Subatomic Brainfreeze

SEGA SATURN SHOPPING LIST: Radiant Silvergun

The Saturn was great. If you were a real gamer, buddy, you'd already know that. Like, oh my god.

But seriously, the Saturn-- like the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16-- isn't fondly remembered despite having had an excellent library. The stories are similar: the consoles were poorly marketed outside of Japan, a lot of the best games were completely buried, they had vastly stronger competitors, the list goes on.

The good news is that you don't have to worry about that kind of thing anymore because we're no longer in the age of multitudes of competing plastic videogame boxes, and we likely never will be again. Furthermore, many of the classics of that era are getting sold off as cheapo download titles for the dominating consoles. Lately we've had a good run. I'll be doing posts for three titles, whose names I won't say but which you can probably guess.

I never owned a Saturn until long after it was dead, and by then game prices were prohibitive anyway.

Like a lot of people, I bought Radiant Silvergun as soon as it came out for the Xbox 360 just because I could. RS belongs to a special club of videogames known mostly for the fact that they're very expensive: despite being readily available for the 15 years since its release, Silvergun's original Saturn release has regularly commanded prices in the range of $150 to $200 on auction sites. It was priced at $15 on Xbox Live Arcade, and nobody batted an eye.

The legendary action game developer Treasure was doing really ambitious work around this time, and Silvergun does that for the 2D overhead shooter. Though a precursor to the well-known Ikaruga, the mechanics in RS are significantly more complicated on every possible level: depending on which are held down, three buttons control eight different weapons on the ship. Each has its own vital role depending on the situation, and like any game in the genre, mastery requires a perfect knowledge of the stages and enemy formations.

Silvergun is unusually long and content-packed for a game of its genre and it's even got a story mode that's designed to be attempted over and over again, with limited continues but progressively easier each time the player fails.

Like its successor Ikaruga, Silvergun is an obssessively patterned game: even more memorization-oriented than other titles in the genre. High scores are achieved by chaining enemy kills, and players aiming for the high score are obligated to plan out their course through the stage and arrange their kills just so. The fun of the game is figuring out just how to do that, and then in realizing that the task is much easier said than performed.

Ikaruga is a distillation of the same game idea: it doesn't exactly make Silvergun obselete, nor vice versa. They are related: strikingly unique, solvable puzzle boxes that are nevertheless incredibly demanding. If you like to solve puzzles with guns, either will suit you just fine.

Mahjong Fight Scrub - WHAT THE GOOD HANDS ARE

I got a comment on the Joyjan post that said “Now I just need to see what the good hands are...” and it reminded me of the time I spent learning the many yaku (requirements) that a hand can have in reach mahjong, and how confused I was at the time by just having them listed in front of me.

When one is just presented with raw rules-- especially the mountain of rules that reach gives us-- one doesn’t necessarily know where to go from there. In the interest of nudging the beginner forward, I’d like to take apart a very common piece of Japanese MJ terminology: “men-tan-pin”.

“Men” stands for “menzen” or concealed, meaning a hand made without calling any tiles. Menzen tsumo is the most basic yaku: it’s given to the hand when the player draws the final tile by themselves. It’s extremely important for beginners to keep this in mind, because most valid combinations of mahjong tiles-- four sets and a pair-- don’t actually fulfill any yaku themselves. A hand without yaku is worth nothing, so if you go calling tiles without knowing what you’re doing (the number one downfall of the reach rookie), you will probably make yourself unable to win. This is obviously bad.

Furthermore, even when the hand fulfills other yaku, making a call disqualifies it from the menzen tsumo yaku and often lowers the value of those yaku it qualifies for (a full flush is worth 6 han closed and 5 han open, for example). Beginners should avoid calling tiles until they completely understand the consequences of that action.

“Tan” stands for “tanyao”, meaning a hand with no terminals or honors in it. No ones, nines, winds or dragons. We like tanyao because it’s easy to make: the middle tiles obviously connect to more tiles than those on the edges, which often leave us with difficult and unlikely waits.

Calling with tanyao (or open tanyao) is a common and powerful move. Entire rulesets hinge on whether or not this hand is allowed, but if you are playing online it usually is.

