Complexity, Depth and Skill: Good Games?

Complexity = depth = skill (= a better game, right?)

Now this is something I essentially agree with (and the linked article is well worth reading), however the trouble is the mistakes that many people make are:

1. complexity = execution complexity

and/or that

2. complexity = the sheer number of options, disregarding their viability

Both of these can actually be ‘meaningless rules’, and so do not actually necessarily increase complexity and depth, and I’ll go on to explain why. This is going to be a rather rambley article and I’m purposefully going to labour a few points here, as I get pretty fed up with the amount of misconceptions I see about this regularly.

Execution Skill does not always equal complexity & depth

I’ve just made two Vs Fighting games; Remy Fighter 2 and Remy Fighter 4. In RF2 all the attacks, blocks and moves work in identical fashion to, well, Street Fighter 2, in fact, its identical to SF2 HDR in every way really, except I put Remy from 3rd Strike into the game too (but you can forget about him, as he’s still badly balanced and low tier anyway). But in RF4, it’s an identical game, except that I’ve changed all the execution requirements. To do any crouching MK or HK sweep, you now need to do a quarter-circle backward + kick, otherwise the attack will have no damaging hitboxes. All hurricane-kick motions are now down-to-back-to-up to perform. To do any fireball you need to do a 180 rotation. To do every jumping attack you need to use a QCF and the attack button whilst in the air, otherwise you just jump. Super moves require a half-circle back, half-circle forward, then x3 of the relevant P or K attack button. If you don’t hit all 3 attack buttons within the allowable frames though, the move fails to execute but it drains all your super bar.

Ok I could go on adding more layers to this silly example, but hopefully by now you’re getting the idea.

Now at the very top levels of play, which has more complexity, and more depth and so is perhaps the ‘better’ game?

They are both absolutely identical games once both players have the pure execution mastery to do all those additional requirements to perform the moves – and none of these are so difficult to perform that they couldn’t be done reliably by the best fighting game players – so they have the exact same moves, characters, and character balance (or lack thereof). Remy Fighter 4 will take a lot more practice of the execution to get good at, and at anything lower than ‘mastery’ level of skill the different risk/reward ratios of different moves due to the difficulty of execution & the penalties for failure will change the game. But by the time you get to the very top of skill at the game? If you’re playing as Ryu you’ll still have the exact same move options as you did before in every single situation, and your opponent will have the exact same counters, it’s just that you’ll just both be having to flash your hands around that stick like crazy to perform the same moves in Remy Fighter 4.

Now, because it’s harder to do the moves there will be certainly be a greater difference between the top and the bottom players at RF4 than at RF2, so surely that makes RF4 the deeper and better game?

To me, these are exactly the same games in terms of complexity & depth – it’s just one of them takes a lot more execution ’skill/depth/complexity’ to play. But this execution skill isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the game. It isn’t the only form of skill, and in fact, as players get better at the execution skills, they become increasingly meaningless in this kind of game.

Which is more complex and deep & requires more skill to play, Chess or Street Fighter 2? Clearly the idea that execution skill is the major component in determining the overall depth of a game is not always true.

Sheer number of rules does always mean depth & complexity

So what about Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III? Street Fighter III certainly has far more execution complexity and skill required to play it. It also has way more ‘rules’ in terms of the number of options available to the players.  19 characters vs 16. Each character has a choice of three Super Arts rather than a single super move. Most characters in SF3 have far more special moves. Almost every special move can be “EX’d” and powered up, then of course you’ve got new subsystems of taunting, universal overheads, variable jumps, kara throws, and the big one, parrying. This is a lot of new rules! So if ”each new rule interacts with the existing rules in new and increasingly complicated ways, creating an ever-widening realm of possibilities which the player is called upon to grasp. The better he grasps them the more capable he becomes in using them to his advantage, and thus the more skillfully he can play”, why then does this ever-widening realm of possiblities, end up looking like this a whole lot of the time at the top-level of play:

From 2005…

From 2008…

How can all these rules and systems boil down to Chun Li vs Chun Li (with a few Kens and Yuns), using a tiny amount of the available characters & moves & options? It’s because the vast majority of those other options are so sub-optimal that they’ve all become essentially meaningless rules – most of the moves and characters have become redundant. The new rule of parrying itself, rather than interacting to create new complexities arguably actually compresses the decision tree in the game, making other mental parts of the game less complex. So whilst the execution complexity rises due to parrying, the decision complexity is actually a lot lower – the game starting to revolve almost entirely around a poke/parry/meter-gaining/kara-throw game.

So just neither adding more rules and more execution skills to a game necessarily means more depth. To go with another hypothetical example for anyone not familiar with Street Fighter III, I’ve also just made Dud or Arrive, a 3d Vs Fighting game. It has three moves, block, throw, and attack, all of which are done with a single button press, which create a simple (slightly weighted) rock/paper/scissors guessing game. It’s not exactly a deep game but it does reward the player who can guess correctly more often, and also has better timing and positional skills. Even so, a first time player could quite likely beat an ‘expert’. So in my sequel, Dud or Arrive 2, I add a new special kind of attack, the headbutt. Performed with a Forward-Back-Forward -> Attack&Throw command. Headbutt beats blocks, other attacks, and throws! The game now requires a lot more execution skill than single button presses, yet it’s also less complex and deep overall, as to play the game well, it’s simply a matter of doing headbutts as constantly & perfectly as possible. I’ve just made three different moves redundant for the sake of one that’s harder to execute. There’s no guessing game anymore; however the experts at that headbutt command who can do it almost instantaneously over and over without a mistake (and if you think it’s too easy, you could make the headbutt command as hard to do as you like) will be the unbeatable masters at this game.

Executor! Execution Barrier Upgrade Complete

National Fighting League?

 

As you add too much execution complexity to a game, instead of adding real depth, you actually end up creating more of an execution barrier at times; meaning that the game just ends up with an increasingly elite and smaller crowd as you up the complexity more and more. This is exactly what happened with Vs Fighting games over the years in many ways. But hang on, Street Fighter’s for EVERYONE right? Well, as much respect as I have for Seth Killian, I think some of this is rubbish that really needs to be debunked. “You don’t have to be any particular height/weight/strength to win”. True, but I actually think that top Fighting game players (or any top video game players) actually have a lot more in common with the top sportsmen & women than people give them credit for. Maybe their own specialised talents and skills aren’t so immediately obvious, being more mental and reaction based, but make no mistake they are there. Claiming they are not in some way, does top players a huge disservice. 

It’s certainly appears far ‘easier’ to get to the top in the Street Fighter world than in the NFL, as the innate talent requirement is probably lower, and there are certainly less barriers to entry in terms of cost and organisation, but I also wonder about how much of the ‘ease to get to the top’ idea about video games is more simply down to the lack of structured competition and lack of really dedicated players.  Are the mental/dextrous twitch-demon freaks like say, Daigo Umehara, THAT much more common than the physical freaks of the NFL? (or tennis, or any major sport). Or is it just that the NFL has a far greater money, far greater organisation, and thus greater sifting of society at large to locate and reward the freaks that fit it’s bill of requirements? If I start running a 10 million pound tournament every year for Street Fighter IV, don’t you think they’ll be a few more “Daigos” springing up, and lesser gifted players won’t stand a chance. Can anyone really become a top tournament level SF player? Even if everyone was given equal time & experiences & a theoretical level of dedication, the physical dexterity & mental skills required are just too much for most. And this is ignoring the fact some people will get RSI or have other far more debilitating physical handicaps.

If I take a random sample of 100 people who’ve never touched a videogame before in their life, and give them all 20 hours to play Remy Fighter 4 on their own, even if they all use that time in exactly the same way and have exactly the same mental dedication, attitude,  and drive to succeed at it – I’ll throw them another 10 million pound tournament as an encouragement, it’d still be fully expected that some will still be more naturally gifted at the game than others, and thus will win more, purely due to faster reaction times and better execution skills. There won’t be some even distribution of results with almost every player ends up with a 50% win/loss against these wholly ‘in all other ways equal’ opponents.

10,000 Fists in the air

And if we replay this experimental ‘100 noobs’ tournament for both my mythical Remy Fighter 2 and Remy Fighter 4 games described earlier, I would expect that actually, different players may well come out on top. Why is this? And this is the crux of this for me. The reason is that different skills are being tested more in these two very similar games. In RF4 the person who’s dextrous enough to actually perform their attacks effectively will almost always win. However in RF2 more players are able to perform the moves correctly, and so suddenly their choice of moves and use of the moves becomes more important – tactical skills start to come into play far more in RF2, and perhaps even some strategic skills, or even yomi?

