tempest in a teacup

So apparently someone leaked a video of Sonic 4 running on the 360, and it seems like some of my concerns were well-founded. The physics seem really off – since when did jumping while running on a flat surface give you that much horizontal momentum? Why doesn’t Sonic accelerate as he falls? Why are his jumps so floaty? How is the game letting him stand on an inclined surface without falling? And so on. Not to mention booster pads. Leave those in the Rush and Advance games, please – I like to earn my momentum, not have it handed to me on a plate.

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.

I seem to have run into a bug that prevents me from progressing in the game without using a noclip cheat. WTF

Just wanted to mention that

• I beat Beyond Good & Evil last night and started working through Lost Planet and
• This decision is retarded and will probably come back to bite Capcom in the ass somewhere down the road

That is all.

SNKP, you clowns :(

I don’t think this has been confirmed to be a console-only bug yet, but seriously, with all the crap you left out of this game you still managed to let moronic infinites like this through your playtesting process?!

This game is starting to resemble KOF2003 in more ways than one. Oh well, I guess I needed a coaster for my coffee mug.

Ever find your skepticism to be completely justified?

Everything about KOFXII’s game system feels weird. The game is definitely slower than XI, 98 and 2K2, no doubt about that. On top of that even stuff like jumping has had its timings changed. When I do what used to be a hyperhop in XI or ‘98UM my character flies across the screen to get an uppercut up his ass. On top of that timings for things as basic as Terry’s dB, dA, df+C, QCB+A combo have changed. The first KOF that comes to mind when I think of an equivalent in the games I’ve played is probably KOF2003, and considering how bad that game was I don’t think that’s a good sign.

I took a spin through single player mode, and immediately recalled KOF XI’s pretty good AI on normal difficulty – while not awesome, it at least tried to use human-like attack patterns on you. Iori would pressure you with hop Cs and Ds, Gato would regularly do his tap combo into punch super every time he got an opening, Kyo would try to stuff your pokes with his QCF+A autoguard, and so on. The reason I remembered this is because KOFXII’s normal difficulty AI is dumb as a brick. It jumps around randomly, spamming pokes and rolling out of the blue for no reason (making it perfect bait for a down B combo on recovery). Athena basically did her reflector something like five times in a row, only stopping after I smacked her with a DM. The only exception was Daimon who would use the bullshit autoguard on his HCF+P to blow through absolutely everything I did to him – even jump attacks.

Also if the AI somehow manages to land a critical counter on you it’s terrible of taking advantage of it. Andy tagged me with a counter close C so that he could do f+C….forward roll, nothing. And it doesn’t even get better as you get further in the game.

OK, fine, AI in fighting games isn’t typically known for being great, and the point of fighting games is versus mode anyway. But seriously, everything about this game screams ‘WE DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO FINISH THIS, BUT HERE IT IS ANYWAY.’ Practice mode doesn’t save your training settings (it did in previous KOF ports), there’s no way to go back to the character select menu from Practice mode, and there’s random slowdown all over the place in the front end, which looks like it was designed by some guy with a copy of Photoshop and a hard-on for Times New Roman.

The game also has some weird hitbox issues. I could swear my opponent and I passed through each other in mid-jump, and the hitboxes on ground attacks are messed up against opponents landing behind you. I managed to score a counter hit on someone who jumped over my Terry’s crouch C because he landed behind me and got smacked by the tail end of the hitbox while trying to poke me. Go figure.

And then of course there’s shit like this:

And on top of all that, I still think this game is a net loss in terms of depth from KOF XI.

I haven’t tried it online yet, mainly because I don’t know anyone else who has it on PS3 and because of the horror stories I’ve been hearing about people who have played it online. BlazBlue lets me play laglessly against my friend in Japan – I doubt KOF XII will give me anywhere near the same connection quality.

Oh, and regarding the sprite issue I brought up in an earlier post – I have a HDTV at home, and it is rather obvious that KOFXII’s sprites have been scaled up. While I can’t make out individual pixels on the BB sprites at about 5 feet away, it’s pretty easy in KOFXII.

On a happier note, I scored an S-video cable for my PS3 so I’m going to see if I can record some of the BlazBlue (and maybe KOFXII, if they ever fix the netcode) matches that I’ve been saving. In particular xephyris and myself had a great set of matches last weekend…I’ll be sure to post them up here once I’ve uploaded them somewhere.

