Fighting Games Weekly | July 14-20 | Bracket Resets Full of Tears (of Joy?)

Wow that's pretty underhanded of capcom. Why even use the PS2 version? Costs?

"The decision basically came down to 'should we spend our time re-porting this assembly code (from arcade board) to C or wrapping cool features around the game that’s been done before' and I still think that’s a pretty easy choice," Lang recalled.

i guess time/money. they later released arcade perfect ports of Vampire Hunter and Vampire Savior with extra features like GGPO and a challenge mode so maybe porting from cps2 is easier? or maybe they had more money for that project? i dno. i just wanted an arcade perfect port of 3s without having to emulate it.
 
pretty sure 3soe isnt an arcade perfect port. believe its based off the ps2 version. iron galaxy stated it was arcade perfect initially but finally came out with it about a year or so later. it certainly didnt fool a lot of 3s heads and some og's like pryolee refused to touch it.



Edit: just found the article

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2013/...ort-base-dave-lang-ceo-iron-galaxy-interview/

Yeah that shit was stupid, especially because people were calling them out on it early on.


Anyway, fuck 3S. The most infuriating and retarded SF in existence. I would like to see it rebalanced though, but not with a lot of poor suggestions people make.
 
It actually sounds like Capcom no longer has the original source code for the arcade version, unless they coded in CPS3 assembly from the start.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

It didn't interest some people aesthetic or gameplay wise. The art style and 'all girls' theme kinda alienated people (I really love it though), and from personal experience I feel like the pacing of the gameplay is irritating and becomes redundant because random hits convert into ridiculously long combos. Also the roster is small so there's not much to work with despite the custom assists.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

It had a bit of a rough start, and couldn't get enough traction to build a big following before other games came out, and you've actually got a ton of choices for games if you're interested in that sort of gameplay. The art style also turns a lot of people off, probably.

You can also say this about every non-marvel airdash/anime game, basically. I think even Justin Wong says Marvel 3 plays more like Arcana Heart than it does any of the other Vs games.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

It's a team fighter with like 8 characters. It's anime, but in an ugly way. Lots of embarrassing panty shots and tit jiggling.

As a fighter, it's okay I guess. Execution wise, so much easier than any Marvel game. It just boils down to a series of resets. It's nowhere near as fun to screw around with as Marvel 3.

Meh/10.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

The early game had some very touch of death combos that weren't to hard to do and you could have really long ass combos, but they have fixed a lot of things in the overall system. The new characters have been bringing some more freshness to the game and I've been enjoying it a lot more (not sure about everyone else). Also the game is a team based game, but it doesn't have to many characters so it does get stale fast.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?
I disliked the combo system and overall feel of the game too much to stick with it for very long. The gameplay had this overdesigned, "too many rules" feel to it that I'm not a fan of. It's the same reason why I don't play ArcSys games.
 
The early game had some very touch of death combos that weren't to hard to do and you could have really long ass combos,
Basically Marvel? The guys on the Skullgirls Quick Look seemed pretty honest guys and they were clearly passionate. The thing with pantyshots is that for example Cammy is only wearing a single thin sheet of clothing, yet this game bears the flak. Just a weird observation, not to instigate anything. In the end it's just fictional cartoon stuff.
 
Oh, man, I missed a randomness/variance discussion.

Just wanted to tag a point in there- it is absolutely fine to have it and it can add a lot to gameplay by increasing the amount of situational awareness players need to have in a game.

However, it has to be in the right place. If it's not, your players will want to murder you. Tripping, random double damage- these are bad places to put it.

Random Item spawns at specific times/locations? That's a good place to try putting it.
 
Am I the only one that wanted the villian FChamp to win? He brings the drama when he laid down the Haggar disrespect with that magneto push. Or that near time-over victory with the Doom lvl 3.
 
Am I the only one that wanted the villian FChamp to win? He brings the drama when he laid down the Haggar disrespect with that magneto push. Or that near time-over victory with the Doom lvl 3.
That disrespect against Haggar was godlike. Might have been my favorite play in top 8.
 