I still don’t believe either game is really ‘deeper’, I think it really comes down to a matter of taste and perspective, and the aim of the game in general. What skill tests do you focus your game on? I could make an update to Starcraft called Starcraft: NavanWar. NavanWar has no hotkeys and every unit must be manually selected and clicked every single time make it fire an attack. To me, the game isn’t any deeper, in fact it’s probably far less so now that it almost completely rewards the very few players that have the execution speed and skills to even muster any kind of organised attack or defense.

In any game there are physical & dexterity execution components. It could be, to all practical intents and purposes, none, like chess, or it could be incredibly high, like an NFL Quarterback. It could be somewhere in between like Street Fighter, with low physical skills, but high mental/dexterity ones.  Where video games pitch themselves along the execution line I think is really important in both single player and multiplayer titles. Not only does it change the mix of skills being tested, but also the accessibility to players. Whereas complexity is usually a good thing, the nature of that complexity matters, and neither simply increasing (or decreasing) the execution complexity, nor the sheer number of options necessarily increases the overall complexity=depth=skill of a game.

Control Freak

“Been playing HL2 as I fancy going through it again. I’m enjoying it, but still find it weird on the XBOX controller. Things which are piss easy on the mouse can be a real bugger on the controller” – Navan Daughn

Valve need to get their heads screwed on for console conversions

When does a controller become part of the game? Pretty much always! However the degree to which it affects the game experience really varies wildly from case to case. I think Navan now understands some of my complaints with regards to The Orange Box much better, having tried it on a twin stick pad. And having played through Half Life 1 myself on a mouse, I already wish I’d got The Orange Box on the PC rather than for the 360. I’m having the same problem with Left 4 Dead as well. Apart from the small concession of a quick-turn button the game is completely designed for mouse & keyboard control rather than for twin stick on a gamepad, and I felt the game really suffered. Now with the Left 4 Dead 2 demo out, I’ve been able to directly compare it on the 360 vs the PC; and there was no contest at all, the game handled far more easily on a mouse, and due to the design of the game this made it actually much more fun to play in many ways. It leaves me frustrated with both versions because many more of my friends are on 360, and I’d much rather play over XBox Live, in the comfort of my front room, with my preferred twin sticks; yet the game feels so much nicer to control on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. So basically I won’t be 100% satisfied with either version. I realised what I really want is a proper “Left 4 Dead 360″ version that changes the game control mechanics enough so that control on a twin stick pad becomes viable & fun and doesn’t feel like you’re stuggling to replicate a mouse. Halo, Gears and many other titles all do this fine, so it can be done.

Some people may say it’s a simple case of “always play a game on it’s default intended controller”, which held more weight with arcade conversions, but it’s still not exactly clear cut. Should Street Fighter 2 HD Remix be played on an 360 or PS3 pad since those are the systems it was released for? Ok, it’s clearly a update of an original joystick game though – so fine, use a joystick. But what about the differences between different joysticks? Isn’t it a bit of an unfair advantage in the game to be using a high quality controller vs someone that isn’t? For Street Fighter IV, shouldn’t I always be using button bindings and turbo auto fire? These things are built into the game options and the official controller! On the PC it gets even more murky, with WoW Macro keyboards, gaming mice with extra button bindings and on and on. Where do you draw the line between cheating and ‘playing to win’ when it comes to your choice of controller? Should you even be allowed to reconfigure your button layout on Halo on the 360? That sounds ridiculous I know, but it shows how difficult it is to draw the line without some kind of organisation of the metagame rules around the video game itself. For Street Fighter, I play to the standard I’ll be held to at whatever offline tournament I want to enter, but if I wasn’t competing in organised offline events, what then?

Auto-fire is probably the biggest controller issue on competitive 360 games, and it affects everything from Street Fighter to FPS titles. There are some quite simple solutions to either designing the game so it won’t be an issue, or detecting it as cheating online. But sadly games developers don’t appear to care, putting in pistols that ‘fire as fast as you can press the button’ which is foolishly naive in an online competitive game, and making the aforementioned official controllers with auto-fire built in. It’s there so you can test combos out in training mode? Yeh right. And the line just gets blurrier all the time – it is already possible to use a keyboard and mouse on a 360 if you are willing to go to enough trouble with things like this XPFS 4.0 Speed.

Another game I love, Virtual On was recently re-released in an upgraded version on the 360 on XBLA, and I was initally overjoyed. But it requires such a specialised controller to play properly I’ve completely avoided it until one comes available. My friend Ollie Barder covered the history of Virtua Ron (as I affectionately refer to it sometimes) and it’s controller issues on the 360 here. However, luckily, fan pressure has meant that a twin-stick controller for the 360 was eventually announced. It’s still not out at the time of writing, but is imminent, and can be previewed at Hori’s site. Of course the problem is whether I’ll ever be able to get hold of one in the UK, and at what price, and then will the game’s netcode make it worthwhile to even play, let alone shell out for another controller?

I don’t really have any answers here, with the current state of play, other than to raise this point as yet another murky area of gaming that developers of competitive games, and conversions of games, really ought to pay much more attention to. However especially on platforms like the PC, it might be a case that there’s very little they can do to control the issue however. All this, and I haven’t even touched on WiiMotes or Natal yet!

Balancing Match

Earlier I looked at the concept I attempted to coin ‘Versus Flow‘ in video games. Here’s my continued thoughts on that & how to improve things.

Don’t Give Up, Challenge Again

So what can you do to try to fix the matchmaking? Well, much like getting good at anything; the first step is to at least try! Flawed as they are, at least SF4 and Halolz are starting along the right track, it’s just that overall it’s taking videogames a ridiculously long time to get anywhere, given that this is something that’s been needed since the dawn of competitive gaming, and has been ripe for any game to utilise for as long as we’ve had internet enabled games.

I’ll use a primary example of Vs Fighting games, as those are my favourite. You need to start with a decent skill rating system like those in VF5 or HDR, ie: one based on results and not experience (although experience might be used to count for a very small portion of your rating), but use it based on the character you select, not an average overall score. Just because I’m pretty decent with DeeJay, it doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near that good with Ryu. However your ‘best character rating’ could be used to give a default ‘base’ rating with a character you hadn’t played before eg. you’d start at half your best character’s rating until you actually played a more games with different characters to assist the game in ‘finding’ your skill level based on results. You could potentially go even further than a character based rating, and use a character matchup based rating. eg. I’m pretty familiar with the Dee Jay vs Ryu match, but I’m really not good or familiar with playing Dee Jay vs Dictator.

Then, here’s how a network battle options menu ought to look:

Online Game Type: Single Vs Match, Repeated Vs Match, Best of Three Vs Match, Group/Lobby Match etc. Whatever relevant modes that game allowed. Maybe even allow a player to try and play all types depending on what is available with a priority setting for whatever the player prefers.

Priority: Skill Match, Connection Match, Equal, possibly even a Zone/Attitude Match (more on this below).

Ping Limit: Set the highest ping time you want to play from Any, down to 10ms or something ridiculous (good luck!). Turn this into a number of stars of connection or whatever for simplicity. Or Best/Good/Average/Any banding.

Skill Upper Limit: Set how much higher ranked than you your opponents can be, this could be banded rather than actual points for simplicity.

Skill Lower Limit: Set how much lower ranked than you your opponents can be.  Again this could be banded, and might not even be needed at all. Certainly if it was, it could be limited to not very much easier, or tied to your upper limit, so you can just choose how far varied rankings you play against.

All of this could be further simplified for players who didn’t want to worry about ‘under the hood’ mechanics, just let them pick “I only want to play Good/Average/Any net connections” and “I want online Vs matches to be Easy/Normal/Hard/Any”. Oh and you’d probably need to put in warning messages like “you may not find matches for a long time” if people set it on certain silly options – like a low rated player only wanting easier opponents, if you even chose to allow this (perhaps not).

Then I’d pick the character I want to play as.. and we’re off. No, not staring at a ‘waiting for opponent’ screen – I’m playing vs the CPU, or training mode, or ideally, whatever the heck you wanted to do in that game, or even a different game if the gaming platform could allow it. But my ‘Request to Fight’ would be out there, on the network, looking for another request to match with, and when they find each other via XBL dedicated matching  servers etc, bam – “Here Comes a New Challenger”. You could still quit at this point if necessary (your Mum just called!), but the game wouldn’t even show you your opponents name, character, connection or actual ranking until the match began. And once the fight begins, if you quit or disconnect – you’d lose and your opponent would win. After the match your ratings would be recalculated appropriately – perhaps given lesser weighting to the result, the further the match was from your preferred settings.

Hopefully the online code would also have some method for dealing with other forms of ‘cheating’ other than the simple to deal with quitting – including things like auto-fire, lag switches – whatever the actual known exploits are in the game. Almost all of these would be detectable over time.

