Adjusting Difficulty Curves for Nonlinearity

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How would you implement difficulty in a non-linear game. A good game should get more challenging as it you progress ,but if you can choose what to do in what order you have to make them all equally challenging .This means the game becomes easier as it progresses.

I indirectly answered this already with my metroidvania solution, having areas you’ve beaten get easier, and just straight up tuning all the other areas around a base power level, but you do bring up a point that I didn’t consider: You want endgame areas to be harder, whether by levels or just tuning, but you don’t want players ending up there early on by accident.

When people speedrun Quake, they do it in reverse order actually, because you’re allowed to pick whatever episode you want. So people choose episode 4 first. I think they mix up 2 and 3 because of some routing detail that makes it faster, but I can’t imagine why.

The obvious thing you can do is follow from the metroidvania solution and make the other unbeaten areas harder after you beat one. Actually, if you did it on a level beyond just number buffs, like world tendency in demon’s souls, by changing enemy and level arrangements, then it might add to the replayability of the game, beating the levels in different orders to see their beefed up forms.

The other, probably more obvious, thing you can do is organize the levels so people have to go through the easier ones to get to the harder ones.

Or alternatively, you could not really worry about it. The intention of the warp pipes in the original Super Mario Bros was apparently so if players felt the early areas were too easy, they could skip to the harder ones. It’s one of the things I like about dark souls, going directly to blight town to fight Quelaag, or into the catacombs to grab the gravelord sword/rite of kindling.

The larger issue is making it so unskilled players don’t go to areas out of their league by accident, like accidentally going into the graveyard from firelink. The best way to do that perhaps is to make it so sequence breaking involves low affordance and/or difficult to perform tricks. Like in order to get to blighttown first, you need to either kill ingward so you can get the key to the seal and open the seal, which you won’t know how to do until the late game, or pick the master key and open the door at the entrance of new londo, which you would be hard pressed to find just starting out.

The graveyard at firelink is a good example of how not to do this. A lot of people go that way by accident because it’s really high affordance, you’re practically lead that way. I fought down to the first bonfire in the catacombs on my first time playing the game, not realizing it wasn’t the way I was supposed to go. And that was patch 1.0! The skeletons didn’t even drop souls back then! If the way into the graveyard was obscured somehow to dissuade beginners, then it would probably contribute to a better experience for them, while still allowing advanced players to do as they please.

Super Bunnyhop’s not that bad

Celia Wagar7 Comments

Why do you dislike SuperBunnyhop?

I put off answering this one, because I knew I’d have to rewatch his videos to really recall all my reasons, and I finally worked up the nerve to do it.
First, his position on the journalistic integrity thing was dumb, especially when he got his journalism professor to interview on the matter and basically blew him the fuck out. Also he was on the game journo pro list, which is kind of scummy in of itself.

I’ll be honest, his coverage of stories can be pretty good, like his look at MGS2, MGS3, The Witcher, and Bloodborne versus HP Lovecraft. I liked his MGS3 review overall and I felt like it tapped into a little of how the game worked with its vertical slice thing, and how there were so many different possible tactics you could take.

Watching the witcher sum up, he even gets into the combat a bit in a way that’s appreciable, even if I personally hate the witcher’s combat, even witcher 3’s. I gotta give him credit for that.

Minus massive props for playing a doom source port that allows looking up AND jumping. Also for admitting to quicksaving as a form of savescumming. In the process he does however mention how fucked up hitscan weapons, cones of fire, regenerating health, and iron sights are.

I mean shit, I can’t call the guy horrible. Though I can say his dark souls review isn’t very good. The high difficulty of early games was influenced by their arcade origins, not technical limitations, and contra is like half an hour to an hour long if played from beginning to end. They could afford to be hard, and they were very fair about the ways they were hard. Super Mario Bros restarted you at the beginning of the world if you got a game over, ninja gaiden did too, also shatterhand, and castlevania, and a lot of games on the system had actual save game functions, mostly RPGs, but also Metroid, Megaman, and Zelda. You’re not SUPPOSED to use save states for those NES games, hell, you’re devaluing games like Doom and a lot of other PC shooters for using save states. This is why I insist on sticking with auto-saves or only saving on level transitions. The first half of the review is all about the theme that I don’t really care about. The coverage of the combat is a sales pitch and more shallow than I’d really like. A lot of the talk on the level system is filler.

