Rage Quit

I really don't know what to make of this game. Game play wise it is probably above average. It is a driving based FPS game with some RPG elements thrown in. I am kind of bored with the whole post-apocalyptic setting in games, especially when they are represented wholly by desert wastelands. Fallout 3 and Borderlands have sated my (apparent) appetite for it long in advance, so it really could just be a case of me not finding the environment interesting. At all. But, I have to say it. Rage looks like shit, and it makes me sad.

It makes me sad for a variety of reasons, the biggest being the simple fact that this is supposed to be iD Game's ( a company I have enjoyed previous games from) new engine technology. Over five years in the making, Rage and its engine are supposed to be the new benchmark for making games. I can see the appeal of the technology (streaming texture/geometric environments) but really, they should have pulled a Crysis and made this for PC only because this sorry console port looks fucking terrible in my opinion. It's not so much the lighting/rendering/polygon count as it is entirely to do with the textures. They are god awful, and the game suffers because of it.

Now I am not usually one to fuss too much over graphics. Sure, I like them. I go to great lengths to see them. Hell, I am a fucking PC Gamer ffs, so it does matter to me. But, if the game play isn't there as well then you won't find me playing it for long. Not to mention I play plenty of games (on console and PC) that you would hardly call state-of-the-art visually. However, my confusion when it comes to Rage has been all the talk about how good the game looks, from console and PC users alike. "Hmmph" I thought to myself, getting my hopes up once again. "Maybe it will look good after all".

Perhaps it is better if I explain my observation in a certain way. The following screenshot of some steps is from Doom II:
Doom II (1994) was also made by iD Games. It uses the same engine as Doom (1993), which for the time was an incredible piece of technology. Sure, you can easily make out the pixels in its 8-16bit texture palette, but for the time it was considered incredibly realistic. The colours/detail of the textures don't detract from the gameplay as everything kinda looks the same anyway, so it all fits nicely. The game is still incredibly playable even today. It is a game I frequently revisit to remind myself about aspects of game design and system architecture as it was a game that pushed your PC to its limits back in the day.

Let's jump a few years ahead. The following screenshot is some steps from Unreal Tournament:
Unreal Tournament (1999) is possibly my favourite game of all time. Released in what I still consider to be the best year in gaming, ever, UT99 was also a game that gave your PC a run for its money. In an era when AGP video cards were actively coming into distribution, games like UT99 were taking things like detailed textures and dynamic lighting very seriously. Besides this, UT99 was enjoyable as hell, looked like a beast and was/is an absolute gem of a LAN game.

The following screenshot is some steps and ridges from Quake III: Arena:
Quake III: Arena, also made by iD Games, was released late 1999. A direct competitor to UT99, it was/is a solid arena shooter. There is perhaps no better arena shooter for measuring skill and efficiency in FPS games than Quake III. It also boasted a significant texture palette, probably slightly better than UT99's and definitely was a benchmark for its time. Unlike UT99, however, it ran quite well on systems due to highly optimized rendering and network code in the format of iD tech's new gaming technology (i.e. iD tech 3).

The following screenshot is from Doom III:
Doom III (2004) was a strange game. It was rather hit and miss for certain audiences, especially those who were a fan more of the frenetic run and gun action of its older brothers. Game play squabbles aside, the game did look great, even with its default textures. Although the game has not aged well, looking rather bad comparatively to modern game's rendering engines, for its time it was considered state of the art.

The following screenshots of some ground is from Crysis:
Impressive huh? Despite the discontent people have for this game (something I have never understood) Crysis (2007) looked absolutely incredible. Taking full advantage of new technologies such as bump-mapping and dynamically lit textures, Crysis made the ground in games look almost photo-realistic. I say almost as, like all textures, repetition patterns emerge if you look at them closely enough (marked above). Nevertheless, it was a minor non-issue to an otherwise stunning game that, admittedly, kicked the shit out of your computer and raped it dead. In my opinion it is the last game to come out that was truly ahead of its time and nothing since then has beat it from a technology-vs-year standpoint.

The following screenshot is of a sidewalk curb in Rage:
-_-
WTF is this greasy looking shit covered excuse for a texture doing up in my curb yo?! I think I could vomit onto some dry leaves and come up with something better looking than that. Seriously. This looks fucking horrible, and it is everywhere. All over the damn place. Sure, there are some interesting crease lines and possibly unique cracks in the cement, but jesus christ! Does it really have to look that bad. The problem is, I know this is just a low resolution version of the textures they were actually working with. John Carmack has even stated there is a HD texture pack in the works so the game doesn't look so shithouse on PC. But ... why? Why would they not publish the game with said HD textures in the first place? What possible motive could they have for releasing their game with highly compressed, blurry, indistinguishable textures at all?