All of this would totally change the idea of “Ranked Match”; which arguably emulates entering a tournament against all comers and figuring out ‘who’s the best’ instead to a “Balanced Match”; attempting to match equally skilled players. Online versus shouldn’t be about the ‘n00b pwnage’! I’d even rename it Balanced Match if I could do, and hopefully at least put a hinderance on the ’rank-whoring’ obsession with Leaderboards & how to cheat them. To me a leaderboard for the vast majority of players should be the byproduct of play, not the goal of play.

Now, it might sound overly complicated or difficult to code the features in my online battle menu, but all of these features already exist in one form or another in various games, they just haven’t ever been put together in any game that also has good netcode and a good rating system.

There’s certainly hope of all of this being put together at some point. The most progress seems to be coming on the ‘Attitude Match’ mentioned above. Impulse (a PC digital download service from Stardock similar to Valve’s Steam) will attempt to match players based on game ownership and their self-defined gaming priorities, which is a bit like a far more advanced version of XBox Live’s “Zones” for a player – which I’ve only ever seen a single game (Marble Blast Ultra) even make use of – probably because they are just too limited to be of much use. Social gaming applications like Raptr might also eventually become an aid to matchmaking – even Facebook itself (& its games) could use all of this – you can see the early signs that they are starting to look into it’s relationship with gaming when you read interviews like this one, and see the start of it’s integration with XBox Live (even though it’s really basic at this time).

 

With regards to actual skill matching, it appears Blizzard have some fantastic ideas for Starcraft II:

“The old experience of playing through single-player, getting online, getting your ass handed to you,and then saying “I don’t want to play anymore” is not something we’re after. We want to have more friendly experiences for new players.”

It seems like they really want to make Starcraft II multiplayer far more accessible:

“Sigaty talks about how long it took him to feel like he could win at Warcraft III. “It took 10 games… I knew it would get to that point, but I think, 10 games, that’s ridiculous. If you play three, get your ass handed to you, then you walk away, you say yeah, I think the online thing’s not for me.”

Pardo, and Battle.net, have the answer. Over and above improved matchmaking algorithms, searches, and the persistent player profiles that should prevent “smurfing” (experienced players creating new accounts to take noobs unawares), there’s an ambitious and clever new ladder and tournament system that aims to give players of all skill levels the kind of thrill experienced at the top end of competition – “the competitive arena for everyone”, Pardo calls it. “Ladder play doesn’t have to be for hardcore gamers only.”

There will be seven levels of competition in StarCraft II – five regular bands from Copper to Platinum, book-ended by the e-sports Pro League at the top, and the Practice League at the bottom. Practice League will feature a slowed game speed and maps custom-designed to prevent the rush tactics that can be panic-inducing and off-putting to a new player.”

It sounds like exactly the same things I’m talking about, just translated to the RTS genre, doesn’t it? But all competitive games should be doing this. Even if Starcraft II actually ends up more like this:

Even Capcom appears to have some decent ideas for Super Street Fighter IV, as they are talking about having rating points based per-character, and also matchmaking in team vs team battles to try to create equal teams. Now they just need to put these features in a better fighting game with better netcode (like, say HDR ).

Overall, once again, it’s down to ‘e-sports’ to take their cues from real sports. There’s usually multiple paths available to a sportsman to get a varied skill level of competition. But video games don’t have much available between “casual games with your mates” to “take on the best in the world”; but they easily could, and should do. In many ways this is recovering another lost part of local arcade culture; where you vied to be the ‘best in your arcade’, as that was all you really knew about. Your local arcade catchment area was the equivalent to an amateur sunday league at a sport in some ways, but the options that are available with online matchmaking could actually be signigicantly better than this.

Coming next in this series – my thoughts on how to improve measuring actual skill at games to get good ratings, and also training modes in games and how to allow players to improve their skills better.

Saving Anywhere costs you Half a Life

It’s taken me almost a year, but I’ve finally completed Half Life on the PC. The reason it took me so long to play was that I only played it in my ’spare moments’, usually late at night, far apart from my more dedicated gaming time. That wasn’t something intentional, it was because the game wholly failed to grab me at all. It was really only the non-game factors that ever piqued my interest – mainly a desire to discover the story, and to see what all the fuss was about with this old game (1998). Now this review does a good job of placing the game in its historical context, but my problem is despite all the innovations to the FPS genre, that doesn’t mean this was a fun game to actually play through then, and it certainly isn’t now.

What absolutely kills this game is the save game mechanic. You can save at absolutely any point, anywhere, with an infinite amount of save slots, and you can even ‘quick save’ and ‘quick load’ almost instantaneously. Such a mechanic will kill any action orientated game, as all elements of suspense and worse, challenge, are ruined. Half Life basically devolves into a trial-and-error slog throughout. Any battle, no matter how ‘hard’, can easily be overcome not by any improvement in the player’s skill (although it will require a basic minimum), but by simply increasing the use of saving & restarts. The issue of checkpoints or setting the right challenge and difficultly level for the player has been sidestepped – it’s effectively set on an infinitely potentially easy challenge at all times, as determined by the player. But the player has very little idea of how hard or easy they are making it a lot of the time. How on earth is the player even supposed to guess what a “Normal” difficulty should be for this game?

Could anything be further from the ideal of an arcade challenge and hard-fun? In fact I recall when I started to play Half Life 2 in The Orange Box, I was shocked to discover such a mechanic, as I’d played through a good chunk of the game assuming only the in-game checkpoints that I was used to. But given ’save anywhere, anytime’ any action game becomes an interactive movie more than a game; albeit one with potential frustration & repetition to progress through. Now perhaps there is some hidden ‘ideal’ in the game to only rely on the game’s built-in auto saves, and to attempt to never use the save states (in much the same way “one credit” play is often assumed in an arcade title for the real challenge level). But if this is so, why did the designers not build this into the actual game mechanics? At the very least score a player on the least use of save states or something of that ilk. But the trouble is that many parts of the game seem so obtuse in their design that without the assumed use of heavy repetition, the player really has little chance of passing them, and the game is so long, it is hardly reasonable to require the player to re-start the whole game like a true arcade title. For an example of this type of design, I did enjoy the high level of variety of the weapons in the game – in terms of feel and effectiveness in different conditions & vs different enemies, but the trouble was the game would give me little or no idea as to what the effectiveness conditions of the various weapons actually was. Couple this with random and unknown restocks of future ammunition for said weapons, and the player is clearly being guided by this design to use (& abuse) the trial and error method of play on offer by the save game mechanics.

Now of course the game offers more than shooting based challenges – there are also heavy platforming & manoeuvre sections. Platforming in a first person perspective is one of the most irritating and silly game mechanics I’ve ever come across. I have never been a huge fan of platform games anyway, but I’m aware of a few that managed to effectively translate this play mechanic in 3D environments (such as Mario 64, or even Gun Valkyrie), and they all did it by using a third-person perspective.

Lastly we come to the puzzle element in Half Life. Which mostly comes down to “where the **** do I go now?” or it’s close cousin “how do I get through this bit without X killing/damaging me?”. Now these are the only areas of the game where I actually became stuck a few times and found any real challenge in completing. However most of the time I was simply lost because I hadn’t played the game in a long time (usually due to being bored by it), and the game often gave very little indication of even the direction of progress (although some levels are indeed expertly arranged). However the solution to all of the times I got stuck was either trial and error on movement timing or a jump, or more often had a totally illogical solution which almost always involved moving your ‘disembodied hand & weapon floating camera’ along a 1 pixel wide ledge or pipe. These manoeuvres would be totally impossible in any game where you actually played a character that had any sense of scale and size, or even vaguely realistic physics to the placement of your character within the game environment. The trouble is that, given the save mechanic, these puzzle elements were pretty much the only challenging part of the game left to actually play. It did make me think that if you must design a game within the limiting restraints of a save mechanic like this, making something like Portal -where the action elements have been mostly stripped out in return for far more puzzle elements – is actually the logical way to go to improve it.

The story to Half Life was, by game standards, rather good – albeit very short and simple. And it is told in a fantastic method without recourse to dull non-interactive cut scenes, so I did enjoy that aspect of it. For me the two best things that came out of this experience was that I was introduced to Steam & I actually slowly found my FPS playing skills with keyboard and mouse control vastly improving as I went along. By the time I got through some of the latter action & platform heavy sections I was starting to actually enjoy playing with a mouse & keyboard, as for the first time I didn’t feel like I was battling the control scheme.

Half Life has of course won many awards, but none as coveted or as well deserved as the Agoner’s single turd.

Sticks of Joy

A lot of people ask me “Remy77077, you play fighting games a lot, what joystick should I get?”.

Well okay, only a couple of people have asked me that.

