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.

And apparently Dimps is developing, which again tells me that no-one inside Sonic Team probably has any idea how to develop a 2D Sonic game in the classic style any more. Not that Dimps is infinitely more knowledgeable about this, mind you – the only game they’ve made that came anywhere near classic Sonic physics was the first Sonic Advance. And so far this game looks like it’s using Sonic Rush physics. For a demonstration of the silliness possible in that game, I refer you to this video:

At least the game looks rather nice.

People are claiming this is an alpha build, and that’s true. Maybe I’m getting agitated about nothing. But at the very least you’d think they’d have nailed the physics engine before starting to build full levels. ESPECIALLY since they’re claiming this is the revival of classic Sonic.

Yes, I’m aware that’s a generalization – not all developers do this. However, the developers of the games that I play most often seem to, and that’s not a good thing at all.

Gaming has become a lot more popular than it was when I was a kid – everyone and his mom seems to have an Xbox, whether to play the latest iteration of Madden or the FPS flavour of the month. The immediate effect of this is that pretty much every developer has been wondering how to appeal to this newly-expanded gaming demographic. The more insidious effect has been that they’ve started dumbing down their games to appeal to this demographic.

As an example, let’s take a look at Team Fortress 2. Simply put, they removed tons of stuff that had been present in TFC in order to simplify the game and make it appeal to Joe Gamer whose only experience with FPSes up to that point was probably Halo. This included several advanced techniques like concussion jumping, several weapons (super shotguns, railguns, nailguns, all the grenades), as well as weapon-specific ammunition and armor. Even some of the seemingly innocent changes caused the game to be dumbed down – for instance, the fact that friendly fire is off and you don’t collide with your teammates makes it easier to spy check and thus severely limits the Spy’s usefulness. And let’s not forget the obvious – critical hits and random damage spread.

The result is that the game sort of works if you’re playing it casually, but as soon as you try to get better at it you start to run into problems. High level play in TF2 involves class limits out of necessity and only uses a small set of maps since most of the game modes aren’t particularly suited to it. The end result is that TF2’s high level scene is markedly smaller than that of other games like CS and Quake.

Not enough? Let’s look at another recent Valve game, Left 4 Dead. This game was sold primarily as a co-op game, and in that respect it works decently, although the weapon balance is rather poor. However, Valve also saw fit to add a Versus mode, which was plainly not designed with high-level play in mind, much like TF2. The survivors are blatantly overpowered, with all sorts of abilities at their disposal – this is in addition to the poorly balanced weapons. A team of skilled survivors all wielding autoshotguns is pretty much guaranteed to make it to the safe room most of the time. This situation didn’t really improve in the sequel – while the infected did get buffed a little, the survivors gained several more abilities, such as defibrillators to bring dead teammates back to life, bile grenades to distract hordes, grenade launchers and high-damage melee weapons.

The effect of this on high level play is that various player-developed mods need to be used to achieve any semblance of balance at all. And these mods basically remove several item types from the game and reducing the influence of the AI director in order to achieve this goal.

Now you might ask, “but SonicTempest, aren’t games supposed to be fun? Why are you treating them like SERIOUS BUSINESS?” To which I would reply: “What do you mean by fun?” What someone finds fun isn’t going to be fun for everyone else. Some people have fun messing around in 32-player low-gravity mario_kart servers in TF2, whereas others have fun learning the ins and outs of a game and mastering its nuances of its ruleset. Note also that someone’s perception of fun changes over time – at one point I enjoyed playing Pyro on 32-player instaspawn Dustbowl as much as any casual player out there. However, after 300 or so hours of playtime, about half of which have been spent playing Soldier almost exclusively and trying to learn the class as best as I can, my definition of fun has changed, based on the simple fact that my skill level has increased. This change has also led me to realise that playing TF2 in pubs is becoming less and less fun for me, simply because of all the things built into this game that hinder high level play.