Basically Marvel? The guys on the Skullgirls Quick Look seemed pretty honest guys and they were clearly passionate. The thing with pantyshots is that for example Cammy is only wearing a single thin sheet of clothing, yet this game bears the flak. Just a weird observation, not to instigate anything. In the end it's just fictional cartoon stuff.

The game was basically going for a Marvel 2 feel, which now it feels more like that where you need to have a reset if you wanted to kill the character and you would have to block all of it if you wanted to play. The early game had combos that the system was trying to stop, but wasn't completely fixed at that point because I believe Lab Zero had a problem putting out patches because of some legal issues with their publisher(correct me if I'm wrong about that). I was okay with the art, but I didn't like most of the character designs besides a few and found most of the planned characters for later on more appealing then the main cast at the time.
 
"Why Skullgirls didn't take off" discussions tend to make me sad, especially when taken in context to Marvel 3 where a lot of the same complaints could be fielded. It's aesthetically divisive and had a small roster, limited training mode, and no move lists upon release. The roster has been steadily expanding, the training mode has been hugely iterated on and is up there with the best of them (and has movelists), it's one of the few fighters with a tutorial that actually tries to teach you fighting games, and the game has become increasingly mechanically sound with each major update.

But if you hate the look you're out of luck (I don't blame people for this, I find Netherrealms games to look absolutely repulsive and that amounts for a lot of the reason why I dont try to pick them up)

There's 200-300 people that play the game daily on Steam and 3 characters slated for release (one of which you can play on the Beta on Steam) try it out if you're interested.

Also here's Robo-Fortune (was this ever posted here?)
10463841_713438408723656_1398581701119276300_o.png
 
"Why Skullgirls didn't take off" discussions tend to make me sad, especially when taken in context to Marvel 3 where a lot of the same complaints could be fielded. It's aesthetically divisive and had a small roster, limited training mode, and no move lists upon release. The roster has been steadily expanding, the training mode has been hugely iterated on and is up there with the best of them (and has movelists), it's one of the few fighters with a tutorial that actually tries to teach you fighting games, and the game has become increasingly mechanically sound with each major update.

But if you hate the look you're out of luck (I don't blame people for this, I find Netherrealms games to look absolutely repulsive and that amounts for a lot of the reason why I dont try to pick them up)

There's 200-300 people that play the game daily on Steam and 3 characters slated for release (one of which you can play on the Beta on Steam) try it out if you're interested.

Also here's Robo-Fortune (was this ever posted here?)

I still think every single fighting game should respect and take the ideas of Skullgirls.
1) The game tells you who is the leader at the top of the health bars (fucking handy)!
2) You can preview which colours you want before picking them at the character selections creen
3) It has 360 detection
4) It has full button checks before needing to go to a match
5) The training mode lets you see hit-stun deterioration
6) The training mode overall has extensive feedback give to player

There's so much with Skullgirls that every other fighting game has failed to even implement. OK Capcom SF4 as your first comeback but 5 years on and many iterations later you can tell us who is the leader or even have a decent button check on character selection. The only other game that came close was Killer Instinct (even providing hitbox and frame data).
 
I just want Beowulf to be done so I can have my official team that I can play in Skullgirls, but I've been enjoying Eliza a lot and I keep on finding new things with her everyday.
 
holy shit gaf peeps dissing 3s. 3s is da bess. deal with it.

most free form sf fighting game of all time. as in. you play how you want to play.
fundamentals. yolo. jumping balerinas. footsies. rush in. meta mind games (will he throw/hit low/high parry/block/whiff/dash/yada yada)
You play how you want to play... as long you don't like zoning.
I'm in the "parries do more harm than good" camp. ^^

1) The game tells you who is the leader at the top of the health bars (fucking handy)!
I would argue I'm against this for the sheer excitement of "who is winning this!?" at the end of a tight round. :)
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

The art-style is a massive turn off for many people. At least that is what many fans of it will tell you.