You'll need a joystick to pull off moves like this

But since I’ve written about joysticks in the past too, I felt that this was a worthy topic for an update to the current situation. As that old article atests, I believe if you want to play fighting games properly, you do need to invest in a joystick.

The situation with multi-format sticks is still sadly pretty murky, and pretty much the same as documented before. I’ve not researched that further though, as I’ve given up on that ‘dream’ myself, and have gone with standard format sticks. Most pre-manufactured joysticks these days are USB connections, and so will work on your console of choice – the gamer’s XBox 360 or the one-handed blu-ray fondler’s PS3 system – as well as on your PC. And the PC functionality is really not to be scoffed at. As I’ve discovered recently purchased a new PC that can actually run GGPO, whilst the PC fighting game scene is not nearly as well subscribed as it is for consoles, there is actually a huge amount of choice and options out there to play. If you’re a fighting game player with a decent PC I seriously recommend giving GGPO a try if you haven’t already. Then of course there’s games like Street Fighter IV, and other Japanese titles. Although a lot of Japanese titles will need Japanese OS support to run unfortunately. Trawling shoryuken forums would be the first place to look if you want to know more about this. The PC compatibility and USB-ness also gives you huge potential for future-proofing your stick use as well, although of course it cannot be guaranteed, as who knows what new consoles or new PC solutions will come along.

So if you’re willing to spend the cash on a really good joystick with manufactured-for-the-arcade parts, the ones I’d go for are either the Madcatz Tournament Edition stick (the ‘TE stick”) or the Hori Real Arcade Pro (the “HRAP”). I’ve played on the 360 versions of both and I rate them both the same really. The TE stick is slightly bigger, but the HRAP is actually a lot heavier due to it’s metal base. I honestly couldn’t choose between them, and while I currently own a TE stick, I’ll quite likely invest in an HRAP as my next potential stick. It really just comes down to looks & a personal feel (ooo-er). The TE stick does have some snazzy extra features like turbo commands etc, but those are only for online cheaters anyway, and so should not interest you at all. One advantage of the TE stick being far more widespread is that it’s almost the de-facto tournament standard in the UK. So, like I did, you can potentially go to a tournament run on a console you don’t own a joystick for, borrow a sticks off a different kind person each round, and still get a stick you are familiar with to play on the whole time.

I had better state though, whilst I can vouch for the PS3 version of the TE stick as much as the 360 one, I can’t do the same for the PS3 version of the HRAP, as it is actually a slightly different model. The 360 version is called the Hori Real Arcade Pro EX, whereas the PS3 is known as the Hori Real Arcade Pro 3. Their design is actually visually quite different, although they may well be the same parts.

If you’re buying these sticks from the UK, here’s some current links for them on amazon:

Sexy HRAP EX for 360.

Pug-ugly HRAP3 for PS3.

TE stick for 360.

TE Stick for PS3.

Remember, all of these will work fine on a decent PC too.

If you want to go for a cheaper stick then it’s a whole different ball game though. These will always be smaller and much lighter than the pricier sticks discussed above. For many players, that’s a deal-breaker immediately. Also bear in mind cheaper sticks will use replica parts rather than true ‘arcade parts’. This doesn’t mean they are that much worse – such sticks can be perfectly functional (David Sirlin himself defended the Hori EX2 and indeed used it to get the #1 ranking on SF2HDR for a time), it’s just that they won’t feel as good, the stick and buttons will feel slightly less responsive if you are really used to playing with the best kind of parts, and also, they are far more likely to break due to wear & usage.

I would personally recommend the Hori EX2 for the XBox 360. I just sold my old Hori EX2 to agoners’ own Navan Daughn actually, as that was exactly what he wanted to get himself started. The PS3 version of this stick is again slightly different; the Hori Arcade Fighting Stick (HAFS??) which in limited use I’m afraid I didn’t like at all; it may have simply been an overworn old stick, but in my limited use it seemed a lot worse than the EX2 for the 360, hence my concern with HRAP for PS3 too (but it could potentially be better for all I know!). Similarly I have had bad experiences with the Madcatz Standard Edition (the “SE stick”), so I cannot personally recommend it even as a budget stick.

If you’re actually into modding a stick, then I’m afraid I cannot offer much advice other than to explain a few of the basics. The main difference between different arcade parts is Japanese style arcade parts, or American style arcade parts. Both are just as good it really just depends on your preference, which is why if you have limited real-life arcade experience I wouldn’t start modding your stick immediately without trying some out.

For buttons, Japanese style means convex (bumping out, the centre of button is the highest point), and USA style is concave (dimpled inwards, so their edges are highest). USA buttons are also traditionally laid out in a straight line, whereas the Japanese button layout is slightly curved with the lengths of your fingers.

For the stick itself Japanese means a ball-top, whereas American means a bat-top. You can also get specific 8-way gates and 4-way gates. True 4-way gates are sticks that will only go into the up/down/left/right positions and so are actually generally specialised ones for retro games like Pac Man or certain shumps, not really for fighting games, assuming you actually want to be able to jump forward or crouch block. But you can also get specifically shaped gates underneath the stick too. Japanese style gates are generally square, meaning the ‘four corners’ can easily be felt if you slide the stick around. eg. you can feel down/back and down/forward, whereas the straight back and straight forward are slightly harder to find. An octagonal gate means that there is slightly stronger impression for all 8 directions, but it may feel relatively harder to find the corners. Some USA parts also offer ‘optical 360′ sticks which have a true round gate and use optical readings of the stick position to determine which angle it is closest too rather than microswitches.

There are different manufacturers of both Japanese and American parts for both the sticks and the buttons. I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss their various merits or difference, but I can tell you the most popular ones I have seen referenced are Sanwa and Seimitsu for Japanese style parts, and HAPP for USA style parts.

You’ll notice that all of the pre-manufactured joysticks mentioned above are all Japanese style in terms of stick, buttons and layout (and also gate shape on all I’ve tried). For this reason, the main reason to mod these days, is if you have a preference for a specific manufacturers parts, or want even a partially USA style stick at all.

NTSC-UK

I’ve managed to get my hands on a 2nd XBox 360 – finally another USA model. As I now have two different region’s 360s, and a bunch of American (NTSC-U/C) and UK (PAL) games, I’m in an ideal position to actually test what games work across country systems etc. I wanted to publish this information up for reference, since it’s really hard to come by; only a few trusted sites like play-asia.com actually seem to publish it anywhere, and because I utterly detest the fact that region-locking still exists at all, as I’ve ranted about before.

I will update this post in future as time goes on with more information. I’ll only post whatever I’ve personally verified myself.

Verifying more games right at this minute is difficult though, since the moment I got my NTSC XBox, my PAL one got jealous and RROD’d. Yes really. The incredibly irony of this situation wasn’t lost on me; my amusement almost overcame my annoyance at getting my second RROD. The irony was further heightened by the fact my old PAL 360 also just got selected for XBox Live Update Preview (facebook etc). *sigh*

NTSC-U/C (American) Games:

All-Pro Football 2k8

NTSC-U/C only

Call of Duty 3

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Dead or Alive Ultimate (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C only on XBox 360

ESPN NFL 2K5 (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C only on XBox 360

Gears of War Special Edition

Game Disc: NTSC-U/C and PAL

Bonus Disc – NTSC-U/C only

Gears of War 2 Limited Edition

Game Disc: NTSC-U/C and PAL

Limited Edition Bonus Disc – NTSC-U/C and PAL

(Tom Clancy’s) Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Guilty Gear X2 #Reload (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C only on XBox 360

Halo (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C only on XBox 360

Halo 2 (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C and PAL on XBox 360

Halo 3

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Halo 3 Limited Edition

Game Disc: NTSC-U/C and PAL

Limited Edition Bonus Disc – NTSC-U/C only

Halo Wars

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Lost Planet Extreme Condition

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Mass Effect

NTSC-U/C and PAL

NFL 2k3 (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C only on XBox 360

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

NTSC-U/C only

Sega Superstars Tennis

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Street Fighter IV

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Soul Calibur IV

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Virtua Fighter 5 Online

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Wartech Senko No Ronde

NTSC-U/C and PAL

PAL (English) Games:

Battle Fantasia

PAL only

(Sid Meier’s) Civilization Revolution

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Dead or Alive 3 (XBox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

Fable (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C and PAL on XBox 360

Gears of War 2

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Left 4 Dead

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Halo (XBox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

Halo 2 Limited Collectors Edition

Game Disc: NTSC-U/C and PAL

Limited Collectors Edition  Disc – PAL only

Halo 3 ODST

NTSC-U/C and PAL

The House of the Dead III (XBox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

Lost Odyssey

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Ninja Gaiden (XBox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

