The Championship Gaming Series is making great efforts to make professional gaming a reality. Their players and website readers are exactly the right audience for my book, Playing to Win.

It looks like 18-year-old Avtar "Paddaman" Padda, an official writer for CGS, felt the same way. Here you can read his sloppily written rehash of my book/articles where he attempts to define the word "scrub," the concept of cheapness, and asks how far you should go to win. I wonder if he got that last question from my chapter of exactly the same name, or if he just saw it in one of my urls:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/how-far-should-you-go-to-win/

The cherry on top? He didn't even change the title (Playing to Win), created an image banner with his picture and the words "PLAYING TO WIN," and now the Championship Gaming Series makes ad revenue off this. The author doesn't seem to realize that he's done anything wrong. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say:

Plagiarism (...) is the practice of claiming, or implying, original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. (...) In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination.

This is hardly the kind of thing CGS wants to be known for. I mean, what if the gaming press picks up this very post and links it all over the place, putting "plagiarism" and CGS in the same sentence? It's a shame since my content is such a great fit for them.

The best solution would probably be to replace the offending article with a written apology and a link to www.sirlin.net/ptw. Another acceptable remedy is simply giving proper credit. The author could have been much more effective in the first place by starting his article with an explanation of my works and then giving his own spin on how this might apply to certain games or tournaments. This would have allowed him to achieve his goals while still following those pesky standards of journalistic integrity.

In closing, I'll just say that I'm almost as flattered as when my friend asked me if I applied to his World of Warcraft guild, when in fact a Sirlin-impersonator applied, trying to spice up his application with a little internet fame. The lesson to be learned from all this? Don't apply to my friend's guild using my name, and don't rewrite my articles using only your name.

Thanks,
--Sirlin

Update 1: The article in question appears to have been removed. That was fast.

Virtua Fighter 5 just came out for Xbox 360. The gameplay is great as always, but a lot of features of this game leave me scratching my head.

Button Configuration
I think I have witnessed more players configure their buttons than any other US game developer. (Feel free to correct me if you know of someone else who tops me here). I watch people config buttons for hours and hours and hours as I run tournaments at multiple events per year, every year. There is a 100% rate of agreement among players that the best implementation is where the game lists the functions, then the player presses the button he wants for that function. So you highlight "jab" or "punch" or whatever, then you press the button you want to be assigned to that. This process does NOT require you to know that the button you presses is really X or Square or A or whatever else.

Virtua Fighter and many other fighting games STILL use the bad method where you cannot press the button you want to assign. You must highlight the *button* (not the function), then go left/right to set the function. So the game lists "X" then you have to look down at your controller, find the X button, realize that it should be kick or whatever, then go left/right until you select kick.

Believe me, this requires an extra mental step from players and it takes significantly longer for them to configure buttons with this implementation and as I said earlier, exactly no one likes it.

Still on the subject of button config, Virtua Fighter 5 has a major problem that I can't believed passed Microsoft's technical requirement checklist. I configured my buttons for player 1, then I played some matches online where I was the one creating the match. Things worked fine. Then I decided to *join* someone else's created match. I was put on the 2p side (fine), and my buttons were all messed up! I was now using the 2p button config! I can already sense the VF apologists trying to defend this with some kind of warped logic, but it's absolutely terrible. No other fighting game has this problem.

Online Player Match
Very surprisingly, after you play a "player match" (aka unranked match), you and the opponent are both kicked out back to the matchmaking screen. Want a rematch? Tough, there's no rematch option. You can't create a "room", much less with spectators, where you go around in a rotation like Dead or Alive and SF2: Hyper Fighting. Now, you *can* make a private room with someone on your friends list where you get to play them over and over (just them, no spectators or others in the rotation). This will lead to a lot of good players feeling forced to only fight people on their friends list just to have a logistically reasonable set of matches. Bad for community, because you want those players playing out in the open where everyone can challenge them.

Online Ranked Match
You are allowed to set whether you want to play opponents near your skill level or of any skill level. You are allowed to set whether you want arenas with no walls, low walls, high walls, or any walls. These options should not be in ranked matches. The premise of a ranked match in any game is that the player has as little leeway to affect who he fights or what the rules will be. It's supposed to be the same rules all the time and no ability to avoid opponents you're afraid of losing to.

Not only can you filter by skill level and arena type, but you can also see the opponent's name, rank, and exact win/loss record before you even accept the match. (Yes I know that you can see their names before the match starts in Puzzle Fighter's ranked matches. That is a mistake and will be fixed if there's a patch.) Anyway, you get an awful lot of info about your opponent before you even try to join his ranked match. This alone ruins the integrity of the leaderboards. I heard a rumor that disconnects don't count as losses, but I have no idea personally.

