THE Battle of Destiny (it won’t be for me)

Just a short post to say.. yes, it’s finally confirmed I am going to this!

It will only be a day-trip for me though and I’ve still not decided which day to go on. I won’t be entering any of the tournments, because thanks to the sheer idiocy of the Sony-loving organisers means I cannot play any of them. And that’s as pleasant a comment I can make about that…

So moving swiftly on before my rage-gage fills to untold levels, I’ll hopefully get my fill of SF4 and SF HD Remix I hope whichever day I go, but I also want to watch the tournaments for entertainment. So the choice between seeing tournament matches Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (on Saturday) or Street Fighter III Third Strike (on Sunday) is an incredibly difficult one to make. Note that CVS2 only barely qualifies as “entertainment” to watch, and Tekken? Umm, right, I’d rather watch two toddlers brawling in a playground than that rubbish, thanks all the same.

There’s also the hilarity of a certain amount of “money matches” going down – but it’s unclear from forum reading as to exactly when those will take place, so I think I’ll just have to hope I get lucky in witnessing some of these.

Expect a full Agoners report later.

You know when you’ve been Kongai’d

*dodge*

*crunch*

Intercept!

Intercept!

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Ok, I’ve been playing a lot more Kongai. It really is a good game! It became a lot more fun when I didn’t have to use Amaya anyway Although, on Amaya, it was interesting to me that I had very quickly concluded that he seemed to be rubbish, and then I check a few forums and find out he is near-universally regarded as the worst character in the game, possibly the only all round ‘bad’ character in fact, in desperate need of a buff (sic) in a future patch. At least I figured I’d understood the game ok to have worked that out so quickly myself. He’s still the best looking guy in the game anyway

If only these were my real stats!

But it really does fascinate me at times (although that one of my regular opponents enhances the fascination at least 1000-fold I must admit). One of the most intriguing aspects is just how well it models the mental game of high level play at fighting games like Street Fighter. Even when it ‘feels’ like a guessing game, it is hardly ever really a pure guess. There’s a lot of number crunching logistic-play optimisation kind of things you can do in Kongai, which is pretty much pure maths – and hence rather dull in my opinion, but Kongai remains interesting because there’s almost always another viable option, and you’re often weighing the mathematical “solution” against a healthy dose of instinct, and of course yomi. Which was a major design goal of the game, and one which it achieves with aplomb. Even the sometimes-decryed “luck” aspects in the game, actually mirror high level Street Fighter very precisely. For example, the 90/95% hit chances on many moves is very much what a good player feels when doing a ’special move’ in Street Fighter. You know you’ll almost always pull it off correctly, but there’s just a chance that you’ll mess up certain moves, which could affect your choice of what option to take.

 

One of the other really fun similarities with Street Fighter is ‘training your opponent to do silly things’. For example, I was told by regular opponent that I take a certain action in the game too much; and I agreed that I do – but the reason was I’d developed that tactic because when I am playing a random unknown new opponent at the game, I want to ‘train’ them that this is something I am going to do, just to set them up for later when I purposefully won’t do it and this will hopefully cause them to make mistakes when “guessing” against me.

 

However, huge positives aside, I still stand by my earlier comments though; the method of collecting ‘cards’ is a huge black mark against playing the game. Even though they’ve improved it so you do gain a few cards very quickly, which is much nicer, it still doesn’t make it fun going up against someone with the odds stacked against you to try and win those cards. It is fun to gradually increase your collection and improve your choices and your deck, and I wouldn’t mind the method of collecting cards at all if the method of matchmaking was fair (ie: based on your usuable card collection size as well as rank/skill level). Or alternatively allow you to pick your card when you do win one, at least perhaps just from a subset of two or three. I’m a great example of the reason this would be good: I have a collection of 13 cards now, in theory, but actually, 5 of them are basically unusable to me. Also it rather dampens the fun of the “random card win” when each time I seem to get something new that I can’t use. The fun of alea just seems to let me down every time.

My record is now 36-16 and I’ve been playing with clearly sub-optimal decks for all of this time. But my current main deck is not a bad deck at least; well it wasn’t too bad as soon as I’d got a new character - anyone to replace Amaya instantly improved it. And now at least every character I play has some kind of item that isn’t totally useless for them, but none of them are the items I would choose if I had a full choice. But to fix the matchmaking method I have been playing a lot of private matches, so my record is probably rather misleading. I’d like to try ranked matches, but I really don’t want to do this until I’ve got something close to what I’d consider a good deck. I think I’ve only had one open game on Kongai so far when my collection was clearly giving me the upper hand. I won easily, and it felt like I was cheating.

