That stinks that you’re finished with reviewing reviews. I just found this one today that you might be interested in. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGO2dE7GRkg&a=&feature=youtu.be
Nah, just reviewers.
I feel like he misses some history here. God Hand has been a cult classic on /v/ since long before totalbiscuit became popular (or made the video about god hand in 2012). There’s a reason I owned the game in like 2009. Continue reading
Your definition of quality in games is meaningful/interesting depth, right? Doesn’t that leave out satisfying gameplay? Melee would have the same amount of depth if there were a big input delay, all the sounds were really annoying, the animations were not as pleasing, etc.
Depth is not my only component for quality of gameplay, it is only the most significant component by a large margin.
Melee and other competitive action games end up being very different games if you introduce significant amounts of input delay, for reasons of reaction time. Though their absolute depth stays the same, their relative depth changes when you introduce a big delay like that, because players are less able to adjust and make fine grain inputs precisely, so the way they need to play the game changes, basically always for the worse. Continue reading
Editor’s Note: I have slightly edited some of these conversations to be slightly more clear in the absence of context, and to elaborate more on details.
Um, Contra is deep? Always thought of it as very constrictive rather than “deep.” Is your argument that the (slightly) different weapons add depth?
Yes, it’s deep. No, I don’t mean the slightly different weapons, I’m more talking about the movement around enemies and the enemy variety and attack patterns. It’s about micro-positioning, same as Zelda 1.
Depth doesn’t just mean the explicit technical stuff. I defined it as relating to tiny game states because I wanted to capture the difference between say Mario’s jump and a castlevania jump, but acknowledgement of redundancy is necessary too, otherwise more restrictive sets of options like the castlevania jump are ruled out completely because something like mario’s jump can totally dwarf it in complexity, and castlevania’s jump works really well in the context of the game it is, allowing certain types of challenges to exist that could not in Mario. So Mario’s jump is invariably deeper of the two, allowing for a massively larger range of expression, but it shouldn’t be judged as exponentially better just because it can produce exponentially more measurable state. A lot of those states are different but achieve similar results.
Also I meant the Contra series, not just Contra 1. Continue reading
Ghirahim:
He’s the first boss, so maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on him. Arguably he’s a tutorial.
Basically, first phase he has one action, he’ll hold his hand out, and it will follow where your sword goes. Eventually it stops, then you need to slash him in the opposite, or close to the opposite of the direction he’s pointing. He then will get locked in hitstun if you slash continuously and will duck after a random number of hits. Trying to slash after he ducks will trigger a backstep. This doesn’t take any guesswork or heuristic approximations, you don’t need to pick between varying options, you just need to do the same thing every time. If you slash the same direction as he’s pointing, he catches your sword, and then you both get caught in an animation and let loose shortly after. Trying to slash after this will cause him to backstep. If you’re impatient, you can slash randomly during this phase and more often than not it works, even before he’s stopped following your sword. Continue reading
Have you ever done a post on what system-wide mechanical changes you would do to Melee if you could?
I’m pretty sure I did that already, but I have more ideas, so I’ll do it again.
My changes would be extremely minor, like increasing leniency on backdash, increasing the range on the controller that is registered as a dash, increasing the shorthop window, remove reduced jump height for frame 1 attacks, allow canceling IASA frames with airdodge or B moves, allow reverse grab boxes to grab at the end of up B moves, fade out portraits and % when they overlap characters. Plus incorporate all 20XX TE changes for convenience. If I want a balance mod on top of this, I’d go with SD Remix. And add more neutral/counterpick stages as appropriate. Continue reading
You’ve talked a lot about depth and complexity in regards to game design, but what about interaction between mechanics? How does it relate to depth and complexity? Any examples done well/poorly?
Alright, if game quality was purely tied to the number of states possible then the scale would not be linear. It would be exponential or logarithmic, like decibels. A strictly linear addition of states does not create a big jump in quality.
For a mechanic to significantly improve the game it must interact with the other mechanics, multiplying or exponentiating the number of possible states. Continue reading
what do you think about co-op games?
Okay, I honestly don’t play that many Co-op games. Lets see, I remember Tales of Symphonia, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Alien Swarm, Dark Souls, L4D, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and Smash Bros Brawl.
I think that a lot of the basic design applied to single player games overlaps into co-op ones easily. The big troubles are camera controls, griefing, overwhelming enemies, and giving players interesting simultaneous tasks. Continue reading
I absolutely adore Platinum’s stuff but absolutely cannot find anything to like in fighters. What differences between the two do you think causes this?
I can only guess, dude. That’s on you.
My guesses would be that fighting games have a very different control scheme from platinum games. I can only think of Ramlethal in GG Xrd who has chain combos of the same style as your average platinum game. Apart from that, the control schemes are extremely different, and fighting games are even different from normal 2D games in many ways.
And that fighting games aren’t really fun until you “get” them. It’s tricky to really understand what’s going on until it clicks for you, and before that it can seem like degenerate button mashing.
And that fighting games are a lot harder than platinum games. They have way more complex systems, more difficult commands to input moves, and tighter input windows for successful actions. Continue reading
Do you think the immutability of Melee and other classic vs. games is bad? What is your stance on the constant patching that esports games undergo?
I think there’s a tradeoff in patching. There’s a lot of tradeoffs actually. When you patch, obviously you can make the game better. You can bring it closer to perfect balance. The downside is, you upset the meta every single time you patch. If you patch really frequently, then performing well at your game is just about finding what everyone else is suffering against. Too many patches too fast will literally kill a game competitively, both because people can’t keep up, and because it’s impossible to observe how your changes perform if you’re constantly patching and never playtesting.
This happened with Brawl+. They updated nightly, and people couldn’t keep up, so everyone quit giving a fuck. Continue reading
You’ve criticized randomness in games because it gives uninteresting variation, and can be unfair, making competition not about who is best, but about who lucked out. You’ve also criticized the “solution” to this as seen in poker, where many games even out the random variance to pick the best but even in deterministic sports (or as deterministic as real life can be assumed to be) there’s a significant randomness to determining who’s best. These made me think about this: https://twitter.com/nothings/status/762769777819398145 Googled for the source but couldn’t find it. Thoughts?
The short of this seems to be that people are random therefore game’s outcomes are random. I’d personally rebut by saying that people are inconsistent, you could say “chaotic”, not necessarily random. We’ve gone over how people are bad RNGs before, but performance is a bit less in our control.
I’ve actually heard about streaks in sports just being clumps in random distributions, and that more or less baseballers and basketballers follow their average performance most of the time, even when you think they’re “hot” or performing well. Radiolab did an episode on this actually. Continue reading
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 