His coverage of Castlevania Symphony of the night triggers a kneejerk reaction from me up front for him remarking on how the original castlevania games were nothing special or rather humdrum, when they prioritized extreme focus on attacking at the right times in grueling level designs with enemies placed to make it very difficult to move forward or skip any of them. Points to him for backdashing, minus points for not shield-dashing. He does point out how shitty the level design is though, which is something I was expecting him to miss. Overall his impression does seem to be about the same as mine.

In his Zelda videos, he touches on how Link to the Past was more about dodging things and had less tutorials, but doesn’t really go into how lackluster OoT puzzle and enemy design was. And he complains about dumb shit like the room scrolling not fitting his conception of the space or something. He catches himself trying to quantify things, when he’s quantifying the wrong things and when I personally think greater quantification or more precise quantification is what we need in games analysis. Not to mention that Adventure of Link was a greater commercial success than many games that came to follow, sitting right about at the average for sales of the series and being a critical success in its own time.

Also it really pains me how he harshes on himself, used to read the headlines of each section with a really bored voice and acts like this self-conscious jaded fuck sometimes. Like he knows that he’s silly, but has to play it off ironically and begrudgingly to sooth his conscience.

Going to his Megaman Legends review is probably a good palate cleanser, because I haven’t played the game before, and I find it’s a good way to check whether a reviewer can actually describe and break down a game by going to a game I don’t have experience with. He complains about the tank style camera controls, but doesn’t mention how the concept of dual analog literally hadn’t been invented yet. I’ve gotten worse senses of how a game is supposed to be played than this. He does run down some of what the enemy design is like with video examples, and how the tank style controls work with forward and backward (and apparently strafe) movement work with shooting, and the free aim feature that locks you to the ground. I’ve seen worse even if I’d prefer more detail personally. I also feel like he missed out by not covering megaman legends 2 or the failed MML3, with the failed facebook campaign, which is practically what put Keiji Inafune in his current position.

I want to say I dislike his videos, because I don’t want to subscribe to him and I’m used to saying it about people at this point and I suppose it’s kind of expected of me, but he’s honestly not totally shit, and surprises me with alright descriptions of gameplay most of the time. His breakdowns of things tend to feature more correct information than incorrect information, and include genuine insights that aren’t common knowledge or repeating what everyone repeats. He gets the seeds of topics that would be interesting to talk about. He’s not Extra Credits, he’s clearly way above their level and the majority of the other amateur reviewers out there. Maybe what he lacks most is vision and knowledge of specifics? Vision isn’t something you can really fault a guy for. It’s hard to elevate the format. Knowledge of specifics and intricacies, I dunno, that’s kind of advanced stuff. Who can really say? If we had more people at his level then we’d be in a better place.

Someone asked me about Sequelitis, that’s next. Soon®

Smash Bros as an Accident and a Spectator Sport

Celia Wagar1 Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qxVDOc-oV8
This video is so fucking stupid at times (such as when the word theatre is said and every time he goes a little bit SJW), but this video is alright. What do you think?

Dude released this like 3-4 days ago and he’s talking like there are only 5 gods. Leffen is arguably the best player in the world right now next to Armada and PPMD, and certainly stronger than Mew2king or Hungrybox presently. Documentary kiddie!