The Orange Box

NTSC-U/C and PAL

Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

Pure

NTSC-U/C and PAL

SpongeBob Squarepants – Battle for Bikini Bottom (XBox 1)

PAL only on XBox 360

Street Fighter Anniversary Collection (XBox 1)

NTSC-U/C and PAL on XBox 360

Street Fighter IV Collector’s Edition

Game Disc: NTSC-U/C and PAL

Bonus Disc – NTSC-U/C and PAL

Versus Flow

“In theory I love playing online with people on Versus but I get frustrated because I suck so badly at it, with my reaction time, that I just die constantly, and after a while of no joy whatsoever, it loses it’s fun factor.” -DeeGruenEinzige

The game designer’s job of setting the right difficulty and challenge level when it comes to the technical execution required to play a game (as previously discussed here) and the overall “solo” experience in a game is one thing, but for multiplayer competitive ‘versus’ style games it’s a different beast entirely. Here, to a reasonable extent I believe, you can measure the challenge, and hence the ability for a player to experience an enjoyable state of ‘flow’ depending on the person (or team) that they are competing against, and measuring their ‘chance to win’, based on their skill level versus the skill level of the competition. When there is a huge disparity in skill level, and one team or player is easily beating the other, then clearly there is little chance for either team or player to experience flow. Conversely where both players are of a similar skill level, and both would ‘on paper’ have a 50% chance to win, and are winning around that rate upon repeated competitive play, then you’ve got the potential for a really fun game where all players are in the ‘flow zone’.

Now of course, the game’s mechanics still play a part in the flow experience, and you can only go so far with this. A gamer’s taste in games will also come into play. It’s unlikely that even two equally skilled players winning 50% of the time are going to get to a heightened state of flow from repeated games of noughts and crosses (that’s tic-tac-toe for our American readers!), paper-rock-scissors (jun-ken-pon), or even a perfect 50/50 game of ‘flip the coin’ (unless they love alea and really enjoy winning by luck). And conversely many players wouldn’t enjoy a drawn out game of chess, even if it was against someone of exactly the same skill. The vast majority of gamers don’t appear to enjoy competitive play whatsoever. But we can assume for the sake of this article that we’ve got a game that both the players or teams of players enjoy playing, or potentially would enjoy playing.

The Only Test is Your Skill: Face Him Straight!

Now getting the game difficulty and game mechanics right for ‘flow’ in a single-player experience is a really difficult task. So much has been written on that topic already elsewhere. The big problem is matching the challenges in the game to every individual player’s skills, which of course, vary widely. And their tastes in the level of challenge and type of challenge they want (if any at all!) also varies. So you get solutions such as different difficulty settings, the ability to save your game, or as I’ve already discussed as an example setting the difficulty of moves within a game. However getting the potential for ‘versus flow’ right ie: the difficulty setting of versus mode, is actually a very simple goal, no matter the type of game: You simply need to match up two players (or teams of players) of relatively equal skill. Yet this is exactly where video games fall down.

I’ve referenced this issue a multitude of times here on Agoners, and I’m continually astounded that not even a single game has ever really tried to address this fully. I see this as the vital missing component in so many games.

Imagine if you could play a game of Street Fighter (any version!) and have a good chance of fighting against someone very close to your skill level with the character you selected to play. I cannot fathom that anyone would not find that more fun than the current situation; where it’s effectively totally random who you get to play, outside of creating your own game invites. On Street Fighter 2 HDR Ranked Match or a random Player Match lobby, you’re as likely to fight against Joe Noob, who can barely block an attack, as you are to fight against an Evo champion like Afro Legends - and I have first hand experience of both. Now of course your subsequent rating change, win or lose, will attempt to reflect the level of your competition – and HDR has one of the very few decent skill rating systems out there (provided all players have played enough games, you always play your best character(s) in ranked, and don’t get idiots playing you with rubbish ping times, or Akuma players…). But I feel the aim of an online matchmaking system ought to be to provide fun for the players first, and a realistic ranking or rating system second. But of course the rating system itself does become critical if you use it to matchmake. Street Fighter IV is also a total failure in this regard. Whilst it’s “Championship Mode” patch at least gave players the chance to get a match against a similarly skilled opponent with it’s grade point system, the system of grading players itself was so flawed, with far too wide levelling and grinding potential, that this actually did nothing but add a a slightly improved, but still only very small chance of a good versus match. Probably the only fighting game that even comes close to decent matchmaking is Virtua Fighter 5 – but only if people use the ‘find players close to my level’ option; which many do not, given that not enough players with good ping-times are play the game.

I can't believe I only stumbled across halolz.com thanks to writing this article - great site, click image for more!

When it comes to another staple competitive genre – FPS’s – things are arguably even worse. Almost every game I’ve played that could be a helluva lot of fun with good matchmaking eg. Left 4 Dead Versus Mode or Team Fortress 2, has no actual attempt at matchmaking at all. And adding vastly to the complexity is the fact that determining the skill of teams is a far more difficult task than ascertaining a single player’s ability. But what amazes me is that these games don’t even try.

I’ve often held up Halo 3 as one of the exemplars of good matching, with it’s in-depth experience point and grading system and seemingly excellent matchmaking system. However I’ve played a lot more of it since Halo 3 ODST came out, and very quickly huge cracks started to appear to me. There’s a lot of them, but they all generally fall under the umbrella of the major problem being that players are not realistically ranked on the actual skills that matter in the game. For example, map knowledge plays a huge part, whether in a team game or a free-for-all. However the matchmaking works on the assumption that you are equally knowledgeable on all maps in the game… not so much fun when you’ve never had a DLC map-pack, and just got ODST and hence are experiencing a multitude of new maps for the first time.

Jumpers for goalposts

I could go into a lot more depth about the problems in virtually all current games across any genre, this is just a sample that I am familiar with. But the point is that hopefully it’s obvious that it is a problem. If you analogise video games to real sports, the current situation is like asking a soccer team to have to play against anyone from the Premiership, through to a bottom division, to a bunch of kids kicking the ball around in the park, whenever they want to play a match. Most versus modes on games don’t even attempt to offer anything like Easy mode or Hard mode, or even a Normal; it’s just totally random, or more likely VERY HARD all the time, if you’re not an expert experienced player. How many of those players out there who don’t appear to enjoy playing competitive games, like the quote at the start of this article, might do, if they felt they had a chance for a ‘equal match’. Next time in this series I’ll look at some possibilities for solving it, and better ways of doing things.

Challenge me Angel!

Challenge me angel ?? :-S

Do you really want to mess with me punk? Well, do ya?

Despite how I describe myself as being a fiero-seeking nutjob sometimes the challenge just seems too much, or too far away from my core interest in a game, even for me. For example, as part of my practice for Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, I’ve watched youtube videos of the best players in the world fighting with DeeJay & read about them and even from them on forums like shoryuken. And I see and read about things that I just can’t seem to do reliably, no matter how much I try. The biggest stumbling block for me is the execution of combos & blockstrings, which whilst not always that important to SF2, can be in certain matches for DeeJay. It’s a bit like how I’d describe watching any match of Street Fighter 4 in some ways [link to the future here ^_^], in that the best DeeJay players always hit that huge combo in that one chance they get to land it in a match, or can repeat a blockstring over and over if it’s effective to do so. It’s pretty much the opposite to me, as I have to play around the fact I will more than likely miss a big combo if only given a single attempt and a small opening to get it – and I actually quite deliberately work around this weakness in my play style and strategy in some ways. However it definitely limits my ability to play at a really high level – and with blockstrings it’s much worse than just missing a combo. In matchups where I need them a lot – eg. vs Dictator, I struggle with the whole matchup and am generally a lot worse because of it. Despite hours and hours spent in training mode on combos & stringing moves together, whereas I can at least do every combo in SF2 with my chosen character (unlike many other fighting games!), it always seems forever out of my grasp to become consistent at them. Now having this never attainably execution plateau is sometimes inspiring, but equally sometimes I wonder; what’s the point? What’s the point of learning every setup and situation & mindgame (which I find amazing fun, because it’s interactive & opponent dependant, not rote-learning of facts; like a map or course layout), when I get into the perfect situation I want to be in – I miss the exact move or combo I’ve just spent the whole round setting up.

I sometimes wonder if I ought to attempt to find the character in a fighting game that requires “the least physical dexterity to use”. My ideal character would therefore be the one with the least combos, least difficult moves – anything that’s a motion special I find much harder than a charge move, and I am quite bad at direction-held normals where they have to be applied in very small reaction windows, least important to time a perfect safe-jump / cross up / or reversal? ie: A character that is most dependant on mind-games (yomi) & knowledge. I’m not sure who this character would be in SF2, perhaps Blanka? But it’s so matchup dependant in SF2. And I would bet that this theoretical character in any fighting game is very probably low tier. It sometimes makes me think I really ought to go and play a good competitive turn-based game instead, such as Kongai or Magic the Gathering; and of course, sometimes I do. This is especially a problem when I’m playing when mentally or physically tired, and I’ve even suffered from serious issues with RSI in the past (thankfully joysticks never really cause me this, although I do get ‘button basher’s forearm’ at times ).

