New Street Fighter Characters! + News from the Kiosk.

New Street Fighter Characters!

Well not really new, but how on earth would I know? Thanks to the sad state of the American arcade, it would take quite a bit of driving to get to an arcade where I could play Super Street Fighter 4 instead of just down to my local mall or movie theater - and I haven't been to the movies in months, so if they had put in a SSF4 machine I still wouldn't know.

In December of last year, an Arcade Edition of Super Street Fighter 4 was released that includes Yun and Yang from the Street Fighter III series, Evil Ryu from the Street Fighter Alpha series, and a new version of Akuma simply listed as "Oni". "Oni" loosely translates to English as "ogre" - fans of one of Capcom's other series, "Onimusha" may already be familiar with the word. I was hoping to include a link to some video - there's lots out there on Youtube, but since most of it is shot on handheld cameras it's not quite as good as some of the demo videos of the other characters that are available that are direct video feeds.  The other problem is that Capcom has been taking down some of the videos of Oni Akuma and Evil Ryu, although it's hard for me to figure out how they choose which ones to take down.  It's easy as pie to just search "Oni Akuma", and they're not all taken down, just some of them.  As of this writing, there are still plently there to see.

Yun, Yang, and Evil Ryu play largely as expected. While not 100% identical to their counterparts in previous games, it's close enough from what I am able to see.

Oni is a little different and should not be mistaken for Shin Akuma. His super moves are different, and some of his strategy has changed because of changes to his special moves. He doesn't have a 4-way teleport move like regular Akuma does, ((f,d,df or b,d,db) + (PPP or KKK)), but he does have an air dash, and a new move (d,df,f + K – strength determines distance) that moves him forward quickly with a rushing punch. The Roundhouse (Heavy Kick) version will cross up if performed close. It's no teleport, but it could get you out of a corner in a jam. It's hard to tell how safe this move is if blocked because people seem to want to show video of it connecting more than video of it being blocked. His (f,d,df +K) move has been changed from its usual diving kick guessing game to a high-hitting smash that can be used as an overhead if done as an EX move (two kick buttons instead of one, uses one level of meter).

Word is that these additional characters will be available for download for consoles at some point in the future for owners of Super Street Fighter IV. The original Street Fighter IV console version was not programmed in such a way so as to allow additional characters, but apparently Super Street Fighter IV is. Let's hope.

News from the Kiosk

I noticed something new at our local Walmart game kiosk - they had the demo version of LEGO Star Wars 3 for PS3 and for XBox360. My older son and I fired it up on both units in an attempt to see how they looked. Sadly, the XBox360 was not set up for maximum resolution and it looks rather fuzzy compared to the PS3 version. There was no way to adjust the XBox's output resolution from demo mode. I just know that the PS3's video output was set correctly because I was there the first morning that they fired up the PS3 and know that the TV was correctly set for some flavor of 1080. Sadly, the XBox360 looks like it's running in standard-def because it was only scarcely better than the Wii running Mario Sports Mix on the other side of it.

But what about Mario Sports Mix? I have played the hockey and the dodgeball parts at the kiosk. The dodgeball did not have intuitive controls, so I floundered against the computer. The hockey had great controls, so I thoroughly trounced the computer even though I started from way behind (0-3) at nearly the end of the first period. I think I finished the second period with a score of 15-5. I'm going to pass on this game unless someone else can convince me otherwise.

Emergent Gameplay

I talked with a co-worker after work the other day about bout Super Smash Bros. Brawl in comparison to other fighting games. I like to talk to him about it because he is more skilled at the game than I am, and I can gain some insights into what makes the game tick. While I am certainly no expert at Smash, I admire the straightforwardness of it. Smash Bros. takes a different kind of strategy than traditional fighting games. We digressed into talking about what makes a great game, and I think that we were both able to agree that the games that were the simplest in premise but that had lots of options as to what could happen were the most satisfying games for us. I rattled off Katamari Damacy and Tetris right away, because they are games that you can explain easily. We quickly realized that we could have easily been talking about baseball or soccer or basketball.

My co-worker suggested that American Football had no hope of ever really catching on in other countries to the degree that it has in America because its rules are too complex to easily explain and games tend to run long. Then it occurred to me that those restrictions had never stopped cricket from being spread across the globe everywhere.

