in my Jeep to go find sustenance at a place called The Honkey Tonk BBQ. Their Memphis styled barbecue fare was exactly what I needed after 9 hours of nothing but driving and snacking.
After a much needed dinner of beef brisket chili and ribs had been washed down with a few glasses of whiskey, I was finally ready to get down to business. After hearing that it had one of the largest cabinet collections in North America, I could hardly wait to get a look at Galloping Ghost Arcade (GGA) in the neighboring town of Brookfield, IL.
While I did have an awesome experience at University Pinball, I had been surprised by how small it was compared to the arcades I had frequented growing up. The four linked AE cabs were the most impressive setup of their kind that I had ever seen in person but the rest of their collection, while wonderfully kept up, wasn't really my particular cup of boba. Certainly if you love pinball, shooting and racing games, University Pinball has higher quality cabs than say a Tilt or Dave and Busters or any other chain amusement center for that matter. But I was in search of a true arcade Shangri-La where I could relive the halcyon days of the American arcade as remembered from my youth.
I feel the need to tell you right now, that if you crave the same, stop reading this, hop in a plane/train/teleportation device and get to 9415 Ogden Avenue in Brookfield, IL to see what you have been missing.
Walking in the front door of Galloping Ghost Arcade, the place doesn't so much welcome you as it consumes you. A black tile walkway leads you straight to the concession/merchandise counter. The railways flanking the walkway are clearly there to ensure people go to the counter first before losing themselves in the wild forest of 80's and 90's arcade cabinets that dominate the rather substantial floor space of GGA.
Railways, barricades or no, I did not require restraining. All I could manage to do was stand there, slack-jawed, just inside the entrance as sights and sounds I had not experienced in nearly two decades flooded my eyes and ears.
"Hi, have you come in before?"
I avert my gaze from the sea of cabinets and back to the counter, where a tallish young man stands, smiling.
"Uhh, umm, no." I sputtered back.
"Ok, well it's fifteen dollars and then you just play as much as you like until we close which is usually around 2am."
My name is Vincent Lorenzo Ingenito and I am 8. I have just been informed that apparently, I have won an unlimited amount of chocolate ice cream which will never make me feel full or make me fat. I can eat as much as I like for the next 5 hours. Then I will die from happiness. The End.
I couldn't give the nice man my $15 fast enough. Until this moment, the last time I had seen a Shinobi cab like the one now staring at me from just a short distance from the counter, I was begging my father for quarters after tearing through the $5 he had already given me (yes, I was terrible at the game, sue me! I was 9. Jerk.) This was like Dad dropping me off at the arcade with an AMEX black card (which is clearly accepted at arcades) and saying he'd be back by the end of the day.
But before I submerged myself in all that golden-age goodness, likely never to resurface, I decided to check out what was on the OTHER side of the walkway, a smaller area with a row of homemade cabinets housing all of today's most popular modern fighters. While many home built setups like these tend to look really...well...home built, these jobs were really snazzy looking. Sharp, game relevant artwork and title cards adorned many of them, and all of them featured very solid construction and pitch perfect sticks.
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, BlazBlue: CS, MvC3 and Tekken 6 were all present and lined up in addition to two really nice looking MK9 cabinets and the (hopefully) soon to be smash hit, King of Fighters XIII. Oddly, Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition was mixed in with all the legacy SF games a bit deeper into the arcade proper. This seemed odd at first, but looking at the small group of people huddled around the MK9 machines, it started to make sense. While 6 or 7 people huddled around the two cabinets waiting to get some casuals in, not a soul was at any of the other cabs.
This kind of thing happens of course. Different communities latch on to different games for a multitude of different reasons. It was just surprising to see the FGC's red-headed stepchild getting all the love while the rest of the kids get no one to play with and Street Fighter, usually the class president, gets asked to stand in the corner. Curious, I decide to approach the MK9 cab for a closer look.
I'm only there a minute before I am reminded how much I love watching people play fighting games. The ebb and flow of a good match is part of it and that is something you can get from watching streams and YouTube vids. But being there, in the presence of the competitors, hearing the button slaps, watching their expressions, seeing the urgency, intensity, finesse and dexterity of their hands across the sticks and buttons and feeling the energy between them and the small crowd of spectators watching them is very powerful for me. I believe that, in it's purest form, it becomes about mastering oneself to master the mind of another. This mixture of inner and outer conflict results in a level of mental engagement that is totally unique, both in the gaming world and even in the world beyond gaming. It's one of the best reasons for arcades to exist.
Oh that, and because playing games face to face with friends is just a damn good time.
Here is a little footage that I think illustrates a lot of these points nicely. It isn't the highest level play, nor is it the most intense example of what I am speaking about but all the elements that make playing and watching fighting games in person something special are here:
The rest of my evening at GGA is something of a blur. Maybe it was all the whiskey or maybe it was the warm, fuzzy glow of nostalgia that creeps into your belly once you start walking the endless rows of classic arcade cabinets. One thing that really stuck out, was that even though I messed around on 20 or more different cabinets, I never had to contend with a broken button or a bum stick. Upon talking to the gentleman at the counter again, I discovered why: they take maintenance extremely seriously at GGA.
The owner of the place, whom was referred to by patrons and employees alike as "The Professor" (repeated attempts at getting an actual name were thwarted, not even kidding) was fully trained in cabinet maintenance and he also trained 2 other employees with his knowledge. According to the man at the counter they replace the sticks on the most popular games every 6 weeks, whether they are broken or not, to keep them in perfect working order. Even now as I was playing at 1 in the morning, a maintenance man was working on an NBA Jam cabinet in the corner. Further inspection of the facility revealed a large workshop in the back where tons of cabinets sat, in various stages of assembly, with parts and tools strewn everywhere. This is an approach I wish more arcades would take but sadly, few can afford to.
Before I left, I decided to take another stroll through GGA's extensive old fighting game section. As I did, I found many fond memories returning, not so much about the games themselves as the times in my life they marked and the relationships I formed while playing them.
Killer Instinct wasn't a great game per se, but I will never forget meeting my first real girlfriend at an ice skating rink I used to frequent to play it. That same girl would later stand by me in arcades and brag to her friends about how good she thought I was at Mortal Kombat 3. Not a small thing to a guy who, to that point in his life, had never felt terribly brag-worthy.
Around that same time I met a boy from my neighborhood who liked fighting games too. We were really into Marvel Super Heroes at the time. We would walk a couple of miles to our local arcade instead of spending money on a taxi or a bus so we could have that many more quarters to play with when we got there. We spent a whole summer doing that together. He ended up being the best man at my wedding and to this day, one of my very dearest friends. It all started with Maximum Spiders, Weapon X's and Magnetic Shockwaves.
As I finished my trip down memory lane, it was approaching 2 am and the other arcade I had hoped to visit was certainly closed. After leaving GGA behind, I decided to at least locate the other place and maybe check it out in the morning before hitting the road to St. Louis. The name of the place was Black Hole Arcade Pizzeria and from the pics on the web, it looked a lot like the arcade I haunted when I was a kid, which was why I wanted to see it.
Upon reaching the address I was having trouble finding it. I figured, "It's late, I'm still a bit tipsy, I'm probably just missing it." It took three trips around the block for the cold reality to sink in. Like so many other arcades in our country, Black Hole was no more. At some point, kids like the kid I used to be dragged their Dads there and met girlfriends there and made friends there, but the realities of the modern gaming scene and the economy proved too harsh to weather. For every story like Galloping Ghost or University Pinball there are ten Blackholes, Arcade Infinities and Chinatown Fairs. I knew all of this of course. Chalk it up to too much whiskey, or the nostalgia of GGA or the memories of my childhood arcade, but I found myself just a little choked up as I drove back to my hotel.
These places we still have are truly magical, but if we don't support them, they can only last for so long. If you take anything away from my story, let it be this: if you love games and you love the way gaming can bring people together, find a local arcade, spend some time and money there and tell ten of your friends to do the same. The day we stop doing that is the day the magic dies.
And so it did. I had pulled out of the hotel parking lot in Pittsburgh at around a quarter to ten and by the time I was standing in the next hotel parking lot in Chicago it was a quarter to seven. Aside from a delicious breakfast pastry I scored from the Potomac Bakery in Pittsburgh before departing, I had only had water, some nori waffers and a granola bar to eat and I was starting to feel like it. After checking in to my hotel room, I literally dropped my bags just inside the door and hopped right back in my Jeep to go find sustenance at a place called The Honkey Tonk BBQ. Their Memphis styled barbecue fare was exactly what I needed after 9 hours of nothing but driving and snacking.
After a much needed dinner of beef brisket chili and ribs had been washed down with a few glasses of whiskey, I was finally ready to get down to business. After hearing that it had one of the largest cabinet collections in North America, I could hardly wait to get a look at Galloping Ghost Arcade (GGA) in the neighboring town of Brookfield, IL.
While I did have an awesome experience at University Pinball, I had been surprised by how small it was compared to the arcades I had frequented growing up. The four linked AE cabs were the most impressive setup of their kind that I had ever seen in person but the rest of their collection, while wonderfully kept up, wasn't really my particular cup of boba. Certainly if you love pinball, shooting and racing games, University Pinball has higher quality cabs than say a Tilt or Dave and Busters or any other chain amusement center for that matter. But I was in search of a true arcade Shangri-La where I could relive the halcyon days of the American arcade as remembered from my youth.
I feel the need to tell you right now, that if you crave the same, stop reading this, hop in a plane/train/teleportation device and get to 9415 Ogden Avenue in Brookfield, IL to see what you have been missing.
Welcome home.
Walking in the front door of Galloping Ghost Arcade, the place doesn't so much welcome you as it consumes you. A black tile walkway leads you straight to the concession/merchandise counter. The railways flanking the walkway are clearly there to ensure people go to the counter first before losing themselves in the wild forest of 80's and 90's arcade cabinets that dominate the rather substantial floor space of GGA.
Railways, barricades or no, I did not require restraining. All I could manage to do was stand there, slack-jawed, just inside the entrance as sights and sounds I had not experienced in nearly two decades flooded my eyes and ears.
"Hi, have you come in before?"
I avert my gaze from the sea of cabinets and back to the counter, where a tallish young man stands, smiling.
"Uhh, umm, no." I sputtered back.
"Ok, well it's fifteen dollars and then you just play as much as you like until we close which is usually around 2am."
My name is Vincent Lorenzo Ingenito and I am 8. I have just been informed that apparently, I have won an unlimited amount of chocolate ice cream which will never make me feel full or make me fat. I can eat as much as I like for the next 5 hours. Then I will die from happiness. The End.
I couldn't give the nice man my $15 fast enough. Until this moment, the last time I had seen a Shinobi cab like the one now staring at me from just a short distance from the counter, I was begging my father for quarters after tearing through the $5 he had already given me (yes, I was terrible at the game, sue me! I was 9. Jerk.) This was like Dad dropping me off at the arcade with an AMEX black card (which is clearly accepted at arcades) and saying he'd be back by the end of the day.
But before I submerged myself in all that golden-age goodness, likely never to resurface, I decided to check out what was on the OTHER side of the walkway, a smaller area with a row of homemade cabinets housing all of today's most popular modern fighters. While many home built setups like these tend to look really...well...home built, these jobs were really snazzy looking. Sharp, game relevant artwork and title cards adorned many of them, and all of them featured very solid construction and pitch perfect sticks.
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, BlazBlue: CS, MvC3 and Tekken 6 were all present and lined up in addition to two really nice looking MK9 cabinets and the (hopefully) soon to be smash hit, King of Fighters XIII. Oddly, Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition was mixed in with all the legacy SF games a bit deeper into the arcade proper. This seemed odd at first, but looking at the small group of people huddled around the MK9 machines, it started to make sense. While 6 or 7 people huddled around the two cabinets waiting to get some casuals in, not a soul was at any of the other cabs.
This kind of thing happens of course. Different communities latch on to different games for a multitude of different reasons. It was just surprising to see the FGC's red-headed stepchild getting all the love while the rest of the kids get no one to play with and Street Fighter, usually the class president, gets asked to stand in the corner. Curious, I decide to approach the MK9 cab for a closer look.
I'm only there a minute before I am reminded how much I love watching people play fighting games. The ebb and flow of a good match is part of it and that is something you can get from watching streams and YouTube vids. But being there, in the presence of the competitors, hearing the button slaps, watching their expressions, seeing the urgency, intensity, finesse and dexterity of their hands across the sticks and buttons and feeling the energy between them and the small crowd of spectators watching them is very powerful for me. I believe that, in it's purest form, it becomes about mastering oneself to master the mind of another. This mixture of inner and outer conflict results in a level of mental engagement that is totally unique, both in the gaming world and even in the world beyond gaming. It's one of the best reasons for arcades to exist.
Oh that, and because playing games face to face with friends is just a damn good time.
Here is a little footage that I think illustrates a lot of these points nicely. It isn't the highest level play, nor is it the most intense example of what I am speaking about but all the elements that make playing and watching fighting games in person something special are here:
A tale of souls and sticks, eternally retold.....
The rest of my evening at GGA is something of a blur. Maybe it was all the whiskey or maybe it was the warm, fuzzy glow of nostalgia that creeps into your belly once you start walking the endless rows of classic arcade cabinets. One thing that really stuck out, was that even though I messed around on 20 or more different cabinets, I never had to contend with a broken button or a bum stick. Upon talking to the gentleman at the counter again, I discovered why: they take maintenance extremely seriously at GGA.
