Critiquing Control Schemes

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What do you think is the best method to critiquing controls?

That’s complicated. I think criticizing controls sits somewhere between User Experience and Game Feel. Also controls can mean a number of things. It can mean the actual buttons that each action is bound to, and it can mean the way the game responds to input. It’s a matter of figuring out what feels good in terms of how the animation responds tightly to your input (like nero’s shuffle or calibur). And it’s a matter of figuring out how to make it easy and understandable to input the actions the player is trying to input.

Here’s something recent for binds: Nero’s controls in DMC4 are just fucked. There’s 3 buttons you want to be holding like, all the time, Lock-on, Gun, and Devil Buster. Holding onto an enemy with Devil Buster is optional, it’s not the most useful feature in the world, but the other two you want to be doing rather frequently. In the default control scheme, charging the gun is ridiculous. Everyone I know rebinds the gun to a trigger. Even with the gun bound to a trigger, it’s a pain in the ass to hold the trigger and also pump the shoulder button to get EX-ACT. Maybe a better configuration might be having the exceed bound to the button gun used to be on, but devil buster is just completely fucked. It gets worse when you want to juggle an enemy, summon swords or stay in the air longer by shooting the gun repeatedly. That’s difficult on a trigger. Continue reading →

The Educational Value of Games

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Do you think people overstate the educational value of games?

Depends which people. When violence in video games comes up I see a lot of people say, “Video games might make our children into violent killing machines but games do at least help hand-eye coordination,” which is a clear undersell, but then a lot of people reacting to that go, “blah blah, but they’re so interactive, they can engage kids on a level that books and lectures can’t. Video games are the future of education.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-video-games-are-the-future-of-education/

Why video games shouldn’t freak parents out

http://www.acsd.org/article/the-effect-of-videogames-on-student-achievement/

Video games clearly have an influence, some video games can certainly be considered educational, but video games categorically do not have all of these properties. Categorically there is a broad increase in ability to analyze and solve problems, to find solutions from what’s available, but more specific benefits are unknown, or rare. Continue reading →

Are High Execution Top Tiers Fair?

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How do you feel about characters like Crimson Viper who are purposely powerful but have a high execution barrier? I hear people who hate her say that execution doesn’t matter in high level play and that she isnt balanced just cause she’s hard to play.

I’ve been dealing with Fox my whole life.

I think that just because a character is hard to execute with isn’t an excuse for making them better than the rest of the cast. There’s certainly something to be said for having a reward for execution, but eventually in a game’s life, someone will overcome that execution hurdle and the tables will turn, and that character will dominate.

Having a character like that be the best character in the game is tolerable. If you’re going to have a top tier, it might as well be the hardest characters in the game to play. However ideally you want to prevent any one character from dominating over others.

So basically, it makes sense to give characters a bit more for doing something tricky, like 360s on grapplers, however this shouldn’t be used as a license to make all the high execution characters top tier and super strong. Continue reading →

Is Street Fighter Made Obsolete by Smash?

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Have traditional fighting games been rendered obsolete by Smash? How would you convince someone who thinks like that to try out, say, SF? Someone who thinks SF is the same thing every match.

Not a chance in hell. I’ve been meaning to make a post/video on the differences between Street Fighter and Smash Bros. The games emphasize totally different things. They have different forms of blocking, hitstun, combos, damage, moves, movement, knockdown, footsies, zoning.

In my opinion a lot of it stems from 1 really innocuous core change. In Smash Bros, you are allowed to grab someone during hitstun or blockstun. In Street Fighter, you are not. A basic issue that came up during the first version of Street Fighter 2, and Smash 64 was, if people are allowed to get advantage on block, then they can throw instantly, and that’s a guard breaker. So in SF2 World Warrior, you could jump in at someone, hit them with a roundhouse on their block, then just throw them. Easy unblockables. Similar stuff is possible in Smash 64, like shieldbreak combos, and unblockables off higher shield stun aerials. Continue reading →

Dishonored vs Thief

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How does Dishonored compare to the OG Thief series?

Blah, I’m upset and frustrated with Dishonored, and I don’t have total confidence that Dishonored 2 will solve the core issues with the first game.

Dishonored and Thief are extremely different games overall. They can’t be directly compared, because a lot of the thief-like elements were stripped from Dishonored in development.

