We want cake! Where's our cake?

By this time, I would presume that everybody that had preordered “Portal 2” has had a chance to start digging into it. I really liked the original “Portal”, but I'm not sure what to do about the sequel.

“Portal” places you in a testing facility under the supervision of the Aperture Science Corporation. They are trying out a new handheld device that allows instant teleportation between two surfaces. The device shoots two different colored portals, and only one portal of each color can exist at a time. Your entrance velocity into one portal is your exit velocity out of the other portal, although the relative direction of gravity will sometimes change on the transition between portals. For example, you see a deep chasm below you that you can't jump across. Shoot one portal on the floor of the chasm, and another on the wall above you, and jump down into the chasm. The acceleration due to gravity increases your velocity, and your exit out of the other portal flings you across the chasm that you wouldn't be able to jump across. Granted, this may not be the only way to proceed, but it's nice to have those kinds of options.

As it stands, I could just get the PC version of “Portal 2” at some point over the summer if I think that I will have time to really dig into it, and it wouldn't matter so much when I play it. I'm not that worried about spoilers. I can hold my ears, or not – it won't matter so much since I heard the internet meme of “The cake is a lie” for so long before I actually played “Portal” that I wasn't even sure what it really meant by the time I played the game. It's like when you look at a familiar word too long and start to break it down into letters, or like when Vizzini starts second-guessing himself endlessly (to his peril, I might add) in “The Princess Bride”. Was there really a cake, or did they want me to think that there was a cake? But if that's what they thought I was going to think, then was there any need for an actual cake? Or perhaps there was a cake but also a specific reason for making me think that there wasn't a cake, making me want the cake more knowing I couldn't have it?

Needless to say, I played “Portal” unencumbered by the thought of cake – trying to think in portals was challenging enough. I had even played the predecessor to “Portal” - “Narbacular Drop”, but that game while sharing the basic mechanic of a portal gun, doesn't play that much like “Portal” due to a less interesting set of physical rules. I am looking forward to returning to the world of “Portal”, even though GlaDOS, the computer that runs the testing facility in the game scares the crap out of me.

(Side note: I answered the phone at work one afternoon about a month ago, only to find that I was being robocalled. Not just a crappy recorded message to tell me to refinance my mortgage – but high quality voice synthesis, and an adult female voice just a little too close to Ellen McLain's, the voice actress who played GlaDOS in “Portal”. I hung up the phone and had to get up and walk around to shake off the feeling of dread.)

The real problem for me is that of the expanded game this time. No, I'm not talking about all the new game elements, because any series of games will always add or subtract elements as it progresses. I expect that. I'm talking about the cooperative mode. It would be one thing to just wait for the right moment to play the single player game and immerse myself in the experience, but now I fear that if I wait too long to play it, I may rob myself of the opportunity to play the co-op part of the game. I hear that the console versions have split screen local co-op. Maybe I'll have to teach my older son to think in portals.

Follow your instincts.

There was a day, years and years ago, that I thought that I saw an upright bass in a pawn shop quickly through the open front door as I drove by.  As it was around the corner from the house, it was easy enough to go and check on what I thought I saw.  Oddly enough, what I thought I saw turned out to be a large camera tripod that had been fully extended - but they did have an upright bass in the store.




For me, this was an important lesson in following my instincts.

So, today when the little voice in my head said to stop by the Play N Trade store because I'm never usually near it, I listened.  I scored the DS version of Desktop Tower Defense, which my son was pretty jazzed about, but what I was really excited about was scoring a copy of Metroid Prime Pinball, also for the Nintendo DS handheld. I had given up on this game since it was released pretty close to the original release of the DS.  One of the nice things about Play N Trade are that they still have games and accessories for older systems there - there were a few dozen N64 games, quite a number of PS1 and XBox games, and I even saw a few Dreamcast controllers thrown in there along with the pink Xbox360 controllers that some retailers are having a hard time moving.

This is not about Sengoku Basara.

I have been trying to work on a big writeup of Sengoku Basara, with a whole compare and contrast to Devil Kings section in it, only to realize that it's getting in the way of me actually playing the games. I think I need to go back to shorter blog posts for a while.

Over this last weekend, #1 son and I went to get Okamiden and No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle at our local Gamestop. Since I waited so long to pick up NMH2, which came out at the same time as Tatsunoko vs Capcom, it was only $13. I was completely losing my mind when the clerk asked me if I wanted a used copy for a dollar less, and I know they make more money from used copies, but I did not want to be their test pilot for a used copy only to save a dollar.