The conclusion, therefore, is that developers need to design their games with high level play in mind first and foremost for them to remain interesting. Most people’s response to this approach is that it ‘alienates new players’ – which is a premise with which I disagree quite strongly. Look at games like Starcraft and Quake. These games have very high skill ceilings which is the main reason their high level play scenes continue to thrive even today (keep in mind that these games came out ten years ago!) Yet is either game any less fun at low levels of play? I played Quake and Quake III Arena deathmatch back when the games were new, and I was by no means a good player, yet I still had fun with both games. Similarly, I was terrible at Starcraft, but this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of my weekly matches with my high school friends one bit. And these games are still great fun to play, even today – I played Starcraft with my fellow interns while I was in India back in 2006, and even though I still sucked at it, it was every bit as entertaining as it was back in 1998.

Will I be able to say the same about TF2 or L4D ten years from now? I doubt it.

PS: I spent most of this post talking about FPSes, but this is something that’s becoming prevalent across all genres. A little game called “King of Fighters XII” comes to mind…and some might even say that Street Fighter IV falls into this category.

(Also I’m such a Sonic nerd that I noticed that they used the sprite from the beta version of Sonic 2, hurhur)

More details here. No boost meter anywhere in sight, although I must wonder why they left the homing attack in. It was a necessity for the 3D games, but in the 2D ones? Not so much, except in Sonic Rush and its sequel where it made the game a little too easy.

I wonder who’s developing it…the trailer says Sonic Team, but it’s entirely possible that they’ve subcontracted it to Dimps again, much like how Capcom went to Inti Creates for Megaman 9 and 10.

I have to admit, that enemy concept art reminds me way too much of old-school enemy concept art. Having enemies with actual weak points that you can’t just hit anywhere will be most welcome.

That said, I’m not going to say anything substantive until I see some footage of this thing in action. I’ll just reiterate what I mentioned in my earlier blog entry on the subject – more Sonic CD/S3&K, less Sonic Rush, please.

Although I wouldn’t mind if they had Hideki Naganuma do the music again…not at all.

• Mirror’s Edge (already beaten – they weren’t kidding when they said this was a short game)
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
• Prince of Persia (the new one)
• Crysis Maximum Edition
• Torchlight
• Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition

Backlog doubled, just like that :(

In any case, I’ve put a little time into Crysis, Torchlight and PoP Warrior Within. Crysis is pretty awesome so far – not only does it look nice, but there’s a fair amount of open-endedness in how you can approach enemy encounters. You can run in guns blazing, or you can choose to play Solid Snake and pick off enemies one-by-one. And of course with either approach there are different ways to go about it as well. So far I’m favouring a stealthy approach since it’s just a lot more fun.

I still don’t like PoP Warrior Within’s darker aesthetic, but the improvements to the combat system are appreciated. I wish they hadn’t added the ability to do the platforming tricks in battle, though; while trying to roll out of the way of one of the enemies the Prince decided that he needed to take a jump off a cliff instead. Bleh.

Mirror’s Edge was short, but it was pretty good. That said the combat is not the strong point of the game – I had the most fun when I was running around and actively trying to avoid combat. On top of that the time trial stages are pretty much exactly what I expected them to be – exercises in maintaining momentum and finding the best route to hit all the checkpoints – very old-school Sonic.

Torchlight is basically a single-player Diablo II clone with some elements from Diablo I chucked in – namely spell scrolls/books. I’m playing a Vanquisher on Hard, and it’s fairly entertaining in short bursts. Without online I can’t see myself playing this for extended periods of time, though.

Anywho, on to something a bit more topical.

I’ve been playing a fair bit of TF2 since the new patch hit, mainly because my primary class (Soldier) got updated. I’m kind of at a loss when it comes to understanding how Valve designs their updates – on the one hand the Soldier got a set of very useful, if a little buggy, items that added new ways of playing the class, but on the other hand the Demoman got completely shafted with a new sticky launcher that limits his offensive potential, and a pair of melee items that encourage them to run around and engage in melee clusterfuckery (and subsequently get gunned down by Scouts, shotgun-wielding Soldiers and Heavies).

I suppose the Demoman is already good enough that he doesn’t need any new weapons, but at the very least it means I have to deal with less sticky spam as idiot Demoman players run around with their swords and shields, trying to hack people’s heads off. It’s also proved to be a great way to improve my aim with the shotgun!