Character Selection
Virtua Fighter 5 does another strange thing that no other fighting game does: it tries very hard to get you to only play one character. Usually, character selection is part of the main loop, meaning you go back to it after every game. In VF5, after you play a player match (and are kicked out to the matchmaking screen, ugh), you are *still* tied to your character. You have to exit the whole online mode to switch to another character. Another character is basically like another account.

I of course know why they did this. In Japan, players tend to play just one character in a fighting game. In tournaments, they don't allow switching characters like we do in the US. Now, as a tournament player, I strongly dislike the Japanese method. If I can beat 70% of people in a tournament with character A and the other 30% with character B, I deserve to win the tournament. But anyway, let's not argue that right now. The extreme emphasis on sticking to one character in VF5 comes from how the game is played in Japan. That's nice, but I want to play Jeffry sometimes, Pai sometimes, and Lei Fei some other times. It's a real hassle to do this relative to every other fighting game. The designers are saying to me, "We don't really approve of you having that sort of fun" and it makes me sad.

As I said at the start, the gameplay in VF is just a technical and well thought-out as you'd expect and the online play is surprisingly unlaggy. That's what counts the most, but all the other rough edges are a bit of a downer.

--Sirlin

The Videogame Style Guide attempts to create a consistent set of rules for writing about video games. It starts with an introduction that goes into great detail about many little details of language and why we should care about getting them right. They make great points here, and I'm totally on board with the concept because I already care about language. I already know why you should care, too

The problem here isn't the theory--it's the actual writing. The book mentions the example of when the editor of Wired magazine made the (good) decision to spell "internet" with a lowercase letter "i." It was only really ever spelled with an uppercase 'I' to make it sound important, the book says. I'm totally with them. And yet...the book itself spells the the word Internet with a capital "I" the rest of the way through!

(EDIT: Actually the book doesn't give reasons about "internet" vs. "Internet." That was from another source. The book is not guilty of being inconsistent in this matter; it's just guilty of spelling the word with a capital I.)
In the introduction, there is a colon followed by a capital letter, for no apparent reason. I looked up the usage of colons in Strunk & White, just in case I was having some kind of memory lapse. I wasn't. It's not correct to use an uppercase letter there.
(EDIT: The AP style guide disagrees with Strunk & White on this. The AP style guide also spells it "Internet" though, if that tells you anything. I personally recommend no capital letter after a colon (or semicolon or comma)).

Furthermore, the introduction ends with an ellipsis, which would be fine except that there is no period. There are three dots rather than the required four dots. You might think these are nit-picky details, but they are EXACTLY the kinds of things the entire book is about.

I also have to mention the book's decision to spell "video game" as "videogame." Quite a lot of words are spent on this topic, but it's a pompous-looking spelling. The authors know--and explain--that we should strive to reduce jargon (they spelled with a capital "J" for no reason, by the way), and they are right. We should not create new terms unless they are absolutely needed. We had no need to create the word "boardgame," we had no need to create the word "cardgame," and we also have no need to create the word "videogame." But they put this word in their title!
The authors' hearts really are in the right place here. They get it. They are fighting the good fight and they care about language. But honestly, what the hell happened here? Maybe most of these errors were simply overlooked in copy editing?

Take care videogame fans. Ouch, I can't even type that without cringing.

--Sirlin

This article on the many, many, many problems with the overly-DRM'd Windows Vista is absolutely amazing. It's long, but you should really read the whole thing.

All your device drivers checking to make sure you aren't trying to copy premium content...every 30milliseconds! Real-time encryption and decryption in paged memory (slowing down your computer for no good reason)...but only DRM'd movies/music are encrypted in this way? Your credit card numbers, bank PIN, and social security numbers are stored as always in plaintext paged memory. (We see who's running the show.)

Device manufacturers have to have their circuit designs approved to make sure their device doesn't somehow allow copying of DRM'd movies/music. Who do you need approval from? Three Hollywood studios! MGM, Universal, and Disney need to make sure your video card is up to their standards, ha.

The "tilt bits" are especially scary. Any little minute irregularity can flip them such as voltage fluctuations or a device driver finding a device in a slightly different state than expected. Vista flags any small fluctuation it can find with a tilt bit, suspecting that you are hacking. System stability becomes questionable at best. These paragraphs explain it better than I can:

Content-protection "features" like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of-
service (DoS) implications.  It's probably a good thing that modern malware is
created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam
industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible.  With
the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection
provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause
considerable damage.  The homeland security implications of this seem quite
serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to
render a machine unusable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection
would make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is
occurring.  Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of
"content-protection" features, would be protected by the DMCA against any
attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection "features" that
they're abusing.