What about the “Kongregate Challenges” to win cards you ask? Well, let’s just say every game I’ve played on Kongregate for this reason I’ve only given one star or two stars. They are all terribly boring RSI-inducing click fests… or worse. The only challenge I enjoyed doing was the one that involved playing Kongai itself. Even more irritating is that I know there are other decent games on Kongregate, it’s just a shame they don’t seem to ‘promote’ those games with challenges.

But anyway, Kongai is free & does prove to be a lot of fun… so, I do recommend it. And I’ll happily throw ‘practice games’ on Private Match too if you’re new and want to play me and win some cards

“Nanan da, Anta?”

…is a taunt & win quote from Remy in Street Fighter III Third Strike. It means literally: “What are you trying to do/Why are you doing this?”. And the same thought went through my mind very late last night after spending a huge amount of time gaming. One game in particular I’d played stood out that spurred this thought: Ninja Gaiden 2. It’s a game I’d been put off even getting due to the reviews, in particular the Eurogamer review, written as it was so clearly by someone with a near-identical viewpoint to my own on the first Ninja Gaiden game. But I’d been lent the game by a friend.. so.. why not give it a try?

But last night, during the evening I had stopped playing the game in frustration and switched to playing other games instead. This has been a frequent occurance with NG2. Usually I start playing it full of enthusiasm, but I’ve invariably ended up turning it off with a huge feeling of annoyance, and either stopping play or moving onto something different. Last night when stopped, I put the game back in its case and back onto the shelf and thought to myself “I won’t play this again. I’ll give it back to my friend next week”. However, instead, I woke up today after thinking about it wanting to play it again.

I just =had= to steal this image

According to one model, International Hobo’s DGD1 model I came out as a majority “Conqueror” type player. Now whilst I have other types of gamer in me, I recognise that ‘hard fun’, agon, is certainly my #1 driving force, as you can probably guess from the name of this blog . It’s definitely a large part of it. I simply want to beat this game. But is it just the drive of fiero calling me?

Is it perhaps the lure of those XBox Achievements? I don’t believe so. Such carrots tend not to affect me, as I seem to able to simply choose not to let them. For example a game like World of Warcraft that is fiendishly addictive for those who enjoy that “level up” feeling simply does not addict me. I got frustrated playing that too, and there were certainly some potential fiero-inducing challenges, but even so I did just walk away from playing it easily.

There is another possible strong factor that is “outside the game” as such and so isn’t ever really mentioned in most player models, and that’s the investment of time and money. Simple really, but so often overlooked – once you’ve spent a large amount of time, money and effort on something, you often want to believe it is good and ‘fun’ and you actually start to find more ‘fun’ out of it because of your investment. Talk to anyone with an especially blinkered “fanboy” attitude to any piece of software or hardware and its really obvious this is the case. Again, its part of the factor in a game like WoW, also part of the reason I believe many people ‘happily’ play agon-based challenge games even though they aren’t really predisposed to this kind of play and would be much happier playing something else – although I think there’s a lot more at work there I could go into at another post. I don’t think its possible to be un-affected by this really, I’m likely been as “guilty” as this as anyone, but also personally I’ve found this is as actually likely to swing both ways. Many of the games that I find particulary annoying and I generally consider the “worst games ever made” (such as Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, and a number of FPS shooters), I am aware that a huge part of my loathing for them comes from the fact I wasted so much money, but far moreso I wasted my precious free time on playing them, yet gained little or no enjoyment ‘reward’. But in any case, in this particular situation it really does not apply, since I have not spent a really large amount of time or effort (yet) on NG2, and I have only borrowed the game anyway.

So if it’s not just the fiero (or lack thereof), it’s not just the investment factor…  so what’s the difference with Ninja “Where’s Me” Gaiden 2 where I seem to keep wanting to go back to it, to something like WoW which I was able to drop on a whim and never ever felt like playing again? I feel that is down to what I consider the core gameplay in the game – at least for me; I understand different people will even get different ‘core’ experiences from a game. With NG2, I can see that the basics of the game really do appeal to me. A fighting game engine where I pit my skills against a good AI with beautiful fluid controls, feedback and graphics all heightening the excitement and engagement feeling (more on this in a future post) – sign me up now! It is exactly like my kind of thing.

