We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with PS2 Third Strike so much as the Online Edition is better. People do tend to overblow an imperfect port as “bad”, but on the issues that really matter, the PS2 port is close enough. (I will say this against it, though: the menu music is pretty annoying when you accidentally leave it on the TV in the other room for hours—it’s not a very long loop. Yes, this is from experience.)

I’m going to guess that in most places the PS2 port now costs more than the Online Edition does, and due to the difference in online capabilities, I think it’s pretty clear which port is currently the best one to get if you have a choice.

My Fallout: New Vegas playthrough resulted in me creating Batman, the red space suit wearing unarmed wonder who punched the entire New Vegas Strip to death in just a few days.

The versions of SFA3 and 3rd Strike in the Alpha Anthology/Anniversary Collection, respectively, are purported to be arcade perfect. That's really all I care about.

They’re not, but it’s all in little details that will never ever ever matter.

(Ryu’s bag doesn’t fall down in the PS2 version of Third Strike aaaaaaagh)

My Fallout: New Vegas playthrough resulted in me creating Batman, the red space suit wearing unarmed wonder who punched the entire New Vegas Strip to death in just a few days.

Punching them all with no arms. That's an accomplishment.

e: P.S. divekick is coming to pc steam august 20 same as it's coming to ps3/vita just so y'all know

Yeah. It depends on the game. And for a lot of the genre, it’s truly irrelevant. Sometimes there is no port. Sometimes it matters that nobody plays the game anymore. Sometimes the arcade version has a “tournament” setting, sometimes it doesn’t.

As bad an idea as more grandiose NEO·GEO features turned out to be in terms of practicality, I love what they were trying to accomplish. In many cases they had AES and MVS versions, as well as multiple regions’ data on the same cart. They could ship the same ROM anywhere in the world and the BIOS did the region selection for them. Then again, that’s probably why they had a lot of SNKglish.

There are some games that act that way for other systems, but I don’t know of any other game system where that was the general rule.

A wonderful deviation from the startlingly formulaic “SFII clone” mindset.

To my knowledge, the Gem/Orb thing originated from Marvel Super Heroes as a loose adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet. Some cross-pollination works great like that. Of course, it doesn’t seem to have made its way into any other Marvel fighting game, curiously enough, what with comic books and video games’ willingness to re-tread old territory.

Now I want the PS1 port! Why is the animation in these old Capcom fighters SO AMAZING. I lament the move to 3D if only for that reason.

90s animators in Japan had some real wowie-zowie skills! I’d ask, “where are they now?”, but I think the issue is more like the economics have fallen out from under them for the most part. Two lost decades too many and all that.

I've still not gone through the PlayStation library, but it's revealing itself to me as the second most advanced 2D powerhouse available. People dump on it because the Saturn is more powerful and because of how many of the quality games are on both platforms (with most Saturn versions claimed to be superior), but it's still a joy for sprite enthusiasts such as myself.

Yeah, I think the difference in capabilities has been exaggerated a bit much, despite the technical details. Particularly with the history of the Saturn being what it is (and having never gotten my hands on one; yes, I’m still on the run from a certain judo practitioner), I’m a bit leery of the many non-objective-and-just-a-little-defensive-sounding comparisons between the two that I’ve heard before.

It would not surprise me if two ports from/to the same systems with what is probably a good deal of shared code have transparently identical components. There has always been plenty of “hope they don’t notice” to go around, and that’s something that won’t be going away any time soon....

well, usually fighting game enthusiasts are super picky about missing animations because that missing frame could be the difference between a cancel that saves you and getting comboed but... that's just in theory....

People also complain about stuff like constant 1-frame lag.

Seriously.

I’m sure you are some sort mutant that your opponent is not where 1/60 of a second is going to give you your freaking edge.

Incidentally, The Cutting Room Floor says the international names for the Darkstalkers characters are actually the originals, and they were changed for Japan. Makes sense! Now I feel justified in calling him Lord Raptor.

Oh cool, i didn't know that.

The ps1 and saturn ports of DS3 are kinda broken, check this out. Aside from not being in turbo 3 (the standard speed for ds3), the attacks don't have as much pushback so it allows for some pretty crazy shit as you can see in that video. Compare that to the combos you can do in the arcade version.

I haven't played the actual thing but i played it on emulator once and it did have missing frames in some of the animations, yes, actual frames of an animation, just missing. It could have been the emulator though.

E: After watching some videos, i do think there are missing frames. According to the capcom wikia (dubious source, i know) due to the RAM limitations of the Playstation, a few animation frames had to be removed. I have studied the shit out of those sprites and i can just tell, some of those animations feel choppy and incomplete. The sound is also butchered a little bit, though that's perfectly understandable.