Regarding Amsa, he should have mentioned how the guy placed at Evo 2014. I have a local Yoshi player who said if Amsa took top 8, he’d redouble his efforts in Melee rather than moving cleanly onto P:M. Yeah, Yoshi was considered a gimmick character that nobody knew the matchup against, but once everyone figured out the matchup, Amsa went into a slump, then recovered to show he truly knew how to play well, not just abuse things people were unfamiliar with (he does mention that Amsa might not have much staying power, but this video came out over a year after the events he’s summarizing). He also probably should have mentioned the facets of yoshi that had potential, like the three different types of “parries” Yoshi has, between super armored DJC attacks, his power shield, and light shield. And how his normals have good hitboxes and knockback, unlike a lot of other low tiers. He also could have mentioned how historically, Sheik is known as a HORRIBLE matchup for Yoshi, and it was Amsa who figured out how to play the matchup well and dominate in it, versus the best sheik player who ever lived (well, besides Plup I guess). Also Vectorman pioneered a ton of the techniques Amsa brought out competitively. He has an old combo video, Eggstinction. He even did a sequel to it.

Bonus, on the 20XX thing, it was Hax’s joke originally, he could have mentioned how Mango perpetually snubbed Hax, and even beat Hax’s Fox using Captain Falcon.

But hey, it’s reasonably good coverage. I agree with a lot of the gist of it, even if being a part of the scene I know there’s more to the stories. I just hate this guy’s guts for his first two videos, and looking at his uploads, probably a lot of others he’s made.

Instinctively, I want to say it’s not theater as purely a kneejerk reaction, given you know my bias against that sort of crap, but a lot of what he’s repeating are stories by this point. A lot of what circulates in the smash scene is essentially stories, which is part of why following Smash is so interesting. Though not quite theater, because these are real games at some point, played with an intention to win, to clutch it out. They aren’t art like theater is, even the stories of them aren’t art, but yeah, they’re interesting.

What do you think of this analysis on super smash bros melee?

Someone linked it to me already. Not a fan. The writing is cringey and lacks perspective for why a lot of things in Melee work the way they do. That and the author is a little shit.

http://smashfts.com/2015/02/09/melee-is-an-accident-i-disagree/

Melee certainly wasn’t intended to be played the way it is, however a lot of what enables it to be played that way was on the implementations of the game designer. Dash dancing works in part because they wanted a smooth transition from a standing animation to a dashing animation, and wanted some leniency on the dash direction before players would do the fancy long turnaround animation from being committed to the full run.

Smash Direction influence is hella technical, and hasn’t been removed until Smash 4 practically nerfed it out of existence. The idea that the C-stick should buffer automatic SDI and out prioritize the control stick for the privilege? That the crouch state should subtract some knockback? Perfect shields that reflect projectiles? Variable density light shields? There is a lot of complex shit going on in melee that was entirely the decision of the developers. They included a crazy walljump mechanic in the vein of super metroid that is difficult to input and Young Link’s target test is reliant on. They decided Fox and Falco’s shines should be capable of being jumped out of. They decided that the C-stick should buffer all your shield options, including jump. A friend told me an easy way to get frameperfect wavedash out of shield, by buffering jump on the C-stick when you’re in shield stun.

They decided that throws should have weight independent knockback, but vary the length of the throw animation based on the weight of the character so weight determines frame advantage. They decided to make landing animations shorter if you land at the top of your jump arc, and to allow you to drop through platforms when your shield is up if you press within the right range, and make it faster than normal platform drops too.

I had that one topic idea a while back that great games make for great glitches, and Melee is a shining example of that. If you compare to say PlayStation All-Stars, you can see the smash bros developers put a ludicrous amount of detail into how every system functions, in such a way that enables a wide range of possibilities. This is why people are finding out new possibilities this late into the game, like Z-perfect shield, or Wavedash forward into PC drop (PC drop is walking forwards then turning around so the momentum will slide you off the ledge for a grab), or actually bringing yoshi’s light shield and parry into use. It’s why Armada could bring out an underpowered character like young link and beat hungrybox’s fox with it. Plup is still pioneering the reaction tech chase with Sheik right now (not that it wasn’t done before, just not as well).

Calling it purely an accident is underselling the game.