Then, I got to thinking about fighting games again. Why was Street Fighter II the game that took off and not Street Fighter? Why didn't they just come out with Darkhorse vs Data East 4 starring the dudes from Karate Champ, Fighter's History, Diet Go!Go! and Tumblepop squaring off against The Mask, Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and The Goon? Aside from the fact that Data East has been defunct for several years?

It's not special moves, Street Fighter had them. (Heck - Atari's incredibly lame Pit-Fighter had 'special' moves.) There is no difference between Ryu's fireball motion in Street Fighter and Street Fighter II. You rotate the joystick from the crouch position to the direction that your character is facing, and then press one of the punch buttons. The difference is that Street Fighter II had gameplay that evolved beyond the rules that the programmers gave it. It didn't hurt that it added variety in the playable characters, and made playing against human opponents more of a focus, but the animation programming of the game led to certain things behaving in unexpected ways. In Street Fighter, if you do the motion for a fireball with correct timing, a fireball surges forth from your character's outstretched hands. If your timing is incorrect, then you only see the animation for the punch button that you pressed. In Street Fighter II, if you press the jab button (the quickest, least damaging punch) quickly while doing the fireball motion, you may see a couple of jabs come out, and then the animation of the fireball motion cancels out the animation of one of the jabs. In addition, the logic for determining if you have done the motion for a special move correctly also accepts letting go of the required button instead of just pressing it, giving you a second chance to finish the motion correctly. Many special moves in Street Fighter II can cancel the animation of some of the regular moves. Also, when an attack lands on an opponent, there is a window of time where the opponent is stunned, allowing for another move to be landed in quick succession. This is referred to as a 'combo' although it has very little to do with cheese filled pretzels or how you get your school locker open. When Street Fighter II was programmed, these combos were another unknown. Hit stun and block stun were designed for making the game feel like the programmers wanted the game to feel. The combos that emerged from it were only discovered by people actually playing the game against each other. Other annoying little things were discovered like tick throws - getting your opponent to block a normal attack and then throwing them during the time that they are stunned from blocking the attack - and other variations on exploiting stun and move canceling.

Certainly, this is not the only way you come up with emergent gameplay. Sometimes, it's just as simple as leaving a bunch of objects in an environment with known individual properties and waiting to see how those things react with each other. The Grand Theft Auto games from GTA3 on are a good example of this, because the wide variety of items and environments combined with pedestrian AI behavior, although we have seen things like this before on a smaller scale. In Adventure for the Atari 2600, the erratic behavior of the bat flying around and swapping objects can turn success into death or failure in seconds.

I would contend that unanticipated behavior can come from any sufficiently complicated system. If you have only one thing in an environment, then you have only one interaction. If you have two things in an environment, you have each thing interacting with the environment plus one more interaction of the two things interacting. Three things, six interactions. Four things, ten interactions. The number of interactions increases as the square of the number of objects.

Warning: Math Content - For x objects, the number of interactions is x squared plus x all over 2. With five objects, we take 5, multiply it by itself, (that's x squared) and get 25. Add 5 more to get 30. Divide the whole thing by two, and that's 15 interactions. For ten objects, ten squared is 100, add 10 to get 110, and divide by two to get 55. There is no danger of getting half an interaction, even though we're dividing by two at the end since we're dealing with integers (whole numbers). If x is odd, x squared is also odd, so adding them together is an even number. If x is even, x squared is even, so adding them together is still even.

For those of you that skipped the math paragraph above, suffice it to say that with more stuff comes a lot more complication. Also, remember that this math having to do with interactions technically also applies to the code used to write the game in question. If the designers of a game are looking for a finely crafted experience, they usually make an effort to play test (or get their stable of testers to play test) through most of the possible interactions both as a way to make sure the game has as few bugs as possible, and to make sure some unforeseen interaction doesn't totally break the game. The play testers also have to deal with design and difficulty elements of the game, so it's not like looking for glitches are their only emphasis. With the limits of time available to make a profitable game, this means that there is limited time to do play testing, so sometimes games will ship with bugs or glitches. Sometimes the glitches are minor, and sometimes you're up to version 1.7 and every patch description starts with "Fixes exploit where..." Now, as far as I know, the Street Fighter games haven't needed major patching - even if the game has been slightly unbalanced, we as players have managed to deal with it. In light of that, maybe Capcom needs to make a first person shooter with Hadoukens.