The owner of the place, whom was referred to by patrons and employees alike as "The Professor" (repeated attempts at getting an actual name were thwarted, not even kidding) was fully trained in cabinet maintenance and he also trained 2 other employees with his knowledge. According to the man at the counter they replace the sticks on the most popular games every 6 weeks, whether they are broken or not, to keep them in perfect working order. Even now as I was playing at 1 in the morning, a maintenance man was working on an NBA Jam cabinet in the corner. Further inspection of the facility revealed a large workshop in the back where tons of cabinets sat, in various stages of assembly, with parts and tools strewn everywhere. This is an approach I wish more arcades would take but sadly, few can afford to.
Before I left, I decided to take another stroll through GGA's extensive old fighting game section. As I did, I found many fond memories returning, not so much about the games themselves as the times in my life they marked and the relationships I formed while playing them.
Killer Instinct wasn't a great game per se, but I will never forget meeting my first real girlfriend at an ice skating rink I used to frequent to play it. That same girl would later stand by me in arcades and brag to her friends about how good she thought I was at Mortal Kombat 3. Not a small thing to a guy who, to that point in his life, had never felt terribly brag-worthy.
Around that same time I met a boy from my neighborhood who liked fighting games too. We were really into Marvel Super Heroes at the time. We would walk a couple of miles to our local arcade instead of spending money on a taxi or a bus so we could have that many more quarters to play with when we got there. We spent a whole summer doing that together. He ended up being the best man at my wedding and to this day, one of my very dearest friends. It all started with Maximum Spiders, Weapon X's and Magnetic Shockwaves.
As I finished my trip down memory lane, it was approaching 2 am and the other arcade I had hoped to visit was certainly closed. After leaving GGA behind, I decided to at least locate the other place and maybe check it out in the morning before hitting the road to St. Louis. The name of the place was Black Hole Arcade Pizzeria and from the pics on the web, it looked a lot like the arcade I haunted when I was a kid, which was why I wanted to see it.
Upon reaching the address I was having trouble finding it. I figured, "It's late, I'm still a bit tipsy, I'm probably just missing it." It took three trips around the block for the cold reality to sink in. Like so many other arcades in our country, Black Hole was no more. At some point, kids like the kid I used to be dragged their Dads there and met girlfriends there and made friends there, but the realities of the modern gaming scene and the economy proved too harsh to weather. For every story like Galloping Ghost or University Pinball there are ten Blackholes, Arcade Infinities and Chinatown Fairs. I knew all of this of course. Chalk it up to too much whiskey, or the nostalgia of GGA or the memories of my childhood arcade, but I found myself just a little choked up as I drove back to my hotel.
These places we still have are truly magical, but if we don't support them, they can only last for so long. If you take anything away from my story, let it be this: if you love games and you love the way gaming can bring people together, find a local arcade, spend some time and money there and tell ten of your friends to do the same. The day we stop doing that is the day the magic dies.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
EVO Roadtrip Day 1 - Philadelphia, PA
"Welcome to University City" reads an overhang, as the first stop on my roadtrip draws near. It occurs to me that I have only the vaguest memories of Philadelphia, as the last time I visited I was on a day trip with my elementary school. What I definitely didn't remember was it being so CLEAN. Some older Philly residents might be quick to correct my use of the word "clean" and opt for "sterile" or "Pennified" due to the urban renewal initiatives led by the University of Pennsylvania, which calls the neighborhood home. But as an outsider, my shoulder is chip-free. From where I stand, University City looks like the best parts of Brooklyn: diverse and urban enough to have verve, but clean and quiet enough to seem sophisticated, at least at 3 in the afternoon when I showed up.
I park my Jeep on Pine Street and start walking towards South 40th. The architecture on Pine really jumps out at me for some reason. The buildings have a sort of classical charm to them that I didn't expect to find in this part of town. But I didn't come to University City for the atmosphere. Shortly after I round the corner of Spruce and South 40th, I see exactly what I came to see: the three mischievious yellow smiley faces outside the University Pinball Family Fun Center, home to some of Philly's finest Street Fighter and Marvel players.
I step inside to a familiar sight: a barred off counter, behind which a man sits, surrounded by the kinds of stuffed animals and knick knacks that seem very desirable to the 7 year old in all of us. It looks like a jail cell for escaped refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys. These furry felons are doing back to back life sentences, and the only thing that can free them is your Skee-Ball tickets. Sadly, I have neither the skills for, nor inclination towards ticket games. Sorry "big blue bat thingy", you're staying stuck in the slammer.
What I do have the inclination for, however, is some fighting games and University Pinball does not disappoint here. While UP has a great selection of fun arcadey distractions (including a row of beautifully kept up pinball tables and gun games), the highlight for many will be the fighting game quarter. There you can find, among other things, a homemade Marvel vs. Capcom 3 sit down cabinet, an old Marvel vs. Capcom 2 cab and UP's crown jewel: a row of 4 genuine, linked Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition sit down cabs.
I put a stack of quarters (yes quarters) on the cabinet surface and plopped 2 in the machine. I felt my stomach tighten. This was the first time I had had this feeling since my teen years (read: forever ago). I've competed in tournaments and on line, and of course, against friends but none of that is the same. When you come in off the street into an arcade you have never been to, you are on someone's turf. And no one, especially not the proud warriors at University Pinball, wants to lose on their turf.
The games had begun. I run Dudley, usually with Ultra 1. Both of my opponents were running shotos, one Ken, one Ryu. I don't care what the tier lists say, I love fighting shotos with Dudley. Stuff those tatsus with stand or crouch fierce, bait out DP's after knockdowns for free combos, Ultra 1 fireballs or blocked sweeps on reaction...I love it. I took my first 3 or 4 matches against them, but then things got serious when the Ken player pulled an Inigo Montoya on me.
Him: I admit it, you are better than I am.
Me: Then why are you smiling?
Him: Because I know something you don't know.
Me: And what is that?
Him: I...am not a Ken player.
And out comes his Akuma.
This is a match I feel very comfy in as well, since I have a friend back home who mains Akuma. But I wasn't quite ready for THIS Akuma. I managed a round here and there but it was pretty one sided. Our third match came down to the last round with both of us at 1/3 life, ultras loaded. I was spacing and stalking for a fireball to U1 but he was wise to my game. He threw out a fireball and FADC'd backwards. I let the Rolling Thunder rip as soon as I saw the purple of the fireball. His backdash put him just out of reach for me. Then he demon'd and that was it. One second I was smiling because I thought I caught him, next second I'm looking at a screen full of Akuma's back.
We both smiled and acknowledged one another. Then he got up, patted me on the back and left me to simmer in my defeat. Now it was just me and the little girl. I have to give her credit, she never stopped trying. After a couple of matches I felt bad though and decided it was time to hit the road. I left the remainder of my quarters on her cabinet. "Thank you, thank you!!" she squealed, as her grandmother in the corner smiled at me.
Before I left I had a chat with the warden of the plushy prison. He seemed to do it all: maintenance, janitor, ticket redemption. I asked him about business and he said things have been going well, thanks in large part to the community of players who come through to do tournaments like Eric and WorstPlayer from the Shoryuken.com boards. The other major factor, he said, was that the owner of University Pinball owns the building as opposed to leasing it from someone. As he said that I couldn't help but think of the loss of Arcade Infinity and Chinatown Fair earlier this year due to lease disputes. It's a real comfort to know University Pinball won't be suffering the same grisly fate any time soon.
After finally leaving UP I took a short 15 minute drive to Philly's famous cheesesteak corner on South 9th. Like the tourist I was, I got a cheesesteak with onions and cheesewiz from both Geno's and Pat's. Every bit as good as the hype I must say. As I climbed back in my Jeep with a stomach full of South Philly's finest meat, I thought about the spirited 8 year old girl at UP and whether she knows how lucky she is.
I hope she knows to cherish her time at a place as special as University Pinball, because like many children who grew up in arcades during the 80's and 90's she may drive by it one day to see that it's doors have shut. It's a sad thought, but one I can't help but have after seeing my local haunt in Rockland County, NY get unceremoniously replaced by a mattress store. But having now visited University Pinball myself, I have hope. With luck, it will survive long enough for that 8 year old girl to come back one day as an 80 year old woman, with grandchildren of her own to come fight the good fight, play skee-ball and help some of those stuffed critters get out from behind bars once and for all, to get a sweet taste of freedom.
I park my Jeep on Pine Street and start walking towards South 40th. The architecture on Pine really jumps out at me for some reason. The buildings have a sort of classical charm to them that I didn't expect to find in this part of town. But I didn't come to University City for the atmosphere. Shortly after I round the corner of Spruce and South 40th, I see exactly what I came to see: the three mischievious yellow smiley faces outside the University Pinball Family Fun Center, home to some of Philly's finest Street Fighter and Marvel players.
I step inside to a familiar sight: a barred off counter, behind which a man sits, surrounded by the kinds of stuffed animals and knick knacks that seem very desirable to the 7 year old in all of us. It looks like a jail cell for escaped refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys. These furry felons are doing back to back life sentences, and the only thing that can free them is your Skee-Ball tickets. Sadly, I have neither the skills for, nor inclination towards ticket games. Sorry "big blue bat thingy", you're staying stuck in the slammer.
What I do have the inclination for, however, is some fighting games and University Pinball does not disappoint here. While UP has a great selection of fun arcadey distractions (including a row of beautifully kept up pinball tables and gun games), the highlight for many will be the fighting game quarter. There you can find, among other things, a homemade Marvel vs. Capcom 3 sit down cabinet, an old Marvel vs. Capcom 2 cab and UP's crown jewel: a row of 4 genuine, linked Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition sit down cabs.
"What do you mean 'You don't play Skee-Ball'?"
I put a stack of quarters (yes quarters) on the cabinet surface and plopped 2 in the machine. I felt my stomach tighten. This was the first time I had had this feeling since my teen years (read: forever ago). I've competed in tournaments and on line, and of course, against friends but none of that is the same. When you come in off the street into an arcade you have never been to, you are on someone's turf. And no one, especially not the proud warriors at University Pinball, wants to lose on their turf.
The games had begun. I run Dudley, usually with Ultra 1. Both of my opponents were running shotos, one Ken, one Ryu. I don't care what the tier lists say, I love fighting shotos with Dudley. Stuff those tatsus with stand or crouch fierce, bait out DP's after knockdowns for free combos, Ultra 1 fireballs or blocked sweeps on reaction...I love it. I took my first 3 or 4 matches against them, but then things got serious when the Ken player pulled an Inigo Montoya on me.
Him: I admit it, you are better than I am.
Me: Then why are you smiling?
Him: Because I know something you don't know.
Me: And what is that?
Him: I...am not a Ken player.
And out comes his Akuma.
This is a match I feel very comfy in as well, since I have a friend back home who mains Akuma. But I wasn't quite ready for THIS Akuma. I managed a round here and there but it was pretty one sided. Our third match came down to the last round with both of us at 1/3 life, ultras loaded. I was spacing and stalking for a fireball to U1 but he was wise to my game. He threw out a fireball and FADC'd backwards. I let the Rolling Thunder rip as soon as I saw the purple of the fireball. His backdash put him just out of reach for me. Then he demon'd and that was it. One second I was smiling because I thought I caught him, next second I'm looking at a screen full of Akuma's back.
"That only works if your opponent has not studied option select techs.....which I have!"
We both smiled and acknowledged one another. Then he got up, patted me on the back and left me to simmer in my defeat. Now it was just me and the little girl. I have to give her credit, she never stopped trying. After a couple of matches I felt bad though and decided it was time to hit the road. I left the remainder of my quarters on her cabinet. "Thank you, thank you!!" she squealed, as her grandmother in the corner smiled at me.
Before I left I had a chat with the warden of the plushy prison. He seemed to do it all: maintenance, janitor, ticket redemption. I asked him about business and he said things have been going well, thanks in large part to the community of players who come through to do tournaments like Eric and WorstPlayer from the Shoryuken.com boards. The other major factor, he said, was that the owner of University Pinball owns the building as opposed to leasing it from someone. As he said that I couldn't help but think of the loss of Arcade Infinity and Chinatown Fair earlier this year due to lease disputes. It's a real comfort to know University Pinball won't be suffering the same grisly fate any time soon.
After finally leaving UP I took a short 15 minute drive to Philly's famous cheesesteak corner on South 9th. Like the tourist I was, I got a cheesesteak with onions and cheesewiz from both Geno's and Pat's. Every bit as good as the hype I must say. As I climbed back in my Jeep with a stomach full of South Philly's finest meat, I thought about the spirited 8 year old girl at UP and whether she knows how lucky she is.
I hope she knows to cherish her time at a place as special as University Pinball, because like many children who grew up in arcades during the 80's and 90's she may drive by it one day to see that it's doors have shut. It's a sad thought, but one I can't help but have after seeing my local haunt in Rockland County, NY get unceremoniously replaced by a mattress store. But having now visited University Pinball myself, I have hope. With luck, it will survive long enough for that 8 year old girl to come back one day as an 80 year old woman, with grandchildren of her own to come fight the good fight, play skee-ball and help some of those stuffed critters get out from behind bars once and for all, to get a sweet taste of freedom.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
EVO Roadtrip: Crossing the Land of the Free in Search of Good Fights and Good Food
It has been a long week. At the time of this writing, I sit in a nicely air conditioned hotel room in Las Vegas, NV. Eight days ago, I was pulling out of the driveway of a beautiful house in the suburb of South Salem, NY, my parents already looking tiny in my rearview mirror as they waved goodbye to me from the bottom of the hill. They do not know when they are going to see me again, and neither do I.
