To get something out of the way quickly: I’ve never been good at fighting games.  My ascent up the playstyle ladder usually stops around “find a couple moves that work and stick to them”.  This isn’t through lack of desire to be “good” at fighters.  Before the advent of Internet video though (and honestly now as well), learning about fighting games involved reading ASCII hieroglyphs or knowing someone who could teach you.

(Admittedly, I can talk shop about MMO mechanics with the slightly-less-than-best of them, but the physical act of inputting commands is much less important in WoW than in Street Fighter IV.  MMO play is more about the decisions made before the fight and in-fight decisions measured in seconds versus the fractions-of-a-second scale for a fighting game.)

VF4 had this “Training Mode” that Wikipedia describes best:

The mode consisted of an encyclopedia of fighting game terms, complete character command list walkthroughs, tips on all of the games mechanics, recommended character combos, alternative options for failed combos, detailed command input timings, slow motion for frame counting and timing, and other useful training tips.

The Command Training was really what made it awesome.  You could go through a character’s list move-by-move and learn them by seeing your inputs in real-time and what the move actually was timing-wise.  You could also have the game do the move so you can see what you’re missing.

I’m sure a real person could beat me senseless, but I actually had a lot of fun going through the Quest Mode (going to different arcades, playing in tournaments, and getting customization stuff).  If I ever got stuck, I’d go into the training mode, learn a few new tricks, and get back out and win a couple tournaments.  It was by far the most fun I’ve had with a fighting game which is surprising because the Virtua Fighter series is on the technical-side of the spectrum and I am not technically-proficient in the least.

Now, the lack of such a mode in the next-gen fighters I’ve played hasn’t been a huge deal.  Dead of Alive 4 wasn’t very good and Soulcalibur IV’s combination of character creation and the Tower mode were a blast to play with.

Enter Street Fighter IV (literally, in the mail today via GameFly).  SFIV’s move list is tiny compared to VF4’s but it is nearly unapproachable.  Its “Training Mode” that I entered into full of hope was just the usual “beat on this turned-off-AI”.  When I go the command list, I get icons that look nothing like the “QCB + K” that the fine folks at Shoryuken tell me is what I need to do C. Viper’s Burning Kick.

(via Kotaku)

Now, it would be awesome if SFIV could tell me what’s wrong with my “QCB + K” action: am I too slow or am I not actually making a quarter-circle-back?  But, instead, I just have a turned-off-AI Ken to beat on hoping that I’ll get it eventually.

Of course, all this time spent raving about VF4’s amazing training mode (that wasn’t carried over to VF5 apparently) could have been spent learning C. Viper or any other character, but SFIV really doesn’t provide the tools that I’ve now come to expect if I can’t just learn-as-I-hit-things.

I have no problem going to Shoryuken or Calibur Forum to figure out what kind of fighter might suit my playstyle best or to learn some advanced techniques or to get down into the nitty-gritty of frame counting, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

SFIV seems to expect that I know everything as soon as I put the disc in, which along with VF5 not continuing VF4 in having an awesome, robust training mode, is a real bummer.

With that one faithful post, schild may very well have ruined my life. So, I load up Steam and it sounds pretty awesome off the bat: dinglewtsgrats + a puzzle game? I’m weak for either, but just like Mass Effect combined shooter + RPG (more spam Techs + hold down Right Trigger for great justice than an actual shooter, but the point stands…) the combination is a vice grip on my brain.

It’s good, oh so good. I also imagine it’s a lot better on the PC (versus 360 via Live Arcade or PS2) just by virtue of it having a mouse instead of thumb-aiming for pieces which would make me very sad with this game.

Essentially, you have a standard “line up 3-5 pieces in a row/column and they disappear” puzzle game (plus special pieces of course), but when you take out pieces… you get that color of mana for your spells. Clear 4 red and yellow mana and you chuck a fireball at your opponent’s health bar. Or, my current favorite, use my trained rat mount’s ability to bite them. Yes, I captured a rat and I’m riding it around. What did I tell you about it being good? Sure, there are quests, with it being Puzzle Quest and all, as the world map expands out ala FFT and you go around doing feats of daring do… with puzzles… and spells… and rat mounts!

I have a final in two days… all is indeed lost.

In not-future news, I picked up God of War 2 and GH3 recently. More importantly, I picked up a new PS2 for the living room (man is that thing small) and it’s very nice to get off my 14in. + RF connection. What’s not awesome though is that the Kramer Wireless decided that it would devour batteries, or at least not recognize them as inside, so I would get like… to the intro movies before it crapped out.