I wrote up some quick impressions of the new Soldier weapons on the TF2 forums, which I’m reproducing below:

The Direct Hit
This thing shoots rockets ridiculously fast – think Quake III rockets fast. That said, it has virtually no splash damage so awesome aim is pretty much a requirement. That said the faster rockets make airshotting a lot easier – so much so that I think the fact that it minicrits on midair opponents is a little overpowered. Particularly since the game treats anyone not standing on a solid surface as being in midair. So if someone walks off a ledge and you hit them with a rocket from the DH, you just got a 35% damage bonus.

The Buff Banner
I see a lot of people use this, but honestly I’d rather have my shotgun. The minicrit effect depends on you being in the Soldier’s general radius, which can be tricky if you’re trying to flank or sandwich the opponent.

The Gunboats
This is the fourth item that the two classes were competing for. It doesn’t have a corresponding achievement so the only way to get them are to hope for a random drop or to use the new crafting system (more on that in a bit). They’re quite nice, if you want to play roaming soldier – using these, my regular horizontal rocket jump only takes off 10HP. Losing the shotgun is a big deal though, so you’d better have really good aim with your rockets.

The Equalizer
This is a straight up upgrade over the shovel, but then again I don’t really care. It’s really handy for the roaming soldier – I actually played a round of ctf_well where I ran into the intel room, killed all the defenders with 40HP left, grabbed the intel, whipped out the Equalizer and sprinted all the way back to my base unchallenged.

As for the other parts of the update:

Crafting System
You can now combine your excess items to make new items (think Diablo II’s Horadric cube). This is pretty much how I got my Gunboats (although the first time my crafting failed and I got another Buff Banner, argh). The list of ‘recipes’ is located here: http://www.tf2items.com/crafting/blueprints.php
There are tons of people whining about how it takes so many items to craft new hats, but honestly I don’t really care too much about that stuff. Although it would be nice if the game would give me another hat already…

New Maps
cp_gorge is rather nice – Lots of open spaces so there’s less spam, and lots of flanking routes. I like it.
ctf_doublecross has a metric ton of alternate routes, making it possibly the first CTF map I’ve ever played that hasn’t ended in stalemate all the time. Quite a fun map, I have to say.

• Added some more titles to my backlog thanks to Steam holiday sales: Mirror’s Edge and the last two titles of the PoP trilogy (as well as the newest one).
• Immediately removed Mirror’s Edge from my backlog because I beat it in 3 days
• Removed Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword from my list after beating it over Thanksgiving weekend.

More significantly, I upgraded my PC pretty much as far as I think I can take it – swapped out my old Core 2 Duo E6750 for a Core 2 Quad Q9650, which is about as fast as I can take it without buying one of the ridiculously priced Core 2 Extreme models. More cores certainly make a huge difference in games like Left 4 Dead 2, and to a lesser extent in Team Fortress 2. I also replaced my 8800GTS 512 with a GTX275, which has helped with some of the more graphic intensive games that I’m still working through (like Lost Planet). I also needed a new power supply for the new card, so I grabbed a simple 650W Antec one.

Just those three parts set me back a fair amount, so much so that I think my next ‘upgrade’ will probably involve just building a new box so I can get in on all the awesome i5/i7 action.

That said, I’m tempted to download the Crysis demo again to see how well these new parts hold up.

Uncharted 2 for $40
Planet Earth Blu-ray for $40
Hori Real Arcade Pro 3 SA for $90

…

Dammit.

• Drew Carey being a secret guest performer (although I should have guessed he’d show up, given that he’s the part owner of Seattle Sounders FC)
• Ryan Stiles and Greg Proops making a reference to the ‘Africa’s a continent’ incident from Whose Line
• Chip Esten and Jeff Davis taking the song title ‘Home Alone’ and turning it into a song about a prostitute called Malone
• Chip playing ‘The Ghost of Billy Mays’ during Celebrity Improv Jeopardy
• Jeff doing his Christopher Walken impression during the same game
• Ryan’s ‘WTF?’ face after someone in the audience suggested ‘Bangkok’ for the category ‘Names of places in China’

Actually, I don’t think I can remember all of them…it was generally a good time all around. Now I just need to hope that the Colin and Brad Show makes a stop around here sometime soon…

(Because I completed it, not because I got fed up with it)

And no, I’m probably not going to buy any of the DLC, since the game itself didn’t impress me that much to begin with. And I don’t think I’ll be missing anything…not with the backlog that I have.