The crazy thing for me is that when HDR was announced I set myself my own personal goal for how good I thought I could get at Street Fighter 2…

Now whilst I’ve not yet signed away my soul to the Spirit of a Fighter, I’ve already surpassed my personal goal to become the greatest jazz player in Yorkshire… Perhaps I set my sights too low, and sometimes I wonder should I even be trying to aim higher? Yet of course, much of the time, it’s great fun, and that good old fiero when I do manage to punch above my weight isn’t half addictive for someone like me

I do believe that the mastery of execution needed to play fighting games well is a big part of the ‘flow‘ that fans of this kind of game can achieve whilst playing. What I mean by this is that when the execution of moves is within their grasp, not too hard and not too easy, the player is put into the flow portion by just this aspect of the game; and they’ll probably have a lot of other enjoyment factors for them going on as well. The trouble is that the vast majority of gamers – at least when exposed to real competitive play on fighting games – are quickly placed into the Anxiety area on the graphic to the left – although I’d prefer to rename the feeling caused as frustration or despair. I believe one of the main reasons I enjoy it so much is that SF2 HDR hits my “flow zone” far more than any other fighting game, during competitive play, precisely because so many other fighting games are just too hard, too fast and too complex (in terms of the dexterity needed to use their mechanics) for me.

Unfortunately it seems that much of the fighting game community – and even the developers of these games – are oblivious to just how much of a challenge even so-called simpler or ‘easy’ games like HDR really are. As fighting games have developed over time, rather than a focus on balance and viable strategic options or tactical styles for players, games have generally just increased the complexity of the execution needed to master them. But then again, you could argue these developers really are feeding their own community, since even today you still hear cries from the ignorant about the so-called ‘dumbing down’ of SF2 in HDR purely due to the handful of motions & timings that were made easier. I take completely the opposite view and I think any nod towards greater accessibility is actually a really good idea for the genre. And the really daft thing is, when it comes to SF2 at least, that at the very top levels of play everyone can execute everything with very high %’s of success. So making moves ‘easier’ for lower level players, really doesn’t change the top-level game at all, it just allows more players access to it. If some players move into the “control/relaxation” zone when it comes to performing moves on a fighting game, I think that’s a really small concern, in fact the game arguable works best at that point. It amazes me that even fighting game fans at times seem not to realise there’s still so much more going on in these games than simply performing combos and special moves! How ‘flow’ can be found equally well, if not far more in the rest of the gameplay inherent in fighting games is something I’ll also go into in future.

So really, maybe HDR is still the ideal fighting game for me when it comes to the mastery of execution, since I’m getting put very close to a ‘flow’ zone every time I get a chance for a crossup combo with DeeJay. “Alright Rikky, bust out da’ jackknife!.. kick”

Technical KO

or.. “how I placed somewhere between 3rd & 46th at Super Vs Battle 09″ Sorry no snappy titles for once! .. unless you want to count “I wuz robbed?”

Super Vs Battle 09 Report & Analysis

Despite getting blown up in HDR casuals before the tournament, I settled down and ended up going 5-1 in my group. I was really amazed I’d managed to do this well, as I was really thinking the competition would be way too good for me at SVB. There were about 50 entrants to HDR, but there were great players from all over Europe such as Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy and it was clear this was a really quite hardcore group, unsurprisingly for perhaps Europe’s biggest fighting game tournment.

Chunli1 (left) and Cuongster (sat) playing HDR

We’d been split up into groups of 6 and 7 players randomly, and the top 2 qualified from each group to create a top 16 knockout tournament. I knew some of my friends had gone through from their groups on only 4 wins so I was feeling quite good I was going though. But there was a problem. There was a 3-way tie on 5-1 in my group. The group organiser was confused about what to do and eventually various other Tournament Organisers were brought over to try to resolve it. Firstly we looked at our records vs each other – but we’d each only lost to each other. There was then an idea we’d all play each other again.. however as I pointed out that could mean we’d get exactly the same three way tie again if the results were the same. “We’ll play all day!” I shouted pumping the air – I love HDR so much I thought this sounded like a pretty good solution. But having run quite a few tournaments, I understood the problem from the TOs’ perspective straight away. It was almost like paper, rock, scissors. Myself, maining DeeJay who’d beaten CalmDownMonkey playing Honda who’d beaten Cuongster playing Ken, who’d beaten me.

Eventually ‘The Golden Gunman’ came over to sort out what would happen.

“None of you are going to like this..” he started, “but we’re going to have to use ‘Inti’s rule’”. He went on to explain: We’d have to play a single elimination bracket where one player got a first round bye, and the other two played a knockout matchup, and then, because they also needed to determine a group winner for top 16 matchup seeding, they’d also have a 1st place playoff. I drew the shortest of the straws and had to play again for knockout, against Cuongster’s Ken – the only player who’d beaten me in the whole tournament. Now I’d learnt a bit about how to play him, and I got a 2nd round win and pulled it really close in the 3rd, but as I’d already discovered, he’s a really great player and was using some tactics I’d never seen before until that day, and he won it again against me. Cuongster then went onto beat CalmDown the second time around too, to take 1st place in our group. And so I was out of the tournament despite going 5-1 in real play and 5-2 even including the extra “Inti’s rule” matches. Cuongster was the well-deserved winner of our group, having gone 7-1 with the two extra matches thrown in, but CalmDown was also the same 5-2 in ‘real games’ without the Bye. And of course not only did I have the same record as him, I’d beaten him, so still arguably had a better claim to 2nd spot. However CalmDown was the only player in the group to have taken a match off Cuongster, so those arguments work both ways. However it wasn’t the fact that CalmDownMonkey went through instead of me that was the most striking about the unfairness, it was the fact that I knew  there were players on 4-2 and 4-1 records and had gone through to top 16, even though they’d done worse within their groups than I had. And I was the only person now out of the tournament who’d only been beaten by a single player! I naturally voiced this complaint and one of the TO’s had the audacity to say “You wouldn’t be saying it if you’d won”… hah.. I just shake my head in retrospect at the thought of that; obviously he didn’t and doesn’t know me at all! If he did, he’d have realised what I’m like; I’d have been FAR more vocal and annoyed on behalf of CalmDown or Cuongster had they drawn the short straw and got knocked out at this early stage despite playing so well. I heard mutterings from a couple of my friends in other groups (some of whom had qualified for top 16) that I was a better player than some of those who had gotten through. I can’t say that for sure myself; but certainly the evidence in tournament matches at SVB did back that up.

The Golden Gunman apologised to me for the situation and even shouted “Inti’s rule sucks!” when he saw me later in the weekend. I discussed it with him and he said “well, if you could come up with something better…”. Within an hour of being out I’d already had one idea which he thought was pretty good, albeit it would need some organisational tweaks. By the next day I’d had even more ideas, so I promised I’d write them up for him. Here would be my thoughts on various ideas to help improve the ‘heats-then-knockout’ tournament format and SVB in general:

1. My initial idea: Why was I forced into a “playoff” just within my group? Why not consider all the groups in this? So whenever a top 2 cannot be determined in a group, then look across the whole 8 groups and select the two worst (or perhaps four worst if required by ties) records to play off for the bottom 16th or 15th & 16th positions. Effectively at SVB I ended up being the 17th player and odd-man out of the top 16, but why should one player in a larger 7-man group with a 3-way tie get all the disadvantages loaded onto them? Why not allow all three of us to go through and have two 4-2 players from other groups play-off for 16th place. Or, not quite as good, but possible, would be to do a playoff with the three way tie group and the 2nd place player from another group randomly selected to balance things out and try to prevent giving out a bye. The difficulty with this, as Golden Gunman pointed out, is that it would mean you couldn’t finalise any groups until all the groups were finished. Earlier running groups (in multiple stages, as was the case at SVB) might mean some players had already left etc. However, I don’t really think this would be an issue if everyone knew the rules beforehand, and knew not to leave or they’d possibly forfeit their chance at top 16.

2. The ‘FIFA’ solution. The World Cup of soccer works in a similar manner to SVB, so why not copy it further. They use goal difference to resolve ties – Street Fighter (& most fighting games) has round difference. People aren’t used to it but there’s no real reason it can’t work. It requires a tiny bit more recording by group organisers, but it means ‘Inti’s Rule’ will hardly ever come into play if you still need it as a secondary tie-breaker. It’s worth noting that Magic the Gathering tournaments also use this method of tie-breaking it’s best of three matches.