I am moving, you see. The Lake Merced area of San Francisco, CA is going to be where I lay my head. But as a rabid fighting game fan since the days of Yie Ar Kung Fu, this nearly 3,000 mile sojourn holds a promise of something equally exciting to me, if not more so, than a fresh start at life on a different coast: the opportunity to attend my very first EVO World Championship. Spectating and playing in the grand daddy of all fighting game tournaments, against the highest echelon of players from across the country, and the globe, has long been a dream of mine and in just 3 more days, that dream will become a reality.
The road has been very long, but equally fruitful. In the last 8 days I have stopped in 12 different cities in almost as many states in search of arcades, independant game stores, gamer meet-ups and great local eateries. I can honestly say that I found at least one reason to come back to each and every city I visited. Our country, I have discovered, is full of beauty and is not lacking for good people, good food or good gaming scenes. I ate well, laughed often, bodied some people, got bodied by even more people and even managed to make some new friends along the way. Now I am going to share all of it with you fine folks, day by glorious day.
It HAS been a long week. But it's been a righteously kick ass one too. I hope you all will enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it! Check back daily for more!
Next up: Day 1 - Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
I am moving, you see. The Lake Merced area of San Francisco, CA is going to be where I lay my head. But as a rabid fighting game fan since the days of Yie Ar Kung Fu, this nearly 3,000 mile sojourn holds a promise of something equally exciting to me, if not more so, than a fresh start at life on a different coast: the opportunity to attend my very first EVO World Championship. Spectating and playing in the grand daddy of all fighting game tournaments, against the highest echelon of players from across the country, and the globe, has long been a dream of mine and in just 3 more days, that dream will become a reality.
The road has been very long, but equally fruitful. In the last 8 days I have stopped in 12 different cities in almost as many states in search of arcades, independant game stores, gamer meet-ups and great local eateries. I can honestly say that I found at least one reason to come back to each and every city I visited. Our country, I have discovered, is full of beauty and is not lacking for good people, good food or good gaming scenes. I ate well, laughed often, bodied some people, got bodied by even more people and even managed to make some new friends along the way. Now I am going to share all of it with you fine folks, day by glorious day.
It HAS been a long week. But it's been a righteously kick ass one too. I hope you all will enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it! Check back daily for more!
Next up: Day 1 - Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Now It's 1984. Knock, Knock At Your Front Door.....
I know that after this weeks watershed ruling by the Supreme Court, we are in a celebratory mood about how the government percieves and treats our community, but we are far from out of the woods folks.
Enter: bill S.978 aka the "Ten Strikes" bill. Should this bill be passed (and apparently it has a good chance to) acts such as uploading a video of you playing a game to YouTube, streaming a video game tournament, or just posting a video of yourself lip syncing to Lady Gaga will be punishable by IMPRISONMENT! What's more, the bill is so broad that with aevil good enough lawyer, a copyright holder could put people in jail for a dizzying array of completely innocuous actions involving their copyrighted work.
I could write volumes on why this bill is such a gross overreach, and how it could effect gamer and internet culture, but someone already did. David "UltraDavid" Graham is an entertainment copyright lawyer by day and a valued member of the competetive fighting game scene by night, participating in community events, casting tournament matches and writing pieces for www.Shoryuken.com.
Enter: bill S.978 aka the "Ten Strikes" bill. Should this bill be passed (and apparently it has a good chance to) acts such as uploading a video of you playing a game to YouTube, streaming a video game tournament, or just posting a video of yourself lip syncing to Lady Gaga will be punishable by IMPRISONMENT! What's more, the bill is so broad that with a
I could write volumes on why this bill is such a gross overreach, and how it could effect gamer and internet culture, but someone already did. David "UltraDavid" Graham is an entertainment copyright lawyer by day and a valued member of the competetive fighting game scene by night, participating in community events, casting tournament matches and writing pieces for www.Shoryuken.com.
If you have, the time, give the whole thing a read. If you don't, scroll down to the bottom for the TL;DR version and click the link to "Demand Progress". By filling in your name and email address there, a letter will be sent on your behalf to your law makers to oppose this bill. Go do it before the suede/denim secret police come for your uncool niece!
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Long Road to EVO
Hey all! Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on what I have cooking because I am really excited about it. In around 3 weeks I am packing up everything I have and driving cross country to a new life in San Francisco. But, OBVIOUSLY, no road trip west in July would be complete without attending EVO 2011 so I will be making a stop in Las Vegas. On the way there though, I plan on taking the opportunity to visit as many local arcades as I can in the cities I stop in. As I make my way across the country to my first EVO World Championship ever (to get blown the fuck up in spectacular fashion) I will be blogging about the arcades I visit and the degree to which they reflect the state of arcade culture in America. It should be a lot of fun to write and I will make it as fun to read as I can too. So stick around people! It's gonna be a long road to EVO and I am bringing all of you along!
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The Blow Up: A Scrub's Eye View of East Coast Throwdown 3
It's about 4 in the afternoon and I've just gotten my pool assignment. By this time, I've been on my feet since 9am, shouldering a laptop bag, and the two MadCatz Fightpads, the comics and the Nintendo 3DS within it are getting heavier by the minute. My new tourney pal, Rob, suggests we take a load off in the lobby of the hotel, the monolithic Hyatt Morristown in Morristown, New Jersey and the site of East Coast Throwdown 3.
As we slide through the sea of people who have converged on the hotel's Terrace Ballroom, I see Mike Z looking on stoicly as wave after wave of new players crowd around the monitors he has set up to demo his upcoming 2-D brawler, Skullgirls. Say what you will about Mr. Zaimont's persona, he has a lot to be proud of. In a room full of enthusiasts and pro players, more people seemed more excited about Skullgirls than Street Fighter X Tekken which was being demoed at the same table by Seth Killian himself. While I won't name names, more than one pro player I spoke with thought SFXT was even scrubbier than MvC3 (apparently that's possible).
Much like it did at PAX East, Skullgirls' distinct art style and posh HD sprites washed in full 3-D lighting impresses. I can almost see Mike Z's tourney sharpened mind crunching data as he watches people play. Even though I've been playing fighting games since Karate Champ, I can tell just from his eyes that as he watches people experiment with his game, he is seeing things I could never see. I continue to shuffle through the crowd.
Rob and I get out into the lobby where it immediately seems 10 degrees cooler. I find a table flanked by several cushy lounge chairs and plop down, giving my feet their first break in 7 hours. As I look over my right shoulder to see where I might get a $10 burger 0r a $3 water I spy Tom Brady sitting with a few buddies, just out of ear shot. He seems to be having a much better time than he was some 6 hours prior, when some random guy started getting at him right outside the ballroom. The man was talking all levels of shit at Tom while him and his crew just stood there smiling and shaking there head, the way one does at that one guy in paradise who finds a way to not have a good time. And speaking of paradise.....
My view of Tom Brady and friends is suddenly and pleasingly blocked by a leggy brunette standing about 5 foot 10 with a plucky smile. She looked like she would have been right at home on a runway or a men's magazine, but she was dressed like a business woman. Her name tag gave away that she worked for the hotel. She begins introducing herself and her voice completes the package: she is clearly too attractive to not be tasked with selling something to gamers.
I almost cut her off before she asks Rob and I if we are at the hotel for the tournament. I humor her with a smile and a "yes", and brace myself for the innevitable sales pitch. Instead she asks me what game I registered for. "Marvel", I answer. Her eyes grow wide with a hint of nervousness as she replies, "Oh I can't play that. I like my fighters fast but it's just a bit too fast and random for me."
Ok, I think to myself, she's good. She has learned a little about the "nerds" her manager told her to sell to this weekend. As a former salesman, I can give her some credit for that. But fun time is over, it's time to derail her obviously pre-rehearsed word track. I grin and ask, "So what DO you play?", fully expecting a blank stare or some "clever" deflection. She answers without hesitation, "Guilty Gear Accent Core. I mostly main Jam and May."
Mind. Blown.
After we finish our discussion about the differences between the flow of Guilty Gear and Blazblue, and her theory about how Taokaka might be a tranny, she bids us farewell and saunters off with that extra pop in her hip that reminds you that she is used to men watching her leave. If she was selling something, I never got to hear about it but I sure as hell would have bought a hundred of them. Rob and I cool our heels for a while longer and head back into the tourney.
As I re-enter the ballroom, which is now so packed with the 500+ tourney entrants, I spy Chris G at his pool waiting to play. I had run into him earlier and had asked him if he was going to hold it down for the east coast at the East vs West Marvel event at EVO. Unaware that 64 EVO seeding points were 24 hours into his future, he smiled humbly, replying, "I'm gonna try bro, I'm gonna try." I asked him who his teammates were but apparently, NerdJosh still hasn't decided who the rest of the team is going to be. I'm guessing he will make his decisions once he gets back from his extended tour of Cali and that the results from ECT 3 will play a big factor in that process.
I am almost to my pool station when I hear a familiar voice booming over the house mic, "KILL THAT BITCH, KILL HER!!!" followed by an eruption of laughter from the front of the room. I look up and there is L.I. Joe, getting hype on the mic as someone on the stream sends Amaterasu packing in brutal fashion. Joe cheers and smiles at the crowd, affable as always. From all the spring in his step and the contagious energy and enthusiasm he was throwing off, you would never know he was in a motorcycle accident just over a week ago. But clearly it takes more than that to keep "iloveujoe" from helping to run a succesful major tourney, and everyone in attendance was thankful for that, as evidenced by the many people who approached Joe to wish him well on his recovery.
And finally, it came time for me to play, and as it often goes in Marvel, things happened pretty fast and none of those things were good for me. It's hard to put a finger on it, what makes the players at a major so different from the on-line rank and file or the people you happen to play with locally. They play at a speed that, even if you are a dedicated and knowledgable player, is overwhelming to experience and deal with. However fast it seems when you watch from stream-monsterland, it doesn't prepare you for facing it.
I am a long time fighter junkie and I watched every match vid of MvC3 from pre-release, played it from a week before it came out, stream-monstered it up every chance I got and practiced 4-6 hours per day for a month prior to this tourney in preparation and I still got bodied hard by players who don't even have a name in the community. While they may seem very mortal and approachable as people, they are, quite literally, god-like when you step in the ring with them and I can tell you first hand as a life-long "best on his block" player, no ammount of training mode or sessioning with friends can prepare you for it (unless your friends happen to have "EMP" or "EG" before their names). Unless you want your feelings hurt and your sodium levels at maximum, come to these tournies with the expectation to learn and have fun.
But DEFINITELY COME because it is oh so much fun. It's unlike anything else. I have been to several smaller events like Guard Crush and Battlefield Arcadia but this was my first major and after experiencing it, I am literally counting the days until EVO. The sense of community is so powerful and I don't think there is another competitive community, "e" or otherwise, where the big names are so accessible. You can walk up to Evil Rahsaan and chat about the rumored X-factor and Phoenix nerfs, you can holler at Yipes to get on the house mic to do commentary and you can grill Ian Coffino about when we are finally getting the feature length cut of his documentary I Got Next. You can even meet people who won't call you a pedophile for liking Arcana Heart 3 (no, seriously). And best of all, you can do all of this while leveling up your game and making new friends. Great tournament, great experience indeed!
As we slide through the sea of people who have converged on the hotel's Terrace Ballroom, I see Mike Z looking on stoicly as wave after wave of new players crowd around the monitors he has set up to demo his upcoming 2-D brawler, Skullgirls. Say what you will about Mr. Zaimont's persona, he has a lot to be proud of. In a room full of enthusiasts and pro players, more people seemed more excited about Skullgirls than Street Fighter X Tekken which was being demoed at the same table by Seth Killian himself. While I won't name names, more than one pro player I spoke with thought SFXT was even scrubbier than MvC3 (apparently that's possible).
Mike Z staying hungry while players devour the latest build of Skullgirls
Much like it did at PAX East, Skullgirls' distinct art style and posh HD sprites washed in full 3-D lighting impresses. I can almost see Mike Z's tourney sharpened mind crunching data as he watches people play. Even though I've been playing fighting games since Karate Champ, I can tell just from his eyes that as he watches people experiment with his game, he is seeing things I could never see. I continue to shuffle through the crowd.
Rob and I get out into the lobby where it immediately seems 10 degrees cooler. I find a table flanked by several cushy lounge chairs and plop down, giving my feet their first break in 7 hours. As I look over my right shoulder to see where I might get a $10 burger 0r a $3 water I spy Tom Brady sitting with a few buddies, just out of ear shot. He seems to be having a much better time than he was some 6 hours prior, when some random guy started getting at him right outside the ballroom. The man was talking all levels of shit at Tom while him and his crew just stood there smiling and shaking there head, the way one does at that one guy in paradise who finds a way to not have a good time. And speaking of paradise.....
My view of Tom Brady and friends is suddenly and pleasingly blocked by a leggy brunette standing about 5 foot 10 with a plucky smile. She looked like she would have been right at home on a runway or a men's magazine, but she was dressed like a business woman. Her name tag gave away that she worked for the hotel. She begins introducing herself and her voice completes the package: she is clearly too attractive to not be tasked with selling something to gamers.
I almost cut her off before she asks Rob and I if we are at the hotel for the tournament. I humor her with a smile and a "yes", and brace myself for the innevitable sales pitch. Instead she asks me what game I registered for. "Marvel", I answer. Her eyes grow wide with a hint of nervousness as she replies, "Oh I can't play that. I like my fighters fast but it's just a bit too fast and random for me."
Ok, I think to myself, she's good. She has learned a little about the "nerds" her manager told her to sell to this weekend. As a former salesman, I can give her some credit for that. But fun time is over, it's time to derail her obviously pre-rehearsed word track. I grin and ask, "So what DO you play?", fully expecting a blank stare or some "clever" deflection. She answers without hesitation, "Guilty Gear Accent Core. I mostly main Jam and May."