Favorite Game Stories

Celia Wagar2 Comments

What are your favourite game stories or lore? (I mean, purely from a narrative/thematic pov, regardless of the gameplay.)

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, StarCraft, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Thief, and MGS3.

Dark Souls and Bloodborne both have a great storytelling style in my opinion, allowing a story to be told without creating interruptions, and creating narratives through fragmented information. I think these two did the job a bit better than the other souls games. It’s interesting when you finally get all the parts of the puzzle and piece together what the fuck is going on.

StarCraft has nice lore sitting behind everything in the manual, the characters are well written, well voiced, and have consistent motivations generally.

Legacy of Kain (at least, the soul reaver series), has really amazing writing, tackles some philosophy, and gets a bit mindfucky with all the travel and talk of destiny, presenting time travel and destiny in a rather unique way. The voice acting is also top notch and really sells the manner of speech for the characters.

Thief has nice characterization of Garrett and the various guards, has clever overheard conversations as well as notes and cutscenes. Some of the background information like Garrett’s eye being made by Karras is also nice. The city and missions themselves are also constructed nicely to deliver information about the world of Thief, which is rather cool.

MGS3, the theme of it and a lot of the writing I find to be really powerful, as well as the more subtle ways in which the theme and a lot of the characters’ motivations are made clear through their actions. The concept behind it is simple, but the execution makes it really strong in my opinion.

Ultimate Technique in Ninja Gaiden

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of Ultimate Techniques being unlimited or ‘free’ in NG? I don’t think the move breaks the game or is an easy mode button in any way, unlike the eMachos who claim to have cleared NGB/2 with their hands tied and in their sleeps using UTs (and ID+FS), but it certainly leads to bad habits. Like instead of mastering the complete moveset, understanding your weapons, and learning fundamental action game skills like positioning and timing, during difficult sequences, it’s very easy to breakdown and resort to cheesing tactics like running away and separating foes, or abusing level design/geometry to camp and charge UTs while the enemies come around the corner. I don’t really think the move is broken in normal combat, but I do think they should have limited it in some way, like how DT is limited.

I am pretty much certain they intended the UTs to be broken in the way they are. I’m basically certain they wanted the most efficient way to kill enemies to be UT chaining, considering they implemented it the way they did. Honestly, playing the game that way is rather interesting, it tests a different skill set than normal, which is kind of interesting and tricky in its own right.

It probably should have been the gimmick of a specific weapon rather than a universal solution to the entire game, like an alternate play-mode rather than something you can pull out at any time. On the other hand, it is still interesting when used sparingly, like trying to find moments in fights when it can be snuck in efficiently, so maybe it would make sense to impose a cooldown on it, or have a meter dedicated to it.

I don’t think there’s a good way to totally fit it in without cutting some type of value out. It doesn’t have much if any synergy with the rest of the moves in the game. It kind of sits by itself, only really losing because other attacks are faster than it, but if you get 1 kill, you’re mostly good.

Also, honestly, mastering the complete moveset isn’t really necessary. Most of the combos don’t have significantly different functionality. You only really need to know the strongest combos for a few situations, like whether you can juggle the enemy or not, they have super armor or not, or hitconfirm versus going all-in.

I dunno what to think of it overall. The trouble is really that it’s divisive and it’s part of the balance and “character” of the UT to make it divisive. You either play the game the normal way, or go for a UT string. In the average campaign, most people are unlikely to go for all UTs, so it ends up fairly limited, but in the sections where it’s effective it feels really cheesy. I guess the problem is the option itself simply existing, which would mean limiting it wouldn’t actually do much good, only reduce the cheese factor rather than eliminate it. It certainly doesn’t feel in line with what the rest of the game was going for to say the least.

Disappointment in Critical Distance

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about critical distance?

I was away at a tournament when I received this. I made it out of pools, so that’s progress.

Critical Distance is ostensibly a project to compile all the good games writing. Reading through their compilations shows either a serious bias in subject matter on the part of those selecting entries to highlight, or that there simply is no one talking about gameplay.