3. The ‘NFL’ solution – as well as a very detailed system of tie-breakers than go down in order from ‘head to head’ matchup, divisional matchups, right down to points difference, points scored and eventually to a coin flip, the NFL also uses a system of “Wild Cards” to determine which teams go through to the knockout stage. The winner of each division – groups in SVB terms – automatically qualifies, and then two more wild card teams make it through. These wild cards are the next two best win-loss records out of the entire conference (you could potentially split stages like this in SVB terms if you wanted to), so you can have three teams qualify all from the same division if one division is strong enough. This is essentially similar to my initial idea but taken further. The problem with this is that the NFL season also has inter-divisional and inter-conference play, whereas SVB groups only played within themselves. So you’d arguably be increasing the problem of an unbalanced group by doing this.

4. If you are going to use groups, then attempt to avoid unbalanced groups by using some form of seeding, so known ‘top’ players are theoretically spread out across the groups. Again, I believe this the same method the soccer World Cup uses to seed teams into different groups. The obvious difficulty here is the lack of data you have on players to even attempt to seed them. SVB did have the Dramatic Battles as preliminary heats to potentially gather data, but there wasn’t really enough of them to do this. Still, they also presumably had data from previous Super Turbo tournaments that could’ve been used to seed players. Another idea would be to seed players based on geography. NeoEmpire & Electronic Dojo organiser DNA really likes this idea because he wasn’t too happy about the fact that a bunch of good Midlands players were in the same group. Why let this happen when players are travelling a long way to compete, only to match them up against their local competition anyway?

5. Given the “matchup” nature of most fighting games, you should always allow “blind picks” by ‘telling the judge in secret’ in the same way EVO does it. I’ve already some heard some complaints about “character select screen camping” in HDR, although I saw no evidence of it myself – there’s absolutely no reason to allow it to even be a potential issue. Alternatively make people pick a single character and stick to them for the whole tournament, the same way almost all Japanese tournaments are run, and the way Electronic Dojo runs theirs.

The main thing is that whatever you do there must be TRANSPARENCY; you must have the rules for tiebreakers (& especially for seeding if you are doing it) clearly documented beforehand. I would’ve been much happier if we’d all known about “Inti’s rule”, as the organisers clearly did, before we got in a situation where it applied.

However it’s also worth noting that a totally different tournament organisation would possibly be even better than any of these.

Now firstly let me say, it really all depends on what your goal is for a tournament. If your goal is purely to find a #1 then the way SVB’09 worked was completely fine. I’d had just as good & fair a shot at winning the whole tournament as anyone else – it was just that my “finals” came very early. In fact barring the differences mentioned above, SVB was really quite close to the way the NFL works – a league and then into a playoff format for the ‘Super Bowl’. It’s a great method for creating drama and grudge matches – for example if you maintained the same group from tournament to tournament like the NFL retains its divisions. However it’s also frequently rather unfair in the NFL, and it’s unfair here. This is a definitely personality slant of mine, but whilst I can often see the benefits in other ways of doing things, I place a huge amount of value on fairness and balance. It’s why I abhore cheating so much, and is a big part of my love of HDR as it least attempted to improve overall character balance.

If your secondary goal is to give all the players a chance to play a fair number of matches, then again, SVB’09 is a fantastic way of doing it. Unlike the harshness of elimination-style tournaments, every player had a chance to get in at least 5 or 6 matches against serious competition. I see that as an excellent result of organising it in this manner. However if your goal is to give every player a fair chance to advance as far as they can in the tournament, or to attempt to rank players within the tournament, then SVB’s method doesn’t work so well.

A fantastic tournament game

For ranking, it’s really utterly impossible. Whilst I had a fair shot at 1st place, I definitely didn’t have a fair shot at top 16 or top 8. I don’t have all the data (although I’m hoping the organisers of SVB will give me access to all of it), but I might actually be far from the most ‘hard done by’. Cuongster went on to get knocked out in the top 16, whereas CalmDownMonkey went on to finish 3rd (although got a Bye to top 4 due to 2 people not showing up for the top 8!). I don’t know how the groups broke down, but it was possible that one of the other groups had 2 top 8 players (or even two top 4, or the top 2) in it, and someone knocked out at the heat stage who only lost to both these players might’ve technically performed better than me. The top 16 to top 8 cut-off with a single match was also incredibly harsh. In fact one thing that would be really interesting would be if all the results were put through the same ELO-like calculations used to create the XBox Live ratings – and create an “offline tournament rating” in effect. It would probably be best to take the tournament result itself into account by going through all the matches twice under ELO to “double weight” them. Under that kind of scoring I could’ve easily ranked somewhere in the top 10, having beaten the person who’d placed 3rd, and only lost to a player who placed somewhere between 9th-16th. Note that this is exactly how DCI ratings work in Magic the Gathering – incorporating the results of every single match of every officially judged tournament you play in and weighting them by tournament size & organisation. That sort of thing would be absolutely fantastic for any offline game, and especially for Street Fighter, but it would likely need to involve backing from an organisational body like Capcom to work (just like the DCI is backed by Wizards of the Coast).

In so far as advancing, it’s worth noting that under a double-elimination format (eg. the way the Midlands Dramatic Battle by Electronic Dojo was run, or the way EVO is run in the USA), or naturally a triple-elimination, it is impossible to lose a tournament by being beaten by only a single player- that cannot ever happen until the finals or top x playoffs if they are used. It’s also impossible in the ‘matchmaking’ style of Magic the Gathering tournaments… which having thought a lot about this now, I think is probably the best solution for running a tournament of this nature. Now of course there’s no completely fair way to do it, other than a likely unmanageable round-robin of all the competitors. And even then, as Fulan and I discussed at SVB a single tournament can never truly define a ‘best’ player – it is only a snapshot in time of that small period of the event. However I think the DCI’s method for Magic is the fairest that still allows players to continue even if they lose their first two games. It’s pretty simple really, and there’s even a piece of software (DCI Reporter, that I believe is based on chess matchmaking software) that does all the potentially complex matchmaking & round pairings for you. Basically if you have 50 players it just creates 25 matches for the first round and every round after that, but it also allows for players to drop from the tournament at any time, re-calculating matches (and byes if required due to an odd number of competitors in a round) as it goes. After that, it tries to matchmake similar records as much as it can each round. So if you’re at 2 wins and 1 loss in the fourth round, it will match you against someone else with 2 wins and 1 loss, or the best matchup it can make. This can then go on for a set number of rounds based on the time available & then use tiebreakers as required to calculate results, or it can can on until you have an outright winner, or a calculate a top x cutoff at any point. It’s essentially similar to double elimination with a bit of added fairness put in & without the harshness of a quick knock-out (although going 0-2 can likely means you have no shot at winning if there aren’t really enough rounds for the top people to lose 2 games). It’s also particularly nice in a matchup-heavy game like Magic or HDR. Using this style, you’d probably want o run longer rounds too with perhaps best of  5 rounds or best of 3 matches if time allowed.

One last point before anyone claims I’m whining or making excuses – not at all! If I want to do better at HDR, there’s only one focus on my mind, and it’s nothing to do with tournament rules – I need to learn to beat a player like Cuongster and his great tactics against me! I certainly learned a lot at the tournament and came away with more things to work on. But the thing I found most fun was that as I generally find in high level play at HDR, execution of combos is not that big a part of it. I didn’t once get a chance to land one of DeeJay’s big combos – that I would’ve likely messed up anyway! – simply because these players were too good to fall for the usual crossups or risky jump ins. However some other aspects of my play in various situations and matchups need a lot of work. More thoughts on that in a future post. I also found that, as before at the Dramatic Battle, when the heat is on, my results get better. Even when I’m losing – for example against Cuongster, the guy was absolutely pasting me in casuals before & after, and the only time I almost beat him was, sure enough, when it was a knockout tournament match.

Now having said a lot here about how it doesn’t necessarily represent as much as it appears Here’s the Official Results of HDR at SVB’09 (from NeoEmpire):

Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix:
1: Orf
2: Chunli1
3: CalmDownMonkey
4: Alan Da Man
5-8: Angel Killer
5-8: Prodigal Son
5-8: SMQ
5-8: Kaosflare

My own notes on characters: Orf played Ryu, Chunli1 played Chun Li and switched to DeeJay in top 8, CalmDownMonkey played Honda, Alan Da Man played DeeJay, Angel Killer played Chun Li but missed top 8 due to transport problems, Prodigal Son (Ryan Hart) played Ryu, but didn’t turn up for top 8, SMQ played Boxer, and I don’t yet know who Kaosflare played.