Mind. Blown.
After we finish our discussion about the differences between the flow of Guilty Gear and Blazblue, and her theory about how Taokaka might be a tranny, she bids us farewell and saunters off with that extra pop in her hip that reminds you that she is used to men watching her leave. If she was selling something, I never got to hear about it but I sure as hell would have bought a hundred of them. Rob and I cool our heels for a while longer and head back into the tourney.
The Marlin Pie Fan Club
As I re-enter the ballroom, which is now so packed with the 500+ tourney entrants, I spy Chris G at his pool waiting to play. I had run into him earlier and had asked him if he was going to hold it down for the east coast at the East vs West Marvel event at EVO. Unaware that 64 EVO seeding points were 24 hours into his future, he smiled humbly, replying, "I'm gonna try bro, I'm gonna try." I asked him who his teammates were but apparently, NerdJosh still hasn't decided who the rest of the team is going to be. I'm guessing he will make his decisions once he gets back from his extended tour of Cali and that the results from ECT 3 will play a big factor in that process.
I am almost to my pool station when I hear a familiar voice booming over the house mic, "KILL THAT BITCH, KILL HER!!!" followed by an eruption of laughter from the front of the room. I look up and there is L.I. Joe, getting hype on the mic as someone on the stream sends Amaterasu packing in brutal fashion. Joe cheers and smiles at the crowd, affable as always. From all the spring in his step and the contagious energy and enthusiasm he was throwing off, you would never know he was in a motorcycle accident just over a week ago. But clearly it takes more than that to keep "iloveujoe" from helping to run a succesful major tourney, and everyone in attendance was thankful for that, as evidenced by the many people who approached Joe to wish him well on his recovery.
LI Joe being LI Joe
And finally, it came time for me to play, and as it often goes in Marvel, things happened pretty fast and none of those things were good for me. It's hard to put a finger on it, what makes the players at a major so different from the on-line rank and file or the people you happen to play with locally. They play at a speed that, even if you are a dedicated and knowledgable player, is overwhelming to experience and deal with. However fast it seems when you watch from stream-monsterland, it doesn't prepare you for facing it.
Spooky, the high ruler of Stream-monsterland surveying his kingdom
I am a long time fighter junkie and I watched every match vid of MvC3 from pre-release, played it from a week before it came out, stream-monstered it up every chance I got and practiced 4-6 hours per day for a month prior to this tourney in preparation and I still got bodied hard by players who don't even have a name in the community. While they may seem very mortal and approachable as people, they are, quite literally, god-like when you step in the ring with them and I can tell you first hand as a life-long "best on his block" player, no ammount of training mode or sessioning with friends can prepare you for it (unless your friends happen to have "EMP" or "EG" before their names). Unless you want your feelings hurt and your sodium levels at maximum, come to these tournies with the expectation to learn and have fun.
But DEFINITELY COME because it is oh so much fun. It's unlike anything else. I have been to several smaller events like Guard Crush and Battlefield Arcadia but this was my first major and after experiencing it, I am literally counting the days until EVO. The sense of community is so powerful and I don't think there is another competitive community, "e" or otherwise, where the big names are so accessible. You can walk up to Evil Rahsaan and chat about the rumored X-factor and Phoenix nerfs, you can holler at Yipes to get on the house mic to do commentary and you can grill Ian Coffino about when we are finally getting the feature length cut of his documentary I Got Next. You can even meet people who won't call you a pedophile for liking Arcana Heart 3 (no, seriously). And best of all, you can do all of this while leveling up your game and making new friends. Great tournament, great experience indeed!
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Portal Pontifications
Portal, as a franchise (which I feel certain I may identify it as, having just completed Portal 2) is a pretty big deal. That realization, that we were experiencing an incredibly significant moment in our industry's evolution, did not dawn on me the first time I traversed a 100 foot wide chasm by walking three steps through a blue portal on one side and out a red one on the other. I'm a bit too old and have seen a few too many promising gameplay mechanics gimmicks to be so quick to call anything "the next big thing".
When a trusted friend of mine would go on extolling the first game's virtues to me as if he were a disciple quoting scripture, I would always argue against him. I only believed in the arguments I made partially. For the most part, I just enjoyed being the devil's advocate. Challenging people's viewpoints often leads to learning and just as often (or even more so) to them being pissed off, both of which are good fun.
Truth be told, I wasn't just playing the role of devil's advocate. I had some issues with the first Portal for sure. No issues that ruined the game for me or kept me from thinking it was one of the most enjoyable games that year, mind you. But I had my gripes. I kept them to myself mostly. There was such a positive and optimistic spirit in the community of gamers that congealed around it and I didn't want to ruin that with what I saw as my own critical over-reactions.
After all, its rare in gaming for a game to come along that everyone seems to love TOGETHER as a unified community, sans all the fanboy, flamewar bullshit that clogs up most popular gaming forums. As the subset of people known as "gamers" continues to diversify, such universally enjoyable works will continue to become more scarce. Who wants to be the guy who walks up to a 12 year old SDCC show goer with a plushie companion cube strapped to their back to tell them you think their favorite game is an overrated tech demo? I sure don't.
The truth is we need more Portals, which is to say we need more out of the blue games from optimistic, passionate newcomers that get financed by forward thinking publishers and end up becoming runaway successes that engender love and enthusiasm in the people who play them. Why rain on the parade when it feels so much better to march along with it?
That sentiment changed for me while attending New York Comic-Con (NYCC) in 2010. I was attending a panel whose purpose was to make a definitive list of the 10 greatest games of all time. The process was interesting. It began with one panelist creating their list. Then the list gets passed along to the next panelist, who could then either swap the positions of two games already on the list, or take a game off the list entirely and replace it with one of their choosing. The games on the list are irrelevant to this post. About halfway through the panel, one of the panelists removed a game from the list and replaced it with Portal and was practically met with a standing ovation from the audience.
I remained seated.
The only other panelist decision met with close to that level of approval by the audience was when a panelist removed a Madden game that had snuck on there and replaced it with Earthbound. I hope that helps paint a clearer picture of just how much this crowd approved of the notion that Portal is in the same echelon as Super Metroid, Tetris and Starcraft. I was truly stunned. Not only was I unable to fathom how someone over the age of 18 could put Portal on a list of the ten greatest games of all time, I was blindsided by how unanimously this opinion was accepted. That is when I realized that Portal was, as it turns out, a pretty big deal.
At this point, despite truly loving Portal, I felt the need to step out of the parade. In a future post I will go into more detail about the grievances I had with Portal. I wanted to see it as the revolutionary game-changer my fellow enthusiasts believed it to be, I really did. I even replayed it to see if my experience with it would change for the better if I understood it's shortcomings going in. To my sincere dismay, it didn't. My feelings about Portal proved impossible to change.
And then I played a little game called Portal 2.
Now, to be clear, I am not ready to put Portal 1 or 2 on my top ten of all time list. I probably never will. But I must admit that playing Portal 2 has totally changed the way I feel about Portal as a whole. It has even cast the original in a fairer light for me, which may sound kind of preposterous, but is true just the same. Not only is Portal 2 a better game than its predecessor, but it completes it in crucial ways by giving it a context that I felt it lacked. My experience with it has left me to ponder many things, ranging from the magic of sound design to the nature of power, art and sentience.
I am hoping to share some of those musings in this blog in the coming weeks. Regardless of the validity or specific nature of these thoughts, the fact remains that Portal, as a property, has ignited them in me. In my book that is certainly a big deal, maybe even big enough for me to step back in line with that parade and start marching again.
When a trusted friend of mine would go on extolling the first game's virtues to me as if he were a disciple quoting scripture, I would always argue against him. I only believed in the arguments I made partially. For the most part, I just enjoyed being the devil's advocate. Challenging people's viewpoints often leads to learning and just as often (or even more so) to them being pissed off, both of which are good fun.
Truth be told, I wasn't just playing the role of devil's advocate. I had some issues with the first Portal for sure. No issues that ruined the game for me or kept me from thinking it was one of the most enjoyable games that year, mind you. But I had my gripes. I kept them to myself mostly. There was such a positive and optimistic spirit in the community of gamers that congealed around it and I didn't want to ruin that with what I saw as my own critical over-reactions.
After all, its rare in gaming for a game to come along that everyone seems to love TOGETHER as a unified community, sans all the fanboy, flamewar bullshit that clogs up most popular gaming forums. As the subset of people known as "gamers" continues to diversify, such universally enjoyable works will continue to become more scarce. Who wants to be the guy who walks up to a 12 year old SDCC show goer with a plushie companion cube strapped to their back to tell them you think their favorite game is an overrated tech demo? I sure don't.
The truth is we need more Portals, which is to say we need more out of the blue games from optimistic, passionate newcomers that get financed by forward thinking publishers and end up becoming runaway successes that engender love and enthusiasm in the people who play them. Why rain on the parade when it feels so much better to march along with it?
That sentiment changed for me while attending New York Comic-Con (NYCC) in 2010. I was attending a panel whose purpose was to make a definitive list of the 10 greatest games of all time. The process was interesting. It began with one panelist creating their list. Then the list gets passed along to the next panelist, who could then either swap the positions of two games already on the list, or take a game off the list entirely and replace it with one of their choosing. The games on the list are irrelevant to this post. About halfway through the panel, one of the panelists removed a game from the list and replaced it with Portal and was practically met with a standing ovation from the audience.
I remained seated.
The only other panelist decision met with close to that level of approval by the audience was when a panelist removed a Madden game that had snuck on there and replaced it with Earthbound. I hope that helps paint a clearer picture of just how much this crowd approved of the notion that Portal is in the same echelon as Super Metroid, Tetris and Starcraft. I was truly stunned. Not only was I unable to fathom how someone over the age of 18 could put Portal on a list of the ten greatest games of all time, I was blindsided by how unanimously this opinion was accepted. That is when I realized that Portal was, as it turns out, a pretty big deal.
At this point, despite truly loving Portal, I felt the need to step out of the parade. In a future post I will go into more detail about the grievances I had with Portal. I wanted to see it as the revolutionary game-changer my fellow enthusiasts believed it to be, I really did. I even replayed it to see if my experience with it would change for the better if I understood it's shortcomings going in. To my sincere dismay, it didn't. My feelings about Portal proved impossible to change.
And then I played a little game called Portal 2.
Now, to be clear, I am not ready to put Portal 1 or 2 on my top ten of all time list. I probably never will. But I must admit that playing Portal 2 has totally changed the way I feel about Portal as a whole. It has even cast the original in a fairer light for me, which may sound kind of preposterous, but is true just the same. Not only is Portal 2 a better game than its predecessor, but it completes it in crucial ways by giving it a context that I felt it lacked. My experience with it has left me to ponder many things, ranging from the magic of sound design to the nature of power, art and sentience.
I am hoping to share some of those musings in this blog in the coming weeks. Regardless of the validity or specific nature of these thoughts, the fact remains that Portal, as a property, has ignited them in me. In my book that is certainly a big deal, maybe even big enough for me to step back in line with that parade and start marching again.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Once You Pop, You Can't Stop, Part 5
Welcome back! It occurs to me that this is a good moment to do something I probably should have done at the beginning of this series of posts. Even if you have played other fighting games or have played MvC2, depending on how closely you have followed the scene, you may or may not know what many of the terms being usedf in this blog mean. Allow me to clarify a few acronyms and nuances of MvC3 so that I dont sound like I am just spewing acronyms.
HC - Short for Hyper Combo. These are the MvC3 equivalent of "super" or "ultra" moves that you see in so many fighting games. A normal HC costs 1 bar of hyper meter, and the more powerful level 3 HC's cost 3 bars.
DHC - Short for Delayed Hyper Combo. When one character does a hyper combo, the next character on the team may jump in and perform a hyper combo of their own after which they replace the character doing the first hyper combo. This can be done again for a total of 3 consecutive hyper combos. Chaining HC's in this way is called a delayed hyper combo. It is useful for making big combos, but it is just as important for the fact that it can be used to tag a character out safely since doing a regular tag out can be punished severely by a decent player.
X Factor/XFC - X Factor is a special mode in MvC3 that can be triggered once per match by the player. While it is active, the currently controlled character has increased speed and damage and also begins to regenerate their red, healable, health. There are multiple levels of this, and they correspond to how many of the players characters have been knocked out at the time it is activated. If no characters are down, its level 1, one character down gets you level 2 and two characters down gets you level 3 x factor. At each subsequent level, the buff gets magnified and the duration of the buff lengthened.
Additionally, using this in the middle of a move instantly returns you to a neatral state and ready to act again, allowing you to perform combos that would ordinarily be impossible. This is called an X Factor Cancel or XFC for short and can lead to big damage combos.
A, B, C and E buttons - These are the buttons in MvC3 and they correspond to weak, medium and strong attacks. The "E" button is the "exchange button which is used as a universal launcher to start air juggles, and other select special moves.
Point - The character who is currently active in the battle is referred to as the "point" character. Some characters are ideal for this position while some others are better suited to being assists.
OTG - Short for Off The Ground. This term refers to moves capable of hitting opponents who have been knocked down. Also, characters who are in a state where they can be hit by such moves are said to be in an otg state. Moves that hit otg are useful since they can be used to continue combos after an opponent has been knocked to the ground.
Block string - a series of attacks that are linked in such a way that if an opponent blocks one, they are forced to block the rest or get hit., because there is no time in between to interrupt with an attack.
Thats really it. I will add these to the first post so people reading from the start will know what they need to know going in. Sorry if I have been speaking in tongues for some of you! Now, onward to Crimson Viper.