I’ve spoken to a few people representing other perspectives on how games should be, and the frequent perspective I receive is that, “yeah, gameplay is interesting, there should totally be people out there covering that, but I’m more interested in the story,” or, “gameplay and the rest of the game are equally important,” but what I don’t see is a lot of people talking about gameplay, or game mechanics if you prefer.

I went to a game exhibition run by Kill Screen in Manhattan once actually, and unfortunately the only game I wanted to play there (Grow Home) was on a laptop that got locked and they didn’t know the password. Then when it was unlocked, the game didn’t work, rendered a bunch of black geometry. I talked with some people there, journalists for Kill Screen, and they told me the games they liked were only games that “explored what games could be”. Then I was informed there was someone on their site who actually did really in-depth reviews of games and was supposedly a hardcore gamer, having done their bayonetta 2 review. Ctrl + F “Dodge Offset”, one result, no description of what it is, how it works, or why it’s even a good thing. It was purely a namedrop for cred. I throw pretty much any review of a platinum game in the trash if it doesn’t mention dodge offset (related, it annoyed the crap out of me how there was no BM cancel offset in MGR). http://killscreendaily.com/articles/hell-bent-leather-bayonetta-2/ This is a bad writer. This is a bad writer that another bad writer told me he envies and aspires to be more like. For comparison, http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1siersp this has a lot more details about the actual game, where the prior is empty adulation with a billion flowery little phrases to say, “it’s cool”. http://www.twitch.tv/europeanspeedsterassembly/v/6695652?t=29h55m30s Almost immediately into this you hear how much of a joke Bayo 2 is in general.

To wrap up the tangent, here’s another example of good writing, as described by something that is itself good writing.
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/nov/22/why-i-taught-fighting-games-most-famous-moment-my-college-composition-class/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130707225150/http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-unleashed-capcoms-seth-killian-explains-the-most-famous-minute

Critical distance makes me frustrated because it’s implicitly saying that nobody has anything to discuss about gameplay. They can discuss the writing, the use of sexuality, the way a mechanic might contextualize part of the world, the demographics of players, patents, diatribes about “pure fun”, but almost never mechanics.

Do they assume this mechanical stuff goes without saying? That people never make mistakes on it? Is it just that their blog ring is entirely uninterested with it and they don’t have access to the people commenting on how to put together mechanical game systems? Or is it that there is no one out there saying these things at all? They tend to regard formalism as a boogie-man, but from whence does the boogieman come? Is it a fear of the audience, the rabble?

If I asked them for a listing of articles about how to construct a system of game mechanics, or the shortcomings of mechanical systems from purely a design point of view, would they be able to supply me with anything?

Where did the interest in games go? Does it exist at all? Why is it so hard to cultivate it, even among people who pay lip service to the idea that “gameplay is the most important thing”?

So I go to Critical Distance, see a ton of articles that I really wish I had an alternative to reading on a long train ride or car trip, and feel disappointed.
Then I guess I feel disappointed in myself for not doing a better job producing my own content.

Mario Galaxy relative to Sunshine/64

Celia WagarLeave a comment

You find galaxy’s design limited? I mean it could use a 64 movement system to allow for more variety of ways to traverse something and let the player control pacing via speed, but I think they did great for what it was. Then again you probably don’t think Galaxy is a bad or even mediocre game anyway. What your own rating (between 1 and 5) of it would be, also you shouldn’t appeal to me, I’d prefer you’d be honest.

Yeah, the levels are more straightforward with more of a defined sequence. The level designs allow you to mess around with them in less ways and your moveset is more limited in general. A lot more of it revolves around gimmicks than solid platforming, like blasting off from the stars or pulling yourself in bubble sections. The new spin move is cool, but the means of using it is more awkward. A lot of the game revolves around collecting star bits, and I’m not a fan of collectathon type mechanics in general (then you get the purple coin levels). Shooting at the screen is generally not really integrated into standard play, and the need to shake the wiimote to spin makes it so you can’t do both at the same time (not that you’re required to). Many of the levels are small and flat and can frequently revolve around enemy fighting more than platforming which is what the game is strongest at. The focus of the game on planets with their own gravitational fields lends to the flatness of the level design, because a rounded planet ends up functionally as a flat planet, and the wonkiness of the camera that might be invoked with more interesting architecture leads to them making more flat planets. Even some of the more interestingly shaped planets, like a ? shaped one, end up being effectively flat because of this.