Shout Outs:

Well people are doing this over at the NeoEmpire forum, but I thought I’d do it here.

The, quite literally here, split ST & HDR groups! ST in the background, PlanetRV, Spatz1 & Orf in order nearest playing HDR in the foreground while TastyC watches

Firstly I wanted to say a huge thank you to all the organisers for running it. I know from personal experience how much work these things can be and how little reward it can seem at times! So, I, for one, really appreciate everything it takes to pull this off. Special thanks to the Golden Gunman and BulletProof for being especially sound gents whenever I spoke to them. And HUGE thanks for running HDR. It’s the best fighting game I’ve ever played!

XBox Live REPRESENT! So impressed that tons of XBox Live players made good at this tournament, making up at least half the top 8 and two who were already on my XBL Friends List who I’d had matches with online. I was really sorry for Angel Killer who got caught in a London transport foul-up to miss his top 8 matches in HDR. The look on his face when he found out he was too late said it all. Congratulations of course to Orf for being a fantastic winner. Hopefully get some more matches in with you online sometime. And also congratulations to CalmDownMonkey & SMQ for their top 8 finishes. I think it all shows that no matter how much some people may not like it, ‘online’, and games with good enough netcode to allow it to develop like HDR, are becoming the present and is future of this gaming genre, and I’m starting to agree with what Bruce Askew said here about how good online play really does count. What’s great about this is that it will only improve the ‘offline’ game and the real-life tournaments as well. Thanks to everyone who plays with me on XBL. I wouldn’t have had a chance to learn any fighting game to anything like this degree if it wasn’t for you and for playing HDR. So thanks too to Capcom, Backbone, and Sirlin for getting this game out with good netcode that allows me to even have any competition!

It was really great to get to meet PlanetRV face-to-face after much chat over XBox Live before, oh and don’t forget… TUNA SANDWICH! Great also to meet SMQ (91), C0rbul0 (SIX Elephants!), TastyC & Fulan for real. Hopefully I’ll hear no more accusations of turbo eh SMQ?? Fulan.. loved your smile after hours of HDR casuals on Sat night and loved your explanation – cos you were beating ME! *shakes fist at you and then grins* GGs… I was really tired and off-form though after my Friday peak… you’d better believe I’m better than I showed then! Still, I learnt some new stuff which is what it’s all about. Oh and NICE custom stick TastyC!

Good to get to know CalmDownMonkey, Spatz1, SpinalBl00d and Chunli1 a little too. Congrats Chunli1.. I really wish you played on XBL; I could really learn some stuff from you. Great DeeJay in the finals… and painful, yet somewhat comforting to see you lose to the exact same stuff I lose to when its vs Ryu myself. Still, I’m sure you did better than I would’ve done there. Nice! CalmDown – definitely no hard feelings about the heats; shame that all you Scots seem to play Honda! I already know how to play vs him. Spatz1 – hopefully play you more in future, I need some serious training in that matchup.

SamStyle102 – cheers, dude – you and your 360 really made this event for me as far as casuals go. I really was going to leave on Saturday when it looked like we’d get NO HDR love whatsoever (& not even any ST) but between you, DNA, PlanetRV, Spatz1 and others we kept finding a way to keep SF2 alive, no matter the cost!

Ethan & The Bleeper- good to see you both again after over a year since BOD. Thanks Ethan for helping to keep HDR going somewhere no matter how much crap you got for it. GGs Bleeps… ok sorry, Obi your Claw’s much tougher now!

DNA for many of the same reasons. Thanks for being the first friendly face there at SVB to greet me, and once again for the Midlands HDR Dramatic Battle. I know I’m new on the offline ’scene’ but you’ve really made me feel welcome. Thanks for being a great supporter of HDR too. Maybe if you get something regular going in Brum I’ll be able to make it down more often. Although hopefully one day I can get something going in Yorkshire too.

Killer7 for saying hello even though we’ve still not played in months, you were still a really friendly dude!

Ups, Raks & Kamal for coming down even though you only had a few hours on Saturday & for being the only other guy there I know of from Sheffield. I hope this inspires you to get back into fighting games perhaps.. ?

and finally..

Marc, for doing this: Super Score Tissue 2 Turbo

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Golden Gunman's awesome Dudley AV

Not quite “STOP THE PRESS” but I sent this article to Golden Gunman before full publication and he told me this:

“It appears that during that tiebreak scenario, I made a whopper of a mistake, and in fact, you should have had ANOTHER chance to make it through.

My mistake was that you guys were all tied for first place, not second place, and the rule works differently according to each situation. In your situation, the winner of you against Cuongster should have been the the group winner, and the loser should have played the player who sat it out to see who went through as runner-up.

That way everyone has to win at least one game to make it through, whereas in this case, one player made it through without playing a game. Although he later played Cuongster, he was already through, so the result didn’t really matter.”

!!!

He’s also apologised far more than is necessary, cos he’s a great guy, and also offered me some monetary compensation; which I’ll trade in at my next big Neo Empire event. Also, as I said to him, this would’ve still put CalmDownMonkey in the same unfair position I  had been in, had I beaten him in a rematch, he’d have been 5-2 and only beaten by a single player; and yet out of the tournament, so I believe the points I’ve raised here in this article still stand completely, even though it would’ve been a fairer situation overall that no-one got through with a ‘free’ win.

Hardcore you know the score

The keen-eyed reader may have noticed that we’ve been playing around with the summary tagline that attempts to describe this blog in a single sentence. It’s actually quite a difficult thing to pin down, as Agoners is really about an attitude to gaming and our thoughts that develop from that, coupled with a wider reach on just about any gaming-related topic that interests us. I guess the whole purpose of this blog is founded in my own constant quest to find games reviews & articles by writers who share my kind of perspective on gaming. Whilst I also value a wider or counter-perspective as well, when it comes to the matter of opinion I can trust for buying or more importantly, investing my time in a game, I really do want an author who I can tell actually thinks somewhat like me. So for example, when I’m reading reviews of Madden 10, and deciding not to buy the title for yet another year despite my historical love of football video-gaming, it really helps me to have some faith in a review when the writer compares the actual gameplay to NFL2k5 or to the real sport of football. Ideally I’d also like to see hardcore views on the online & offline competitive portion of the game – but sadly things like this only really come around a few weeks or months after the game’s release, and I’ll probably have to forum trawl, or quiz friends that actually play it, since I know of no-where in the gaming press actually does this kind of hardcore review. Other than painstaking internet research on each & every individual title, nowhere provides the information I’d really like to know. Most of the time I simply have to play it myself to find out, which is unfortunate given how little precious gaming time I sometimes have available.

I seem to keep using that word: hardcore.

“musings of hardcore competitive gamers”

I’d better point out that I completely disagree with the traditional ‘hardcore’ or ‘casual’ gamer distinction. That model is quite clearly an overly simplistic and flawed one… so what do I mean & why do I even use the term at all? Well Only a Game explained this perfectly, so I won’t rehash the same ground but simply direct you there.

When I use the term ‘hardcore’ I mean the confluence of both the dimensions described there: A highly gaming literate ‘gamer hobbyist’, who also particularly enjoys ‘hard fun’ (agon) and punishing games; in particular this is most often found in games with human competition, and so therefore social factors involved in playing that game also often become important.

I’m well aware this is actually a very niche interest & it’s becoming rarer as gaming becomes more mainstream. The peak of gaming fun for me is most often when I’m dying, or losing, over and over in a game and being really challenged and then finally beating it – or even better my opponent – by improving my actual skill – not just winning by getting more ‘levels’ on my character, a better gun, or by luck. Whilst I may get temporarily frustrated, I know this is actually what I enjoy the most. However I’m also extremely particular about the manner in which a game challenges me. Whilst I can enjoy all of the traditonal skill tests in games – strategic, tactical, logistic & diplomatic, I still have general strong dislike for tests of rote-learning (eg. learning the map in an FPS), trial & error (eg. point & click adventure games with illogical solutions), and overly complex dexterity tests and non-interactive parts of a competitive game (eg. long combo strings in a fighting game), and I also have a wider ‘general interest’ taste in games than just this, but it is definitely my core.

A hardcore gamer in these terms will probably identify with more than one of these gamer types but will definitely associate most strongly with ‘Conqueror’.

You’ll certainly come out as some kind of Conqueror type in the Brainhex survey too.

Add in a self-analytical slant & a love of thinking about why you play and what you get out of it, and you’ve got, well, Agoners.

HARDCORE MOTHERF**KERS

Incidently, if any of this sounds like you and you’d like to write for Agoners, feel free to get in touch via the comments! Or if you know of any websites you think I’d like to read that aren’t already featured on our links, again, please comment.