Crimson Viper
Much like the last character I wrote up, Crimson Viper has big time potential for the highly skilled tournament level player. I fully expect her to be on many winning teams during this game's tournament life and for many of the same reasons as Chun.
To get away from tournament level discussion for a second, I just want to say that I am in love with what they have done with Viper, but that should suprise no one who has been reading this series because I have been really pleased with every choice Capcom has made where character interpretation is concerned. Of all the characters they could have brought over to represent Street Fighter 4 they couldn't have chosen better than they did. Her design is modern, striking, sexy and badass all at once. With jet boosters and flamethrowers in her shoes and an electricity generating exoskeleton lining her gloves she could just as easily be a Marvel character as a Capcom one. As seems to be par for the course, she also brings with her, all the unique nuances that make her an execution intensive terror in her native game.
In my section on Chun, I outlined how dangerous the combination of a good 8 way air dash and jump cancelable low attacks can be. Viper hits that same perfect storm. Her 8 way seems nearly as good as Chun's and just like in Street Fighter 4, she can super jump cancel her seismic smash, which is a low hitting special move. So low block strings ending with a seismic will be quite abusable when people start super jump cancelling out of them and then instantly 8 way dashing back in for an overhead attack. Shenanigans ensue. Watch Marn show a bit of it off in this vid:
Super jump cancelled seismics are not the only trick she remembers from SF4. She retains the "focus attack" mechanic from that game as well, though it works a bit differently. During her focus attack, she can't be knocked out of her attack animation, but she takes damage normally. When she unleashed her focus attack, if it hits, the opponent will be put into a crumple stun state to be combo'd.
Other things she retained include here ability to "feint" her special moves to fake out opponents, and like all the members of the SF4 cast, she can do "EX" versions of her special moves (COOL!!!). This actually expends HC meter. Her EX Thunder Knuckle has full screen range and causes a crumple stun to set up for combos. Once the inputs for all this stuff are mastered, SF4 Viper players should be able to play many of the same mind games in MvC3. The original reveal trailer for Viper shows all this stuff in action, and also confirms she has her awesome music theme from SF4 as well:
There is one more thing that makes Viper very unique and dangerous that is worth mentioning. Her Burn Kick assist hits overhead, meaning it must be blocked high. This means that if you start a low block string with your point character, and call in Burn Kick Viper as an assist, the result is an unblockable situation since you will be hitting your opponent both low and overhead attacks at once. While i am not sure how one might follow this up, having a reliable way to open up your opponents defenses is invaluable and will make Viper a very attractive addition to any team.
Dante
It seems rather superfluous to write an impression piece on Dante at this point. The legendary son of Sparda has more hype behind his entry to this game than perhaps any other character on the roster. Every good gameplay vid you have seen on the web seems to have Mr. Showtime himself. It's like you can't get away from the guy. Not that I am complaining. Devil May Cry sits behind only Street Fighter and Mega Man as far as my list of favorite Capcom properties go. That it took this long to get him into a fighting game is criminal if you ask me, but fortunately, Capcom has made the wait more than worth it. From the casual passers by to the hardened professionals, the verdict is unanimous: Dante is a bonafide , hyper stylish beast!
Similarly to the treatment of all the other "first time contestants" on the Capcom side, the devs gave tremendous love to Dante, furnishing him with purportedly over 40 special moves, all pulled from the exhaustive move list he has compiled across his three award winning (and one not so award winning) games. Hard to say if that number is a matter of "creative marketing", but according to Keits it may be possible I guess we will really see when we head into the lab with him but based on even just what we have seen, its clear his array of moves is vast and varied.
Nailing down his overall style is fairly simple, but communicating its individual elements is difficult, both because there is so much we have seen and because there is apparently so much we have not. While he is definitely a rushdown character with dizzying levels of combo and damage potential, he accomplishes it with a motley mix of fire arms, sword play and varying forms of elemental and dark magics....oh yeah and demonic guitars. To watch him in action, even in the hands of an average player is to behold a wild fireworks display of hacks, slashes, spells and explosions. Following it can be difficult, but describing it proves impossible.
The truth is that right now, even the game's best player (for whatever that is worth after one casual tourney 2 weeks before release) is playing the character in a very linear fashion. Marn's Dante is extremely aggressive and in constant forward motion. His goal is to make you retreat, get in, catch you not blocking and pull off his big money combo. Then he just traps you in the corner with the massive hit boxes on Dante's normals and makes you panic so he can find another opening to hit his combo again until your character is down or you tag out, which doesn't really change his approach. It isn't so much high art as it is like watching a lion devour a zebra after catching it.
This is in no way to take away from Marn. On the contrary, the fact that Dante has so many specials and that Marn can put together such a scary combo with just 2 of them speaks both to his ability and to the potential of this character. It's both exciting and frightful to imagine what a fully figured out Dante using all his tools will look like in the hands of an execution savant like Marn. Until we learn what all the moves do, or heck, even what they ARE, we can only speculate as to which roles Dante will be able to effectively fill.
As a quick snippet, it is worth noting that Dante is able to burn a meter to activate Devil Trigger mode, which any fan of the Devil May Cry series is familiar with. This powers him up for a period of time, but in exactly what ways is unclear to me right now. I have seen him fire streams of electricity down towards the ground from the air in this mode, an ability he had in the first DMC game. Like all other "buff" and "debuff" status conditions in the game, he retains the buffs from Devil Trigger when tagged out, where the countdown timer on it freezes until he is put back on point. How exactly this affects his assists is something I have not seen tested or spoken of anywhere yet so that will be a lab visit when I finally get the game in my hands.
While I loathe to say it, Dante seems so invitingly usable, fun and charismatic that he will definitely be MvC3's answer to SF4's Ken. One of his moves is innevitably going to become our next "Fierce DP", and I expect online matches to be overrun by extremely one dimensional, exploitative Dante trolls for the first 2 weeks at least. If it takes longer than a month for someone to make a Dante flowchart then I will retire from the interwebs.
But thats all fine, because Dante, unlike Ken in SF4 is the perfect face for MvC3. With combos that will have stream monsters furiously typing "SO GDLK!1!1!" in their livechat windows, infectious style, layers upon layers of complexity and a metric ton of undeniable swagger, Dante truly embodies everything great about this franchise.
HC - Short for Hyper Combo. These are the MvC3 equivalent of "super" or "ultra" moves that you see in so many fighting games. A normal HC costs 1 bar of hyper meter, and the more powerful level 3 HC's cost 3 bars.
DHC - Short for Delayed Hyper Combo. When one character does a hyper combo, the next character on the team may jump in and perform a hyper combo of their own after which they replace the character doing the first hyper combo. This can be done again for a total of 3 consecutive hyper combos. Chaining HC's in this way is called a delayed hyper combo. It is useful for making big combos, but it is just as important for the fact that it can be used to tag a character out safely since doing a regular tag out can be punished severely by a decent player.
X Factor/XFC - X Factor is a special mode in MvC3 that can be triggered once per match by the player. While it is active, the currently controlled character has increased speed and damage and also begins to regenerate their red, healable, health. There are multiple levels of this, and they correspond to how many of the players characters have been knocked out at the time it is activated. If no characters are down, its level 1, one character down gets you level 2 and two characters down gets you level 3 x factor. At each subsequent level, the buff gets magnified and the duration of the buff lengthened.
Additionally, using this in the middle of a move instantly returns you to a neatral state and ready to act again, allowing you to perform combos that would ordinarily be impossible. This is called an X Factor Cancel or XFC for short and can lead to big damage combos.
A, B, C and E buttons - These are the buttons in MvC3 and they correspond to weak, medium and strong attacks. The "E" button is the "exchange button which is used as a universal launcher to start air juggles, and other select special moves.
Point - The character who is currently active in the battle is referred to as the "point" character. Some characters are ideal for this position while some others are better suited to being assists.
OTG - Short for Off The Ground. This term refers to moves capable of hitting opponents who have been knocked down. Also, characters who are in a state where they can be hit by such moves are said to be in an otg state. Moves that hit otg are useful since they can be used to continue combos after an opponent has been knocked to the ground.
Block string - a series of attacks that are linked in such a way that if an opponent blocks one, they are forced to block the rest or get hit., because there is no time in between to interrupt with an attack.
Thats really it. I will add these to the first post so people reading from the start will know what they need to know going in. Sorry if I have been speaking in tongues for some of you! Now, onward to Crimson Viper.
Crimson Viper
Much like the last character I wrote up, Crimson Viper has big time potential for the highly skilled tournament level player. I fully expect her to be on many winning teams during this game's tournament life and for many of the same reasons as Chun.
To get away from tournament level discussion for a second, I just want to say that I am in love with what they have done with Viper, but that should suprise no one who has been reading this series because I have been really pleased with every choice Capcom has made where character interpretation is concerned. Of all the characters they could have brought over to represent Street Fighter 4 they couldn't have chosen better than they did. Her design is modern, striking, sexy and badass all at once. With jet boosters and flamethrowers in her shoes and an electricity generating exoskeleton lining her gloves she could just as easily be a Marvel character as a Capcom one. As seems to be par for the course, she also brings with her, all the unique nuances that make her an execution intensive terror in her native game.
In my section on Chun, I outlined how dangerous the combination of a good 8 way air dash and jump cancelable low attacks can be. Viper hits that same perfect storm. Her 8 way seems nearly as good as Chun's and just like in Street Fighter 4, she can super jump cancel her seismic smash, which is a low hitting special move. So low block strings ending with a seismic will be quite abusable when people start super jump cancelling out of them and then instantly 8 way dashing back in for an overhead attack. Shenanigans ensue. Watch Marn show a bit of it off in this vid:
Marnito putting the pieces together.....I sense danger
Super jump cancelled seismics are not the only trick she remembers from SF4. She retains the "focus attack" mechanic from that game as well, though it works a bit differently. During her focus attack, she can't be knocked out of her attack animation, but she takes damage normally. When she unleashed her focus attack, if it hits, the opponent will be put into a crumple stun state to be combo'd.
Other things she retained include here ability to "feint" her special moves to fake out opponents, and like all the members of the SF4 cast, she can do "EX" versions of her special moves (COOL!!!). This actually expends HC meter. Her EX Thunder Knuckle has full screen range and causes a crumple stun to set up for combos. Once the inputs for all this stuff are mastered, SF4 Viper players should be able to play many of the same mind games in MvC3. The original reveal trailer for Viper shows all this stuff in action, and also confirms she has her awesome music theme from SF4 as well:
Viper comes over from SF4 and brings her unique mechanics and awesome theme with her!
There is one more thing that makes Viper very unique and dangerous that is worth mentioning. Her Burn Kick assist hits overhead, meaning it must be blocked high. This means that if you start a low block string with your point character, and call in Burn Kick Viper as an assist, the result is an unblockable situation since you will be hitting your opponent both low and overhead attacks at once. While i am not sure how one might follow this up, having a reliable way to open up your opponents defenses is invaluable and will make Viper a very attractive addition to any team.
Dante
It seems rather superfluous to write an impression piece on Dante at this point. The legendary son of Sparda has more hype behind his entry to this game than perhaps any other character on the roster. Every good gameplay vid you have seen on the web seems to have Mr. Showtime himself. It's like you can't get away from the guy. Not that I am complaining. Devil May Cry sits behind only Street Fighter and Mega Man as far as my list of favorite Capcom properties go. That it took this long to get him into a fighting game is criminal if you ask me, but fortunately, Capcom has made the wait more than worth it. From the casual passers by to the hardened professionals, the verdict is unanimous: Dante is a bonafide , hyper stylish beast!
Similarly to the treatment of all the other "first time contestants" on the Capcom side, the devs gave tremendous love to Dante, furnishing him with purportedly over 40 special moves, all pulled from the exhaustive move list he has compiled across his three award winning (and one not so award winning) games. Hard to say if that number is a matter of "creative marketing", but according to Keits it may be possible I guess we will really see when we head into the lab with him but based on even just what we have seen, its clear his array of moves is vast and varied.
Dante's got moves for days and we haven't seen the half.....
Nailing down his overall style is fairly simple, but communicating its individual elements is difficult, both because there is so much we have seen and because there is apparently so much we have not. While he is definitely a rushdown character with dizzying levels of combo and damage potential, he accomplishes it with a motley mix of fire arms, sword play and varying forms of elemental and dark magics....oh yeah and demonic guitars. To watch him in action, even in the hands of an average player is to behold a wild fireworks display of hacks, slashes, spells and explosions. Following it can be difficult, but describing it proves impossible.
The truth is that right now, even the game's best player (for whatever that is worth after one casual tourney 2 weeks before release) is playing the character in a very linear fashion. Marn's Dante is extremely aggressive and in constant forward motion. His goal is to make you retreat, get in, catch you not blocking and pull off his big money combo. Then he just traps you in the corner with the massive hit boxes on Dante's normals and makes you panic so he can find another opening to hit his combo again until your character is down or you tag out, which doesn't really change his approach. It isn't so much high art as it is like watching a lion devour a zebra after catching it.
Marn uses his signature Dante combo to take out two characters
This is in no way to take away from Marn. On the contrary, the fact that Dante has so many specials and that Marn can put together such a scary combo with just 2 of them speaks both to his ability and to the potential of this character. It's both exciting and frightful to imagine what a fully figured out Dante using all his tools will look like in the hands of an execution savant like Marn. Until we learn what all the moves do, or heck, even what they ARE, we can only speculate as to which roles Dante will be able to effectively fill.
