Why I’m not Fond of Smash 4

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How come you are not fond of Smash 4?

First off, grounded movement is fucked. In any normal game, you’re allowed to move left and right unimpeded. In fighting games this is especially important because you want to move into and out of your opponent’s range to bait attacks. In Smash 4 you can walk, which requires a turnaround animation before you can walk the other way, or you can dash, which either only lets you dash dance in an extremely small range, or locks you out of changing direction until you’ve moved far enough to get the long turnaround. In Melee, you have the same restriction on walking, but dash dancing lets you move back and forth in any interval at any time, thereby allowing you to footsie like in street fighter, or really any other game. Smash 4 has this irritatingly limited movement system that forces you to engage in these longer animations to change directions.

Next up, Defensive options are ridiculously good for no fucking reason. They’ve thankfully nerfed shield stun, I don’t really know where that sits right now, it used to just mean free shieldgrabs all day, but dodges are still super invincible as well as fast, making them difficult to punish on reaction, requiring a prediction instead. This means that they no longer need to be timed to escape pressure and can be thrown out without much risk.

Then on top of that, DI is completely fucked. They kept the stupid angular DI system from brawl, then tacked vectoring on top of it, and made vectoring crazy more powerful. Thankfully they realized that was horrible and removed vertical vectoring, but they left in horizontal vectoring, making it so everyone survives to fucking insane percentages on the left and right sides of the screen. This also means that the DI system as a whole is simplified, since if you’re sent upwards, you should hold left or right, and if sent to the sides, you hold the opposite side. It’s generally beneficial to just hold left or right primarily rather than all the different directions you’d need to in the other smash games. Plus they nerfed SDI into oblivion for no real reason, and since that fucks up the counterplay on rekka ken type moves (like rapidjabs or marth’s dancing blade), they nerfed all those moves and gave rapidjabs a finisher so you can’t trap anyone in them, since it’s no longer possible to SDI out.

They thankfully limited the dumb ability in brawl to cancel hitstun, but it’s still in the game, just you can cancel after 41 frames instead of like 13. This contributes to people surviving forever, because knockback is no longer sustained when you’re in a regular freefall state. This feature is still dumb and anti-competitive, limiting combo length

Then they gave everyone a crazy good recovery and magnet hands, so why even bother with on-stage ledgeguards? And got rid of edgehogging, so you don’t need to time when you cover the ledge, or judge whether your opponent will go high, low, or stall. It’s simplifying the offstage game and removing some basic counterplay.

Plus moves have longer fucking landing recovery times than Brawl in many cases. Wow, I can understand not bringing back L canceling, since that’s hard, but giving moves such stupidly long recovery times on the ground is absolutely awful. It slows down the pace of the game and prevents a lot of combos. Sure, there’s autocanceling now, but that serves a different and more restrictive role in combos and general neutral.

And the controls are totally fucked, because they didn’t make the C-stick its own macro function for smash attacks and aerials yet again (they did this in brawl too), instead making it press a direction and the A button for one frame, which leads to dumb shit like not being able to control yourself in the air if a c-stick direction is held (or vice versa, I don’t remember), or not being able to smash attack in the same direction the control stick is held.

In general they made the same fuckup as last time where different buttons with overlapping functions aren’t registered by the game independently, because the programmers don’t give a shit.

Oh, and a ton of advanced techniques were taken out, even from Brawl, but that’s really the smallest issue compared to everything else.

Plus they nerfed SDI into oblivion[….][…]since it’s no longer possible to SDI out Can you please elaborate/explain on this a bit? I don’t own Sm4sh, but I did notice watching videos that a lot of jabs are finisher, and I don’t understand why

http://www.ssbwiki.com/Smash_directional_influence

Here’s two different explanations of Smash DI, or SDI for short. 64 players call it “PI” or “Positional Influence” which is a better name for the phenomena honestly.

Basically, when you get hit, you enter hitlag before hitstun and knockback. Hitlag is a few freeze frames where the character is frozen in place before they start moving. Hitlag is different per-move. During this state, every time you press a cardinal or ordinal direction on the control stick, you will move a tiny bit, when you exit the state, if you are holding a direction on the control stick, you will be shifted a bit in that direction automatically (called ASDI). C-stick will take priority for this if it is also held when hitlag ends.

The effect of SDI is slight, but it can matter. It especially matters in escaping multi-hit moves, because during a multi-hit you have many chances to SDI over and over again. A common example of this is rapidjab type moves, like Fox, or Captain Falcon’s. If they hit you with one of those, then you can mash the control stick to get out.