To be honest, I also think it is a pretty slow and boring fighting game. As above, the main points people talk about are how good training mode and all those other features are. While they should be applauded, actually making a game that is fun to play after all that should have been the first goal. So ultimately, people might say it is like Marvel, but I don't really think that is the case at all and the problems go much deeper than looks.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

you're gonna get a lot of arcane answers about art and lack of features and shit and 'capcom players!!' or whatever

the real answer is basically what sixfourtyfive said here:
I disliked the combo system and overall feel of the game too much to stick with it for very long. The gameplay had this overdesigned, "too many rules" feel to it that I'm not a fan of. It's the same reason why I don't play ArcSys games.

the game felt really slow and bad when it came out and people don't give second chances to games that are unfun.

it sincerely was like sfxt levels of slow in terms of how maneuvering characters and pressing buttons felt. characters were not responsive to your button presses, movement had seemingly massive startup and slow travel time. basically, it felt like everything was seriously slowed down, from buttons to movement to assists when in the neutral state because it would be easier to balance and design how characters operated. so it 'made sense', but felt terrible.

the main zoning character of the game, peacock, at the start of the game, was a pretty clear example of this deal. all of her projectiles were comedically slow and she had like 'summon sentinel drone' kinda specials that didn't cover that much space. however, in the context of the game's limited movement (in terms of speed and coverage/type) her keepaway game was mega strong. which was really, really unappealing because it seriously exposed that 'overdesigned' aspect- if characters had better movement, then her game would be trash. if her moves were sped up to adjust for that, then the carefully crafted balance would go out the window and lead to potential bullshit keepaway rather than a carefully designed zoning character. it made sense, but it felt terrible, yeah?

the reason people disliked the early combos in that game was specifically because of the restand system and how resets work in that game. basically in the early days of the game when everyone was picking it up, you'd have super long combos that didn't kill and visually looked similar to the borefest of lightning loops and flame loops due to the lack of screen movement and 'loop-esque' based combos. whenever you hit someone OTG in skullgirls, they restand to a standing state. and combos had a TON of otgs in them, meaning that at any one of those points during the combo instead of actually continuing the combo they could reset you into a 3-4 way mixup (low throw overhead crossup) and you were forced to guess out of it, period. this is obviously not very fun because you have to pay attention up to from when the combo starts to the 15-30+ second mark when the combo ends (this was early combos, so no minute-long shit yet). it was really draining and not the mvc2 'ok this is around the the reset point, now guess' magneto-esque resets that mike z had envisioned.

---

for some reason a lot of skullgirls players seem to think that the game never got a chance from the start but that's fucking bullshit and anyone who was around at it's launch knows that. almost everyone was hype for skullgirls and was hoping to use it as a way to bury the shittiness of marvel 3 with a new megafast paced game with teams that was designed by someone who actually knew what they were doing rather than the incompetent morons at capcom.

to this day i do not know a single marvel 3 player at the time who didn't try skullgirls at launch. not one. and almost every single one of them dropped it within 2 months of it's release.

but the terrible feel of the game combined with the draining pace made it astonishingly unfun for a lot of people, who then dropped the game. there's different ways people have voiced that but ultimately all of it boils down to that nebulous concept of 'game feel'

i sincerely feel like the people who say the game is 'the new marvel 2!!' are full of shit and have never played marvel 2 or SEEN marvel 2 at a high level before. that game is breakneck paced genius with split second decisions being made about spacing constantly.

someone told me that skullgirls would've probably gotten a lot less hate and retained a lot more players if they didn't make the marvel comparison because the game is actually more along the lines of like a (non-cp?)blazblue-paced game with assists rather than marvel in terms of pacing, movement and general stage length and char design (normals/how they approach and stuff)

i have no idea if it's true but that dude is way smarter than me when it comes to examining fighting game design so i'm prone to believe him

i have no idea how the game has developed since it's release but that team is real sincere about what they do so that's cool as hell. it's really unfortunate to me that the actual game itself felt how it does because of how much love that team puts into the game. i know there was a resurgence of people tryin' to get back into it after encore came out on pc and whatnot but even then it seems like those folks didn't stick around either.

the skullgirls curse really didn't/doesn't help the game at all either lol

this is a lot of words about a game i despise. damn. the hate is real i guess
 
Pretty much agree. I gave it a pretty fair shot, as did everyone else I know, and this is coming from someone who didn't like the aesthetic (gameplay first...and I wouldn't want to miss out on a great fighter just because I don't love how it looks). My main gripe was the responsiveness and feel of the game. The overall audiovisual and 'kinetic' experience just doesn't hold up, despite being relatively fast and having some very impressive spritework. There's just something fundamentally off key about the whole thing when I sit down and play it. That said, I still had some fun with it for a while when it first released. I really liked some of the movesets, and there are just lots of great, thoughtful ideas in the game that other devs should rip off.
 
