Subatomic Brainfreeze

Otomedius Excellent ISN'T VERY GOOD AT ANYTHING, QUITE FRANKLY

As the credits rolled on my first successful clear of Otomedius Excellent, a feeling from the distant past started to creep over me. It wasn't nostalgia over shooting bubbles in Gradius III, or the game-over music from Salamander, or mid-90's videogame magazines' mystified reactions to the blockbuster sales performance of Tokimeki Memorial. 

It had just been so long since I'd felt such intense regret over buying a videogame.

Suggestions for King of Fighters XIII's online modes-- CAUSE RIGHT NOW IT KINDA SUCKS

I wanted to give KOFXIII's netplay a couple of sessions before I made the call on it. So here's the call: it's bad.

It is not the absolutely unplayable online we saw in KOFXII and most of SNK's Xbox Live Arcade games (Neo Geo Battle Coliseum is the sole exception). However, that doesn't mean it's good. It means it's playable with a little hassle and major caveats. Note that I'm located in New York City and playing on Xbox Live: I'm told that the situation is a little worse on Playstation Network.

First off: there are not a lot of available opponents. Of course, this has a lot to do with KOFXIII's terrible choice of release date (one week after Ultimate Marvel 3, which is easily the biggest game in tourney circles right now), but the bad netcode makes the situation worse.

When you're searching for matches, players' connection speeds are listed at anywhere from 1 to 4 bars. 1-bar is effectively unplayable, and 2-bar is very laggy. These are out of the question. Unfortunately, the vast majority of players I see have 2-bar connections. This means that starting a room and simply waiting in it (like the mode where you can practice while you wait) guarantees you a match that isn't worth playing.

You should notice this right away, but the best way to test the amount of lag you're getting in a KOFXIII match is at the character select screen. Just take note of the time it takes to move the selector a single space. That's the lag of a single input. If you see a significant lag here, imagine how much fun you're not going to be having when it's taking you that long to, say, block a punch.

This is especially a problem because KOFXIII is such a fast game. A lot of combos depend on whipping out commands as fast as you possibly can, and on a 2-bar connection these combos will drop. It won't necessarily be your fault: the input just won't come in right and you won't do your damage. Needless to say, this is very, very frustrating.

3-bar is more reliably playable, though issues remain. 4-bar is much better, but I have only seen three or four players with this connection status at all. When I have checked profiles, the 4-bar players have all been in the same city as I am. I suspect that people in less populated areas will have a much harder time playing online at all.

As the arcade is a dead institution in most of the US  online play is vitally important for these games. It's not something you want to screw up if you want the game to have a thriving community. Neither SF4's nor Marvel's netplay is the best ever, but it works well enough for the highest-level players. The best C.Viper player in the world had no problem tearing me a new one on Live a couple of weeks ago.

Local scenes and private get-togethers can't keep these games alive by themselves, especially not the smaller games. The fighting game bubble is on the verge of popping (mark my words, it'll be Street Fighter X Tekken), and this is the best exposure KOF will probably ever get. The patch for online play needs to come as soon as is possible.

I did say suggestions: there are a couple of other, little things, related to finding good connections in this terrible online hellscape. You can set the connection speed you want when you start up a room, but as you'll eventually learn this serves only as a friendly suggestion to other players: people with bad connections will still turn up in your room, and you can't kick them out either. You just have to take your ball and go home. Both of those points have to be fixed: if I'm never going to have a good time playing against a 2-bar connection, then I never want to see a player with that connection speed come into my room. This is especially bad in ranked matches, where you can't back out.

In conclusion, my color edit for King is Panty, my color edit for Yuri is Stocking, and it's going to be pretty much impossible to make Kim into Garterbelt.