Opening a tanyao hand is all well and good, but remember that yaku are worth the most when they go together. By itself, the open tanyao is such a low-scoring hand that it’s hardly worth winning. Menzen tsumo and tanyao make an easy 2 han: now that's still a low-scoring hand, but stacking more and more yaku is how you move forward.

“Pin” stands for “pinfu”, meaning a no-point hand. Pinfu is both an vitally important yaku, your bread and butter, and one of the most complicated. I’m not going to get into the particulars of fu points because scoring in reach MJ is very complicated and beyond the reach of an article like this. A pinfu hand contains:

-all sequences (no sets of three of a single tile)
-any pair but that of a round or seat wind or a dragon
-a final wait on two tiles to complete one of the sequences (examples, 3-4 waiting on 2 or 5, but not 3-5 waiting on 4).

Finally, unlike tanyao, pinfu must be concealed. The final tile can come off another player, but no calling is allowed until then. A pinfu with menzen tsumo is a common combination.

Pinfu is complicated, but it’s also one of the most likely patterns to fall into your hand. Pinfu is good because it's likely. Sequences are easier to pull than triples: there are just more tiles available, and tiles in sequences form complex shapes that can catch many different tiles. Think of the shape 556. Is it more likely that I’ll pull one of the two remaining 5s, or am I more likely to pull 4 or 7, of which four of each are still out there? In general, favor the possibility of a sequence over that of a triple.

Pinfu is also likely to combine with menzen tsumo and tanyao, which add up to a very basic, fast, reliable, and profitable hand that most players aim for right away. Put reach (reach is its own post) and a dora tile in there and we have a high-scoring mangan hand! Great!

This hand is, going down the list: reach, tsumo, pinfu, tanyao, sanshoku doujun (one of the same sequence in each color), 1 dora. Dealer haneman. 18,000. Bread and butter pays off.

Hence the mantra men-tan-pin. It’s by no means the only combination of yaku that we shoot for, but it’s among the most common and flexible. For more analysis and advice on yaku from an actual pro player in Japan, have a look at Garthe’s columns on reachmahjong.com.

What's up with SF X Tekken? IT LOOKS LIKE A DISASTER IS WHAT'S UP, HOLY CRAP LOOK OUT FOR THIS VIDEO GAME

So I've been concerned about the Street Fighter X Tekken project from day one. I am a firm believer that Capcom is running its fighting franchises into the ground with faster, increasingly lazy releases and money-grubbing download content: Guitar Hero-ing fighting games, if you like. As the details flow on this game, well, I don't want to toot my own horn but it's like they're in a race to prove me right or something.

Marvel 3 was released in March, and despite how packed with content it was, it really gave the feel of an unfinished beta. It was, of course, and now at the end of the same year Capcom wants to give us Ultimate Marvel 3 with new characters, rebalancing, and fixes for major, game-defining bugs (for bugs, at least, why can't these games be patched like every other game?). Capcom usually waits a year to do this, but the new cycle is nine months.

SF X Tekken will be out... in March. See where I'm going with this? Street Fighter 4's two paid upgrades have already made buyers wary, and a lot of people passed on Marvel knowing that an upgrade was inevitable. You'd be a fool not to think that Capcom wasn't planning another $40 upgrade to this game by this time next year.

That's been a thing for a while now, of course. What makes this worth posting about is the news that came out of New York Comic Con. SFxT will feature a new "gem system" by which the player equips items that will have various effects, like boosts to attack power and so on. In interviews, this has been directly compared to collectible card games like Magic. This isn't some optional screw-around mode acting as a side dish for the main game: it's been stated that gems can't be turned off.

I'm already not crazy about this: one of the reasons I like fighting games and arcade-style games in general is the absence of a really heavy metagame. The Marvel games get into that territory, but in that game we're talking about building a three-headed beast out of a roster of 30 or so, rather than picking two characters out of 30 and picking five gems out of what have said to be hundreds of gems. The more complex the metagame is, the more likely most of the options are to be useless, and the more likely the game is to be dominated by a few overpowering setups that are more perfectly tuned to kill than the others (my money is on auto-block plus extra meter gain plus anything that makes attacks come out faster). Hundreds of gems ensure that this system is much too complicated for Capcom to properly test before the game is rushed to a March release.