It doesn't matter that much though, it's still a decent port and it's good enough to experience the games, imo.

Also, hey

Fighting games are serious business, i really don't understand why people get mad about wanting to have optimal control of your actions in a competitive game. Yeah, i know people are dicks, but not all of them! It seriously frustrates me when people just label competitive enthusiasts as ridiculously picky and whiny.

Also also, yeah, old capcom fighters are pretty much my biggest inspiration when it comes to animation.

Honestly, I've played enough fighting games and heard enough actually good players talk about them that I can say that yes, that one frame can make all the difference in the world.

one frame is the difference between getting locked in that infinite combo loop and losing the match and turning it around at the last second, etc etc

the problem is some people definitely complain too much about it, too
not everyone who plays the game competitively is automatically a dick, they just often seem to forget that not everybody notices that 1/60th second lag... lol

E: After watching some videos, i do think there are missing frames. According to the capcom wikia (dubious source, i know) due to the RAM limitations of the Playstation, a few animation frames had to be removed.

While there isn’t really any way to identify the exact reason unless you somehow know someone who worked on it, yes, it is a very safe assumption to say that frames were excised and that the reason is because PlayStation didn’t have enough RAM for that. Because it didn’t.

Honestly, I've played enough fighting games and heard enough actually good players talk about them that I can say that yes, that one frame can make all the difference in the world.

one frame is the difference between getting locked in that infinite combo loop and losing the match and turning it around at the last second, etc etc

A one-frame difference makes the difference, I’ll buy that. But if your opponent has the same handicap, it’s not enough of a difference that the gameplay suffers in any measurably significant way. 1/60 of a second is faster than any human being in the world sees anything—it’s faster than a signal gets from the eye to the brain, and it’s certainly faster than any reaction gets from the eye to the brain to the hand.

Hate to say it, but worrying about any (constant) lag time under a certain threshold is wandering off into an audiophile-like la-la-land. Yes, “good players” like to talk about frame advantage and stuff like that, which is a valid concern in theorycraft on simultaneity. Yes, synchronizing beyond a certain latency gets to be a problem, and with certain kind of time-dependent tasks, that gets to be intolerable (audio, for example). But I see people imply that it’ll throw off your reaction to something if the moves come out 17ms later, and the science seems to indicate against that. If you react to something in under 100ms, you either performed a false start, or you have übermicro.

Also, again, not really fair, but I don't think I have to say anything about the FGC's record for being a dick beyond "bad" ports. I'm flawed and human and shit like that colors my opinion of the community. I'd also like to point out that competitive games are the only ones I have to make excuses for "not being that good" at, and I don't think that's the sort of welcoming atmosphere they should cultivate if they want to be taken as seriously as they act. Yes this is a total ad hominem I am a stupid idiot asshole and that's how I roll.

Yeah that's pretty fair, the fgc is by far one of the worst gaming communities. I guess i'm just frustrated by how shitty it is and how everything competitive is generally frowned upon as a result.

I see people imply that it’ll throw off your reaction to something if the moves come out 17ms later, and the science seems to indicate against that. If you react to something in under 100ms, you either performed a false start, or you have übermicro.

Fair enough as well. People on both sides of the casual/hardcore just take it to the extreme pretty often i think. This is all really just a matter of general intolerance :I

Surely, the attack animations would still be the same real-time duration, just with less in-betweens visually? The other frames displayed for longer to compensate?

Yes, less in betweens. I've been trying to find it displayed clearly in a video but i can't find any, but i remember Jedah's HP being just 3 bloody arms kinda flailing around instead of coming out one by one.

One of the issues with web videos is that somewhere between compression and being clamped down to a framerate (YouTube maximum is 30fps), it does make that kind of thing hard to spot.

Oh, and one of the things I just love about 2D video games is when they really are animated with the 60fps capabilities in mind. It’s not that the animated sprites themselves necessarily have that many unique frames (that’s very rare) so much as how it looks when they’re fine-tuned so that it clearly has a 60fps, or at least 30fps fastest-common-framerate, combined with the more physics-like motions that move things around at that rate. It may sound contrary to whatever I just said about reaction speed (that only concerns what we perceive as instantaneous, discrete actions), but you can definitely tell when something is moving that smoothly on the screen (really, it’s the stuttering when it fails that we notice). There’s something magical about seeing something animated that fluidly (or vibratory, or spasmodic, as the case may be) while retaining the Fingerspitzengefühl of good 2D animation.

ah yes I almsot forgot about the SDA charity

they're doing an estimated 1:30:00 Dark Souls run

which, honestly, isn't the best time ever but still pretty damn impressive considering

Spiral Knights is being less shitty again finally. You can play for as long as you want without energy, and craft gear using items you find in dungeons instead of having to buy energy.