.... do I really need to say it?

Don't be fooled. No new engine is going to magically overcome the limitations of hardware that is going on 6 years old. No game studio is going to stop developing for the masses, even at the expense of the quality of their games. Don't listen to people who don't know wtf they are talking about, who are looking through a kaleidoscope from the wrong end. Most of all, don't believe what you see in screenshots solely used for advertising and marketing. What may seem like a beautiful, lens flare filled vista of the vast horizon....
.... is nothing but a fake distraction from the giant turd you are crouching on:

Those are the times

I wasn't originally going to start off this post by talking about this, but sometimes sifting through the mass of utter crap on Youtube can be really depressing. Usually I have posts that are loaded with videos when I am too lazy to discuss something original and sometimes the amount of searching you need to do to find the right videos is fucking absurd. Often you get these shitty videos of a dude with parkinson's disease filming a TV screen on their phone with the holocaust roaring in the background, limiting your ability to both see and hear wtf is going on. Often these videos are the most watched and liked, which I cannot fathom to any extent. I dunno, maybe I am too picky, but I really cannot understand how people can think these sorts of videos are worth even putting on youtube, let alone their constant ability to record stuff while having an obvious seizure.

Anyway, my frustration comes from trying to find some non-hyped up game play of the upcoming CS game Global Offensive. In my frustration in finding anything decent on youtube I have had to look elsewhere, and found something that made me cringe just a little. Basically its CS:GO on Xbox 360 ...

:S
I think what makes it that much more painful to watch (at least for me) is the simple fact that in any of the engagements the guy gets into in the first few minutes would be over in less than a second or two in both CS 1.6 and Source. It's like ... Deagle, point at head, click. Over. Quick, clean, easy. This is CS, the game that birthed the whole 'Boom Headshot' theme (from Pure Pwnage) and here we see two clowns jumping around emptying clips into walls more then they are emptying them into man. It almost looks like a mod for Halo. Maybe the people playing aren't very good, but to me it just shows the obvious difference in control between PC and console for FPS games ... and it bugs me. It bugs me because it should not be considered 'fine' and 'normal' by industry standards, both developer and consumer based.

Nevertheless, branching away from the occasional pile of steaming that Youtube can be at times, one does stumble across absolute gems of video. This is particularly the case concerning an e-sports, fighting game documentary of a player in the US. Taking on the likes of Daigo and Justin Wong at Evo 2010, Mike Ross is the star of FOCUS, an incredibly well put together story about his happenings in the big league of professional Street Fighter IV play.



There are a growing number of videos such as this (e.g. Beyond the Game) emerging slowly over time, which in my opinion can only do good for both the e-sports scene and the gaming industry as a whole. Showing the humanity behind these 'players of games' and exposing the fact that for some, e-sports can and are a profitable venture is a step towards un-demonizing the perspective many people have towards games and game development. Especially in this country.

Roughly this time of the year I start looking forward to things that are on the horizon. While I personally think that this has been one of the best years for games in a long, long time, some of the best stuff is yet to be released. I may just be in a RPG mode, perhaps from playing too much LoL and withdrawal symptoms from WoW, but Skyrim, Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3 are all ranking highly on my list of most anticipated. It would be excellent if we could get a group of us playing Diablo 3 at once, or at least playing it concurrently (not necessarily together). Here's hoping it is as addictive and time consuming as its previous iterations. No surer way of fucking up my PhD research than playing an addictive game too much.

Other than games though (and I should talk about things other than games), the announcement of Evangelion 3.0: The Quickening is also rather tasty. The name though (and I am sure this has been done to death) is rather ironic in the sense that it has been in production for fucking ages. Almost twice as long as the previous installment, which took 50% longer than the one before that. At least Asuka is coming back as a pirate with a sniper rifle this time, shooting things in space. Some kind of cosmic hybrid of LoL's Gangplank and Caitlyn methinks, yarr!