Since the weekend, #1 son has spent a lot of time playing Okamiden, predicated on finishing his math homework first. I even got him to finish his weekend math homework Saturday morning before he ate his breakfast because I told him that I wanted him to get that out of the way before we purchased Okamiden.

Okamiden is a DS game that is a sequel to Capcom's Okami. You play as Chiberatsu, a pup of the wolf goddess Ameratsu featured in the original game. Evil once again rises up in the land, and Chiberatsu solves puzzles and meets friends to help combat the menace. Since a main feature of the game is using written symbols to interact with your environment in a variety of ways, it is quite suited to the Nintendo DS and its touchscreen. Instead of drawing symbols with an analog thumbstick or drawing in the air with the Wiimote, the stylus and the touchscreen allow you to draw more naturally. In battle mode, just drawing a slash across the screen is an additional attack. If you need the sun when it is dark, draw a circle in the sky. If there is a crack in a wall, draw a circle with a diagonal line through it (like a Q, but upside down) and a small cherry bomb appears to open the wall for you. As you go through the game, you find more friends and brush techniques that allow you to make further progress. I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone that liked Okami, and to anyone who likes action/adventure games, unless you're stylus-averse.

Once we got back to the house Saturday with both games, #1 son quickly absorbed into his DS, and I didn't really talk to him that much the rest of the day unless he was laying in the way. I didn't start No More Heroes 2 until both kids were otherwise occupied, and I had dishes to wash anyway.

No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle is the sequel to Ubisoft's critically acclaimed Wii game by Suda51 and his team at Grasshopper Manufacture, No More Heroes. Our protagonist, Travis Touchdown, gets back in the assassin business about the same time he discovers that his one real friend in the city of Santa Destroy has been brutally murdered by a group of thugs. Armed with a beam katana (that's what you call a l*ghts*b*r if you don't want to have to pay George Lucas a nickel every time you say it or swing it around) and an array of wrestling moves learned from countless hours of TV wrestling, Travis once again works his way back up the assassin ranking ladder to fight the #1 assassin and avenge his friend.

It's very easy to pick back up, even though it feels like a long time since I've played the original No More Heroes. The biggest difference I noticed was how much harder it was to recharge the sword. In the first game, you aim the Wiimote skyward, hold the 1 button, and shake the Wiimote back and forth. (You can keep the jokes about what that looks like to yourself.) In this game, all of that is the same but it seemed like it took a lot more effort. Of course, it could be that me shaking a virtual beam katana handle to recharge my virtual batteries were beating the heck out of my actual Wiimote and the actual batteries. I had to swap batteries at least once, although the state of all the rechargeable AA batteries in my house probably has more to do with a few marathon sessions of New Super Mario Bros. Wii than anything else. The one thing that I don't like about the game is that you can't just walk around the city any more, but the giant empty city was the biggest complaint that most reviewers made about the first game. I really like the empty city and driving the motorcycle around, or even walking. It made the city seem more real and gave it a sense of place. Now, that is replaced with a menu system overlaid on a map of the city. I might have preferred the option of going places instantly via the map when I wanted to, but also being allowed to venture out into the city when I wanted to. Some of the things that you found by wandering around the city in the first game are in treasure boxes in the boss levels in this game. I haven't figured out how to view the collected items yet.

I can only recommend this game to adults that have a firm sense of reality, since this game is fairly detached from reality in quite a number of ways. There is an excessive amount of violence, a fair amount of profanity, and a couple of unrealistic characterizations of female characters. While it is not required, the game will make a little bit more sense if you have played and finished the first one already.

In other news, I finally got a new set of wheels. What am I excited about? I am excited that all the doors open, the A/C works, I can fit stuff in the back, and there's a 1/8” Stereo jack marked “AUX” that I can hook the audio from the Nintendo DS into. I sense a mobile session of Korg DS-10+ in my future.

Today is the beginning

of the 3D revolution.  North American retailers are going to have the Nintendo 3DS handheld game system for sale starting today!  While I am not one of the people that will be buying one today, I feel oddly compelled to go watch the carnage.  Also, I'd really like to see the 3D for myself if possible.

I think this may have repurcussions in some of the big box stores - it might actually hurt their 3D TV sales a little, as some customers knowing that this new technology is now available will wait for it to trickle up to larger screens instead of dealing with glasses.  I will be listening for store employees that make odd comments about that, also.

Viva la 3D Revolution!

P.S. My older son is _really_ going to bug me for Okamiden if we go out to the store to look.  I can hardly blame him.

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".