But of course the tradeoff with NG2 is how this underlying gameplay that I would really enjoy is so obsfuscated by the game. The “levels”, the story, the “non melee”/puzzle-like boss fights, the logistic play of the items and save points.. almost all of this stuff actually serves to hide the part I really like about the game. The first Ninja Gaiden also did this to a great extent which was why I was so surprised I really enjoyed it, possibly because it straddled a line for me, yet never crossed it. But NG2 does seem to cross it at times. Especially, as reviews have said with way it challenges you. Its not so much that it’s hard to beat, its how & why it is hard. It’s hard in a way that feels to be almost random and .. well, you can read all about this in a good review like the EG one linked earlier. What is especially frustrating me is how this spoils the logistical play for me, because I could really enjoy that, but it feels especially annoying to me to ensure a full stock of health items, or to not “waste” a full-heal save point, only to lose all my items, or worse my life only due to what feels like bad luck or an unforeseeable event. I also keep wanting to believe their is a higher level of play possible where you are not affected by these things, but I suspect more and more that is only the case once you have experienced the game multiple times through. But that’s not a challenge that usually interests me with this style of game. Even at all the sections that I became “stuck at” so far in NG2, I knew I could have made them all “easy” simply by spending all of cash on healing items. But if I get to the point where I am just bludgeoning my way through the game with health items, thats when I’ll know I really ought to stop playing it. Then again, the fiero and investment factors may just make me pigheadedly fight to finish it anyway, I’ll have to wait and see how I react.

So. Ninja Gaiden 2, an exceedingly flawed game it appears to me; although part of my judgement is always reserved when I feel I haven’t yet played a game enough as is the case here. I am perhaps guilty of wanting to see the good in it too much – a charge that could be levelled at me in other walks of life incidently, so it is perhaps a personality trait of mine. But I think I know why I will persist with it to a point, even though I don’t for other games, although it is perilously close to the line for me still. I know I’d probably be far better off playing a more ‘pure’ experience of what I enjoy, something like Street Fighter perhaps, which is exactly what I ended up doing last night.

Defection to the Enemy Camp – Console vs PC (again)

Sore Thumbs

I knew this was a bad idea to start a blog with Remy. Due to his persistent and insidious prodding I went out and bought myself a large hi-def screen and an <shame>xbox360</shame>
…
…
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In my defense the screen is still technically a computer monitor (a highly recommended Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP 27)

So throwing off the chains of prejudice that I have been swinging around my head, usual aimed at console gaming and consoler gamers (aka: baboons), I booted up the machine (nb. to justify my purchase I’m going to use as much PC terminology as possible when talking about my Xbox). Mucho to my disgust I was already enjoying the experience. A few seconds later it was on, no passwords to put in or bios screens to negotiate. Even connecting it to my home network was a doddle. And I was so looking forward to failing at it so I would have a chance to gripe about it! Damn!

So sticking in my new purchase of Ninja Gaiden 2 it started up within a few seconds and the graphics are gorgeous! So as a PC user my first port of call is the options menu to start optimising the sound, graphics and controls to get it running as crash free and efficiently as possible. And what do I find!? Nothing! NO options, NO graphics sliders, NO control configurations…how do they play the game then?!?

Then suddenly it all made sense. This is why people use consoles. It’s gaming with no faff. It was such a liberating feeling. I dove straight into the game and loved the smooth controls, the lovely graphics and amazing animation (as in the first Ninja Gaiden game I played on the XBOX). It was already obvious that a lot more effort and detail has gone into this than any PC game in recent history. This elation with my new gaming experience came crashing down around my ears a few hours into it. First the graphical tearing, then the frame rate dropping and finally a complete system failure. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or disappointed; happy that the console gaming experience wasn’t a flawless nirvana or disappointed for the exact same reason. At least resetting the game didn’t take too long.

My next experience was to try out Halolz 3. Again, beautifully cinematic. But the moment the gameplay began I forgave my clunky and expensive PC all its past sins. The FPS experience on a console controller is unbearable after playing at high levels with the mouse/keyboard. It’s slow, sluggish and awkward with no finesse (like a bicycling hippo). The fact that it requires assisted aiming means that it is the wrong way of doing it. With a different control input it would be fine, but with the standard game-pads it doesn’t work. I can now understand why Remy has never had a chance to get on with this genre of game.

So to conclude this extremely abridged comparison between console and PC gaming: they are both great and flawed gaming platforms. Some games work better on the PC and some on the Xbox.

However, this is a pointless argument as the best gaming platform has already come and gone. None are as awesome as:

Bow before my awesomeness!

What a Donkey-Kongai

As you might have guessed by my taste in games and the fact his site is linked on the sidebar on this site, I find David Sirlin a very interesting fellow. I’ve actually locked horns with him in the past as long back as the heyday of usenet and alt.games.sf2 – although I was hardly a regular poster, having never been able to play fighting games at anything approaching a ’serious’ competitive level until the very recent advent of decent online play. (Although I’ve always been a potent Theory Fighter ) But it turned out over the years I actually have far more in common with him and far more that we’d agree on – especially in matters of gaming taste – than we would disagree. In fact I suspect that most of my early disagreements have been down to poorly worded interpretations of his points by others; rather than his actual argument when explained in detail. Anyone who thinks that “playing to win” at Street Fighter involves kicking their opponent in their real-life shins so they can’t play properly, or who quotes Sun Tsu as a defence for why they pressed their opponent’s Start button during a fight has really missed the point somewhat.