Knockback seems pretty strong here, comparable to the arcade. Am I missing something?

It... it is. I don't even know anymore man.

I never said it made the game that worse to play though, like i said, it's fine to experience it specially if you're just playing by yourself.

Also, awesome, i've got something to watch tomorrow! I wonder what Cosmo's gonna do this year.

oh god
SK is actually going to be fun???
OOO ACTUALLY LISTENED TO PEOPLE???
IT'S THE END TIMES

E: and then I remembered that CE is actually used for things like weapon and trinket slots, and for etc etc so OOO is still making money

because a lot of high tier players (myself included at one point) like having 4 weapon slots and the advantage of trinket bonuses which.... means that a lot of really good players will keep buying CE.. oh well

We are removing mist energy for a couple of reasons. First, so that elevators will stop requiring the use of energy. Second, from a design perspective, we want to encourage Spiral Knights players to experiment with more of the game than our research shows that they currently do. It turns out that providing energy to players in greater or lesser amounts does not encourage them to try out different weapons and gear, something we have always believed was a core part of the Spiral Knights experience.

NO FUCKING SHIT

but...now they're making the items required for crafting as drops....

which doesn't fill me with confidence given the prospect of the rare drops system

We are removing mist energy for a couple of reasons. First, so that elevators will stop requiring the use of energy. Second, from a design perspective, we want to encourage Spiral Knights players to experiment with more of the game than our research shows that they currently do. It turns out that providing energy to players in greater or lesser amounts does not encourage them to try out different weapons and gear, something we have always believed was a core part of the Spiral Knights experience.

NO FUCKING SHIT

but...now they're making the items required for crafting as drops....

which doesn't fill me with confidence given the prospect of the rare drops system

well, the way they're talking about it is making me think they're gonna be common drops

Orbs of Alchemy for Crafting

Orbs of Alchemy can be found as loot drops as you play in the Clockworks, and will be used instead of energy for crafting. Orbs exist for each star level in the game (save for 0 star). As you play, you will find over time that you have more orbs than you need for the upgrade of your initial choice of weapons, and that you have the resources to build a broader arsenal of gear. This, in turn, will make it easier for Spiral Knights players to experiment with more varied equipment and gameplay styles. Orbs of Alchemy, in addition to being found in the Clockworks as loot, may be bought from the Supply Depot.

and besides, if you really want a lot of drops of the items, the easy solution is that "well now you aren't limited by mist, go grind for as long as you want to"

this will basically make several of the steam achievements a thousand times easier, too

Yeah, some of the hidden upgrades are obnoxious. I feel like I spent as much time on those as I did on the main game the first time I played it. There are a few jumping puzzles that involve the booster that are just pointlessly cruel.

I actually liked the Chozodia section, mainly because it was an unexpected change-up. But on subsequent playthroughs it definitely loses its novelty.

I loved Zero Mission overall though; would you say Fusion is worth getting if I liked it? I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Metroid series.

I played Fusion first, so I thought Metroid games always had quality storytelling and that was part of what made them so popular
and was I ever wrong

Fusion is my favourite metroid game and I am so mad that Nintendo won't let me buy it on 3DS

Ending spoilers:

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SpoilerI'm also mad that we still don't have weird mutant Samus, enemy of the government as the plot of a game because seriously they set that right up and then haven't touched it
I really need another 2D metroid game (but hopefully by the time they go back to sprites instead of using 3D graphics in 2D environments... please?

I tried the first Prime out and ended up just closing it down after a few days of hacking away at it because I just couldn't handle the control system and the game somehow simply wasn't that engrossing, which is odd given that I was able to tough my way through Hunters pretty well.

I went back and played through Rhythm Tengoku (GBA), since my Japanese is now better than the first time I went through and I easily get trapped into spending too long on things once I get started. What a well-done game!

It’s short if you know what you’re doing, and long if you don’t. It’s full of nice little quirky segments with great music, and is laid out in such a way that skills build upon each other roughly progressively. It also comes with drum lessons. It’s a crying shame they didn’t take it out of Japan, but since it had that dubious distinction of being a GBA game from 2006, it had no chance of happening. But I think it would have gone over well if they had given it a proper localization (I think that’s a hard requirement due to a number of verbal audio cues). You don’t really need to know Japanese that well to just play it, though.

Wish I had the sequels.