Marvel vs Capcom 3, February 2011 edition

So, Capcom's new fighting game Marvel vs Capcom 3 has been out for a week or so, and I forgot to mention about the last two characters that were included in the game. Hsien-Ko is a character from the Darkstalkers series, and you may remember Sentinel from Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

Sentinel seems just as in-your-face as ever, even for being a rather large, slow character. He has a wide variety of beam attacks and long-range punches to make up for his slow movement speed, and one of his super moves is a large ball of electricity easily as big as Chun-Li's 'Kioushou' move and pushes opponents into the corner from mid-screen. In the X-Men comics, the Sentinels were sent out to crush all the mutants, whether they were X-Men or not. In Marvel vs Capcom 3, Sentinel is out to crush everybody like he did in MvC2.

Hsien-Ko is a nice change, since she is unlike the majority of Capcom fighting game characters in that she has a move that reflects projectile-type special moves. My older son reminded me that Karas in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom can reflect projectiles also. It is a little odd, with her being a jiāngshī, or "Hopping Corpse" and with her sister taking the form of a piece of paper on her hat. Her inclusion in the game has less to do with zombies being the 'in' thing right now and more to do with her being a popular and unusual fighting game character.

The final boss of the game is Galactus, world-eating enemy of the Fantastic Four, but no members of the FF are directly in the game for reasons unknown to me. Super Skrull has all the moves of the Fantastic Four, but that's about all you get. Capcom apparently tried to build a Silver Surfer character, as he is a friend of the FF and usually warns people about Galactus eating their planet for lunch, but they weren't able to make it work with the surfboard and didn't want him to look like Iceman.  Maybe we'll see them in the endings.

So, I have already seen a great deal of complaining posted on the internet regarding this game.

Couldn't they have come up with something better since Marvel vs Capcom 2?

No. This game wasn't even in the works until after other developer licensing agreements expired in 2008, and Capcom got them back again so it could republish MvC2 as a downloadable game. Capcom wasn't even ready to officially announce MvC3's existence until 2010. Just because fans had been whining about it for years, didn't mean anybody with any authority had been working on it.

Why doesn't this have more game modes? Can't they change it up more like Smash Bros., Mortal Kombat, or Tekken and have more game modes?

Let's take this one in three parts. Believe it or not, despite the great number of game modes available, any group of Smash Bros. Brawl players that I've come across tend to have items turned off if they're playing "seriously", because they don't want random item drops to ruin their skill. Correspondingly, they will likely have a favorite stage that they tend to play on to nullify any perceived undue advantage some character might have. So, despite the numerous modes available, I've seen very few of them used.

Mortal Kombat has had an adventure mode crammed into several of the versions (although the first one in Mortal Kombat:Deadly Alliance was just an overgrown training mode), and a simple Kart racer, and a rudimentary puzzle game. Come to think of it, they even managed to make a battle chess game in Mortal Kombat:Deception. Compared to Mortal Kombat:Shaolin Monks, where the adventure mode was the entire game, you might think that the Mortal Kombat fighting games suffered from having some of the staff work on the extra modes.

Tekken's extra game modes have been the best ones, but still aren't quite as good as the fighting game itself. Tekken Force Mode in Tekken 3 was mandatory to unlock one of the characters. I have no explanation for Tekken 3's Tekken Ball mode other than to say that it's volleyball for crazy people. Tekken Bowl, a bowling game on the Tekken Tag Team disc was fun, and it was too rudimentary a game to be sold on its own disc so I find it better that it was included with Tag instead of being a bargain bin title. I almost think that it was some sort of a tech demo for their developers working on the PlayStation 2 for the first time. Tekken Tag Team also included a training mode with enough hand-holding for new players, which seemed like a good choice with new people coming on board for the PlayStation 2. Tekken 4's Tekken Force mode made a lot of improvements from Tekken 3, and still managed to use the characters in mostly the same way as they do in the regular part of the game. However, for all of the improvements with Tekken 4's Tekken Force mode, they abandoned all of that for a Jin-only side quest for Tekken 5. Thank goodness that they included the arcade versions of Tekken 1, 2, and 3, and StarBlade in Tekken 5 - well, I'm not really that excited. Tekken 3 is adequate, but Tekken 1 and 2's visuals don't hold up well against the modern games. StarBlade's visuals are even lower fidelity than Tekken 1, but since it's a space shooter, it suits it well and so the gameplay isn't dragged down by old-school visuals.

