tempest in a teacup

For a while now, I’ve suspected something wasn’t quite right with the look of King of Fighters XII. Sure, I’ve ranted on and on about how the system they’ve put in place is less interesting to me than those of the other three most recent 2D KOF games, but what I’m talking about today is the actual look of the game – namely the sprites.

If you put screenshots from the two major high definition 2D fighters – BlazBlue and KOF XII – next to each other, one thing immediately becomes clear. The KOFXII sprites look incredibly pixelated compared to their BlazBlue brethren. If you don’t believe me, here are a couple of shots that you can tab between in your browser and verify for yourself:

BlazBlue shot

KOF XII shot

This was explained away in an earlier interview as SNKP preferring the ‘dot art’ look for their sprites. That didn’t really make sense to me, though – it’s possible to get the ‘KOF’ look for a high-resolution sprite without it looking incredibly pixelated. For instance, look at Akatsuki Blitzkampf, a game that runs at 640×480. At their native resolution, the sprites look sharp and don’t have the same problem KOF XII’s do.

My suspicions were only multiplied when I found out that the home port would have a filter option for the sprites. Why on earth would you need to apply a filter to sprites that were designed to be displayed at 720p? Sure, games like Guilty Gear XX have had soft filter options for whatever reason but they didn’t really need them.

As it turns out, I really should have just applied Occam’s razor and come to the obvious conclusion – the sprites were never drawn to be displayed at 720p to begin with.

SNKP launched a new site today lauding the awesomeness of the dot art approach they’re taking with KOF XII. One of the features is a dot art gallery that lets you see the new sprites in action. This gallery lets you view the sprites at 100%, 200% and 400% zoom.

This is the Kyo sprite on the website displayed at 100% zoom:

Compare that to the Kyo sprite that we can see in the screenshot I linked above – it’s a lot smaller. In fact, the in-game sprite seems to line up more or less with the website sprite displayed at 200% zoom. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that the KOF XII sprites are in no way drawn at HD resolution (in this case 720p).

You might think this isn’t a really big deal to be making a fuss about, but honestly, from playing games like KOF XI, NeoGeo Battle Coliseum and Melty Blood that use low-res sprites on high-res backgrounds, the difference is honestly very visible and very jarring. If they weren’t going to draw these sprites with HD resolutions in mind, they should have just gone with a 480p game and made that look awesome.

Heck, that way they could probably have put it on a cheaper board, and might have even been able to put in all the stuff they had to cut. Like all the interesting mechanics and half the roster.

But for now, this is all I want to say.

Damn you Valve and your crappy weapon unlock system!

I’ve put in maybe 3-4 hours of game time a night for the last four nights, and all I have to show for it are two Spy items that I got in quick succession on Thursday night (one of which has since become completely useless thanks to a bug fix).

I didn’t think it was possible to make the weapon acquisition process even worse, but somehow, they found a way. What is so wrong about just giving everyone the new items and letting them run off and play with them?

Bah.

This image is really the only way to sum up the situation. And yes, there are tons of achievement_idle servers out there, with players doing nothing but standing around while AFK.

Been a while since I wrote anything here…maybe that’s a good thing.

Anyway, if you play TF2 and don’t live under a rock then you probably know that the next big update hits on Thursday. The twist this time is that it’s a double update – both the Sniper and the Spy are getting new items and achievements. Since I’ve started playing Sniper recently (rather terribly I might add) and occasionally dabble in playing Spy this is good news for me.

On a related note, go watch Meet the Spy. It’s funny.

They’ve revealed two Sniper and three Spy weapons so far, as well as a new game mode, so here are some thoughts.

The Huntsman

A bow and arrow – I was hoping for something like a crossbow (the bow from Half-Life and Half-Life 2 is probably my third favourite weapon after the magnum and the shotgun) but this’ll do. It has a faster recharge time between shots and still crits on headshots, and will apparently pin people to walls if you kill them with it. No real complaints…it seems to fill the niche of people who want to headshot without having to scope (with the drawback that you need to be a lot closer to your target).

The Razorback

And here we have the other side of the coin. I find it hard to believe that any decent Sniper will ever equip this. For one, the best Snipers hardly ever stand still – they go for quickscope shots, and the move around a lot so that the enemy doesn’t know where they are. On top of that if Spies know that a Sniper can’t be backstabbed they’ll just whip out their revolver. 3 shots = dead Sniper.