In any case, one of the games I’d been following the progress on with a great interest mainly due to David Sirlin’s involvement is Kongai. It’s a ‘Collectible Card Game’ (CCG) meta-game for the free-to-play webgames site Kongregate. And an intriguing game it is too. It’s actually more like a Vs turn-based RPG battler than a card game though. I’ve played quite a variety of virtual and non-virtual CCGs too, but this doesn’t readily compare to any for me. Also the ‘collectible card’ aspect is only really about the cards you get to select your team of characters from. You can call your team a ‘deck’ as they do if you prefer, but as you’re only picking three characters it feels more like a King of Fighters team selection than a 60-card Magic deck to me. I also ought to mention the fact the art for the game is very good and is done by, the often-fantastic, Udon.

Since Sirlin was on the case with the balancing, I had pretty high hopes this game would be interesting fun & also not suffer from the usual drawbacks of collectible card games.

 

 

Sadly, that does not seem to be the case at all.

The big problem is that as a new player who just wants to play Kongai (and then potentially get interested in the rest of Kongregate and its meta-game antics) you simply can’t even begin to COMPETE on a level playing field. Firstly your more ‘well-endowed’ opponents will be picking from a wider field of characters – which is not necessarily a problem if all characters are balanced – but does become a problem if certain combinations of characters are not so well balanced, which the game itself indicates is the case. But secondly and far more problematic is that there are also “item cards” which are essentially power-ups for your characters. So even with the same cards, you end up playing what feels initially like a Ryu vs Ryu match… until you realise your opponent’s Ryu also has a regenerating energy bar!

Can you imagine being introduced to playing Street Fighter like this?

You mean we can’t even play fairly until I’ve UPGRADED? I can only play as Super-Saver class, except at weekends, when I Upgrade… UPGRADE TO DONKEY!?

*sigh*  I do expect to get whupped by an experienced player at a game like this, and I don’t mind losing at all, but I expect to at least have a level playing field apart from my (lack-of) skill & knowledge -especially since this is a major thing Sirlin appears to stand for in games. If there has to be some kind of handicapping health items or whatever in a game like this, it should be given to the new player, not the more experienced one.

So for me right now, this appears to be a total waste of what could be an interesting game by Kongregate. They have recently introduced some ”newbie-friendly” changes which I need to research to see if it has made things any better… but unless it lets me at least have the same chance at abilities as my opponent eg. – is a matchmaking system so I can play people who only have a similar size card collection & lack of item cards as me too much to ask?… then I’ll still see this as a waste of time sadly, despite how fun the game appears to potentially be. Luckily they do seem to have added a way to play a specific opponent, so I will have to try and get a few equally “noobish” friends to play against at this.

But at the moment I can only recommend it if you are an existing fan of Kongregate and have lots of cards to play with already.

Sole Halibut

This week’s XBox Live Arcade release actually got me rather intrigued: Soul Calibur. A game that remarkably registers an “okay” from me. I say remarkable, because Namco’s pedigree with fighting games is simply appalling to me. I generally detest everything they’ve done. They are all simply so weak compared to the Sega or Capcom equivalents they are often literally laughable by comparison. But at least Soul Calibur was alright, had beautiful graphics, and came out on the Dreamcast. All good points for it.

It also has something unique among all fighting games for me – in that the main “hero” character in the game also happens to be my favourite character and my “main” for competitive play – not that Soul Calibur is actually good enough to really take especially seriously though.

So, as I do with any DC re-release XBLA title that I can, I ran it back-to-back with the Dreamcast version to compare. It does look much crisper and cleaner in HD of course, and looks great on a much nicer TV. But the main thing this did was make me realise was just how ridiculously good those DC graphics were once again.

Sadly though this release had been utterly gimped, and I won’t be buying it. It has no Mission Mode or online play; which renders this totally pointless for me. What a waste of an okay game! I’m just glad that I realised this before I paid to download it as that would’ve been a big mistake. The fact I barely even considered it might not have online play is an interesting point perhaps in how much more I expect from my games these days. I know it’s no simple “bolt on” for developers, but for me personally, this would be worth twice the price with online play. Without it; it’s not worth a penny.

 

I also thought I’d just leave a note on this blog, given my recent posts, that I don’t only play Vs Fighting games. Right now I’m also playing Lost Odyssey, Gears of War and Ninja Gaiden II. So expect some non-fighting content at some point if any of these games inspire me. Also on my to-buy list right now are also Civilization Revolutions & Orange Box (still). I’d have both by now if I knew the PAL versions worked on a USA XBox 360.