So, with all that being said - it does still beg the question of why they couldn't have at least included the same modes that were available in Super Street Fighter 4. I don't know if a bevy of complaints will get them to release a patch, but I seriously doubt it.

Why is there a simplified control scheme? I want my six buttons back!

I think I covered this before, but Marvel vs Capcom 2 already had a simplified control scheme. (Medium attacks were removed to make room for two Partner buttons.) The new one allows for three attack strengths more easily to accommodate fireball traps and attack range variability. It worked well in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and once you got used to it, it was more reliable than Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (for me, anyway).

I have been pleasantly surprised to see that now that the game is out, people are not complaining about the graphical style. I would be surprised at a $5 costume pack that comes out March 1st and only covers six of the characters, but since it's Capcom I'm not so surprised. That does seem to be the way they handle DLC. My sincere hope is that the game sells well enough that they decide to make a Wii version and decide to include the DLC characters. What? It could happen.

Marvel vs Capcom 3 was released February 15, 2011 for Playstation 3 and XBox 360 by Capcom and is ESRB rated "T".

A clear case of fatigue.

The long time music game series Guitar Hero is getting the ax. Should I have said 'axe'? I guess it's no surprise. It's the same reason that we're not buying Tony Hawk Skateboarding games like it was 2001. It's game fatigue.

Colored dots come streaming down a screen, and you play the dots as notes in time with the music that your are listening to via a guitar-like plastic controller, and it's basically the same from Guitar Hero 1 on. From Guitar Hero 1 to Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, not counting DJ Hero or handheld releases, that was 12 games in the span of almost five years - from November 2005 to September 2010. What makes that even more ridiculous is that Guitar Hero (2005) and Guitar Hero II (2006) were the only releases of their respective years, which means the last ten games were crammed into the last three years of that. By comparison, the last ten Mario games stretch all the way back to 1988 - although that's only Mario platforming games and doesn't count all the sports titles, Super Smash Brothers, or Mario Party games.

Of course, it's no coincidence that Activision took over the series from the original developer in 2007. Harmonix had been purchased by MTV Networks/Viacom right after Activision acquired RedOctane. RedOctane was the other half of the original Guitar Hero/Guitar Hero 2 dream team, the half involved with the plastic guitar controllers. Harmonix went right to work on a conceptually identical competing game, Rock Band which added drums, bass, and vocals to the existing guitar paradigm. Guitar Hero was quick to add the other instruments in an effort to keep up.

In an eerie parallel to the previous Tony Hawk situation, Activision brought in developer Neversoft to work on Guitar Hero once they took it over . Also, similar to the Tony Hawk scenario, they dedicated themselves to cranking out sequel after sequel. I'm not sure about Tony Hawk in this respect, but a real problem with Guitar Hero is that playing it against an opponent doesn't do anything for its replay value. Once you really learn the song in Guitar Hero, that's pretty much it. The competitive aspect shoehorned into Guitar Hero 3's so-called 'guitar battles' helped put me off of Guitar Hero for good. Well, some of you would say - but Guitar Hero is so much fun at parties when there's a group playing! That's correct - but that's cooperative, not competitive. So probably there are a bunch of agreed-on songs that everybody likes, and you play those, and that's about it. If you do it again, the experience is largely the same. Even in a platform game, it's harder to replicate the experience exactly and additional playthroughs may yield some new area you didn't find the first time, and it's not like there would be a hidden alternate ending of a song if you changed one chord at a certain point to something that wasn't on the screen. Well, there could be, but since a musician thought of it instead of a game designer, it can't be in the game. There aren't new special moves to learn, or an added-in character in the new version that forces everyone to re-learn all their strategies, or a game-changing new weapon to try. If you want a new song, that might be something genuinely new, but it's a lot of work for something that only a few will purchase as a download, and many will resent as a standalone release.