Speaking of LoL (yeah, sif not weave an entire blog post compositionally into some shit about LoL by what seems like random topics), Dominion has been an interesting distraction from classic SR, something that I feel I am infinitely worse at because of it. It is a strange beast though, favouring the tanky dps, mobile and ranged/global ult characters harder than ever. While I find my strongest characters are Ryze, Yorick and Xin, almost every game I play has an enemy Akali, Jax, Rammus, Shaco, Ezreal, Heimer or Gangplank in it. Some of these characters massively counter my favourite picks (e.g. Xin vs Jax) so making a smart choice in blind pick is somewhat impossible. Still, many enjoyable moments have occurred, solo and frequently with friends. The following video demonstrates some of our awesome powah!!



Special thanks to PanicsX, hotpies, MorePieNow, m1ch3ck and fooolishfool for being cannon fodder for the enemy.

To kill a Mordekaiser: Xin Zhao

In addition to that old video of me killing a terrible Mord ... as Mord (so annoying -_-), I thought I would upload one that is even more faceroll as Xin. Technically, since the recent changes to Mord, it is actually a lot harder to 1v1 Mord without creeps because he now generates even more shield off champions. I have also improved the video quality significantly after mucking around with some rendering settings, so this video should look beautiful at 720p at fullscreen. Expect future videos to be just as good.



However, it is worth noting that Mord is almost useless as his early game farm is now rather impossible, provided you aren't fighting brain-dead opponents.

Faceroll

After many months, it is finally complete. After a weekend of editing and another week of rendering (20 fucking hours for both quality versions -_-) and uploading, Faceroll is finally online.

Recommend watching in fullscreen at 720p. I would force these settings by default but Youtube's new iframe object eludes me and I cannot be fucked figuring it out for the moment.



If you are unable to view the Youtube video (blocked in some countries), or would prefer to download the SQ version as a single file, please use the this Depositfiles link.

Overall, I am not super happy with the final product. This isn't so much because of the number of shots I received, but more so the quality of them. They could be better. More awesome. More exciting. To an extent I have tried to beef up the not so exciting shots with editing that tries to direct the observer, which works to a degree. However I have not went overboard on the editing this time. This is partly because of time available and partly because I think an editor of video should be able to distinguish when less (editing) is in fact more. In principle I have gone for this approach.

I don't think I will edit another big LoL video for at least a year. Until then I would highly recommend Frapsing your own replays because it is unlikely I will be viewing them anytime soon with any form of enthusiasm.

The Guessing Game

Usually I will use this silly blog of mine to post some random crap I have been doing or thinking, sometimes in the form of a video but more often in the form of a rant. As much as I would like to think that this space is above the popular and socially acknowledged communication mediums also used for this sort of thing (including crap like Facebook and Twitter) I know that most of the time it probably isn't. Most blogs, including this one, will only ever bring up topics of interest to the author, and while they may be more expository and informative then some fool on Facebook exclaiming how drunk they got last Friday, they really are just more concentrated versions of the same thing. I am interested in things->I write them up onto a place->you digest them and contemplate their meanings. I would like to think they are somewhat less egotistic than say ... the average twitter post ("Hey! Look what I am doing. I am oh so happy!") but I am not so courageous to actually make that claim without some form of quantitative evidence. As much as I may try to justify my actions and fill these posts with things that I believe to be interesting, I know that deep down, even subconsciously, they are but bundled up expressions of the same deal.

The difference is I don't care who reads this.

So, with that out of the way, I will now do exactly what I described above. Often spurred by 'discussions' with certain friends of mine, the concept of what I describe as 'mechanical skill' has been fluttering around in my brain more often than not, for various reasons. This has been further punctuated by random interesting reads in the field of AI such as this, which form part of my weekly research for my PhD. The idea of implementing AI techniques that mimic those performed by human players is an interesting area of the domain, especially in terms of leveling the playing field and creating realistic agent behaviours. It is also ... simply refreshing to see that other people are out there that think like I do concerning the topic, proving that I am at least not entirely crazy (or that there are at least two of us who are). This is especially the case in regards to the amount of criticism I get about my PhD from certain supervisors of mine.

Still, the mechanical skill necessary in games is an interesting game design topic, primarily because it can determine two important factors of a game: the game's learning curve and its overall difficulty or skillcap. Mechanical skill relates to the accuracy, speed and appropriateness of the user's input with the peripheral/s controlling their game play. In simpler terms, how good you are with a touchscreen, gamepad, joystick, keyboard or mouse. Games of all types have varying degrees of this mechanical skill. If you compare something like Angry birds to Tekken 6, you can see this difference factor quite clearly. One has only several button presses a minute whereas the other has tens, if not hundreds (depending on how good you are or how hard you are facerolling).