UPDATE:

I tried playing online. The lag was so bad that the game was running at less than 1/2 speed, and some fuckwit who didn’t know how to play managed to beat me with his laggy Joe after I beat his other two characters with Kyo alone. RAGE

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.

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 :(

I could say much about what I think of King of Fighters XII (and indeed, I have, multiple times), but if anything the most telling thing about the game is the complete lack of high-level match videos in spite of the game having come out more than two weeks ago. We got a couple of batches of videos out of Portland where the game first showed up, and a small set of lousy videos off Nicodouga, and since then, nothing.

I mean, even bad games like SvC Chaos and KOF2003 had tons of videos in the weeks immediately after their release. On top of that, if you check the tournaments of places like A-cho, TRF and Game41, there are no KOF XII events scheduled at all (and if you look at TRF they in fact have regular Hokuto no Ken tournaments, and that’s a game that’s basically retarded at high level).

If anything all signs are pointing to a complete lack of interest in the game (moreso than usual for a new KOF game, at least), and part of me can’t help but think that someone at least should have seen that coming.

(Before you ask, I’m still getting the PS3 version along with BlazBlue, if only because they’ll look nice on my HDTV)

Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 gets put through the blender en route to PS2

I was under the impression that the era of lousy ports was behind us. Apparently I was wrong.

(By the way, it’s not just graphical problems – there’s apparently lag as well)

In other news, I was playing some KOF’98 Ultimate Match on my PS3 today and it locked up when I tried to exit the game. Turning it off and restarting it basically yields…nothing. Looks like it’s bricked.

I wonder how annoying Sony’s repair process is…

Once again I’m finding myself casting around for something to write about. I’ve got a few ideas, but I honestly don’t think that I could do any of the subjects justice.

So I figure I’ll just start writing stuff and see where it goes from here.

Work has been pretty hectic lately – the project that I’ve been working on for about 4 months now had its first production milestone last week and my team was involved in a last-minute scramble to get everything in place. The first milestone is now done, in that my team’s contribution is more or less over, and after my week oncall I’ve shifted over to working on our next milestone. The last few weeks have been pretty hellish because of some mistakes we made early in the project, and I’m doing my best to ensure that we don’t run into the same problems on our second milestone.

As for what sort of project it is, I’m not sure I’m at liberty to say – suffice it to say that it’s a company-wide initiative that will have a pretty big impact on how all the teams in my organization do their jobs.

I actually had a dream last week where I was interviewing with some other team within the company, although for some reason the team worked in an indoor playground. Not going to bother trying to interpret that one…

I’ve started looking at apartment listings, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, Amazon is going to be moving to a new campus downtown, and I’d like to move somewhere closer to the new campus, even if it means I have to commute to work by bus for a few months. On top of that, while my current apartment is really close to work, it’s not particularly close to anything else, meaning that I have to take a bus to do pretty much anything important. And let’s not forget that the effective duopoly on Internet providers in my neighbourhood means that I get to choose between crappy cable and crappy DSL. I currently use the latter, and it’s the #1 reason why I haven’t watched any of the new anime that’s come out in the last…2 years or so. 1.5 Mbps means that even Youtube ends up being a bandwidth hog. Not to mention my pings in TF2 and L4D are awful, even to servers that are relatively close by.

My dad suggested buying an apartment, which is probably not a bad idea seeing how prices seem to be heading lower every day, but I haven’t contacted any realtors yet. Part of me is wondering if buying a property when I’m on a visa that might not be renewed in 2011 is a really good idea or not.

I guess I’ll think about it some more.

On a side note, the CEO of the OnLive service that I talked about in my previous entry has apparently been on the PR warpath, offering interviews to a lot of big gaming sites about why all the naysayers are wrong. Apparently they’ve spent seven years developing a video compression algorithm that can get frame data down to very small sizes, which is great, but that also means the stream is going to have compression artifacts, reducing image quality overall. On top of that you’re apparently locked to 720p or 480p, so if your monitor’s native resolution is something else, you can’t play in full screen mode without blurring the image.

So yeah, it’s not for me. Or for anyone with taste, I’d say.