At a certain point, I would guess that fans of the music game genre were starting to wonder if they should run down to their local Guitar Center and pick up some guitar stands. If you had the original PlayStation 2 Guitar Hero guitars, they didn't work on PlayStation 3, so you might have been better off buying new guitars with the sequels. If you switched to Rock Band at some point, you had to buy new guitars for that, also. Then, the newest Guitar Hero games included super Expert Plus modes for even more plastic button pushing, and Rock Band fights back with MIDI-compatible instruments with more realism and little 25-key keytar. Did I mention that there were drumsets? Do you even have enough room to set up a fake plastic drumset where your game console is without moving a couch or a bed? I wonder how many people opted to set up their Guitar Hero rig in a garage so that they could get the full garage band experience. Also, did these new little faux-garage bands take advantage of the newer features of the Guitar Hero games? Are these the sort of people that would get extra mileage out of the game by creating their own music? At a certain point, playing Guitar Hero makes me just want to practice real guitar more instead of playing to the canned tracks - perhaps they could have garnered my favor with a substantial version of "21st Century Schizoid Man" in Guitar Hero 3 instead of waiting until Guitar Hero 5.

At a certain point, I think the audience was sick of paying over and over again for ostensibly the same experience every time. There's a sweet spot - games like Perfect Dark (that Rare made right after GoldenEye) and Super Mario Galaxy 2 have it - where all the things that you wished that you could have put in the first game end up in the second game. It was the same experience, but better, richer. Once you get past that sweet spot, it seems like some publishers just crack the whip on the developers for frequent sequels to get the short-term cash in lieu of building a long-term brand.

So, dear readers - what game genre or brand will get ruined next?

Never say never, Mr. Bond... I mean, Mr. Ebert.

Since I assume that I am brain damaged in some way, I can rarely tell the difference between genuine conviction in an idea and the low-down dirty attempt to invoke or simulate conviction for the benefit of some greater force. Every once in a while I run across a carnival barker or used car salesman that lets me see behind the curtain of deception a little, and I gain some tiny insight into how that mechanism works. But, it's not foolproof, and I am often tricked into thinking that I'm being tricked.

Had he not tried something similar before, I would not question Roger Ebert's recent declaration that 3D Film will never 'work'. Had he not made a bold statement some time ago that video games could never be art like a movie or a book or a painting, I might have believed unquestioningly that there were no larger forces at work and his current Luddite position against 3D movies was completely sincere. The house of cards that his video game argument was built out of came crashing down, and he even went so far as to apologize and admit his foolishness in breaching the topic - but it got thousands of comments and many times more page views in the meantime. Why shouldn't I think that he has an ulterior motive again?

Mr. Ebert has made some improvements this time. This time he has the opinion of a film editor to back him up, and not just some guy that worked on two effects shots for a direct-to-DVD horror film. He has the support of Walter Murch, editor and sound designer on some of Hollywood's most visually and sonically impactful films. To summarize Mr. Murch – the basic flaw with 3D films, in his expert opinion, is that we're asking our eyes to focus at one distance (the distance from your seat to the screen) and converge at some other distance (the distance from your seat to the perceived object on the screen where your eyes think they are looking). This is mostly problematic when the perceived object is well in front of the plane of the screen, asking your eyes to converge well ahead of the focus distance. I'm sure there is a substantial crowd of people that will cry foul at Mr. Murch's assertions on a variety of grounds. The first and most obvious point will be that similar complaints were lodged against sound and color when each of those were introduced to film. Another point is that a conventionally filmed movie already does funny things to our sense of perspective, focus, and convergence anyway so why should the 3D part matter? Yes, some people walk out of 3D movies with headaches. It may be that some people's brains aren't happy with the effects of simulated 3D. I would argue that those people now know not to watch movies in 3D, and in most instances can go watch the same feature in 2D in the same theater. I would love to do a thorough survey and testing of people that have issues with 3D films, but I'm guessing that the MPAA has no interest in a study being run by an engineer/mathematician/film nerd with no neurology credentials.