One of the reasons that Virtua Fighter is so good is that it's completely devoted to the fundamentals and that it doesn't mess around with metagame elements. It's about you, the other guy, and your position on the stage. That's it, and that's why it tends to appeal to existing fighting game fans who've been around the block and want a game without all the bullshit.

Anyway, that's not all about the gems. Just like Magic cards, these gems are probably going to cost money. Capcom has not said a word about how the player will acquire gems, and an image from NYCC unveiled the collector's edition, which will come with additional gems. These two points spell it out for me.

The other reason I like these games is that you get everything when you buy the damn game. Things like costumes aside, everything you need to become the best player in the world is right there in front of you, and it's just a matter of the player putting in the effort. This is how it should be. Introducing vital pay items that directly affect gameplay eliminates so much of the appeal of these competitive games, where the playing field is supposed to be equal and the strongest player always wins. The guy who wins the most at SFxT is going to be the strongest player-- among the small subsection of guys who pay up for whatever the most overpowering gem combination is. This is how trading card games are, except at least those guys make a little money at it.

Even speaking theoretically, people in the community have offered strong cases for why, for example, the auto-block gem is way too good not to play. (Videos from the devs have confirmed that the gem works in exactly the way that was speculated.) If we're even taking this game apart on a Theory Fighter level with just one gem, imagine what it's going to look like when the number-crunchers and the Desks of the world take their scalpels and notepads to the released game.

Before these revelations, SFxT was actually looking pretty good. Not anymore. To be frank, this game already looks like it's going to be a trainwreck for competitive play (tournament organizers already have their heads in their hands) six months before release, and I'm really not interested in paying $60-- plus $20 or $30 in gems-- to find out. I'll just watch the tournament streams.

MY FAST NEW YORK COMIC CON REACTIONS

I am aching and semi-conscious, but I really oughta make a NYCC post here before I finish my ANN work and hit the event up on Colony Drop.

There is a point at which the sheer attendance of a con becomes a detriment to it, and NYCC has been at that point for a while now. 100,000 people is simply too many. The entire Javits wouldn't have been enough to hold all these people, and we didn't have the whole Javits. Thursday, when the attendance was capped at 10k, was without question the best day of the weekend. From then on, the show floor was unbreatheable and I'm pretty sure that several of the lines were honest-to-god mile-long lines. As I said to people at the ANN panel, I really felt nostalgic for the relative peace and quiet of the biggest anime cons and their 20k attendance numbers.

If you had doubted my "anime ghetto" hypothesis at all, NYAF was back to prove it in style. Without getting too deep into it-- saving that article for CD-- the intent of this area is much more clear this year. NYAF is absolutely an event designed to corral anime con kids away from the main show floor: the space is little more than a huge lounge-- no open space, only seating, a stark contrast to the rest of the Javits-- and an artist's alley. Sure, there weren't many events or panels to speak of, but you could stay there all day if you were an anime kid-- and many did. The place looked even more like a daycare than it did last year.

I was also doing work for ANN: you can see my writeup of the Yen Press panel, and I gave an interview-- the first I've ever given in my life, imagine my nervousness-- that'll go up in a while. Feeling really "pro nerd" about now.

ANN panel went well: it was nothing more than audience Q&A with us, but the boss had some pretty enlightening things to say about the business end of streaming video. I got the best laugh of the panel, so I'm pretty content. Wish I'd brought more toys to give away: my two figures disappeared at lightning speed.

Skullgirls is gorgeous. Video doesn't do it justice, you need to go see the game on a TV with your own eyes. I didn't get to the other fighting games because even on Thursday, even with tons of cabinets, the lines were unreasonable. The reveal about SF X Tekken-- the gem system, by which the player increases base stats and other properties with equippable items that will very likely cost money-- sounds like an incredible, community-wide disaster in the making. We'll see.

I regret not actually making it to Pony Bar. I try to get a pint there whenever I'm at Javits. Oh well.