Given how much has changed over the game's troubled lifespan, I wonder how Skullgirls 1.0 compares to today's version. I've always owned the game but beyond dicking around with Ms. Fortune I never put much time into it.
 
I get that same feel of "this game has a million awesome features... but the core game has to be good for it to matter." It was funny- I tried to watch Mike Z's panel from UFGT (how to design fighting games? sounds interesting!), but rather than being about how to design fighting games, it was about how to design fighting game UI, menus, training mode, etc. It was about everything except the actual fighting part of the game. It reminded me in a way of Little Big Planet- an amazing level editor and aesthetic... for a game that's not actually fun to play.
 
I bought Skullgirls strictly out of support for a lot of the ideas and features that Mike Z and his team brought to the table (competent GGPO implementation, custom assists, certain training mode features, small but important tournament-friendly features like button config and hold-to-pause, etc.) despite really hating the surface-level stuff such as the character designs. It was and is a game worth buying and trying out of principle. But while I know that it's been tweaked a lot since launch, that initial experience of piecing together combos and following all of the rules about how to exploit IPS to the best of my ability was just so dull, both in training room and in versus play. The game didn't last a month in the Alabama scene, despite both Marvel and ArcSys having strong support and lots of people at least trying it out.
 
It was funny- I tried to watch Mike Z's panel from UFGT (how to design fighting games? sounds interesting!), but rather than being about how to design fighting games, it was about how to design fighting game UI, menus, training mode, etc. It was about everything except the actual fighting part of the game.

lmao this is exactly how i feel about that panel. i really was hoping he'd go into the design process of the core gameplay mechanics and character design so i could see where and why the team decided to go with such a slow pace of game.

instead it was that

if you're interested in the ideas behind fighting game design here's the blog of the dude i was talkin' about: http://finalatomicfilibuster.tumblr.com/

there's only 3 posts but they're all really good. i wish he'd post more stuff or at the very least that i'd saved the stuff he'd say about fg design whenever it pops up

the first post is really good and important because it seems like a fucking truckload of action games do not understand the basic concepts outlined within that post in the SLIGHTEST.
 
lmao this is exactly how i feel about that panel. i really was hoping he'd go into the design process of the core gameplay mechanics and character design so i could see where and why the team decided to go with such a slow pace of game.

instead it was that

if you're interested in the ideas behind fighting game design here's the blog of the dude i was talkin' about: http://finalatomicfilibuster.tumblr.com/

there's only 3 posts but they're all really good. i wish he'd post more stuff or at the very least that i'd saved the stuff he'd say about fg design whenever it pops up

the first post is really good and important because it seems like a fucking truckload of action games do not understand the basic concepts outlined within that post in the SLIGHTEST.

Was a good read! I'd love to read about the nuts and bolts of fighting games (how hit/hurtbox choices, active frame choices, general move safety, etc. contribute to the feel of the game and such).


I'm still waiting for Flight of Bumblebee, haha.
 
I know it´s a little late but special thanks to that emmy award winning video editor guy for putting indestructible as the opening song to the usf4 finals. Now I have to put the stupid song on my mp3 player and listen to it everyday. Thanks a lot, asshole.
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

Aestetic.

The the massive creator between character design quality is massive.

Like Oh sweet peacock. Oh Yeah Big band, Oh yeah elza, oh yeah this music. These controls, they just make sense they are super easy. Why doens't everyone do it like this. Oh shit pain wheel, oh shit look at this lobby its so good we can have like a bajillion matches at once. Oh wow they actually tried to have a narrative thats neat.