Even without deliberate abuse by malware, the homeland security implications
of an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in
response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally
happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users.  Non-US
governments are already nervous enough about using a US-supplied operating
system without having this remote DoS capability built into the operating
system.  And like the medical-image-degradation issue, you won't find out
about this until it's too late, turning Vista PCs into ticking time bombs if
the revocation functionality is ever employed.

I wonder what Microsoft has to say about this laundry list of extremely damaging claims against Vista. I was considering a new PC with Vista in a couple months, but this just takes the cake. I'm hoping Apple will somehow end up less DRM crazy than Microsoft (though I'm not sure if Leopard will be guilty of any of this stuff too).

On the bright side, it looks like Amazon and Yahoo are planning DRM-free online music stores, according to this article.

--Sirlin

Giving out truly unbiased and thoughtful awards is a lot of work and requires a lot of research. It also yields pretty predictable, boring results, so that's why my awards are totally biased and generally unfair. Also, don't you hate it when award stuff starts counting up from like the top 100 when you just want to know the #1 winner? Me too, let's start with that.

Best Game of 2006
Tie: World of Warcraft TCG and Magic: The Gathering

World of Warcraft TCG is a design masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I tried for years to design a card game with a system as good as MTG, but with streamlined design choices and reduced chance of "mana screw." I was on a very similar track to what WoW TCG turned out to be. They made good choices, have good art, good flavor, and good card layout. The concept of special multi-player-only addons like the Onyxia Raid Deck is also great. The only thing WoW TCG really lacks right now is card pool deep enough to support really interesting decks, but that will come with time.

Magic: The Gathering has probably been the best designed game around for many years. Back in 2005, players had to contend with the overpowered Affinity decks and that damned Scullclamp card, but Ravincia and this year's Timespiral are a refreshing change. I especially like the idea of a block where each of the three sets are "past, present, and future," and the idea of reprinting 121 "timeshifted" (aka, greatest hits cards from the past) was an excellent one. Thank Mark Rosewater for that, great job.

It's kind of ironic that MTG is hitting a high-point by printing a block with so many old cards. This practice is an attempt to make a "good game, rather than a new game," but the ironic part is that the "oldness" of the set is the newness. Wrap your mind around that.

It's also interesting to note that neither of this year's winning games is a video game (yes, I know about mtg online, but that's not the point). It goes to show that while card games are focusing on excellent rule design, so many video games are focusing on boring mechanics like testing your ability to aim a cross-hair on a 2d plane. What a joke. (A pretty version of the "aim the cross-hairs game," Gears of War, does not appear anywhere in these awards.)

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend that you play either of the two winning games. Both are "trading card games" which means they use the rip-off scheme of selling you cards in random packs to limit your ability to make whatever deck you want. If you want a constructed, tournament-quality deck in either game, the market value is about $300. Yes, it's possible to somehow play a specific or semi-weird deck that's cheaper, but $300 is about the cost of most tournament-level decks in both games. This is absolutely ludicrous, and you should not support this system. You should instead support my upcoming card game (not to be confused with my upcoming Street Fighter-type card game or my upcoming Pokemon-style card game for Kongregate.com). This new card game will take me a year or two to get anywhere with, but it will NOT use the same rip-off marketing scheme of TCGs and yet it will contain the fun style of mechanics that those games offer.

2nd Best Game of 2006: Resident Evil 4 (PlayStation 2)
You might be saying, "Hey, RE4 didn't even come out in 2006, so it shouldn't be able to win this award," and you'd have a good point. But consider a few things. First, RE4 did not win the Game Developer Conference's award for best game of 2005. In fact, it wasn't even NOMINATED for any award. Instead, Shadow of the Colossus swept just about everything. (Shadow of the Framerate, I call it.)

Shadow of the Colossus should have won these awards:
Best Brave Attempt at Something that Didn't Pan Out
Worst Framerate of the Year
Worst Controls of a Horse, Ever

I usually give the Game Developer's Choice Awards a special significance because awards by game developers for game developers tend to be a little more thoughtful and less political than the rest, but the lack of RE4 to even be nominated last year really took credibility away from the entire affair. Tommy Tallarico's immature jokes while hosting the event didn't help either (why is he allowed to represent the game industry again?)