Part of the reason Mr. Ebert has to say this now and loudly enough for his peers to hear, is because Nintendo is about to put glasses-free 3D in the hands of hundreds of kids fairly soon. The handheld Nintendo 3DS comes out in March of this year which includes a glasses-free lenticular 3D top screen and adjustable depth slider. Nintendo is already adding 3D photography and looking into movie releases on the system. If you can't deal with the 3D, you can turn it down to nothing. If it turns out that it's a horrible flop, he has to say something now to look like a genius. Of course, if he turns out to be wrong, there's no harm because everybody will just go "Oh, that Roger Ebert. He's just a grumpy old man that doesn't get it." I think we heard that cry from the commenters before on the video game/art thing. The other part of the timing of this had to do with Mr. Murch's letter to Mr. Ebert primarily being a response to a tiny side note in Mr. Ebert's review of the new "Green Hornet" film where he complains about the 3-D film being "dim" - and we're talking about apparent brightness and not about a plot written for morons. I think on a certain level, we 'get' that there won't be quite as much light heading to our eyeballs since we're wearing glasses that are intentionally keeping some of the light from our eyes - the image that's for the other eye is kept out by polarization. That particular problem is surmountable, seeing as there have already been great strides in improving the reflectivity of movie screens since we started watching 3D movies. I think the biggest problem, and perhaps it is a problem that Mr. Ebert himself does not realize (or has blocked out in some strange case of dissociative amnesia), is that he has watched a lot of lousy 3D movies thanks to their recent resurgence. Walter Murch worked on one of the most-watched 3D movies of its era, Captain EO. But, like most of the other badly constructed 3D movies, they stupidly try to send a meteor way out in front of the screen, causing the very focus/convergence problem that Murch is complaining about. Another issue that I would take with the current crop of 3D movies is that many of the big-name films that were done in 3D were actually shot in 2D and had the 3D done in post-production, which is about like trying to take a still picture and turn in into a pop-up book, which looks like, a movie made out of a pop-up book. Everything tends to look like flat planes. Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton - that one's totally your fault), several Harry Potter movies, The Last Airbender, Superman Returns, G-Force, and the lousy (no offense to Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, or the late Pete Postlewaite) 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans were all shot in 2D. I find it sad that Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil film team has to show up all of the alleged A-listers by using James Cameron's most excellent camera system.

Knowing that I was going to attempt to write about this, I trotted down to my local Sony Style store, and the kids and I put on some funny shutter glasses again and looked at a few things on the 3D TV's in the store. 3D TVs are inherently different from the movie experience - liquid crystal shutter glasses synchronize to the quickly alternating frames displayed on the monitor so that each eye only sees the relevant frames of the film.

We gave a nature documentary a try, and a little of Alice in Wonderland - I think it was the scene where Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee while she's still small - and a little bit of Gran Turismo 5. Alice in Wonderland comes off very unreal - Tim Burton spends too much time trying to break the plane of the screen, and having things fly around in the foreground. Looking at the screen without the shutter glasses on, the objects on the screen are very far apart, much farther apart than they would be in your normal field of vision unless they were only a foot away. Gran Turismo 5, on the other hand, was hard to tell that it was in 3D unless you put the glasses on - and then the landscape was so well-rendered that it actually made it easier to drive because I had a better sense of the space. The nature documentary was somewhere in between the two in 3D quality - I am always wondering how they aim cameras in a 3D system, and whether there is any convergence, or whether they just aim the cameras straight ahead and make you slowly crazy with the unreality of it. The 3D needs to be a positive experience for the audience, and add to the experience, and more importantly not take you out of the experience.

Most people that I know that have had a positive experience with 3D movies have had their most positive experience with animated features. How to Train Your Dragon, Legend of the Guardians and Coraline were all mentioned. James Cameron's Avatar is easily at least half animated CG. Of course, in a computer animated feature, it is comparatively simple to add a second virtual camera to the performance data, and render the film in 3D. In processing a 2D film, you would almost have to create a CG wire frame virtual set and map the 2D film back on to it, draw in a bunch of missing textures not normally visible, and then add in the second virtual camera. The flaw in a system like that is that the natural variations in lighting in textured surfaces would not occur correctly and it would still have the flat, pop-up book effect. Conversely, I found that Legend of the Guardians had a very natural 3D look most of the time, largely due the the wood and feather textures giving the viewers very good visual depth cues, and most of the shots were at a distance that helped that work. I don't remember them breaking the plane of the screen except possibly in the opening credits.