King of Fighters XIII first impressions: AAAAAH THIS GAME IS THE BEST

The fighting games I'd been playing were SF4 and Marvel, just like everybody else in the fighting game scene right now. SF4 is a good enough game: it's the easiest to get matches for online, it's the game with the highest level of competition, and until Yun and Yang showed up there was nothing glaringly wrong with its balance. The most offputting flaw of the game was its insistence on anal execution requirements for simple, basic combos. Marvel was a funhouse of characters and ideas, but most of them didn't really make a lot of sense to use compared to other, vastly stronger option. Also, I often didn't feel like wins were earned because the benefits of level 3 X-Factor were so ridiculous.

I eventually dropped Blazblue because the game changed so drastically every six months: I tried to pick it up again with Noel last week but then I realized the gme would be changing again in December and I'd just have to buy a $40 upgrade disc and do all that combo learning (hours and hours!) over again.

So King of Fighters XIII has been very welcome. It's a completely different style of game, and quite frankly it doesn't have any stupid bullshit like I just described.

I personally theorize that the poorly-recieved KOFXII was the beta for this one, released to the market unfinished. Most players agreed that XII was clearly not done, and this game really cements that. More than just "better" than XII, XIII is the complete product. It feels right where XII didn't, and it completes the thoughts that game was starting to work on.

People not intimate with the genre might wonder what the hell the big difference between King of Fighters and Street Fighter is, anyway. Street Fighter is a game about spacing, first and foremost. The movement options are basic. Defense is typically favored over offense. Ryu's basic MO is to pressure from afar with fireballs, after all. In KOF characters like this exist (Athena) but they go about their business very differently.

King of Fighters is about rushing. The characters have a huge amount of movement options, and they are all fast. There's running, there are four different jumps, there's a roll move that goes through almost everything. (See the Beginner's Incomplete Guide for more on this!) It's about getting close to or even around the opponent, finding the opening and killing.

Being so rush-oriented, the game also has a really complex combo system. Basic combos are as easy as Street Fighter, but it gets a lot deeper than that. Depending on how much super move meter you have, you can typically do anywhere from 20 to 80 percent damage off just about any single hit. Of course, mastering all these strings is difficult: there's a complicated network of cancels and links and juggles. The game's tutorial does an okay job of explaining the basics, but in the mission mode you'll get a much better idea of exactly how the combo system is practically used in a match.

The combo system in this game is definitely hard-- the toughest part is the extreme speed required for many of the cancels-- but it's not anal like SF4 and the combos follow a more straightforward kind of logic that I can't honestly say applies to Arc's games. Characters will really need to be worked on in this game, and in the first couple days I've spent a lot more time in training mode than anywhere else. I am going to have to earn my damage.

And that's the nice thing about this game for a genre fan: that you have to earn it. SF4 has the Ultra mechanic for comebacks, which wasn't so bad. Then Marvel has X-Factor, which I don't think any Marvel player actually likes or thinks is fair. XIII, though, is very simple: your super meter, if you know how to use it, measures your potential to kill. I like this.

The rest of the home port is pretty nice: netplay is at about SF4's level, so not great but doable. Color edit is extensive, which is refreshing because everybody likes to charge money for costumes and leave out this feature these days. There's a story mode that I haven't been through yet, but it seems to just be a straight line with talking heads: definitely no Blazblue.

So of course you should buy KOFXIII. It's a beautiful-looking game: like all these HD 2D games, online video doesn't do it full justice. It's flashy and it's fast, and yet it's got nothing that makes me throw up my arms and yell "bullshit!".  The game is just right.

November 20th, 2011: HOW DID KAMEN RIDER FOURZE OWN TODAY?

Yes, another one. Yes, I am writing real blog posts too. No, this is not necessarily a regular feature like the time I blogged Shin Mazinger, and no, I definitely won't be episode blogging anything this long. I really like this show, though.

November 13th, 2011: HOW DID KAMEN RIDER FOURZE OWN TODAY?

An essay in screenshots. I don't normally do this kind of thing, but I would have just done it on Twitter otherwise...

Never change indeed, Kamen Rider Club. You're the greatest.