Eddy Gordo (right) - The epitome of mechanical skill

However, a higher degree of mechanical skill doesn't necessarily equate to a more difficult game. You would hardly call chess a game of extreme mechanical skill, yet it is a game that is viewed to be incredibly complex and skill based to the point where large amounts of money are still being devoted to making the ultimate chess playing AI. Some games of high mechanical skill, such as Starcraft 2, are more to do with sustained repetition and speed of execution. Others, such as Street Fighter IV, are more reaction based with timely input of button combinations at opportune moments. First Person Shooters like Quake 3 have a mechanical input control that can be seen to require extreme precision, above all things. Even Guitar Hero (and clones) has a strong mechanical skill factor that requires some nimbleness and dexterity on the user's part. They are all incredibly skillful games that lean heavily on the mechanical skill side of things, some warranting e-sport status around the globe.

There are others though that may not rank so highly on the mechanical skill side of things, but still considered somewhat skillful games. Racing games and DotA clones fall into this category, some of which also have e-sport status. In a racing game, the number of actions per minute and timing of actions may not be so different from one person to another, yet clear proficiencies in games like Trackmania are obvious in the online community. Here, experience and understanding of the game's physics are more important. In League of Legends, the input and actions of an amateur player may be little different from that of a pro, yet a clear distinction in their skill differences can be seen in other areas (teamwork, knowledge, itemisation, ability to last hit etc). While most, if not all games have some form of mechanical input which inherently requires some degree of skill, not all games have the same depth of input required by the player. This aspect alone is what turns many people on and off certain games. People like your mum.

The learning curve of a game has a significant mechanical skill component to it, many of which can seem demanding at first. Street Fighter 3: Third Strike introduced a parry system that was far ahead of its time and considered too difficult to adapt to, even for veterans. To a person learning to play an FPS game, competency of aim with a keyboard and mouse comes only after many hours of practice. Hitting buttons on a controller is easy enough. Hitting them in reaction to certain events, especially in sequence, comes only after many failed attempts. An example of this can be seen in my attempt to learn how to play Street Fighter IV. Embarrassingly, there was a time when I was so terrible at this game (I still am) that I couldn't even pull off a Super/Ultra combo without repeated attempts. Of course, having endless chances to pull off a combo like that doesn't happen often in the game itself, so it is absolutely essential that a player can perform something like that first time and everytime they input it. Failure to do so results in losing. Even in League of Legends, playing a new champion has subtle differences in mechanical skill as you learn things such as their attack animation, abilities, attack ranges and hitbox size. This may cause you to tunnel vision somewhat when playing them for the first few times, adjusting to their components slowly over time. The first time I played Urgot, I found his control to be bewildering and irritating. Now? It is something I have gotten used to and not generally a problem.

Chogath's hitbox is both a blessing and a curse. It is enormous. Just like your mum.

When it comes down to it though, all human mechanical skill in the moment to moment game play can be based on one's own uncertainty and ability to guess. Whether this be correcting your mouse aim ever so slightly, blocking immediately after dashing, tapping right repeatedly around a corner or getting in range to throw your Ultimate, everything we do concerning mechanical input in games is based on our feedback response with the games output and our desire to make the game state more desirable for ourselves. Often, we don't know what is going to happen, we are merely assessing the visible situation and positioning ourselves in such a way to perform whatever we have in mind most appropriately. This comes in the form of the duration of a keypress, the velocity of a mouse move, the distance of a drawn skillshot and the placement of a cursor. We perform these tasks effortlessly without even thinking, but they are such a crucial and fundamental component of how we play games that they are often disregarded completely in their design. I know this as it is especially the case in the design of game AI.

Basically, I guess this is what I am trying to say: games should focus more on making the mechanical processes required to play them easier for new players. However, this should never, ever be interpreted as making the game easier to play. A game that is somewhat easy to play mechanically will require other areas through which skill can be injected, and if not available, can cause serious problems in terms of player motivations. If anything, it should be seen as the potential for making even more complex control schemes that can be both unique and demanding for players, but developed in such a way that they can adapt to them slowly over time. Then, and only then, will we see humanity pursuing the development of the next chess, instead of consistently simplistic games becoming increasingly playable by everything and everyone.