So Smash 4 removed SDI, or nerfed it into irrelevancy. Many people were unsure on release, I’m pretty sure it’s still in the game but extremely weak right now. What does this mean? It means that all multi-hitting moves just got a massive buff. It means if you ever get your opponent up against a wall and use a rapidjab, that’s an infinite right there.

So they had to add finishers to all the rapidjabs, otherwise you’d have a cast with easy wall infinites. That’s probably also why they changed Pit’s Side B from how it was in Brawl.

Why’d they do this? Probably because they’re anti-competitive fucks, and considered SDI too hard for the average joe.

Game Addiction

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of articles like this comparing videogames to drugs? http://nypost.com/2016/08/27/its-digital-heroin-how-screens-turn-kids-into-psychotic-junkies/

Not totally wrong. I think saying it’s like Cocaine is an exaggeration. If you’re familiar with Cocaine, it blocks dopamine receptors, meaning that dopamine gets stuck percolating in the brain. Videogames trigger strong dopamine reactions, so yeah, from brain scans you’re going to have similar results. It’s not literally a drug, but it can be addicting like one. Continue reading →

Visited by RNGesus

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are the dumbest pro-rng arguments you’ve ever read?

One of the worst I’ve heard is from Sirlin arguing that 1 frame reversals, like in Super Turbo, should be randomized instead of execution-based. Reversals are bad in ST, unlike SF4 or SFV, because they’re so difficult to perform (I used to be REALLY good at reversals in ST though, including ones off of air resets, I’ve gotten worse at reversals as I’ve fallen out of practice unfortunately). So when waking up, the opponent can okizeme and not have to respect the DP as much, as opposed to later games that made reversals easy and you always need to respect the DP. Sirlin basically got to the heart of the matter, saying that it works because it’s inconsistent, but mechanical skill shouldn’t determine any part of the game, so it should be randomized instead. The idea that he considers randomness more fair than mechanical execution is fucking insane.

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Nier Automata Demo Review

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Thoughts on the Nier Automata demo?

Hmmm, playing it.

Can’t quite get the controls the way I’d like them. I’d like to have fire on one of the left triggers instead of the right trigger, so I can evade while firing easily. Wait, there we go. Overlooked customize somehow.

So we have 3rd person shooting with a little robot beside us, and instead of dark lance and other sealed verses, we now have “Pod Programs”, the first of which being a laser that is an obvious expy for dark lance. These pod programs function on a cooldown, which I think is less interesting than the magic meter. It has a startup time, so it doesn’t suffer the usual weakness-less. Continue reading →

Single Player Game Balance

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What does it mean for a single player game to have good or poor balance? Like does it just mean that things are too easy or difficult?

Balance in a single player context typically means balance between the options the player has, so they’re used in roughly equal proportion. So if you have 5 weapons, you want a balance between them, so they each have a moment where they’re useful. This can mean giving options each their own unique utility, their own thing they’re best at, but also regulating how often more powerful and less powerful options are used. If options aren’t balanced in singleplayer games, then they become all about doing the same thing all the time. Options in single player games need to be balanced both in terms of what they actually are, and the situations that crop up across the game. Something might be really powerful, but if it’s situational and the situation for it never comes up, then that’s kinda lame.

In an abstract sense, even a game like Mirror’s Edge can be said to have a type of balance. There’s tradeoffs between different routes through each level, and the different types of movement capabilities you have. You use all of them in roughly equal proportion, but you have the ability to choose which you use in many places.

Halo had a good example of this with its weapons. There’s a clear sorting order of power between them, but more powerful weapons are constricted by ammo scarcity. I think ironically Halo 2, which has better weapon balance in terms of damage output, does weapon balance a bit worse for a single player game, because it means the power weapons have lower utility as a result. I can see how it would help multiplayer though. Sometimes it pays to balance differently between singleplayer and multi. Starcraft 2 did this for example.

Keeping this type of balance in mind when designing a singleplayer game is important. It helps the game express the depth of all the elements you put in, instead of leaving things on the cutting room floor.

Which single player games do you think have the best overall balance?

Best balance? In a single player game? I mean, balance is a thing in single player games, you need to balance different options, but a lot of single player games don’t totally work that way, at least not nearly as demonstrably as multiplayer games.

How balanced is Mirror’s Edge? How balanced is mario, or castlevania? Balance begins to become a question as you get into RPG territory like dark souls, where there’s multiple ways to build the character. It begins to become a question for games with lots of overlapping options, like Devil May Cry. However judging the game with the best overall balance, who knows? Who can say?