I feel like in comparison, Mario Sunshine had more going on with its levels, especially the secret levels, even if the main world levels were frequently a clusterfuck. The rotating puzzle blocks in the secret levels were a genius piece of level design if you ask me. There was a lot you could do with Fludd, even if the hover nozzle was slow and kind of dull. You can even beat the entire game without the hover nozzle. And you can slide on water, shotgun spray, spray while moving. Plus the turbo+rocket nozzles were great. And the game added the 360 spin jump, which you can even do loosely to not get the full spin, but to go higher/further without the same physics as the spin jump, effectively replacing the long jump, though not entirely. It has the best walljump physics too if you ask me.
64 has the best level design of the lot, and a strong platforming moveset overall, with great Z-action on most maps, or at least obfuscated paths forward with a ton of different ways to get around things, and almost never only one path forwards, which I think helps it win by itself.

You get things like mario 64 free running, which can be really varied and technical. Mario Sunshine freerunning is alright, and mario galaxy freerunning is nonexistent, and would probably be a joke. It doesn’t have the levels/moveset for it.

I just see Galaxy and 3D world as weaker games, with the spin attack as a solid addition to games that don’t really demand it, though hey it’s cool that it resets on walljump I guess.

Mario 64, 5/5 (basically perfect)
Sunshine, 4.5/5 (very good, bit shy of greatness for various reasons)
Galaxy, 3/5 (average, doesn’t stand out much to me)

On 3d Mario: http://pastebin.com/BpyS7Y8X

Okay, I’m probably sending mixed messages here.

My primary inspiration here is the secret levels in Mario Sunshine. These are like a playground, generally don’t have Fludd, and the game has enough movement options that there are a lot of ways to deal with each obstacle.

I don’t like the way mario 64 levels and the main levels of mario sunshine are filled with so much unnecessary stuff. I don’t like the 100 coin challenges. I don’t like the scavenging for the stars. I like the Secrets because they’re direct and to the point, but still open enough to allow different approaches. I’d like them more if they had just a bit more leeway, a few more moving parts, bits of geometry.

Mario Galaxy by contrast has fewer movement mechanics and more constrained levels. It’s true that they’re straightforward, but they’re so much so that they kind of force you to rotely follow sequence. Also yeah they’re too slow.

Mario 64 has a lot of little level design elements that are really cool for speedrunning, wrapped up in a cacophany of a level. It would be cool if those could be focused into a more straightforward course, like the bowser levels, or of course mario sunshine secrets.

I’d like to find the middleground between these two extremes of straightforward + constrained and clusterfuck + freedom.

Also 3d world far as I’m aware is really easy except for the green star scavenger hunts and has less movement options than even galaxy.

How would you expand on fludd for a future mario game?

Change the hover nozzle to not be so damn slow or remove it completely.

Add rain sections where you have infinite water.

Maybe let you switch between all the functions at any time.

More traditional dual analog third person shooter controls for fludd starting from whenever the button is pressed. If the console allows light presses, then keep the existing light press function in.

Add in more combination moves, fludd + another move. Like maybe if you dive right when you do a rocket boost, you can do a rocket dive.

Apart from that, I got nothing.

High Execution in Fighting Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Should fighting games have high executions?

Not the best worded question.

The simplest answer I can give is, yes, some things should be hard to do, other things shouldn’t be, these should ideally be in some way proportional to their role. If it’s a central character defining option, it should be more straightforward probably, as straightforward as can be managed with the control scheme. Like Eddie/Zato’s Shadow, there’s no way you could really make that simpler execution-wise without changing how the character functions.