So, I contend, that it is possible to make a good 3D film. Certainly, some things need to be done differently - maybe there should be less things jumping out of the screen, maybe there shouldn't be so many jump cuts in a 3D film. People seem to show up and pay for the bad ones that are out now, so I think to say that they don't 'work' is a gross overstatement that some box office numbers would certainly disagree with. A problem like that should not keep us from our path of self-improvement. Additionally, learning how to make a quality 3D film may give us important insight into the nature of vision and how the brain processes it. Just because a new media possesses some new technical challenges is no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

Marvel vs Capcom 3, January 2011 edition

Over the holidays, without much fanfare, they added Haggar and Phoenix to the roster for MvC3. Haggar is finally making it to a fighting game long after his Final Fight compatriots Guy and Cody. Guy first appeared in a Street Fighter game in 1995 (Street Fighter Alpha), and Cody followed soon after in 1998 (Street Fighter Alpha 3). No, I don't consider Saturday Night Slam Masters a fighting game, it's a wresting game which is arguably its own genre.



Haggar certainly has a lot of moves that are similar to Street Fighter's Zangief, but the Red Cyclone never had to whip out a big lead pipe in the middle of a combo.

The powerful and beautiful Phoenix finally graces the screen, waiting for us to be able to handle her awesome power. She has homing fireballs, air fireballs, giant Kikoken style fireballs, flaming rushdown moves, and great range on the ground. I guess if Capcom's Dante and Trish are fair game now, there's no reason to hold back on Marvel's mightiest mutants.



Akuma and Taskmaster were just recently announced, but it took a few days for them to show up on the Marvel Vs Capcom 3 website. Akuma is simple - he's been in so many games that most people expected to see him. He's more of a draw for flashy players than Ken is, with his more varied moveset, air fireballs, and punishing super moves. Typically, this is offset by Akuma taking more damage from opponents. True to his original nature as a hidden character, Akuma is an unlockable character based on accumulating 'play points' during the course of playing through the game, similar to the home versions of Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Akuma is packed full of more moves than ever, and his air combos look pretty vicious. Here's his trailer.




Taskmaster is getting the same unlockable treatment as Akuma. In the comics, he's a mercenary with the uncanny ability to mimic anyone's moves in battle - just the sort of thing that reminds you of Mokujin from Tekken or Olcadan from the Soul Calibur games. Here's Taskmaster in action.



You'll see him doing a lot of Cap's and Spidey's moves here, plus some serious arrow action. I wonder if that means we should expect to see Hawkeye later, since this game is already Avengers-heavy.

On a side note I'm pretty proud of #1 son for finally defeating Megahammer in Super Mario Galaxy 2 after being stuck on that board for weeks.

Bowling in Video Games

I have a great interest in bowling, although I don't own my own ball or shoes. Part of the game's appeal for me is that it's simple in premise but there is great depth to it. This also explains why I like the Katamari games and Tetris. The physics of bowling is complicated, but not so much so that you can't get your mind around everything that's happening. This is the sort of thing that makes a game a likely candidate for video game simulation. However this has not been without some major missteps.
Bowling for the Atari 2600 was a joke - one of my bowling teammates from school had mastered it within weeks. She explained to the rest of us that as long as you stood in one particular spot, you could get a strike every time. That feature notwithstanding, it also rarely left spares typical of actual bowling based on where the ball hit the pins. I ignored bowling video games for a while, hoping they would eventually catch up. I picked up Gotham Games' Big Strike Bowling out of the PlayStation 1 bargain bin, only to find that they incorrectly spaced the pins making it basically unplayable. One of the Spiderman games for the PS2 had a mode where Spiderman swung down the lane, swinging into a group of webbed-up enemies arranged like bowling pins. I think Bruce Campbell's voice-over was better than the game, but to be fair I am a big fan of Bruce Campbell. I was somewhat satisfied with Tekken Bowl in Tekken Tag Tournament. Despite the fact that the pins were top-heavy and the lanes had no gutters (errant curve balls just head off into the crowd), it felt a lot more like bowling than a lot of the previous games that I had played. Even so, I managed to bowl at least one 300 - since I figured out Gun Jack's aiming system.  Now, some of you will probably mention that they had come out with some serious bowling simulators that I should have been more satisfied with - for whatever reason I passed on all of these, instead opting for only semi-serious bowling games. This is in keeping with my overall character with a gamer - on the golf side, I like Hot Shots and Outlaw Golf a lot more than that Tiger Woods game. I also enjoyed the bowling modes in Super Monkey Ball, SMB2, and SMB Junior . There was still something not quite right about these games, but there was not a real way to fix it - after all, it's not like they could rig up a mock bowling ball full of sensors and let you swing it around the living room or anything.