In Single Player Games, the balance just needs to be good enough most of the time, rather than really fine-tuned perfect. Also single player games can cheat a bit by giving different elements unique utilities, so you need to use them all to some extent. In many games, you’re perfectly capable of ignoring the balancing between different options and just powering through with one underpowered option, where that gets you slaughtered in multiplayer (except versus very bad players who can’t adapt).

That honestly gave me the idea at one point that a boss enemy, like in the souls series, should perhaps try detecting if the player is using the same tactic over and over again and specifically doing the tactic that counters that. Like if the player only punishes this one move, never use that move. If the player never attacks long startup short recovery moves, use more of those. Basically, use moves in inverse proportion to how much the player punishes them.

Making A Good Video Game Secret

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think makes a good videogame secret?

This is complicated. Like, a lot of games such as Doom, Quake, Metroid, Dark Souls, these have a mix of secrets. A lot of the secrets in these games are intended to be found however. The trick is, there’s a “secret language” that the developers establish to convey that there are secrets in various places (you should always check under stairs, and bomb off-color blocks for example). There’s a lot of possible tricks you can do for these. Dark Souls always has illusory walls be a bit inset versus the areas around it. Or they show you what’s beyond the wall so you suspect where there might be one. Or they have that boulder wall that needs all the boulders lined up to be broken, which you can figure out on your first try if you’re clever.
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What Would An FPS Game by Platinum Look Like?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What would a FPS made by Platinum look like? Assuming it was made for a mouse in mind unlike Vanquish

Funny, I was thinking about how to build an FPS combo system this morning. I don’t think they’d ever make something like my idea though (involves a lot of subtle manipulation of hitstun values in a weird way no other game does). Suibriel, the Desync Dev, suggested it would be like Painkiller + Vanquish, which makes a lot of sense (though I didn’t play Pankiller yet, but I know it’s about fighting waves of enemies in arenas, much like platinum games).
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Dynamic Difficulty

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Thoughts on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB84uBc68QE

The video is excessively pessimistic about difficulty levels. Difficulty levels work fine in a lot of games. The big issue with them most commonly cited is that players don’t know what the difficulty levels are like before they try them, so they can accidentally get slotted with the wrong one. I played Nier on hard and it was a shitty experience. I for some reason chose to play Metroid Prime 3 on easy, I still don’t know why, and that was entirely too easy. Players are basically being asked to be mind readers about which of your difficulty settings is right for them.

I’m a bit conflicted on how exactly difficulty should be handled here because I’ve accrued some beliefs that don’t totally line up.
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Making Team Shooter Healers Interesting

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of videogame characters who specialize in healing other team mates like Mercy, or the Medic?

I mean, this only really applies to Overwatch and TF2. Other games like Dota and MMOs have healers, but they don’t really overlap with the things I have to say about healers in those particular team shooters.

Basically, Mercy and the Medic, characters like them (with an auto-lock heal beam) in these team based shooters have a tendency to be really powerful. Medic was the most powerful character in TF2, and Mercy has been at or close to the top frequently. Lucio is actually better than Mercy and has been top tier consistently throughout overwatch’s life cycle. These characters serve a valuable function that all the other characters need, because these games have a slow pace of movement, and a low time to kill, factors which compound on each other. You basically always need and always want a healer rather than another damage dealer or support. They’re that essential to winning.

What kind of sucks about them though is, they’re not terribly interesting characters (except perhaps Lucio). They generally get to move faster than other characters, but their input on the battle is basically holding M1 and avoiding getting shot. Mercy is kind of interesting, because she can dash to the target she’s healing (and otherwise moves slower than the other characters), glide along in the air, and resurrect everyone on her team within a certain radius.

TF2 put an interesting spin on the medic with the vaccinator: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Vaccinator A weapon which allows the medic to select a resistance for their heal target, between bullets, explosive, and fire, making the process of healing the target slightly more involved, but overall is still kinda just, hold the button and stay close, but don’t get hit.

Making a character that is more interesting than that in a healing role is kinda tricky and I don’t have any good ideas off the top of my head. Making it so healing characters aren’t as necessary to a team means making a game where you don’t always fight battles of attrition, but rather more rock paper scissors oriented fights. Right now you can’t avoid losing damage, so you need a way to heal it or you can’t have a sustained map presence. Also making the game faster helps, but also makes it harder to maintain a defensive perimeter.