I went through an entire box, it was a God damn crusade for batteries. But I will rock out… eventually, I swear to you all. (Seriously though, I sucked so bad, like, I don’t know what my fret hand is doing bad.) I did feel badass for the like the half-song I actually got to do though.

GoW2 rocks, but you don’t need me to tell you that. I don’t think I’ve said “shazam” so many times in my life. (In my defense, I had the Simpsons scene with Homer thinking “PYLE!” “Sha-ZAM!” over and over again stuck in my head.) At the same time that I felt awesome, it was completely different from GH3-awesome or any other platformer for that matter, more like playing Fahrenheit with less acid. Like I was watching 300 instead “being” Leonidas, but the smoothness of movement (the wall climbing in the titan’s cave was glorious) and the whole “press one button to do like five different things to the dude’s spine” did let me appreciate how awesome it all looked. (On that note, I’m thinking about getting this poster all nice and framed up.) For more consumer-whore speak, I need to get a nice platformer that isn’t ball-crushing.

Yeah, we’re not having that. (Technically I could buy a wireless receiver and buy a separate 360 guitar, but that’s bordering on crazy town, especially because there isn’t a PC-only bundle.)

So, a next-gen system is looking mighty tasty.

• The Wii’s out of the question, I’m not that desperate (although Super Mario Galaxy is apparently really good).
• In other news, I can now verify that I’m getting a new model 360 if I buy it with this Pro bundle with Forza 2 and MUA ($350), so that’s a definite leg up. 120GB for save games is a bit excessive for the Elite version (at a $100 premium), especially now that that (and a black tax ala Apple) are its only real advantages it has over the Pro. (For the record: 120GB HDD, black, and HDMI cables that I can’t use. The new Pros can do HDMI out, but don’t come with the cables for it in-box. The hardware is practically the same with the Elite and new Pro.)
• My best bet on the PS3 front is 80GB with Motorstorm bundle ($500). My original fears regarding the combination of JRPGs and software emulation have not come to pass with the 80GB (i.e. my games work on it). The 40GB on the other hand is straight crippleware, no PS2 guts or software emulation.

Honestly, at this point, I could get a 360 + a slim PS2 (as my launch-day PS2 is getting on in years) for the same price as the 80GB PS3 (i.e. the only good one). It’s basically the first panel’s argument in reverse…

Which has a certain irony to it. (As a result of a previous revision of this parenthetical, I found that the Firefox’s default spellcheck does not have the word “nunchuk”. That made me sad.)

You know the funniest thing about all this? I realized what I am likely to get.

Slim PS2 + DVD remote for the living room (since I can’t set up shop in the living room permanently, another strike against the next-gens) and a couple PS2 games (MGS3 and KH2 come to mind in addition to GH3). After all, Mass Effect will eventually get ported, I kinda suck at fighters in the first place (see DoA4 and VF5), and by the time new stuff from NISA and Atlus come out for the PS3 and 360 respectively, things should have calmed down a bit.

“First, there’s a rumor floating around (wildly unfounded at the moment, mind you), suggesting that Sony will sell licenses for PS3 games. Basically you’re paying your $50 for the license, and the actual software, digitally downloaded or a hard copy, is just a distribution method. This is to prevent the sale of pre-owned games. Amen, I say.”

First off, MMOs work the same way, and while he commented later on about you letting your friend borrow a game for a bit, it’s accepted as fact that giving someone your MMO account is a bitch and a half to do.

I agree with him on it being the whole used game thing being bad for us in the long run, after all, EB doesn’t make my games, they just charge me out the ass for them.

It’d honestly be a great idea if you allowed some sort of “required allowed transfers” just to make sure you’re not stomping on the whole “Fair Use” issue, which is important as well. Still, this is coming from Sony, and I think the last thing they need is this another thing that might put people off even if it’s a good idea for everyone involved.

Blu-ray player in a PS3, I’m looking in your direction .

Hopefully it’ll be good .

I’m really thinking that the ESRB is just adding the “added gore and violence” (which I’m sure was there in their copy) to screw Beth over for the whole nudity thing, which you can’t even unlock on the 360 (but they’re still giving that one an M rating too). I mean… Hot Coffee got big because Rockstar denied it at first, but this is something that had to be modded. There was no way for someone without an internet connection, searching up a mod site, to get the chicks’ tops off.

