tempest in a teacup

Looks like King of Fighters XIII is en route.

(logo yoinked from Dengeki Online)

To be clear, I didn’t like KOF XII at all. I did pay $60 for the game, but in retrospect, my money would have probably been better spent on something else. And no, my complaints have little to do with the lacklustre console port – they all centre around what was done to the game system itself. General dumbing down, removal of anything that might be potential interesting and highly stripped-down movelists that made even my usual go-to KOF characters boring as hell to play. Oh yeah, and the stuff about the sprites being upscaled didn’t really help either.

To be honest, the fact that everyone’s complaint about the game seems to be ‘the game plays fine, but the port sucks’ just astounds me. I have to conclude that these people never really played the games that came before XII (the great KOF XI and KOF’98 Ultimate Match) and what came after it (the equally great KOF2002 Unlimited Match). I regard all of those games as superior to KOF XII in every way, simply because their systems were far more interesting. They may not have fancy fake-HD sprites with tons of frames, but they make up for it by actually being fun to play. XI took 2003’s incomplete tag system, fleshed it out and made it awesome; ‘98UM added new twists to a classic formula without breaking it (I actually have a reason to try and use the Extra mode meter and dodging now) and 2002UM addressed my only problems with the original game (crappy aesthetics and stripped-down movelists) while making enough system tweaks to be interesting.

Out of the new stuff KOF XII added, I only regard the Guard Attack and guard crush CDs as interesting, and the latter already made an appearance in KOF NeoWave (albeit in a slightly different form). Critical counters and deadlocks are too rare and too difficult to get to be of any consequence, and the changes they made to how close and far attacks work is just off-putting. Why the hell would I want Shen Woo’s close C from a full character length away?

Anyway, what does all of this have to do with KOF XIII?

Simply put, I’m not super confident about it. Based on a comment from Falcoon back in 2006 (shortly after XI’s arcade release), they worked on KOF XII for 3 1/2 years before releasing it, and the end result of that was a game that felt stripped down in every single way. Given also that the first build of the game at AOU 2009 didn’t even have super meters and most of the subsystems implemented, I’d say that the bulk of the time was spent on drawing those fancy new sprites. They’ve had a year to work on the game since then, but given that these sprites take so long to draw (SNKP themselves said it’s 16 months per character in terms of man-hours), I’m not expecting a major shakeup in the game system. Maybe everyone gets a new move or two, and we get 2-3 new characters at most.

Hey, maybe they’ll add super cancels! Or a multiple-level power meter! That’d truly be revolutionary.

…

So yeah. I’m keeping an eye on it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nice logo though.

I bought 4GB (2×2GB) of RAM during Amazon’s pre-Black Friday sales last week. I got it on Monday and installed it, and things ran smoothly…until I popped into Left 4 Dead today and my computer turned itself off. Twice.

One quick run of memtest86 later, and the result was clear – one of the sticks was bad. In fact, ONE BIT on that stick was bad. It would have passed the complete test suite had it not been for the random number test where that bit failed to get flipped correctly.

The aggravating part is that this happened to me one year ago with the RAM I originally bought to build this machine. The same exact problem – one bad stick of RAM.

On top of that, my five-year old Creative speakers finally gave up the ghost this week, so it looks like I’ll be needing a new set. I’m not into 5.1 or 7.1 setups that much (I used to have a 4.1 setup way back in 1999 but I kept tripping over the rear satellites), so I’ll probably pick up a cheap 2.1 set. There’s a Logitech set on Amazon going for $30 that’s gotten some good reviews.

Fortunately we have a pretty good returns service, so I’ve already asked for a replacement, and will be shipping this dud RAM back to Amazon for a refund. I hope they don’t mind that I snipped off the bar code to submit for my mail-in-rebate, though…

I’ll be heading to Vancouver next week for what will hopefully be a brief trip to get my US work visa stamped. And before you ask, yes, I have to leave the US in order to get my visa stamped. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

I’ve heard horror stories of people who get stuck for weeks waiting for their passport to be returned to them…I have my fingers crossed that my interview goes smoothly.