That new game Rising Thunder is probably the elephant in the room here. I am in the alpha, and the design of the game does limit it. It has a 6 button layout, with 3 normals and 3 specials, meaning that you can’t get different versions of the specials by pressing different buttons, and many characters don’t have a normal anti-air (or in dauntless’ case, a sweep). It is a fun game, there’s no apparent flaws or mistakes in the character or system designs, and the characters are fairly unique. However by the nature of the way the game is designed, there’s just less moves and less way to combine the moves, because to get a more flexible system that allows for more differentiation between moves, you need to use command motions. It also leads to this effect where every character sort of feels like a charge character in that performing anti-airs or other hard punishes is only one button, so you can do it on reaction rather than buffering the input on anticipation. Crow has different versions of his flaming ring special (close, medium, far), but that’s about it. To get KoF hops, you have to add an execution barrier. To get high/low blocking, you’re adding something of an execution barrier. Sometimes you need execution-heavy things to implement a feature at all, or to differentiate between different functions of a single button.

Do games really need 1 frame links? Not really. If you have like, one 1 frame link somewhere or another in a place where it has a big reward for success, but isn’t integral to the character’s function, then go ahead. Hell, a lot of people didn’t really like the 3 frame FRCs in Guilty Gear AC+R, including Mike Z for one, because a lot of them came off as integral for how given characters play and it was a pain to have to work so hard for options that you should basically always be doing. Now I can gunflame pressure with Sol, which should be a fairly standard and easy thing to do (though that wasn’t one of the harder FRCs in AC).

Fighting games need some things to be high execution in order to balance them, like reversals, like 360s, like 720s, and those things attract people, in particular the 360s and 720s because they make the moves intrinsically work in this different way, where you need to buffer them with other movements, or be wary of jumping in the process of executing them. Reversals, you want those to be a somewhat risky proposition rather than something easy that people always have to respect, so that (unrelated: it feels soooo great to get a reversal super in Guilty Gear considering the input, HCB F + HS, and it’s a 1 frame window).

Something like shield dropping in Smash Bros, or moonwalking are probably harder than they reasonably need to be, but the multishine on fox and falco (frame perfect each time) are exactly as hard as they need to be. Moonwalking and shield dropping don’t provide very significant benefits and are best when players can do them consistently on demand. Shield dropping in particular is very difficult to do quickly, when it’s mostly useful for how quick it can be performed versus releasing shield and dropping.

Extra Credits on Fighting Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_xG1Yg_QoM
Would you mind mocking this SPECIFIC extra credits video?

Sure, I’d love to.

Despite their praise of fighting games, Extra Credits have absolutely no goddamn idea how fighting games work, and as usual, they’ve done no research, no thinking, no introspection on this matter.

Probably my favorite highlight in this video is the part where they suggest slowing down time, and presenting in big flashing letters, REVERSAL OPPORTUNITY, when neither of the two characters is knocked down or in hitstun. The fact that they don’t actually know what a reversal is (or that they think it’s a counterhit), is absolutely pathetic. They reinforce this earlier in the video by showing a small woman hitting a big man when he attacks her after mentioning a mode where enemies can only be harmed with reversals.

They’re right on one thing, fighting games do need a tutorial mode and they need it more than a single player mode. They’re wrong about pretty much every other element of how to design a tutorial for them, and they very clearly didn’t consult any existing tutorial for fighting games whether online or ingame. Their proposals don’t teach players the rules of combos, they don’t teach players what basic normals are even good for.

Beyond that, locking off player’s moves until they unlock them is a TERRIBLE way to teach players. It’s one thing to have a specific section of a tutorial where some moves are emphasized by locking the others off, but requiring the player to grind to unlock moves means players will get used to fighting with incomplete versions of their characters, and develop bad habits. Most characters have sets of moves that work together or fill in for specific situations. If you play a fireball/anti-air character, but have the anti-air locked off, then you won’t learn to play correctly.
Not to mention, most fighting games don’t have an RPG-like system, and extrinsic rewards a shit.