As a quick snippet, it is worth noting that Dante is able to burn a meter to activate Devil Trigger mode, which any fan of the Devil May Cry series is familiar with. This powers him up for a period of time, but in exactly what ways is unclear to me right now. I have seen him fire streams of electricity down towards the ground from the air in this mode, an ability he had in the first DMC game. Like all other "buff" and "debuff" status conditions in the game, he retains the buffs from Devil Trigger when tagged out, where the countdown timer on it freezes until he is put back on point. How exactly this affects his assists is something I have not seen tested or spoken of anywhere yet so that will be a lab visit when I finally get the game in my hands.
While I loathe to say it, Dante seems so invitingly usable, fun and charismatic that he will definitely be MvC3's answer to SF4's Ken. One of his moves is innevitably going to become our next "Fierce DP", and I expect online matches to be overrun by extremely one dimensional, exploitative Dante trolls for the first 2 weeks at least. If it takes longer than a month for someone to make a Dante flowchart then I will retire from the interwebs.
But thats all fine, because Dante, unlike Ken in SF4 is the perfect face for MvC3. With combos that will have stream monsters furiously typing "SO GDLK!1!1!" in their livechat windows, infectious style, layers upon layers of complexity and a metric ton of undeniable swagger, Dante truly embodies everything great about this franchise.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Once You Pop, You Can't Stop, Part 4
Hello again all. Going to try to power through two more characters for you so let me get right to it!
Chris Redfield
To be honest, its hard for me to do the same kind of impression of Chris as I have for the other characters so far. I have made some observations but nothing overly earth shattering. He is one of the first people I am going to take into the lab when I get the game because I feel like I understand him less than most of the other characters. However, that wont stop me from sharing what I have learned.
The thing I like most about Chris is that he is the closest thing we are going to get to The Punisher, a Marvel character I love who didn't make it into MvC3. Chris has almost every piece of traditional military hardware you can imagine in his back pocket and it's all pulled from the Resident Evil series. He's got a combat knife, a 9mm pistol, sub machinegun, magnum revolver, a shotgun, a flame thrower, an RPG launcher and some land mines and frag grenades to round it out. We dont really see characters like this in fighting games too often so I m looking forward to playing with him. He isn't as adorable as B.B. Hood, but he has more guns and thats a trade off I am willing to make.
I want to say that Chris is a keep away character, but that doesn't really do him justice. While he has tons of projectile attacks, they aren't all longe range. In fact many of his projectile attacks have limited range, like his flamethrower and shotgun. In fact I think just his pistol and sub machine gun have full screen range. His land mine is the only tool he has to deter someone from pushing in on him but it's easy to jump over and Chris has no good way of dealing with arial threats. Pairing him with a character with a good anti air assist will help this, but short of that, characters with strong 8-way air dashes or double jumps will have an easy time getting in on Chris.
But thats not really so bad. Chris is fine at close range and really, REALLY strong in the mid range with his smg, shotgun, land mine, flamethrower and frag grenades. His normal chains are much better than any other character who has as many projectiles as he does. Characters like Arthur, Dormammu and M.O.D.O.K. have a few decent normals, but not very fluid or consistent chains. Chris has as many projectiles as those characters, but a chain game just as solid and standard as say Captain America. He has a close range HC that does good damage and combos very cleanly with his basic combo strings.
He has a couple of other unique little moves that give him some flavor too. He he has a unique preset attack string (kind of like a "target combo" from SF4). He charges forward a bit and does a series of body punches. From the way some people were talking about it it seems to have a unique input and timing to it, kind of like Cyclops's attack rush in MvC2. I dont know if it will be terribly useful, but it looks cool and is different so i figured I would mention it. He actually does it in the video above.
He also has what seems like a stance. I dont know the input, but he actually gets on the ground and goes prone and takes out his 9mm pistol. While in this state, he is lower to the ground than even Amaterasu which means pretty much any ranged attack is going to just go right over his head. While in this state he can crawl forward or just take pot shots at his opponent with his pistol. It's possible that in certain matchups, or with certain assists this stance could really fluster an opponent.
All told, Chris is what I would call more of a zoning character than a rushdown or keep away character. While he can play keep away with the right assists, and can be a threat up close in a rushdown role if properly supported, he is definitely at his best from mid-screen and can really give opponents a lot to deal with at that range. All his hardware will make him fun to play with and with the right assists around him he can play a variety of roles.
Chun Li
It must be said, Chun-Li is just a beast. I am going to call it now, whoever wins EVO is going to have Chun-Li in their team.
For casual players, Chun will be exactly what you expect. Capcom did not re-invent the wheel here. She looks really great in this game. Anyone who had a problem with her "thunder thighs" look from SF4 will be happy to know she is back to normal proportions. She is speedy, easy to combo with and her lightning kick is extremely spammable with a lot of priority and huge hit box both vertically and horizontally.
The intermediate/advanced players are going to be murder with her though because of several details to how she plays which I will now go over.
"I feel like if you are going to be randomed out in a tournament, its going to be by a Chun-Li player spamming legs." -Keits, http://www.shoryuken.com/
I know I mentioned this above, but it needs to be re-iterated: lightning kick (aka "legs") is totally insane. It comes out really easily, and just continues to combo for a number of hits and from a distance that is far beyond any other incarnation of Chun Li. But I said all this already. Wanna know whats even sicker than legs?
LEGS AS AN ASSIST!!!
So you know legs rocks. But the legs assist is hilarious. The key is the position Chun takes on the screen. One would expect her to jump in right where your character is standing and kick right in front of you. But she actually jumps out in front of your character, creating a wall of kicks that keeps anyone not super jumping from getting in on you for around 3 full seconds. Yes I said 3 full seconds. If someone gets hit by, or must block it, they are locked down FOREVER. It makes so much possible that would not normally be.
The applications are too many to discuss here. Lets just put it this way: anytime you ever try out a move, or try to create space between you and your opponent or try to get in on a turtling opponent and you think to yourself "if only I had more speed/time/opportunity to do this manuver..." that's something that having Chun-Li legs as an assist will make possible. The combos, mix-ups and manuvers this assist will facilitate will blow minds once advanced players figure it out. Watch Justin "Marvelous" Wong abuse it against Keits at the CES 2011 tournament in the Capcom suite:
Back when the game was first announced, Seth Killian said that the version of Chun-Li in this game is the fastest character they have ever put in a fighting game. They have slowed her down since then in the name of balancing but she is still lightning fast. If you pop level 3 X-Factor with Chun she is actually too fast to even control properly unless your reflexes are off the charts. Pros are going to abuse this so hard because she has nasty low/mid mixups for MvC vets to use.
If you watched any pro MvC2 or played competitively at an intermediate or higher level, you remember that Storm and Magneto were scary rushdown characters because of their 8 way air dash. For those who are unfamilar, with those (and other) characters you could press in any direction and press both punches you would suddenly dash in the pressed direction while in midair. This meant that you could be neutral jumping or even jumping back, and then suddenly change direction and dash in unexpectedly to attack your opponent. Since jumping attacks must be blocked standing, iff you threw out some low attacks and then jumped away, then air dashed back in with an air attack, you could catch someone blocking low still and they would get tagged. This was a staple of high end MvC2 play.
Chun is the new queen of the 8 way air dash. Hers is very fast and her air attacks are perfect for starting combos on your opponents. Making it even crazier though is the fact that her crouch+C attack is jump cancelable! So she can throw a whole low block string ending in crouch+C, jump cancel out of it and then quickly air dash back down to attack. With the right timing on the air dash, you could cross up instead. This all happens so fast that reacting is VERY difficult. Anyone who has good enough execution to pull this stuff off while X-Factor is active is going to just ruin people.
Something that will make these kinds of mixups even crazier, is that there are people with overhead and low hitting assists. Mix that in with her natural overhead/low mixup and you will be able to force unblockable situations on your opponents. If you don't feel comfortable with using advancing guard when Chun starts a block string on you, good players WILL open you up with these traps. You must keep her out at all costs or pay the price.
I didn't even mention her HC's, which are great too. I do not know if Kikosho hits otg like it has in some other games, but it certainly can be combo'd into. Her lightning kick HC can be combo'd into AND out of. It actually ends with a launcher and you just jump up after that and keep the combo going like any other arial combo. This is going to make it great for tail ends of DHC's. I cant wait to do a three part DHC, where Chun is the last one in with lightning legs HC and then go into an arial rave, and cycle back through my whole team with a series of air tag combos. Imagine the rage of opponents when each character in your team gets tagged in twice during ONE COMBO!! I can almost taste the tears!
I could keep going but I am going to stop. If you are a low level player just going into it for fun, you will have a blast with the Chunsta'! But if you are a serious player looking to play competitively or just an intermediate level player looking for a character who has advanced tools that you can grow into, Chun-Li is where you need to be. She is the new Magneto. Don't believe the hype? Watch her run it back all alone in this vid from the Capcom Fight Club that was held in Birmingham earlier this month:
Here's to a decade of Chun-Li dominance! See you all tommorow!
Chris Redfield
To be honest, its hard for me to do the same kind of impression of Chris as I have for the other characters so far. I have made some observations but nothing overly earth shattering. He is one of the first people I am going to take into the lab when I get the game because I feel like I understand him less than most of the other characters. However, that wont stop me from sharing what I have learned.
The thing I like most about Chris is that he is the closest thing we are going to get to The Punisher, a Marvel character I love who didn't make it into MvC3. Chris has almost every piece of traditional military hardware you can imagine in his back pocket and it's all pulled from the Resident Evil series. He's got a combat knife, a 9mm pistol, sub machinegun, magnum revolver, a shotgun, a flame thrower, an RPG launcher and some land mines and frag grenades to round it out. We dont really see characters like this in fighting games too often so I m looking forward to playing with him. He isn't as adorable as B.B. Hood, but he has more guns and thats a trade off I am willing to make.
I want to say that Chris is a keep away character, but that doesn't really do him justice. While he has tons of projectile attacks, they aren't all longe range. In fact many of his projectile attacks have limited range, like his flamethrower and shotgun. In fact I think just his pistol and sub machine gun have full screen range. His land mine is the only tool he has to deter someone from pushing in on him but it's easy to jump over and Chris has no good way of dealing with arial threats. Pairing him with a character with a good anti air assist will help this, but short of that, characters with strong 8-way air dashes or double jumps will have an easy time getting in on Chris.
But thats not really so bad. Chris is fine at close range and really, REALLY strong in the mid range with his smg, shotgun, land mine, flamethrower and frag grenades. His normal chains are much better than any other character who has as many projectiles as he does. Characters like Arthur, Dormammu and M.O.D.O.K. have a few decent normals, but not very fluid or consistent chains. Chris has as many projectiles as those characters, but a chain game just as solid and standard as say Captain America. He has a close range HC that does good damage and combos very cleanly with his basic combo strings.
Guns, LOTS of guns......
He has a couple of other unique little moves that give him some flavor too. He he has a unique preset attack string (kind of like a "target combo" from SF4). He charges forward a bit and does a series of body punches. From the way some people were talking about it it seems to have a unique input and timing to it, kind of like Cyclops's attack rush in MvC2. I dont know if it will be terribly useful, but it looks cool and is different so i figured I would mention it. He actually does it in the video above.
He also has what seems like a stance. I dont know the input, but he actually gets on the ground and goes prone and takes out his 9mm pistol. While in this state, he is lower to the ground than even Amaterasu which means pretty much any ranged attack is going to just go right over his head. While in this state he can crawl forward or just take pot shots at his opponent with his pistol. It's possible that in certain matchups, or with certain assists this stance could really fluster an opponent.
All told, Chris is what I would call more of a zoning character than a rushdown or keep away character. While he can play keep away with the right assists, and can be a threat up close in a rushdown role if properly supported, he is definitely at his best from mid-screen and can really give opponents a lot to deal with at that range. All his hardware will make him fun to play with and with the right assists around him he can play a variety of roles.
Chun Li
It must be said, Chun-Li is just a beast. I am going to call it now, whoever wins EVO is going to have Chun-Li in their team.
For casual players, Chun will be exactly what you expect. Capcom did not re-invent the wheel here. She looks really great in this game. Anyone who had a problem with her "thunder thighs" look from SF4 will be happy to know she is back to normal proportions. She is speedy, easy to combo with and her lightning kick is extremely spammable with a lot of priority and huge hit box both vertically and horizontally.
The intermediate/advanced players are going to be murder with her though because of several details to how she plays which I will now go over.
"I feel like if you are going to be randomed out in a tournament, its going to be by a Chun-Li player spamming legs." -Keits, http://www.shoryuken.com/
I know I mentioned this above, but it needs to be re-iterated: lightning kick (aka "legs") is totally insane. It comes out really easily, and just continues to combo for a number of hits and from a distance that is far beyond any other incarnation of Chun Li. But I said all this already. Wanna know whats even sicker than legs?
LEGS AS AN ASSIST!!!
So you know legs rocks. But the legs assist is hilarious. The key is the position Chun takes on the screen. One would expect her to jump in right where your character is standing and kick right in front of you. But she actually jumps out in front of your character, creating a wall of kicks that keeps anyone not super jumping from getting in on you for around 3 full seconds. Yes I said 3 full seconds. If someone gets hit by, or must block it, they are locked down FOREVER. It makes so much possible that would not normally be.
The applications are too many to discuss here. Lets just put it this way: anytime you ever try out a move, or try to create space between you and your opponent or try to get in on a turtling opponent and you think to yourself "if only I had more speed/time/opportunity to do this manuver..." that's something that having Chun-Li legs as an assist will make possible. The combos, mix-ups and manuvers this assist will facilitate will blow minds once advanced players figure it out. Watch Justin "Marvelous" Wong abuse it against Keits at the CES 2011 tournament in the Capcom suite:
"DO-DO-DOO KICK!"