Including your mum.

Note: Somewhere in here is my usual rant about FPS games and skill. I am sure you can find it.

Your face is a fighting game

Yeah, cop that.

Evolution 2011 was perhaps less exciting overall than previous Evo's, but still had its moments. Some of the highlights in the following video were some I managed to watch myself and I must say, watching a live-stream tournament like this concurrently with others, you do get pretty worked up. Especially when you only just notice your mouth is on the floor with chips falling out of it. I have to remember not to eat at my computer...



Daigo, unfortunately, did not win SSFIV:AE though, which is a loss for quiet, humble gamers everywhere. I am not a quiet, humble gamer. Actually come to think of it, I only know a few people who (really) are. My point is, he should win the tournament on these characteristics alone, as a parody to the vast majority of the other contestants, some who are so cocky that they literally dance in their seat (see above video) ... which is kinda weird. Not to mention American.

HAADOUUKEN!!!!!

It is not I who am crazy ...

... it is I WHO AM MAD!!!!!!!

Once more into the fray!

Upon writing this, Duke Nukem: Forever has been released for roughly a month. It was not a great game. However, at the same time, it was not a bad game. It, like Bulletstorm before it, is a game that suffers from conflicting game play mechanics that, for a lot of people, destroy the potential experience a game like it should offer. Once again, I blame modern FPS game play mechanics and the need to appease a crowd of simple minded, non-resource-manageable 'realism' obsessed kids that think Halo and Call of Duty are the greatest and most skillful FPS games ever made.

I actually stopped playing at the strip club section, much to the dismay of my inner 12 yr old

I don't really care about Duke, how he behaves, his sexist attitude, his immaturity and all that crap. To me he is simply a video game character. If people want to get all worked up and feel somehow offended by his actions then that's their problem. What I do find rather absurd though is the amount of general hate and malice the game has received, especially from non-fans of the series. If you were a long-time fan of Duke Nukem 3D and felt let down by its rather late sequel, fair enough. If you are simply a sheep, jumping on the bandwagon of negativity and hate, describing how terrible the game is without having even played the damn thing, then to you I present my most exasperated and fatigued '/sigh' face I can muster. Wanting to hate something or simply disliking something to be part of the cool club is one of the most despicable things I can think of, and something that is both common and unmentioned in our society (regarding other topics of course). Also, comparing something like DN:F's facial animations to that of LA Noire and describing that to be completely unacceptable in a game nowadays is like complaining that Doom II had a lack of bunny rabbits in it. It was not designed for it, so who the fuck cares?

I am by no means defending DN:F. I played it and found it to be a pretty standard modern day shooter in my opinion. You could at least jump. There are just times that I see social trends emerging across the gaming community that irk me somewhat, especially when they are unwarranted. Nevertheless, I am reminded of why, generally speaking, I dislike most modern day FPS games, and so, comma, I have decided to make a short list of 5 more aspects that should be included in FPS games if you want them to be a success:

1. More than two weapons
Yep. This 'press-button-to-change-to-other-weapon' bullshit has to go. I don't care how realistic it is for a super soldier (lol?) to only be able to carry two weapons, the fact of the matter is that the more weapons a player is allowed to character, the more fun they potentially can have. That means there should be more ammo scattered around the place for said weapons. That means maps should support said weapon/ammo variety. That means they should stop being fucking linear, funneling the player towards the next ammo dump for them to refill at. It is obvious how aspects like this bleed into one another from a design perspective and how something as simple as reducing the number of weapons a player can hold has totally destroyed the explorative qualities of an entire genre.

2. Faster game speed
I have brought this up before, but relating more to the movement speed of the player's avatar. Now I am proposing that the speed of FPS games be increased as a whole. Basically for the same reasons. A slow game is boring and a boring game has limited re-playability. Think about it. What are some of the old arcade-like games you come back to every now and then? Were they, to a point, fast in terms of game play? Why was that enjoyable? Exactly.

Zankuu Hadouken!

3. Movement speed options
Again, something I have mentioned many times, but not clearly enough for it to be considered a principle design factor. Dodge-jumping, bunny hopping, rocket/grenade jumping, jump-pads, jetpacks, accelerators. All mechanics employed by oldskool FPS games that gave speed and freedom of movement to players both skilled and newbie alike. Sure, mastery of a technique works in favour for those who have mastered it. Sure, this gives said players an advantage. What's stopping everyone from learning these new and interesting techniques? They should be embraced and encouraged instead of shunned and removed, and if you can't do it on a controller ... well then maybe you are using the wrong platform mate.