Oh no, why does parasoul look like she has shit missing from character design and its super boring. Why is valitenine not a doctor but is a nurse for some weird submissive reason. Like why are the female characters who should be in charge either dressed in some way that suggests a submissive capacity, or feels like they actively undressed to focus on sexiness rather than the completeness of the character design, or actually in some submissive capacity to some dude. Why the hell is the last boss just dressed as a maid. Why are they trying to go with this 50's old movie's aesthetic, and a lot of the characters don't fit that aesthetic. Why are girls making aheigo face, when I am beating them up, why every time I knock someone out , they gotta show their booty butts. Why can't the girl with the arms on her head have a full outfit like harleyquin, i do not need to see her booty butts.
 
I know it´s a little late but special thanks to that emmy award winning video editor guy for putting indestructible as the opening song to the usf4 finals. Now I have to put the stupid song on my mp3 player and listen to it everyday. Thanks a lot, asshole.

No ones forcing you to listen to it....

But hell, I can feel it coming over me
 
So Skullgirls was announced for Vita/PS4. When I played it at a steam free weekend, it was pretty Marvel-esque and nothing seemed wrong with it. Is it just blind anime hate why this game hasn't taken off?

It's a combination of things:

1) The publishing situation for this game has been cursed , to put it mildly. Completely out of Lab Zero's control. (and they had to change the name to Lab Zero due to one of the publishers going kaput)

2) The art style isn't for everyone- I love it, even ordered Kinuko's artbook, but some folks really hate the cheesecakey nature of the art. Also, it's not anime IMO, it's more of a western style. Lets not get into this any more, it has a habit of derailing SG threads.

3) The gameplay itself is a turnoff for some folks, because it's pretty complex. Mike Z did a great job in making the game as intuitive as possible (it's a masterful job, I think he's the best ever at it), but the core game is not simple.

4) Most of the community is on PC, because PC is the best version. If more games hit PC, that would help Skullgirls. A big PSN/XBLA monthlong outage on par with black April a few years back would also help.


I bought Skullgirls strictly out of support for a lot of the ideas and features that Mike Z and his team brought to the table (competent GGPO implementation, custom assists, certain training mode features, small but important tournament-friendly features like button config and hold-to-pause, etc.) despite really hating the surface-level stuff such as the character designs. It was and is a game worth buying and trying out of principle. But while I know that it's been tweaked a lot since launch, that initial experience of piecing together combos and following all of the rules about how to exploit IPS to the best of my ability was just so dull, both in training room and in versus play. The game didn't last a month in the Alabama scene, despite both Marvel and ArcSys having strong support and lots of people at least trying it out.

This sums up my personal feelings about the game completely, except that I loved the character designs. I'd love to see Lab Zero do a non-fighting game like a card game Culdcept-Style. I think Mike Z's gameplay knowledge he could make an awesome one of those just like Sirlin did, and the art would be fabulous.
 

I think it's important to gauge the raw numbers for these games when we're making comparisons between Skullgirls and the more popular fighting games and asking the question, "Why hasn't this taken off?"

Skullgirls came out on April 10-11th 2012 for PSN/XBL and 16 days after its release the SG twitter put out this :

YopxYhx.png


In response to a guy pre-release saying he'd eat his own shit if the game broke 50k copies sold : Link

If we use this as a definitive gauge for the game's sales at this point then we can say that the game sold at least 50k units in 16 days. We could probably have a nice debate about the upper limit of the copies sold in the time but it really shouldn't matter compared to ...

Marvel vs. Capcom 3. MvC3 came out February 15th 2011 in the US and the February NPD numbers for the title were 790k.

Street Fighter 4 came out February 17th 2009. Its month one NPD numbers were 849k

Mortal Kombat 9 was released April 19th, 2011 and its NPD numbers for the month of April were just under 900k

So when we start talking about how "everyone was hype for Skullgirls" and how you didn't know a single person who hadn't tried it out then you should probably take a long and hard look at those numbers and ask yourself if you believe that Skullgirls managed even a tenth of that in the same time period. That's the real reason the game didn't take off, its playerbase from the outset amounted to a fraction of what the other communities had at their disposal and then people wondered why it somehow couldn't put out as many players at major events.