Back when the game was first announced, Seth Killian said that the version of Chun-Li in this game is the fastest character they have ever put in a fighting game. They have slowed her down since then in the name of balancing but she is still lightning fast. If you pop level 3 X-Factor with Chun she is actually too fast to even control properly unless your reflexes are off the charts. Pros are going to abuse this so hard because she has nasty low/mid mixups for MvC vets to use.
If you watched any pro MvC2 or played competitively at an intermediate or higher level, you remember that Storm and Magneto were scary rushdown characters because of their 8 way air dash. For those who are unfamilar, with those (and other) characters you could press in any direction and press both punches you would suddenly dash in the pressed direction while in midair. This meant that you could be neutral jumping or even jumping back, and then suddenly change direction and dash in unexpectedly to attack your opponent. Since jumping attacks must be blocked standing, iff you threw out some low attacks and then jumped away, then air dashed back in with an air attack, you could catch someone blocking low still and they would get tagged. This was a staple of high end MvC2 play.
Chun is the new queen of the 8 way air dash. Hers is very fast and her air attacks are perfect for starting combos on your opponents. Making it even crazier though is the fact that her crouch+C attack is jump cancelable! So she can throw a whole low block string ending in crouch+C, jump cancel out of it and then quickly air dash back down to attack. With the right timing on the air dash, you could cross up instead. This all happens so fast that reacting is VERY difficult. Anyone who has good enough execution to pull this stuff off while X-Factor is active is going to just ruin people.
Something that will make these kinds of mixups even crazier, is that there are people with overhead and low hitting assists. Mix that in with her natural overhead/low mixup and you will be able to force unblockable situations on your opponents. If you don't feel comfortable with using advancing guard when Chun starts a block string on you, good players WILL open you up with these traps. You must keep her out at all costs or pay the price.
I didn't even mention her HC's, which are great too. I do not know if Kikosho hits otg like it has in some other games, but it certainly can be combo'd into. Her lightning kick HC can be combo'd into AND out of. It actually ends with a launcher and you just jump up after that and keep the combo going like any other arial combo. This is going to make it great for tail ends of DHC's. I cant wait to do a three part DHC, where Chun is the last one in with lightning legs HC and then go into an arial rave, and cycle back through my whole team with a series of air tag combos. Imagine the rage of opponents when each character in your team gets tagged in twice during ONE COMBO!! I can almost taste the tears!
I could keep going but I am going to stop. If you are a low level player just going into it for fun, you will have a blast with the Chunsta'! But if you are a serious player looking to play competitively or just an intermediate level player looking for a character who has advanced tools that you can grow into, Chun-Li is where you need to be. She is the new Magneto. Don't believe the hype? Watch her run it back all alone in this vid from the Capcom Fight Club that was held in Birmingham earlier this month:
THIS is how you run it back!
Here's to a decade of Chun-Li dominance! See you all tommorow!
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Once You Pop, You Can't Stop, Part 3
For those of you getting to the party late this is part 3 of my on going series of impressions on the cast of Marvel vs Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds (arriving on February 15th, 2011 to fine retailers al over the U.S). Feel free to back up nd read the previous entries for my thoughts on Amaterasu, Albert Wesker and Akuma.
Lets continue the list!
Arthur
So between the awesome rock remix of some Ghosts and Goblins music, the sweet Ghosts and Goblins themed stage and Arthur's unique gameplay quirks, we have another example of Capcom's commitment to making this title feel like true crossover fan service. In fact, some may find that Capcom went a little TOO old school with Arthur but there certainly seem to be rewards for sticking with our little boxer short wearing knight.
First the bad news, and mind you it may actually be really cool/good news depending on your perspective. Arthur plays so much like he did in his iconic Ghosts and Goblins series that it has become popular among those who have played him to say that "If you knew how to play him in Ghosts and Goblins, you will know how to play him in MvC3.". As a huge game nerd who spent many hours playing Ghosts and Goblins, Ghouls and Ghosts, and Super Ghouls and Ghosts as a kid I find this to be beyond cool. As a fighting game enthusiast, I find this to be really fun.......mostly because I hate myself and am a complete gaming masochist.
Allow me to explain. In the old days, Arthur had a double jump. Unlike the jumps of other popular platform game characters of the day (like Mario) once he jumped, the player had no further control of his jump trajectory. You couldn't slow him down or make him jump just a bit farther my continuing to press in the direction he was headed. The only way to change this was to use his double jump to change or stop his lateral movement. He could change which direction he faced mid jump to shoot where he wanted, but could not EVER alter his jump distance or trajectory in any way besides using his double jump to switch directions. This is EXACTLY how his jump (and super jump) behaves in MvC3 and if you haven't played Ghosts and Goblins, you will likely be fighting the impulse to put Arthur back down and never play him again.
Oh and it doesn't end there intrepid readers! He is the only character in the game with NO GROUND DASH!! Yes, a character in a super fast paced fighting game where everyone runs at you or away from you at crazy speeds lacks the most basic and fundamental movement option in the game. No, his walk speed does not in any way make up for this. Make no mistakes, playing as Arthur simply means having to live without the fluid mobility that even the slowest charcters in the game enjoy. But in exchange, Arthur recieves some extremely potent and unique tools that really make him stand out.
For one, some of his normals are just crazy. For instance his command normal, forward+C. For reference, A is weak attack, B is medium attack and C is strong attack. After watching tons of vids, this seems to be standard nomenclature for these buttons so expect to hear a lot of it in the coming weeks/months/years. So forward+C has Arthur charge forward with his javelin pointed straight out. This is as close as he gets to a dash. It isn't as fast as other dashes, but its faster than his walk speed. The key thing here is that it has FULL SCREEN range. More than that, he can combo a launcher after wards and start comboing off it. Especially if you cover him with a good projectile assist, this will be a good way to move up on your opponent and take space so you don't always end up in a corner due to his keep away tactics.
His crouching C attack is also nuts. It hits low, knocks down, has about half screen range and also combos comfortably into a launcher. During a jump, pressing down+C will have him point his javelin straight down. The nice thing about this one is that it stays out until he lands or hits someone and the hit box extends VERY far below him, making this a very difficult "death from above" type move. You combo off it if it hits as well. This should make his super jumps very safe from attacks from below and allow him to get out of corners and just move in on his opponent pretty effectively.
With a dragon punch (DP) motion and A you get a move where he sticks out his shield. This is a purely defensive move. If anyone attacks Arthur directly with the shield out, he takes no damage and they attacker staggers back, vulnerable. I am really eager to test this move out a bit to see what it will work against. It remains to be seen if it has an effect on projectiles or if the frame advantage gained when parrying a physical attack is great enough to combo after. I am also curious to see how it affects jump in attacks. Depending on the answers to these questions, the combination of the shield defense and his long range, combo friendly normals will make Arthur deceptively dangerous to approach without cover fire from an assist. You can see all this and more thanks to Keits and UltraDavid of shoryuken.com and their series of "SRK Explains" videos they shot at the Capcom Suite at CES:
See Arthur's strange jump properties and threatening normals in action.
The real meat of Arthurs game is his keep away and those long range normals are only the start. He has a whopping 6 different projectile attacks, each with varying speeds, number of hits, hit box sizes and flight paths. From what I have seen, all of them can be done in mid air as well giving him a ton of ways to vary the angles he is attacking from and the regions of the screen he is covering. Its worth noting that his quarter circle back projectiles (like fire bottle) all seem to take slower, more round about ways to the opponent and have short recovery times while the quarter circle forward ones are more direct and can fire multiple projectiles (like dagger and javelin), I imagine it will be possible to do something like fire bottle, jump and then in midair, call an assist and do javelins or daggers, land, fire bottle etc. With the right assist and mixing up which projectiles you use you could probaly keep opponents pinned down and blocking almost constantly.
Arthur's HC's are all really good looking and all pulled lovingly from his games. He has a fire dragon HC that seems to hit the whole screen and as shown in the first Arthur vid I embedded above can hit otg, making it a great way to finish an arial combo after slamming an opponent to the ground. He also gets to use the Goddess Bracelet from Super Ghouls and Ghosts which allows him fire a rapid stream of fireballs while the player continues to control his movement. This will be great for safely DHCing him in as he will be able to pick where he wants to end up on the screen while the opponent is stuck blocking. However, his Gold Armor HC is by far his most interesting mechanic.
By burning 1 meter, Arthur can upgrade to gold armor. It lasts a limited ammount of time only, but while it is active, all of his 6 projectile attacks are buffed and/or altered making his keep away more flustering and far more deadly. Of particular note are his gold mode fire bottle and crossbow. Fire bottle takes up huge ammounts of vertical and horizontal space with gold armor active and adds several more hits giving Arthur even more of a frame advantage against an opponent blocking or getting hit by it. His gold mode crossbow gets upgraded from 2 shots to 3 and they actually home in on your opponent instead of travelling a set path.
Aside from the obvious advantage of Gold Armor, there is another interesting attribute to how it works that is actually true of all similar "buff" and "debuff" moves in the game. While there is a time limit on the ability, if the character posessing the altered state tags out, the timer stops, but they retain their new properties, good or bad, whenever they come in as an assist! The time limit on the altered state will not start back up until the character is tagged back in. So for instance, if you chose fire bottle as Arthur's assist, upgraded him to gold armor and tagged him out, he will come in and do the buffed up gold armor version of fire bottle whenever you call him for an assist. I havent seen his other assist moves, but rest assured, gold armor fire bottle is already looking like a "must have" assist like Ammy's Cold Star. It should open up all kinds of possibilities for setups and traps for your team.
All this coolness comes at yet another steep price though. Once the timer runs out, Arthur's armor shatters and he is knoked to the ground, clad only in his signature boxer shorts. While in this state, he has extremely low health and cannot take many hits. The only way to end this state is to spend another meter to give him back his standard silver armor. Having to spend another meter to bail him out of trouble can suck, and I am sure skilled opponents will be looking to time big attacks to come out as he is being knocked down when the armor shatters. Smart players will cover him with an assist during this time or simply tag him out as he is about to lose gold armor and then tag him back in during the pause that occurs after downing an opponents character. Failure to do so will mean a very dead Arthur once the gold armor breaks.
I feel like the combination of some great long range normals, a counter special, a full screen HC, a super safe DHC and great projectiles and assists with Gold Armor are going to make Arthur a very strong point or assist character for keep away and any other "lame" style of play. Whether or not the strengths he posesses out weigh the ways in wihich he has remained, *ahem*, "faithful to his roots" will only become clear after a few months of competitive play. Either way, Arthur is another unique, well fleshed out character on the Capcom side who really brings his franchises flavor to bear. No matter how viable he ends up being, the game is certainly better for having him.
Captain America
Cap is back. Great as this is though, this impression piece is going to sound quite a bit different from the one I have done to this point. So far, the characters I have previewed have been new additions to the MvC cast except Akuma, who was so far enhanced over his previous incarnations in this series that he may as well be a new character. Cap is the first example in the roster of a returning character who hasn't really changed much. While there are many characters who have mile long move lists and unique, nuanced gameplay quirks, Cap is by comparison, very "simple". I guess I have a personal bias towards more complex characters, but given all the love Capcom put into so many of the characters, it's hard not to be a bit dissapointed by how straight forward Cap plays.
Not to sound all doom and gloom, Cap looks great. He just happens to have the same exact move set (from normals to HC's) that he has had since Marvel Super Heroes. Thats 15 years with the same exact moves. Now none of the builds to this point have had an actual command list in game so its possible there are moves no one has found so we shall see. This is actually more likely than you may think. Look at a character like Dante who purportedly has over 40 special moves. If you went by vids he has about 3. So there may be more to Cap than we currently know, but if not then for better or worse, veteran Cap players will know exactly what to do with him the second they pick up the controller.
Just because Cap's move list is identical to his MvC2 incarnation does not mean he didn't improve or that he has been left in the dust. In fact, he has seen some enhancements that I am sure Cap players will be happy with.
The most significant alteration to how Cap plays is, by far, the improvements to his shield slash. It appears there is no longer any way to lose his shield as far as I have seen. No matter how much jumping around I have seen after throwing out a shield slash will result in the shield falling to the ground, it always homes back in on him perfectly.
Secondly and most importantly shield slash hits twice, once going and once coming. This makes it more advantageous as the opponent needs to keep blocking for longer. With the shields new super homing on return, you can do some interesting things by throwing a shield slash in mid air and then landing, or throwing one on the ground and then jumping before it returns. This results in the shield threatening along a different path on return than when you threw it out which can catch opponents off guard. It also makes combos possible that just weren't before. More frame advantage, plus trickier attack angles, plus increased combo possibilities equals a more high powered offense for Cap.
Cap also benefits from a key engine difference between MvC2 and MvC3. MvC2 had all preset magic series that were set in stone for a character. MvC3 is more open and what can link into what is more about the actual frame data and hit properties of your moves. This really helps a character like Cap who has very good normals and can put together good long block strings due to their speed, range and good frame properties. You can actually link a few low jabs, then combo up to his double leg hand plant kick from quite a nice range and still combo into his launcher. In general, his normals seem sped up from what they were, while retaining their good range and large hit boxes.
It seems like Hyper Stars and Stripes goes higher into the air than it did. Instead of 2 regular height ones followed by a higher one, all three are as high as the third one was in MvC2. It also doesn't seem to travel as far forward. This means it will be harder to combo into after long ground strings, but you have Hyper Charging Star for that. What the new height gives you is the ability to combo into it after launching someone into the air.
Speculation abounds that Hyper Charging Stars has huge ammounts of projectile immunity but I haven't been able to verify from any of the footage I have watched.