The Dead Ringer

I think the fact that this triggers when the Spy receives a non-lethal hit will limit its usefulness. It seems to me that the ability to trigger the ability on demand like in Fortress Forever might make it more useful. I can only see this being a crutch for crappy Spies who get found out and don’t know how to use the revolver in conjunction with their cloak to escape.

The Cloak and Dagger

This, I’m a bit more enthusiastic about, as it allows Spies to lurk pretty much anywhere undetected without being seen, at the cost of not being able to refill their cloak with metal boxes. I imagine it might even let the Spy lurk behind enemy lines for extended periods, allowing him to let his team know about enemy movements. Not too many points in that, but it’s a team game, isn’t it?

The Ambassador

I had to do a double-take when I saw the name of this weapon, since given my background this is what comes to mind when I think ‘ambassador.’ That said, I’m not sure what they mean by ‘the accuracy of a sniper rifle.’ The regular revolver is already one of the most accurate weapons in the game; do they mean that this new gun will be able to headshot people? If that’s the case I can see this being a compelling upgrade.

Payload Race

I’m not too happy about this mode – Payload is a slow chokepoint-infested grindfest as it is, and all this is going to do is multiply that by two. On top of that, two Arena maps? Does anyone really play Arena? I mean, I do from time to time but the fact that you have only one life per round makes the existence of crits in this mode quite inexcusable.

In summary, the upcoming update looks like it’ll be about equal parts ‘awesome’ and ‘failure.’ Which, I have to admit, is a step up from the Scout update…

They have yet to show off the last Sniper and Spy unlocks, as well as that nonsense about personalized items…I guess we’ll hear about those tomorrow and Thursday. And let’s not forget that Valve likes sneaking other unrelated changes into their class update packs – we might see some other potentially interesting changes.

Well, this came out of nowhere.

And it was starting to look like they would actually finish the game after all this time, too!

I’m not a huge fan of 3D Realms or Duke Nukem, but they did publish a lot of the games I played when I was a kid (not the least of which was Wolfenstein 3-D, aka the great-grandfather of all first-person shooters) so they deserve my respect for that, if nothing else.

That said, you have to admit that something like this was bound to happen given that they’d been working on the same game for 13 years, with the entire process apparently being self-funded. I mean, Half-Life and its sequels were both bankrolled by Gabe Newell and yet those two games’ development cycles combined were still shorter than DNF’s.

Right now I’m wondering if some other studio will buy the DNF assets and finish the game.

Today’s TF2 blog update is pretty funny, for all the wrong reasons.

The first was whether or not you understand what killed you. If you don’t know what killed you, that death is failing in providing you the feedback it’s supposed to, and you won’t be able to figure out what you could have done differently. Unsurprisingly, we saw that these deaths were highly aggravating to players, and in sufficient number caused new players to stop playing entirely. Trying to reduce the number of these deaths in TF2 was done through a variety of changes. It was one of the reasons why we chose to remove the hand-held grenades that each class had in TFC, which were one of the primary causes of these deaths. It was one of several goals that led to the creation of the freezecam.

…but they added critical hits.

The second was whether you felt you were actually engaged with the person who killed you. Dying to someone you weren’t engaged with, especially when you were already engaged with someone else, was aggravating. Even worse was dying to someone who you couldn’t have engaged with, even if you chose to. In that case, you’re very unlikely to believe you could have done anything differently to survive.

…but they added the Sandman.

Ah well.

Why another post about TF2 oddities? Well, my total playtime as Soldier finally overtook my playtime as Pyro, making the Soldier my most-played class. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing Soldier a lot more since he had a higher skill ceiling, and I’m more or less at the point where I can play the Soldier decently in public games and score reasonably high on the scoreboard. Unfortunately this has also meant that deaths due to crits have become about 100x more annoying as a result. It’s so goddamn annoying to have a decent streak as Soldier ended by some dumbass Engineer’s crit wrench because his sentry managed to kill some dipshit Spy a few minutes earlier. Or to have a Soldier that I successfully juggled one-shot me with a crit shotgun blast that wouldn’t have killed me otherwise.

And don’t get me started on Soldier and Demoman crits, even though I get my fair share of those. Ugh.

Why are there so few nocrit servers out there :(