I remember seeing David Jaffe accept an award somewhere last year (I forget from where) for God of War winning game of the year. God of War is totally awesome and is my second favorite game last year after RE4, but even Jaffe mentioned that he probably only won because RE4 was not allowed into that award process due to a technicality. Well, it just so happens that a reverse-technicality made RE4 eligible for my awards this year, so it wins the #2 spot.

I would tell you about why this game deserves this spot, but I've gone on too long about all this other hoopla, so you'll just have to play it yourself to find out.

3rd Best Game of 2006: Metroid Pinball (Nintendo DS)
I've threatened all year to give this game my #1 game of the year award, but I guess it ended up in 3rd place. This is the most underrated game of the year. It's basically the best possible game of pinball I could even imagine. You fight bosses, you get weapon upgrades, and you play several mini-games that even let you transform into Sammus and shoot alien bugs. Best of all, your mission is to collect 12 artifact pieces as you teleport back and forth between 4 or 5 different pinball boards, plus a final-boss board. How cool is that? It even has a neat little multiplayer mode where you race get a certain score, and if you lose your ball, your points are reduced to equal your enemy's points, if you were winning (that keeps things close, usually!).

Metroid Prime pinball is, for me, the perfect pick-up-and-play DS game. I don't have to remember where I was in some huge story or map, or how this or that mechanic worked. I can just play for a few minutes, or for an hour if I want to try to get all 12 artifacts. Oh, and once you do that, you unlock a harder difficulty for the whole game. What's not to like about this?

4th Best Game of the Year: Wii Sports
My sister and my *mom* play this. Dear Nintendo: mission accomplished, you win.

5th Best Game of the Year: This is a close one, but I'll say Cooking Mama (Nintendo DS). Lots of DS games are some form of "here's a bunch of touch screen activities" but Cooking Mama manages to give a coherent wrapper to whole deal. It's easy to get into, yet offers some challenge if you want the gold medals, and there's lots of different stuff to cook. I'm sure this is an overlooked game, but it's great.

Let's mix things up a bit.

Best Game Consoles of the Year:
1. Nintendo DS
2. Nintendo Wii
3. No console was good enough for #3.
4. Microsoft Xbox 360

The Nintendo DS has like 20 amazing games right now and easily takes the top spot for consoles this year. Remember when everyone hated the DS when it first came out? Two screens, who needs that? Touch screen is a gimmick. Yeah, everyone was wrong.

The Nintendo Wii is fun and great so far and very consistent with Nintendo's goals. Because it doesn't have that many good games yet, it doesn't quite deserve #1. Thank you Nintendo for supporting innovation over graphics and for keeping the costs of game development low so developers can take risks rather than just making more cookie-cutter games.

The Xbox 360 is solid and good. Good graphics, good processing power, and a pretty good game library at this point. The real high-point of the console is, of course, Xbox Live. This online service blows the rivals out of the water. It's so easy to play any Xbox 360 game online (and to voice chat) thanks to the fairly standard interface and online features Microsoft enforces on all online games.

Xbox Live arcade is also an amazing, awesome thing for our industry. I totally love it and have personally bought and enjoyed several Live Arcade games. I really hope Microsoft continues to open the doors for amateur game developers to create game games for it using the XNA platform. Current game companies are certainly not where all of tomorrow's innovations will come from. I see MS's first steps toward cultivating the hobbyists and I'm very happy.

HOWEVER, you'll notice that the Xbox 360 somehow managed to lose out the #3 spot this year to, well, a blank entry. That's because the 360 was supposed to usher in the "HD era" and the damn thing doesn't have DVI or HDMI support at all. What an absolute embarrassing joke that is. Do you know WHY it doesn't have these things? It's because of DRM bullshit. Media companies are so paranoid that you will pirate their content that we're mired in this mess of next-gen video connections having DHCP to make sure you're watching a licensed signal. If content creators turn on the ICT bit, then you have to watch the signal at 1/4th the resolution through component cables or any non-DRM's interface. You can read this for more info.

The fake "good news" is that apparently Microsoft and other big companies have made deals so that the ICT bit will not be turned on by content providers for at least a few years. So you will be able to watch HD content through (crappy) component cables without getting the 1/4th resolution thing happening. But what you won't get is a DVI or HDMI cable for you Xbox 360 because Microsoft is too afraid of piracy. DRM politics yet again make a piece of technology Defective By Design.

Speaking of Microsoft and products that are Defective By Design because of DRm, check out Leo Laporte's, um, passionate rant about how the Microsoft Zune is the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a device so cripled by DRM issues that he thinks the music industry will finally lose this battle.