Cap has lost his double jump. This is no doubt to keep the new properties of the shield slash from making the move too powerful.
Last but not least, by way of the X-Factor mechanic, he can actually combo into Final Justice without the use of any assists. Final Justice is now a lvl 3 HC so it will cost you three bars.
If you haven't heard about X-Factor yet, it is used for, among other things, cancelling the move you are in the middle of and returning you to a neutral state, allowing you to perform combos you would normally not be able to do. Additionally, it gives your character a temporary buff to speed and damage as well as allowing you to regenerate red health without tagging out. The buff gets bigger and lasts longer the more characters of yours have been knocked out. This can only be used once per fight.
So going back to comboing into Final Justice without an assist, this is perfect for late game comebacks. If Cap is the last character standing and he has x-factor and 3 meters to burn, it is concievable he will be able to knockout a character from full health with one combo. Here is a video of Cap and The Avengers in action, ending in Cap doing an attack chain, cancelling into a charging star and then X-factor cancelling and then hitting Final Justice. It looks great and it will make him a scary anchor:
Overall, Cap is in better fighting shape than he has been in since the original Marvel Super Heroes from what I can tell. His damage potential is well above average, the strength of his normals are much more impactful in this fighting engine than in others he has been in and as always he has a solid all around game. He is voiced terrifically, looks snazzier than ever and has more combo possibilities than ever. While he plays in a very standard, familiar fashion compared to some of the super complex characters on this roster, Cap fans will be pleased, and new comers will find him easy and fun to pick up and play.
Lets continue the list!
Arthur
Say "huzzah!" for the new king of keepaway
So between the awesome rock remix of some Ghosts and Goblins music, the sweet Ghosts and Goblins themed stage and Arthur's unique gameplay quirks, we have another example of Capcom's commitment to making this title feel like true crossover fan service. In fact, some may find that Capcom went a little TOO old school with Arthur but there certainly seem to be rewards for sticking with our little boxer short wearing knight.
First the bad news, and mind you it may actually be really cool/good news depending on your perspective. Arthur plays so much like he did in his iconic Ghosts and Goblins series that it has become popular among those who have played him to say that "If you knew how to play him in Ghosts and Goblins, you will know how to play him in MvC3.". As a huge game nerd who spent many hours playing Ghosts and Goblins, Ghouls and Ghosts, and Super Ghouls and Ghosts as a kid I find this to be beyond cool. As a fighting game enthusiast, I find this to be really fun.......mostly because I hate myself and am a complete gaming masochist.
Allow me to explain. In the old days, Arthur had a double jump. Unlike the jumps of other popular platform game characters of the day (like Mario) once he jumped, the player had no further control of his jump trajectory. You couldn't slow him down or make him jump just a bit farther my continuing to press in the direction he was headed. The only way to change this was to use his double jump to change or stop his lateral movement. He could change which direction he faced mid jump to shoot where he wanted, but could not EVER alter his jump distance or trajectory in any way besides using his double jump to switch directions. This is EXACTLY how his jump (and super jump) behaves in MvC3 and if you haven't played Ghosts and Goblins, you will likely be fighting the impulse to put Arthur back down and never play him again.
Oh and it doesn't end there intrepid readers! He is the only character in the game with NO GROUND DASH!! Yes, a character in a super fast paced fighting game where everyone runs at you or away from you at crazy speeds lacks the most basic and fundamental movement option in the game. No, his walk speed does not in any way make up for this. Make no mistakes, playing as Arthur simply means having to live without the fluid mobility that even the slowest charcters in the game enjoy. But in exchange, Arthur recieves some extremely potent and unique tools that really make him stand out.
For one, some of his normals are just crazy. For instance his command normal, forward+C. For reference, A is weak attack, B is medium attack and C is strong attack. After watching tons of vids, this seems to be standard nomenclature for these buttons so expect to hear a lot of it in the coming weeks/months/years. So forward+C has Arthur charge forward with his javelin pointed straight out. This is as close as he gets to a dash. It isn't as fast as other dashes, but its faster than his walk speed. The key thing here is that it has FULL SCREEN range. More than that, he can combo a launcher after wards and start comboing off it. Especially if you cover him with a good projectile assist, this will be a good way to move up on your opponent and take space so you don't always end up in a corner due to his keep away tactics.
His crouching C attack is also nuts. It hits low, knocks down, has about half screen range and also combos comfortably into a launcher. During a jump, pressing down+C will have him point his javelin straight down. The nice thing about this one is that it stays out until he lands or hits someone and the hit box extends VERY far below him, making this a very difficult "death from above" type move. You combo off it if it hits as well. This should make his super jumps very safe from attacks from below and allow him to get out of corners and just move in on his opponent pretty effectively.
With a dragon punch (DP) motion and A you get a move where he sticks out his shield. This is a purely defensive move. If anyone attacks Arthur directly with the shield out, he takes no damage and they attacker staggers back, vulnerable. I am really eager to test this move out a bit to see what it will work against. It remains to be seen if it has an effect on projectiles or if the frame advantage gained when parrying a physical attack is great enough to combo after. I am also curious to see how it affects jump in attacks. Depending on the answers to these questions, the combination of the shield defense and his long range, combo friendly normals will make Arthur deceptively dangerous to approach without cover fire from an assist. You can see all this and more thanks to Keits and UltraDavid of shoryuken.com and their series of "SRK Explains" videos they shot at the Capcom Suite at CES:
See Arthur's strange jump properties and threatening normals in action.
The real meat of Arthurs game is his keep away and those long range normals are only the start. He has a whopping 6 different projectile attacks, each with varying speeds, number of hits, hit box sizes and flight paths. From what I have seen, all of them can be done in mid air as well giving him a ton of ways to vary the angles he is attacking from and the regions of the screen he is covering. Its worth noting that his quarter circle back projectiles (like fire bottle) all seem to take slower, more round about ways to the opponent and have short recovery times while the quarter circle forward ones are more direct and can fire multiple projectiles (like dagger and javelin), I imagine it will be possible to do something like fire bottle, jump and then in midair, call an assist and do javelins or daggers, land, fire bottle etc. With the right assist and mixing up which projectiles you use you could probaly keep opponents pinned down and blocking almost constantly.
Arthur's HC's are all really good looking and all pulled lovingly from his games. He has a fire dragon HC that seems to hit the whole screen and as shown in the first Arthur vid I embedded above can hit otg, making it a great way to finish an arial combo after slamming an opponent to the ground. He also gets to use the Goddess Bracelet from Super Ghouls and Ghosts which allows him fire a rapid stream of fireballs while the player continues to control his movement. This will be great for safely DHCing him in as he will be able to pick where he wants to end up on the screen while the opponent is stuck blocking. However, his Gold Armor HC is by far his most interesting mechanic.
By burning 1 meter, Arthur can upgrade to gold armor. It lasts a limited ammount of time only, but while it is active, all of his 6 projectile attacks are buffed and/or altered making his keep away more flustering and far more deadly. Of particular note are his gold mode fire bottle and crossbow. Fire bottle takes up huge ammounts of vertical and horizontal space with gold armor active and adds several more hits giving Arthur even more of a frame advantage against an opponent blocking or getting hit by it. His gold mode crossbow gets upgraded from 2 shots to 3 and they actually home in on your opponent instead of travelling a set path.
Aside from the obvious advantage of Gold Armor, there is another interesting attribute to how it works that is actually true of all similar "buff" and "debuff" moves in the game. While there is a time limit on the ability, if the character posessing the altered state tags out, the timer stops, but they retain their new properties, good or bad, whenever they come in as an assist! The time limit on the altered state will not start back up until the character is tagged back in. So for instance, if you chose fire bottle as Arthur's assist, upgraded him to gold armor and tagged him out, he will come in and do the buffed up gold armor version of fire bottle whenever you call him for an assist. I havent seen his other assist moves, but rest assured, gold armor fire bottle is already looking like a "must have" assist like Ammy's Cold Star. It should open up all kinds of possibilities for setups and traps for your team.
All this coolness comes at yet another steep price though. Once the timer runs out, Arthur's armor shatters and he is knoked to the ground, clad only in his signature boxer shorts. While in this state, he has extremely low health and cannot take many hits. The only way to end this state is to spend another meter to give him back his standard silver armor. Having to spend another meter to bail him out of trouble can suck, and I am sure skilled opponents will be looking to time big attacks to come out as he is being knocked down when the armor shatters. Smart players will cover him with an assist during this time or simply tag him out as he is about to lose gold armor and then tag him back in during the pause that occurs after downing an opponents character. Failure to do so will mean a very dead Arthur once the gold armor breaks.
Fighting bad guys in his boxer shorts since 1985!
I feel like the combination of some great long range normals, a counter special, a full screen HC, a super safe DHC and great projectiles and assists with Gold Armor are going to make Arthur a very strong point or assist character for keep away and any other "lame" style of play. Whether or not the strengths he posesses out weigh the ways in wihich he has remained, *ahem*, "faithful to his roots" will only become clear after a few months of competitive play. Either way, Arthur is another unique, well fleshed out character on the Capcom side who really brings his franchises flavor to bear. No matter how viable he ends up being, the game is certainly better for having him.
Captain America
Cap is back. Great as this is though, this impression piece is going to sound quite a bit different from the one I have done to this point. So far, the characters I have previewed have been new additions to the MvC cast except Akuma, who was so far enhanced over his previous incarnations in this series that he may as well be a new character. Cap is the first example in the roster of a returning character who hasn't really changed much. While there are many characters who have mile long move lists and unique, nuanced gameplay quirks, Cap is by comparison, very "simple". I guess I have a personal bias towards more complex characters, but given all the love Capcom put into so many of the characters, it's hard not to be a bit dissapointed by how straight forward Cap plays.
Not to sound all doom and gloom, Cap looks great. He just happens to have the same exact move set (from normals to HC's) that he has had since Marvel Super Heroes. Thats 15 years with the same exact moves. Now none of the builds to this point have had an actual command list in game so its possible there are moves no one has found so we shall see. This is actually more likely than you may think. Look at a character like Dante who purportedly has over 40 special moves. If you went by vids he has about 3. So there may be more to Cap than we currently know, but if not then for better or worse, veteran Cap players will know exactly what to do with him the second they pick up the controller.
Cap returns and his move set is all oldies but goldies.
Just because Cap's move list is identical to his MvC2 incarnation does not mean he didn't improve or that he has been left in the dust. In fact, he has seen some enhancements that I am sure Cap players will be happy with.
The most significant alteration to how Cap plays is, by far, the improvements to his shield slash. It appears there is no longer any way to lose his shield as far as I have seen. No matter how much jumping around I have seen after throwing out a shield slash will result in the shield falling to the ground, it always homes back in on him perfectly.
Secondly and most importantly shield slash hits twice, once going and once coming. This makes it more advantageous as the opponent needs to keep blocking for longer. With the shields new super homing on return, you can do some interesting things by throwing a shield slash in mid air and then landing, or throwing one on the ground and then jumping before it returns. This results in the shield threatening along a different path on return than when you threw it out which can catch opponents off guard. It also makes combos possible that just weren't before. More frame advantage, plus trickier attack angles, plus increased combo possibilities equals a more high powered offense for Cap.
Cap also benefits from a key engine difference between MvC2 and MvC3. MvC2 had all preset magic series that were set in stone for a character. MvC3 is more open and what can link into what is more about the actual frame data and hit properties of your moves. This really helps a character like Cap who has very good normals and can put together good long block strings due to their speed, range and good frame properties. You can actually link a few low jabs, then combo up to his double leg hand plant kick from quite a nice range and still combo into his launcher. In general, his normals seem sped up from what they were, while retaining their good range and large hit boxes.
It seems like Hyper Stars and Stripes goes higher into the air than it did. Instead of 2 regular height ones followed by a higher one, all three are as high as the third one was in MvC2. It also doesn't seem to travel as far forward. This means it will be harder to combo into after long ground strings, but you have Hyper Charging Star for that. What the new height gives you is the ability to combo into it after launching someone into the air.
Speculation abounds that Hyper Charging Stars has huge ammounts of projectile immunity but I haven't been able to verify from any of the footage I have watched.
Cap has lost his double jump. This is no doubt to keep the new properties of the shield slash from making the move too powerful.
Last but not least, by way of the X-Factor mechanic, he can actually combo into Final Justice without the use of any assists. Final Justice is now a lvl 3 HC so it will cost you three bars.
If you haven't heard about X-Factor yet, it is used for, among other things, cancelling the move you are in the middle of and returning you to a neutral state, allowing you to perform combos you would normally not be able to do. Additionally, it gives your character a temporary buff to speed and damage as well as allowing you to regenerate red health without tagging out. The buff gets bigger and lasts longer the more characters of yours have been knocked out. This can only be used once per fight.
So going back to comboing into Final Justice without an assist, this is perfect for late game comebacks. If Cap is the last character standing and he has x-factor and 3 meters to burn, it is concievable he will be able to knockout a character from full health with one combo. Here is a video of Cap and The Avengers in action, ending in Cap doing an attack chain, cancelling into a charging star and then X-factor cancelling and then hitting Final Justice. It looks great and it will make him a scary anchor:
The First Avenger delivers his iconic hyper combo in dramatic fashion
Overall, Cap is in better fighting shape than he has been in since the original Marvel Super Heroes from what I can tell. His damage potential is well above average, the strength of his normals are much more impactful in this fighting engine than in others he has been in and as always he has a solid all around game. He is voiced terrifically, looks snazzier than ever and has more combo possibilities than ever. While he plays in a very standard, familiar fashion compared to some of the super complex characters on this roster, Cap fans will be pleased, and new comers will find him easy and fun to pick up and play.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