SEGA SATURN SHOPPING LIST: Daytona USA

Easily the most famous of the games in this little wave, Daytona USA is an extremely well-loved game. Nearly 20 years since its release and long after the effective death of the arcade in the Western world, Daytona USA is still a star attraction at places like Dave and Buster's. There's something special about it-- even among all the other Sega racing games-- that makes people (and not just gamers and Sega fanboys like me) love it. The whys of that are another article completely, but to put it briefly, Daytona is extremely friendly. It is simple, it's bright, it absolutely defies you not to smile.

The developer, Sega's legendary AM2, doesn't necessarily port their arcade games to consoles at all: up until now we've actually never had a perfect arcade port of Daytona. When AM2 does handle a port, though, they do a hell of a job. This release for Xbox and PS3 is a copy of Daytona USA you could, if it came in a box, put next to your Criterion Blu-Rays or display in a museum. Is it worth ten dollars? Is not art worth ten dollars?

It's the same arcade game from '93, though: there are only three tracks, one of which (the most popular by far) is just an oval with a single sharp curve, and there are only two cars. The difference between the cars? One's manual transmission, the other's automatic. It's not a feature list that's going to impress anybody in 2011. But this isn't a game about a feature list: it's a game that has its tiny little amount of content and gets it so right.

The port has a challenge mode that effectively takes you through every corner in the game, and in-game hints will whisper every little trick (did you know that Daytona USA even had slipstreaming? I sure didn't). The steady difficulty curve really shines through in this mode: that first course is braindead easy, but it eases you in. The second course makes you pay attention, and the final course tests you fully. It's just right.

The handling is just right, too: it's probably the key to this game's success. The physics in Daytona USA are flagrantly unreal: the weird magic of drifting, the ease with which you can spin out fully and keep driving at 100mph, the way you land cleanly (and keep moving!) after an end-over-end collision. The designers of Daytona USA made sure that losing was still fun. That's the reason people still play it.

It helps that the game is so damn positive. The scenery is beautiful and it doesn't really make a lot of sense: there's a slot machine hanging over one straightaway, and you can play it as you drive by. It's exuberant. It's a game that not only features blue skies, but a man singing "blue, blue skies I see". You can't even make brightly colored games anymore without some loser whining that the rainbow in the background will make him gay, you know?

On the hardcore end, there is of course the time trial mode and a brutal survival mode, where the game turns on simulated tire wear. The way you abuse your car in this game, a couple of laps will completely shave your tires and leave you unable to even drive in a straight line (hilariously, the game rewards you for drifting uncontrollably in these desperate moments). The only solution is to pit stop, which in turn takes a huge amount of time off the game clock. It's vicious: I haven't cleared a single course on survival mode (80 laps for the beginner course, 40 for the advanced one, and 20 for the expert course) and I doubt that I ever will.

And of course there's a karaoke mode. If you've ever heard the music in Daytona USA, you know why. The famous Takenobu Mitsuyoshi soundtrack is offered in two flavors: the more conventional arranged music from the Saturn port and the original arcade music, in which Mitsuyoshi's voice is choppily, endearingly sampled. He sounds like the first Vocaloid.

So let nobody tell you that this isn't worth ten dollars because it's short a bullet point or two. It's one of the masterpieces, presented lovingly. I paid more for dinner last night.

EXCLUSIVE DAY-ONE IMPRESSIONS OF THE NEW CAVE GAME: oh, by the way, it's Mahjong Rokumeikan

If you know the developer Cave at all, you probably know them for their arcade shooting titles, but they actually do a lot more business than that. It's just not stuff gamers on this side of the ocean would particularly care about: games that only run on Japanese phones, social games, stuff like that.

Case in point: Cave just announced a mahjong game and I jumped in on the closed beta. I didn't know what I was getting into because Cave released very little info aside from the words "social mahjong", but hey, Cave and MJ are two tastes I love. And since this is now a closed beta, I figure I would let you all know what's up with it.

Mahjong Rokumeikan is a mahjong game as accessory to a much more conventional social game. The player starts with a little, tiny house and, as far as I can tell, acquires items to make it bigger... by playing mahjong, of course.