4. Modability
Some of the best games ever made have come from mods. Some of these games have gone to e-sport levels, and still are today (CS 1.6/Source, DOTA). When you provide games with open source development tools, you effectively hand control of your game's potential fame and enterprise to the gaming community. This should be seen as a good thing. Look at Valve. They started from a small company using the code from ID Game's Quake 2 engine. They are now in charge of the world's most popular software distribution network because of the success of mods made for Half-life.

Lauren: The best bot in any game outside of Xan and Xaero

5. Bots
A dying breed, but FPS games with factory made bots are so rare nowadays it is saddening. The last proper game to support true FPS player-like bots was actually UT3 released in 2007. To an extent, this is understandable. The explosion that has been multiplayer gaming has removed the need for a company to even consider programming AI to do the same tasks as a player, except worse. Why would anyone make bots? The answer isn't so straightforward, but it does exist. First and foremost, there does exist a breed of player that enjoys playing offline and experimenting with game mechanics without having the face the troll/rage fest that is the average online experience. For example, the birth of Coop Vs AI in League of Legends has shown how beneficial experimentation can be in non-serious games. Secondly, having an AI framework allows even more possibilities for both custom gaming and modding by the community. Players willing to fight outnumbered against hordes of AI opponents have traditionally been in for a thrilling time, cooperating with other human players to work the system and perform the impossible. Translation: fun.

Personally I feel things are starting to come around. People are slowly seeing just how boring and mindless some of today's FPS game play mechanics are that a slight resurgence of the oldskool design philosophies are coming through. They may not have reached the minds of developers yet, but the community is becoming slightly more aware of it each week. Perhaps it is worth hoping after all.

Also, Doom II had a bunny rabbit in it. So ... yeah.

Random forums posts worth mentioning

Gaming forums are ... strange beasts. A source for trolling for some, a source of QQ for others and a source of entertainment and knowledge for those willing to seek out the information they desire. I am not a big forum poster. Probably the most posts I have ever made was on the old WoW forum boards years ago, and that number of posts probably wouldn't exceed ten in the years that I used to play that game. Generally speaking, unless I have something insightful or meaningful to say, posting on forums is not really worth my time.

However, about a month ago, one of the two Escapist forum posts I have ever made was selected as being a 'Letter to the Editor'. I'm not really sure what that means, but basically it was selected because it was apparently a good post with something interesting being said. I thought this was rather unusual and amusing considering the thousands of posts a site like that would receive a day, let alone a week. That either says something really bad about the average forum poster, or maybe I just got lucky and posted something meaningful when someone high up was looking. It's not really important.

What is important was the context of the post, in reply to Yahtzee's article about action not being finisher porn in fighting and action games. It was a follow up to his review on Mortal Kombat, a review where I think he kind of missed the point of the game. Nevertheless, after reading through the posts of the articles associated forum, I became slightly irritated at the complete disregard for how the concept was being seen from a competitive standpoint. As I have always been in support of competitive gaming I made the following reply:

"I feel something that should be mentioned here is how these over-the-top powerful moves/combos tie into the competitive fighting game scene, and how infrequently they are actually used. Besides MvC3, attempting to get off these sort of moves is incredibly risky and are not of great priority. Most of the time they are blocked or whiff (miss) as competitive players are so very used to avoiding them or anticipating them in the first place.

From a casual point of view (I am a casual myself), fighting games may seem like they are entirely about these super/hyper/ultra/X-ray moves. You see them in all the trailers and there is so much emphasis on them in the media. Really though, these moves form a very small part of a fighting game's actual mechanics and should be seen as merely a catchup option if someone is getting owned. A competitive player is more likely to burn their super/xray bar through enhanced attacks then leaving the whole thing for said move, mainly because it is more advantageous for them to do so. The sparring or 'footsies' of a fighting game is what a competitive player is focusing on 90% of the time. Should said 'footsies' allow them a small window of opportunity to properly place one of these special moves, then great! If you watch enough tournament videos you will know that it is THIS that entertains and awes the crowd, not the special move itself. This is because at the competitive level, successfully getting off one of these moves is not easy. It is incredibly hard.