What I said in a comment in Sam’s blog was simple: it’s like the ESRB pitching a fit over someone making nude models for Jedi Academy! (Which I actually need to play through again, just feeling like some saber swinging, and don’t want to go through KoTOR.)

This is quite simply the death of modding, and through it… the death of PC gaming. Thanks fuckers.

Got to play a little Tomb Raider: Legend today after I got done with MxO (stopped at a shade over 200mil). So far I’m liking it. Running it at my desktop res and just turned off FSAA and it was running really nice. For the brief bit I’ve played (about a level and a half), the controls really feel tight which is something I’ve never felt a game’s gotten right with the mouse and keyboard. My one gripe though is that when going to aim, my cursor could be right over the dude, but it wouldn’t be connecting, especially when I was shooting through a doorway. That’s really minor though as running in and shooting people in the face with the pistols feels awesome.

In MxO news, we’ve got a thread in the private section of our boards going on right now about our RP stance/position/whatever. Basically, just going over what we feel our role as Cypherites is, how we approach things (from the RP POV, which we rarely use to be honest, we’re very pragmatic 99% of the time). Should be an interesting read after we get some people in it. (We’ll be moving it down to the DMZ in a bit.)

Outside of that, I decided to give the Lightning extension for T-bird a whirl. It really does feel like a 0.1 release, but it does what I need it to do (really rare and minor calendaring). Hopefully it’ll get more tightly integrated with T-bird later on, but like I said, it’s good for basic stuff right now. If you use Thunderbird and don’t really need a full-out calendar, you might want to give it a whirl. Sunbird’s the standalone version that has a couple more features at the moment if you prefer that.

Off to the dentist in a bit, yay!

• Oblivion,
• Kyo,
• and RF Online.

The first being at fault because it fucking rocks (but under closer examination is flawed), the second because she fucking rocks, and the last because it fucking blows but Kyo wanted to play it so (kidding mind you).

After we got Xfire In-Game working, so as to get around the game’s asstastic chat filter and disabled Windowed mode. We were able to like… talk. For an example of the chat filter: if a long, well thought out message contained the words, “as such” the entire message would get nuked because the chat filter sees “as s…” as “ASS” so it kills it. Also, at least on her machine, RFO + Teamspeak = me cutting up, so good thing Xfire In-Game works.

I’m still downloading the client off of FilePlanet but log sorta goes like:

[01:56] alynna: this is alot like RO
[01:56] Cal: but 3D
[01:57] alynna: RO was 3d, with sprites.
[01:58] Cal: ok then: 3D in the modern way, not in the FFV way
[01:59] Cal: you know… you starved the MxO community from very long and dry tree guides? how do you sleep at night?
[01:59] alynna: lol

The pot popping (say that three times fast (although in your defense, I can hardly say it once slowly)!) is similar to RO, so I can sort of see where she doesn’t find it quite as “offensive” as I do.

Then again… I’ve been reading too much F13, The Cesspit, with a bit of Lum on the side so… you can forgive me for being waaaaaaay too cynical about things.

Still, I’ve “learned” a lot from reading through their archives, most of which makes my feeble attempts at categorizing the genre look, well, to put in Skaald’s words, “You did pretty good… for a kindergartner.” I was intending to write about it (since I’ve been reading a lot of over the weekend) but, reference the above three as to why I haven’t.

Still, as something useful, I cleaned up the “pages” so as to look less stupid and spruced up the links section (I can’t believe I used the word “spruce”…).

Finally…

I’m sort of debating getting a dedicated PSOne for FFs or if I’ll snag a GBA SP for some its games that I’m missing (FFT:A, Advance Wars). The big question mark is possibly a DS, but the only ones I can think of are Mario Kart DS and Super Princess Peach. That, or I may just hoard the money for later use… *cough* PS3 *cough*.

Really, I’m in sort of a situation where I would KILL for a handheld system, especially one that would give me sweet sweet Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In related news Jane Pinckard is awesome.

Leaning toward the SP since well it has Final Fantasy Tactics and is handheld and well, the DS doesn’t have Final Fantasy Tactics. Still… the PSOne has Tactics proper and that has much merit, and the coolness of having a dedicated FFT machine would be unrivaled. Except by well… hot chicks in bands who played FFT:A to death but that’s the stuff of legends.

Things ethereal even.

Two other things: the Marvel MMO is going to be dual-platform (PC/360) which leads me to worry about complexity issues. Secondly, my Xfire name is “garnet” if you’re someone that is requiring it.