I won't even deny that the game ended up being pretty jank upon its first release but the line that "people don't give second chances to unfun games" comes off as hollow when put up next to the ramifications Xfactor, TAC infinites, Trade -> Ultra, the entirety of KOF12, and any number of stupid stuff found in their respective games. For whatever reason people were far less forgiving of the first release woes and iterations that Skullgirls went through that any number of these other franchises went through in order to really define themselves. And we all still play these games despite their obvious shortcomings. Let's not even bring up the weeks/months of balance/system patch hell MK9 went through to get itself to a state where it was worth playing as well and people kept on keeping on despite it all.

Let's be completely up front with this - Skullgirls is a niche game in an already decidedly niche genre that, despite its "revival" with SF4, is still ruled by the iron fist that is the legacy franchises that originally defined it. And Skullgirls' success reflects what you'd generally expect from a first release game by an unproven studio that isn't backed with the marketing strength of franchises like "Mortal Kombat, "Marvel", or "Street Fighter". . The only new IP to come out since SF4 to come anywhere near the same amount of success is Arc Sys' BlazBlue (if we want to talk about overdesigned ... ) and that was a game undoubtedly given much more resources for its development and marketing while riding the coattails of Guilty Gear throughout.

----

Regarding your gameplay critique I won't argue with the problems the game had with being reset heavy on top of being a combo-naut. These are things that were ironed out with the introduction of a much stricter IPS and the undizzy system later on.
And I can't comment on the nebulous complaints about the "feel" of the game as it amounts to saying nothing.

Your Peacock example is totally off though. It's no coincidence that upon release of any game people gravitate to either grapplers or zoners for pointing out their balance problems with said game. In BlazBlue it was Tager and in Injustice it was Deathstroke. They both exploit a lack of an understanding by the opponent of the basic systems at work. Peacock was not a good zoner in the game's first release, mainly because she really couldn't put out enough projectiles on the field to keep out the more rushdown heavy characters in the game. She was handedly destroyed by Fortune, Valentine, and Parasoul in that version of the game for many of the same reasons you cited as not being adequately developed - their movement options (or moveset options in the case of Parasoul) were diverse enough for them to easily get in to her comfort zone. It's why in the following version of the game Peacock received heavy buffs to her core.
 
As an aside, I never cease to find amusement in the supposed prejudices of the so-called "Capcom FGC." In order for most of those accusations of bias to hold weight, you have to pretty much ignore:

- the performance of most classic SF/DS/etc. re-releases or remixes
- the fact that there's actually not that much overlap in the SF4 or MvC3 scenes anymore
- absolutely everything related to SFxTK

I won't even deny that the game ended up being pretty jank upon its first release but the line that "people don't give second chances to unfun games" comes off as hollow when put up next to the ramifications Xfactor, TAC infinites, Trade -> Ultra, the entirety of KOF12, and any number of stupid stuff found in their respective games. For whatever reason people were far less forgiving of the first release woes and iterations that Skullgirls went through that any number of these other franchises went through in order to really define themselves. And we all still play these games despite their obvious shortcomings. Let's not even bring up the weeks/months of balance/system patch hell MK9 went through to get itself to a state where it was worth playing as well and people kept on keeping on despite it all.
The difference for me, personally, is that when I strip things down to their core, it's just more satisfying to hit things and move around in Marvel. There's a lot of other reasons why I like that game, but that's what's relevant for this comparison. I've been on record saying that the TAC is one of the all-time dumbest game mechanics since the game's debut and I agree with a lot of other criticisms leveled at it, but that very base level of play is rock-solid for me. That counts for so much. I can't go back to SF4 because the dashes and throw-techs feel stiff as a board and kill the momentum and flow for me. I can't play ArcSys games because I tend to go cross-eyed from all the meters and particle effects. But I can put up with mountains of bullshit in Marvel because, for example, plink dashing across the screen with Magneto or crushing someone with Hulk's s.H is just that satisfying. That game feels great.

Skullgirls just felt so off-putting when I tried it out. Having to make mental notes about what did and did not trigger IPS made for a more convoluted combo system than Marvel 2's simple infinite prevention or Marvel 3's hitstun deterioration. The restands just bothered me and felt wrong at a very basic level. And things like that aren't occasional hurdles to enjoyment that pop up here and there like a trade into ultra; they're part of the very core of that game.