So, that brings us to Wii Sports - or if you are just now playing Wii, possibly Wii Sports Resort. Each has a bowling mode in it, but they are not the same. Wii Sports has a fairly simple interface, and the controller doesn't really allow for too much nonsense with how the ball is released down the lane other than liberally allowing you to loft the ball. Wii Sports Resort, since it uses the Wii Motion Plus controller, is a little more advanced in its interface and allows you a choice between manual ball release and automatic ball release. If you played the original Wii Sports, you are already comfortable with the manual ball release.  Automatic ball release it what it says, I will discuss it no further other than to say you lazy slackers should be using manual ball release.

For those that are unfamiliar, here's the basic motion. You start by holding the Wiimote upright (the nose of the controller where the IR sensor is pointed at the ceiling) and holding the B button. (It's the trigger-shaped button on the back.) You swing your arm back like you would if actually bowling, and your character starts walking forward on their own. As you swing your arm forward again, you release the B button to let go of the bowling ball. The speed of your forward arm swing and the timing of the release determine the initial velocity.  Here's where it starts to diverge between the two versions.

In Wii Sports, a somewhat late release of the B button will give the ball some loft - in other words, it will carry through the air a little before it lands and  the static roll angle of the controller (presumably at the instant you release the B button) determines how much spin there is on the ball.

In Wii Sports Resort, a late release of the B button does not appear to yield any loft, as I have been unable to do it at all.  Spin on the ball is determined in a more dynamic fashion, by how much roll and in what direction happens to the controller during your throwing motion.  A slight amount of tilt on the controller yields almost no spin now, or a negligible amount.  Let's imagine the face of a clock, and the hour hand is the normal vector to the plane of the surface of the Wiimote where the all of the buttons (except for the B button) are located. If the controller were face up, we'll call that twelve o'clock.  If the controller were face down, where the only recognizable feature was the B button, we'll call that six o-clock.   For example, if in Wii Sports you were curving it a couple of dots to the left by angling the controller to ten o'clock, in Wii Sports Resort, you would have to go from twelve o'clock  to ten o'clock during the swing to achieve a similar effect.

This simple change, going from a static to a dynamic input for curving the ball, makes Wii Sports Resort even a little bit more like actual bowling.  The amount of curve you were able to put on the ball in Wii Sports was not anything like what you might see from a pro bowler.  Now, the experience of cranking a killer hook deep into the pocket can happen in the living room without one of the kids breaking a lamp. (Maybe.)  My typical hook is from ten o'clock around to four-thirty - I have to stand way to the left to make that work, but the pin action is much more impressive than if I just throw a straight ball into the pocket.

My other favorite addition to the bowling in Wii Sports Resort was the 100-pin game.  It's still ten frames, but it's 100 pins instead of 10.  The score is computed the same way, so a perfect score is 3000 instead of 300.  Converting spares of more than three pins are nearly impossible unless they're clustered together.  And what's even better, is that this awesome bowling game comes with a bunch of other games - Ping-Pong, Archery, Basketball, Beating Cartoon Avatars With a Bamboo Stick Fencing, Wakeboarding, and a few more.  So, if you have a Wii and liked Wii Sports, you should get it.  If you don't have a Wii yet but want to get in on the bowling action, the new bundles include both Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort (unless you get the Mario 25th Anniversary Red Bundle in which case I would guess you're not going to be doing much bowling even if you do get the regular Wii Sports).