Slow motion is bad, because players should be learning what things they can react to and cannot react to in what situations. Rewind is pointless and less effective than focused training. Also dumb to tell players directly the correct option.
Maj made a better proposal for a fighting game tutorial mode a long time ago on his website here: http://sonichurricane.com/?p=5849 Not to mention the skullgirls tutorials do a decent job of teaching you how to do all your characters’ moves, and what they’re useful for, as well as most of the systems across the board and things like mixups and blockstring pressure.

Something I’d personally add to Maj’s tutorial is having a dummy that straight up plays the basic fireball game with you, throws lots of fireballs, and anti-airs if you jump in when he’s not vulnerable. But I’d have the dummy get like a glint or jab first before throwing a fireball, so players can get a clue of when the dummy is about to do it, and get an idea of what timing they need to use in order to jump fireballs safely, simulate reading the fireball. This type of visual language can help signal other reads too in that mode.

The Guilty Gear missions mode is cool too, for having missions where you can only damage with combos over 2 hits, or where only supers deal damage, or where you’re not allowed to jump or use special moves. Especially the jump one, because the most frequent mistake beginners make is jumping forward.

In general the tutorials shouldn’t be these generic, they should be focusing in more on the actual skills required by the genre. A lot of them should have dummies that spam the same few moves so that players can get experience in breaking up common patterns (like fireball spam, blockstring pressure, spamming literally nothing but sweeps or low light kicks.) Teaching players the combo rules common to the genre. Teaching players directly how to do special move inputs by displaying them on the screen as people do them, and the framebuffer timer for the special as well, and instructions for what they did wrong when they do it. Specials are hard for a lot of beginners, and having a tool that can show them exactly what is going on inside the engine as they input movements would be extremely helpful. Hell, someone should make a tool like that on PC, that displays the player’s inputs as they do them, what move the current inputs are read as, and how long before the movement expires from the buffer.

This is just another case of EC not thinking ANYTHING through. Their recent episode on Speedruns is equally bad, I’m tempted to write something on that and post it to their forums.

The 10/10 game rating scale

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Do you believe that we could ever accurately use a numbering system for rating games? I can’t really say that I’ve ever played a perfect game or even near perfect, so I don’t believe any game is deserving of 10/10

The issue I’ve observed with rating things out of 10 is you feel like giving things at least a 6, because hey, they put effort in, it’s “above average,” “It’s not a BAD game, just really boring”. That’s the sense I get from these things. We tend to rate on a logarithmic scale, rather than a linear scale. I think rating out of 5 keeps us a bit more honest with ourselves if we remember what the numbers stand for, and keep our standards in mind. 1 and 2 are for games we dislike, 3 for games which don’t lean strongly towards good or bad, 4 and 5 for games we like.

This might sound a bit silly, but I like to rate out of 5 first, then out of 10, with the out of 10 rating expressing whether a game should fall on the upper or lower value for the out of 5 number. Rating out of 5 keeps me honest, rating out of 10 helps me differentiate a bit closer. There are cases where I feel like two games with the same number should be a bit above or a bit below one another, but I don’t worry over it too much.

That and I think it’s fine to hand a 5/5 or 10/10 to a game with flaws. Every game is going to have flaws of some kind, we shouldn’t be scoring out of “literally not a game at all” to “perfect”. Sure you might say, “well what if there’s some game that’s 10/10, then a sequel is released that’s literally better in every way” and I’m gonna ask how often does that really happen? Give them both 10/10 and check your cognitive dissonance at the door. Games aren’t a medium where standards have gone up over time, and it doesn’t look like it’s moving to become one either.

Just ask, is it good? Is it really good? Is it in the upper echelon of really good games? Then give it a 10 and don’t worry about whether it’s perfect or not. You’re not gonna hand 10s out for very many games anyway and a ton of really popular games deserve worse than a 5.