Basically, Thief is all about detection. They have different sections of floor with varying light levels or sound levels, and you gotta try to balance between staying in the dark and staying silent. It’s about paying attention to how visible you are, and avoid guards investigating sounds. You can also use sounds to lure guards around. Continue reading →

Intricacies of Pac-Man

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Why don’t people circejerk over pac-man as much as tetris? pac-man seems more interesting to me, although not as fun to watch at a high level

Because Pac-man is about a character and Tetris is about shapes. Tetris is about something supposedly universal. Also because Tetris is the best selling game ever, and Pac-man is not.

I think Tetris has more depth overall personally, but explaining how is complicated. Like, there’s a lot of ways to handle individual situations, a lot of philosophies for how to build overall, and what to do if you’re in trouble. Then there’s playing for score instead of just pure survival, which TGM generally requires. Continue reading →

GAME OVER YEAAAAAAAH!

Celia Wagar2 Comments

You’ve said that for short games it’s reasonable to reset to begining in case of repeated failure, as in Curse of Issyos. While I can see that, it still comes off as frustrating when you want to practice a specific section, and the game keeps demanding you get from the begining to there. Plus, it creates the problem of unnecessary, trivial repetition, because you have to continually repeat parts that you’ve already mastered, which is a complete waste of player’s time when they’re wanting to practice a different section. Seems better to leave self challenge to the player, rather than ask for consistency, at least at this kind of level that demands a lot of time spending.

All arcade games are this way, and most games to some extent are this way. Dark Souls shunts you back to the bonfire, and you can’t get back to the part that gave you trouble until you get through all the stuff inbetween.

I mean, maybe there’s a case that these games should have more interspersed checkpoints, that’s what Super Mario Bros and Castlevania did on console, but I’m not gonna harsh on games of reasonable length like Contra sending you back to the beginning.

That and frequently you haven’t already mastered those parts, you’re still getting hit. Segments of this length get repeated in games like Ninja Gaiden or Nioh or Dark Souls all the time. I don’t think it’s a big deal to lose 6-15 minutes over this type of thing. It took me like 6 hours to beat contra, it’s probably gonna take me less to beat curse of issyos, both because it’s easier and because it’s shorter. Continue reading →

Halo: Combat Evolved Review

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Okay, I played Halo when it originally came out. I was honestly a fan at the time. Over time I developed the opinion that it was good, but overrated. Despite playing it way back when, I never finished the campaign. I kind of missed out on the whole halo experience because I never got an xbox and never played halo 2, which was where the multiplayer was at. I was sent a video series on halo recently, and decided to give it a play, because it’s a classic. Overall, I think it’s pretty good. You have enemy variety, weapon variety, environment variety. It’s a very different type of shooter from what came before it, and what’s come since. It’s not a tight map with very controlled encounters like Doom or Quake, it’s not a linear corridor shooter like more modern console FPS. It’s content in many levels to open the space up, hand the player a vehicle or two, drop some weapons here and there, and let the player roam. This reminds me most of Giants Citizen Kabuto, a game from my childhood that I did complete, multiple times even (and probably need to replay some day), which had a very similar open sandboxy structure, similar weapon and enemy variety, similarly designed space suits, and even a similar goofy feeling to the cutscenes (it came out like, a year earlier, was it an inspiration?). Continue reading →

Hand-Holding

Celia Wagar2 Comments

What do you think of hand holding in games?

Okay, hand holding, it can be a pain, especially in Nintendo games, double especially in Zelda Games.

I think Hand Holding is primarily a User Experience issue. Like, if you use photoshop, or microsoft word, or another such program, it won’t constantly stop you to tell you how to use it, it’ll maybe pop up a tip of the day at the start, which you can disable, and have a separate manual, plus little tooltips reminding you of functions when you hover over things and their key shortcut.

In games, we’ve come to build tutorials into every game, because manuals went the way of the dinosaur.

Old games didn’t need as much tutorialization, because they were simpler. You could figure out the functions really easily through simple experimentation. Continue reading →

Games with Conveyance Issues & Intentional Lack of Affordance

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think are some games with conveyance issues?

MGR, Parrying. I honestly didn’t get this without guides and the ingame tutorials were not very helpful.

W101, knowing you should buy unite guts and unite spring from the store, knowing you should use unite guts to reflect projectiles, knowing to use the whip to pull spikes off enemies, a lot of things.

God hand, pretty much everything, the basic method you’re supposed to be playing. Continue reading →