I guess what I am trying to say is that people are probably looking at these moves the wrong way and thinking of them in the wrong light. Yes, for the casual beating up his friend who doesn't know how to block these moves can get boring and probably pull the action away for both of them. But for two people who are actually fighting competitively, getting these moves off are significant, difficult and highly entertaining.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnaTmGHb1g&t=10m10s

Also, fatalities are nothing more than glorified finishing moves. You don't have to do them. Anyone complaining about how they are forcing unnecessary gore porn down your throat is just silly.

- TinmanX"

I'm sure no one actually read the post, being the typical forum readers that everyone is, so I didn't think much about it at the time. The truth is though that using fighting games as a benchmark for game play analysis is a useful tool, not just because of the competitive community that surrounds them, but also the amount of tweaking and balance changes necessary to make them competitive. Unlike most games (save maybe a Blizzard RTS), fighting games must undergo serious stress tests to find bugs, exploits and generally overpowered moves and characters that could break the game. This is because patching a console game is a little more tricky than patching a PC game, and releasing a broken product straight off the bat is never a good idea for a game that is purely competitive. The process is however never entirely foolproof.

I only just realised this comparative strength when reading another fellow's opinion on Vladimir in League of Legends. Vladimir, as of writing this, is still seen to be an incredibly powerful champion, overly powerful in fact, by most of the community, including the competitive scene where he is either consistently played or banned. Ironically he also used a fighting game (SF4) to get his point across, and to me (at least) he makes a good point about character balance and the community's perception of it:

"Vlad players take the term "Vlad is OP" as a personal attack, and the ones who scream it just got rolled by said Vlad, it's the same way people think Morde/Trynd/Xin/whoever just facerolled them are OP. The problem with Vlad is, has been stated before, tournament results are obvious signs that something is wrong.

I can bring up other games in this arguement. Lets see Sagat from the original SF4, that.

That was OP.

However, at the same time people claimed the blanka ball strategy to be OP.

People complained about both, and due to a lot of QQ about such things as the blanka ball strat and the Bison headstomp strat, people treated it the same, until in high level play it became apparent, and people still tried to treat it the same (However once you completely bypass the skill-level and enter the most controlled "control group" you can get, scientifically speaking, the results don't lie.)

The difference being Sagats chip damage and fast recovery times, mixed with ease of use turned out to be a global issue, seeing as someone SPAMMING Tiger Shots actually beat Daigo. (Anyone who follows fighting games/evo tournies knows the epicness that is the Daigo.)

This Vlad issue is very similar. Sagat, in SSF4, got his chip damage nerfed and his recovery time lowered. He is still INCREDIBLY viable but not as easily picked up as before.

Blanka however, WAS a case of people just not understanding the mechanics as you didn't see someone go to top tier in a tournament using that strategy, yet lower level players still claimed it was overpowered.


... I feel I trailed off at the end there, but you should get the gist of it.

SF4 = Sagat
LoL = Vlad
Sagat = Vlad = Something is truly wrong

SF4 = Blanka
LoL = Morde
Blanka = Morde = People simply don't understand enough to counter it yet
(Also the irony of Morde es #1 and Blanka being from brazil is hilarious.)"

- Krimlin

I'm sure we could use many other games or scenarios to explain the same kind of balance relationship, but he makes a fair point. Often I see people complain about things in games being overpowered, cheap or just unfair. Most of the time this can be traced back to a lack of understanding on how certain mechanics work. In the case of League of Legends, most characters that may seem incredibly powerful for newcomers become standard problems later down the track when a player becomes more experienced. For example, Mordekaiser can be nuked, CCed or just simply ignored, with no real escape options at his disposal. Tyrndamere is slightly more complex, but a combination of well timed CC, ignites and general teamwork can shut one down very easily. Karthus' Ult can be countered by having decent support, MR items (Banshee's, Hexdrinker) or generally just not playing like shit. Be wary of Teemo's and Shaco's popping in and out of bushes with low health: a hoard of traps await you. True stealth characters are even easier, providing you have the gold to afford an appropriate ward or elixir. The list goes on...

I guess my point at the end of all this is that everything in gaming, from what people perceive to be unfair, to things in games that they feel are unnecessary, has a different side of the coin which can usually be garnered via experience or just general understanding. So the next time you want to cry aimbot at that ridiculous sniper in Quake, cheap to the invincible 2-shotting Tyrndamere in LoL or think your most recent kill in any game is a result of you being better than them, think about the situation and see if your point of view could in fact be wrong.

... unless it's a Vladimir.