This has pretty much been the only thing on my mind for the last month or so.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. Playing TF2 every night with Perfect Stranger and his friends, going to work as usual and otherwise pretending that my continued legal status in this country is not down to the decision of one guy in a building in Vancouver.

So I read this story on Slashdot this morning and reacted the same way any sane techie would: “My god, AVG is a pile of crap. I need to get it off my computer now!” So I did.

Only to have it, with its dying breath, somehow fuck up my Windows registry, preventing Windows from starting at all, except in Safe Mode.

I booted into Safe Mode and used System Restore to bring my computer back to the last point where I could guarantee that it was working. Unfortunately, System Restore also apparently rolls back installed programs. Meaning the copy of Diablo II and its expansion set that I had downloaded and installed from Blizzard’s online store are now gone.

Guess I won’t be playing any TF2 tonight while I download both games all over again :|

For some reason my game directory (with my save data apparently intact, otherwise I really would have lost it) still exists, backed up under another name, but the .exe files and Start Menu entries are nowhere to be found.

I guess AVG wanted to leave me something to remember it by. -_-

Monday was a repeat performance of Friday’s “awesomeness” at work (only worse), and I got home just in time for a wind storm to knock out all power for 5 hours.

So yeah, I was a little tied up.

That new 3G iPhone looks awesome, though.

Mine was pretty terrible.

I think I’ll go blow up some random douchebags in Team Fortress 2 to vent.

I was hoping that I could write about something unrelated to gaming today…it’s not like I’m lacking for topics in any way.

But then EA goes and pulls a stunt like this with two of the biggest upcoming PC releases; games which I had been very much looking forward to.

I guess the appearance of security (and mind you, it is only for appearances – the probability that this copy protection will be broken by an enterprising hacker is pretty much 100%) is far more important than customer goodwill.

(BTW, anyone who suggest I should buy a 360 to play Mass Effect can go die in a fire)

You have been warned. :P

Kotaku covered an interesting interview on Gamasutra with CD Projekt’s VP of PR and marketing. For those not in the know, CD Projekt developed The Witcher, one of the standout PC games of last year. Click here to read the interview.

All in all he pretty much chimes in with what Stardock’s CEO mentioned in that interview I linked a while back (although honestly I think the whole “PC Gaming Alliance” thing is basically hot air until real initiatives to popularise PC gaming are proposed). He does raise one point which from my experience is pretty much correct, though:

As time goes on, sites that don’t offer any unique perspective will probably watch their readership dwindle. There are a lot of great sites out there that are worth visiting just for the quality of writing; so while they might not provide a lot of in-depth editorials, it’s just entertaining to read their takes on the day’s news. As someone who has predominantly worked on PC games in recent years, I have a different gripe: most of the major blogs just don’t really cover the platform very much.

This is pretty much spot on, I think. My experience with the major gaming blogs has been that PC gaming news, be it related to games or new hardware, doesn’t really show up that much outside of the occasional small piece on PC games sales charts (always accompanied by those “lol PC gaming is dying” comments that I loathe so much). I cannot give credit to any of the major gaming news websites for discovering gems like Sins of a Solar Empire (I discovered it from a review I read on technology enthusiast site Ars Technica), or The Witcher for that matter (I have Penny-Arcade to thank for that one).

I know the audience for PC gaming is relatively small compared to the combined market for consoles, but why can’t my platform of choice be treated with equal regard as the others? It’s not as if the major sites shirked PSP titles when the platform was doing poorly.

Another rhetorical question, I suppose.

(On a side note, a handy site I discovered from that Gamasutra article was Rock, Paper, Shotgun – a blog devoted to PC gaming. Needless to say, it has been added to my RSS feed aggregator)

I’m a PC gamer. Sure, I’ve owned consoles, and I still do, and I didn’t really have a gaming-ready PC for about 3 years, but it’s always been my platform of choice when it comes to playing the newest games.

That said, keeping up with PC news is getting harder and harder for me. This isn’t because it’s being drowned out or neglected (although one might be able to make such a case) but because almost every single article contains some throwaway line about how the PC gaming market is dying or already dead.

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