SoulsBorne

10 Years of Critpoints

Celia Wagar2 Comments

10 years ago (and 2 months, but who’s gonna nitpick that?) I started this blog, Critpoints. Before that, I had been writing for Gather Your Party, a modest blog that aimed to challenge the establishment of professional games journalism with a staff of volunteers, no advertising, some of the early crop of gaming video essayists, and the tagline, “Honest Gaming Journalism”. For a lot of fairly predictable reasons, we burned out and eventually the site shuttered.

While I wrote there, I authored a column called, “More Than Mashing”, which showcased and explained different advanced video game techniques and play. This translated into a few YouTube Videos, most of which have been lost to time. I later ended up reviving this concept as a Facebook page, which did great until I got bored of it, and ran out of clips. Currently, that idea survives as a channel in my Discord Server, and as the banner in this site’s layout.

Since GYP, I’ve been involved in a few different projects, including Design Oriented, a group of game designers who were interested in exploring a more mechanical angle to video game design. I ended up leaving due to differences in point of view, but one thing I held onto was the name, “Crit Points”, which I had suggested as a potential name for the DO project. I tried combining the different ideas of “critique,” “hit points,” and “critical hit” into one short name. The tagline under the website name is intended to reflect the triple entendre. (Similarities to ActionPts, someone I used to work with, and ContraPoints are coincidental (I didn’t hear about ContraPoints until 2018) ).

Critpoints became my new brand, and I started this blog in March 2015!

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Scrubs & Johns: A Defense Against Bad Sportsmanship

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Competition gets personal. Competition gets people riled up and sometimes people get angry. Being a gracious loser and a humble winner is tough. Being a bad sportsman is a common and easy pattern of behavior to fall into, and the Fighting Game and Smash communities have created different types of defenses against salty players who can’t hold their Ls.

No Johns

In the Smash Bros community, legend says there was once a guy named John who had an excuse for everything. “I didn’t sleep well last night!” “The CRT was tilted away from me!” “The sun was in my eyes!” “My dog ate my inputs!” Naturally this wasn’t very polite to his opponents.

This eponymous John was so infamous that eventually, when people would make excuses for why they lost, people started to say, “No Johns!” It became such a big meme that over a decade later, Reggie Fils-Aime would quote it in a promotion for Smash 4.

No Johns helped to promote an environment where, rather than complaining, people would focus on the game and improve. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a funny and certainly helpful.

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Favorite Nioh Bosses

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Surprised no one’s asked you that much of Nioh outside of general impressions, do you have any favorite Bosses?

In order of appearance, Hino-Enma, Tachibana, Yuki-Onna, Okatsu, Saika, and Oda Nobunaga. Plus of course the combination fights of Oda and Yuki, and Tachibana and Honda.

I think each of these bosses emphasized the core group of skills that the game was based on, had varied movesets that controlled different areas of space over different lengths of time, and were generally challenging. They’re some of the best bosses I’ve ever faced in a video game. Continue reading →