(I recall KOF12 being panned upon release and dying pretty quickly, btw.)
 
Despite what I said about not playing it that much, I was highly interested in the Skullgirls character lottery, as simply having a character that feels right for you makes all the difference in how you feel about playing the game. That's honestly been a longtime hangup with me on Guilty Gear, as the game seemed solid, had nice variety, and carried a good style, but none of the cast interested me and I only had the basic pseudo-shoto as a default. (Trolling with Jam charge spam doesn't count.) Nowadays I've started to like May although I still don't really know how to play her.
 
I am happy Skullgirls is coming to Vita because its where I pretty much play all my FGs. I also hope I can play with PS3-4 people but that is usually a pipe dream.
 

xfactor (especially xfactor holy shit it is so bad), trade->ultra, and other various bullshit things are more like proof that people will play 'fun' games regardless of how wack they are competitively tbh. it's like, 'if the game is fun at a base level but also completely competitively wack people will give it a second chance upon seeing potential changes because they enjoyed the system'. not really a hollow statement at all but i guess i figured that the whole thing was kinda self-evident when it might not have been.

also nobody played kof12 i thought. like i swear i've been told that kof12 sincerely almost killed KOF as a whole with how terrible it was.

you're stating that the natural install base is lower because of the overall sales and the niche market it's appealing to which is totally sensible buuuut...

i'm talking about the competitive install base, which died very quickly from what i've both personally experienced and heard other communities experience. nowhere did i state that the game was expected to draw the thousand+ of competitive entrants. he asked 'why hasn't this game taken off?' and my answer was related to the competitive scene for the game. it's existence is pretty shaky for a game that was primarily targeted to the competitive scene, especially considering the hype it had within the competitive community upon release. i sincerely believe it had the chance to really blow up as a game within the competitive community and then failed due to the gameplay not appealing to the majority of the competitive base it attracted.

i don't think i spoke anywhere about the competitive effectiveness of peacock as a character. i just cited her as an example of what i meant by that 'overdesigned' feeling. the ultimate result is not what i'm talking about here, it's the idea that that her basic gameplay in execution displayed the nature of the game's design. the game having limited movement and a slow pace due to the 'overdesigning' of the characters and how they interact kinda thing. if i did though then that's my bad. hopefully this point is getting through because it's something that bugs me a lot even though it's even more nebulous as a concept than 'feel' is.

speaking of which, i do agree that 'feel' is a pretty nebulous term though but i'm not really sure how to best describe it beyond that 'nonresponsive button pressing and limited, nonresponsive movement'. it's not some hocus pocus bullshit that you're handwaving, it's seriously one of the most important fundamental parts of making a "fun" fighting game despite how nebulous the term is. look at how many people are agreeing or saying the same thing with what i've stated about that- what i've tried to define has at least resonated with some other folks in their dissatisfaction with the game and it's not the first time i've heard/read people say the same kinda thing about the game's 'feel'.

edit: if you ask most marvel players why the hell they enjoy playing such a fuckin' terrible game you're going to get something among the lines of 'feel' or 'base gameplay' or 'core feeling' or whatever. some way to say 'it is enjoyable to do extremely basic things like move around and press buttons'. enough to where people will play a game with fucking xfactor, vergil, zero, morrigan, phoenix, TAC infinites and other unreal bullshit competitively with other people. i sincerely doubt you'll find a massive amount of people people who believe that marvel does not feel good. complaints about literally everything else? sure, they're probably valid. but the 'feel' of the game?

it's enough to where those folks would accept anything else that captured that feel and was even remotely more legit than the shitfest that is marvel 3. it's ultimately why players have dreamt of a patch for so long and will just go out and say whatever they imagine for the game's changes in never-never land. that's the power that nebulous concept of 'feel' holds
 
Normally I try and catch up on every post that I've missed in the tournament thread and in FGW, but that's just not happening given there was an OT2 for the Evo thread.

Hope you all enjoyed your Evo experience. I sure as hell enjoyed mine.

That said, 'sup?

Also, we beechifying our avatars?
 
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