The atmosphere is all butlers and aristocracy (my rank is mid-class baron!) and there's a definite otome game feel. Of course, the first thing you do in this game is pick a butler or maid. That premise doesn't really go anywhere, though: the characters only appear between hands and in the menu screens, and the same graphic is always used. No voices, either. Well, it is the beta, I guess. It definitely feels like one: despite the nice art, the interface is neither as flashy as Janryumon nor as elegantly simple as Tenhou.

The idea is that every time you finish a round (East-only) you get a certain amount of items which you later combine to raise your rank and make your butler-house look a little nicer. The specific items you get seem to be divided up by age and gender, so it necessitates playing with lots of other people and friending them to get more stuff, you get the idea. A "social" game, but only in that the other players are tools for getting more items, like any Facebook game you can think of.

I get what they're going for: this sort of item-grabbing thing is popular, but it's a model built more on feeling obligated to obtain those items than, you know, actually enjoying yourself by playing a game. This isn't really the service for serious ranked mahjong grinders like the audience for Tenhou or even the much more casual Janryumon. If you were curious about it from that point of view, you're really not missing anything here. To be fair, Rokumeikan pretty clearly isn't intended to compete with those products. It's first and foremost a game about building a little house, and I think Cave will see more success making that game than they would making any other sort of MJ game.

SEGA SATURN SHOPPING LIST: Guardian Heroes

Unlike Radiant Silvergun, Treasure's Guardian Heroes was at least released in the English-speaking world. It was always expensive, but never that expensive. Nevertheless, it's $10 on Xbox Live Arcade.

I'm partial to fighting games, of course, so this was a real treat for me. As with SIlvergun (via pirated copy) I had played this on the Saturn, but only in passing. This release really has me putting some time into the game.

The beat-em-up ala Final Fight and its successors is a really hard genre to get right. Due to the extreme repetition that's par for the course in games like this, even major classics like Streets of Rage 2 simply wear out their welcome after 20 minutes or so of sustained beatings. But beating up hundreds of guys is a fundamentally exciting activity! What to do? Guardian Heroes is a perfectly paced beat-em-up that liberally borrows systems from RPGs and one-on-one fighting games, with a few tricks of its own, to keep things interesting.

First off, this is a multiplayer game designed for huge melees. The game supports up to four players, and there are typically at least five or so enemies on the screen at any given time. Controls are fighting game style-- press up to jump, tons of special moves-- and the screen is divided up into three distinct "lines" ala Fatal Fury to control the chaos.

Even when you're playing alone, there will be a computer-controlled character (changes based on situation) running around the screen and beating guys up. You could theoretically leave your helper to kill everything for you (he gladly will, if commanded), but you'll actually be cheating yourself out of leveling up.

Unlike an RPG, the party doesn't gain group experience when an enemy is killed: instead, experience points are gained every time a character causes damage. In other words, you have to go out and get experience for yourself. This simple mechanic keeps you playing aggressively: you won't level up if you don't throw yourself into the fight.

With every level gained, characters can level up individual stats as they see fit. Character types are RPG-standard: a heavy knight, a mage, a ninja, and a cleric. As you progress through the brief stages, constant forks in the story mean that every playthrough is a little different and you spend a lot of time rerunning through the game in search of every stage and ending.

On top of a very meaty main mode, the game also opens the sandbox for you in the Versus and Arcade modes, where every single character, enemy, and boss that appears in the game (including, say, Civilian Child who passes through during one stage) is available for a battle royale. It's by no means a competitive or balanced fighting game, but it's a lot of fun to screw around with. Online it's kind of a mess, because everybody just picks the final bosses. Custom rule options allow for Smash Brothers-level "house rules" customization. And of course, like Smash, nobody really expects you to play this game seriously.

If you like Castle Crashers, this beats the living hell out of Castle Crashers and it's 15 years old. This is an essential game, one of the very finest in its genre, and at $10 you'll get so much more than you paid for. Here's hoping we see Spikeout on XBL again soon.