Hey, music and movie industries, I have a sidenote for you. In 2007, I am going to go full gear into pirating your content because your bullshit about DRM has caused so many crippling problems that I can't take you seriously anymore. If you want me to buy stuff again, it's really simple, I'll tell you exactly how. When a new movie or tv show comes out, give me the ability to buy it legally from you. When I buy it, give me unlimited download rights forever to download that show in any resolution I want, with no DRM. If you do this, I will gladly stop all pirating activities. I won't have to worry about torrents being seeded, about getting viruses, or about DRM. I will have no reason left to get content from anyone other than you. Offering a better product (the one I just described) is a better solution than gimping your own product and threatening legal action if people want the ungimped version. Figure it out.

Sony is such a DRM-obsessed dinosaur, I don't even know where to begin with them.

How about some more awards?

Worst Save System of the Year: Dead Rising (Xbox 360)
Dead Rising is great in all sorts of ways, but it's hell-bent on ruining my fun with it's hardcore save system. When you die, you get a confusing message about how if you want to keep your stats, you have to start over. Well, I wanted to keep my stats, so I clicked that one, and I had to start over THE ENTIRE GAME, from the opening movie, on. I was suckered into doing this one or two more times, until I finally decided to just press on. By pressing on, I mean that when I died, I have to "restore game" from my last save point, which might have been hours ago if I forgot to save recently. You can't save anywhere you know, you have to actually go to a save point.

Dead Rising is, on the one hand, a "sand box game" that lets you just explore and do whatever you want (there's plenty to do!) and yet it is also a weak-sauce attempt at some form of Groundhog Day game where I have to keep starting over to get the perfect run, or give up on that but have to keep restoring from save points. What is this, 1980? This excellent game is ruined by overly punishing save system. I have better things to do with my time than put up with that.

2nd Worst Save System of the Year: New Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo DS)
Wow, what were they thinking? You can't save anytime you want, even though this game is on a handheld console. You know, the pick-up-and-play console where you might want to change games often. You have to either get to the next castle or mini-castle to save, or spend some hard-earned special coins to open a mushroom house to save (I totally don't want to spend coins on that).

Here's a thought. Let me save anytime I want. When I save, you don't have to save my exact position in a level (the hardcores would complain there's no challenge). Instead, just save a list of which levels I've completed and which special coins I have, that's it. Then let me turn the DS off so my girlfriend can play Nintendogs or Animal Crossing.

The most insulting thing here is that when you beat the game, you earn THE ABILITY TO SAVE on anytime on the world-map. Wow, so they had the sane-save system the whole time and only give it to me after I beat the entire game, nice. It's not like the save system you unlock makes the game overly easy or anything. The game in general gives you tons of extra lives for no apparent reason anyway.

It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.

Two games that did an unusually good job of balancing "always let the player save" with "keep some challenge" are Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS) and Fire Emblem (GBA). In C:DoS, there are save points scattered around the map, like in many games. So you could keep playing until you reach one, then turn the game off. BUT, you can also pause the game at any time and create a "save marker." If you do, the game goes back to the title screen. The next time you load that save marker, the marker will be destroyed. The result is that anytime you want to stop playing, you can create a save marker instantly, then turn the thing off. You can resume from exactly that point. But saving right before the hard part doesn't help, because you can't go back to that save point more than one time.

Fire Emblem does something similar. You don't need to actively create a save marker though, you can just turn the game off anytime you want, it will automatically resume from exactly that point. I don't mean put it in sleep mode by the way, I mean turn it off and take it out of the console. Again, you can use the in-game system of save check-points, or you can create a save marker automatically turning the game off, but you can't return to that marked point more than once.

These games pass. They thought about accommodating the player, and they made some reasonable design decisions. Dead Rising and N:SMB should stand as examples of exactly what not to do.

Most Overplayed Fighting Games of the Last 10 Years:
Tekken Series and Street Fighter 3 Series

As for Tekken, Virtua Fighter is deeper and Soul Calibur has better, easier controls. Tekken is in a weird middleground that I don't understand. As for SF3:3rd Strike, it's overly floppy animation, total lack of focus on controlling space (parries ruin the positional games common in fighting games), and generally simplistic engine make it a bottom-of-the-barrel offering. Try one of the games below, instead:

Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:
Guilty Gear XX: Slash (Japanese PS2 Import)

Often, retrospective awards take into account how much of a breakthrough a game was at the time. My award is meant this way: If, *today* you have every fighting from the last 10 years in front of you, which should you actually play?

The Guilty Gear series has combined the best features from the genre's history into an excellent overall game. Nice art, most varied set of characters in any fighting game (far more varied than any 3d fighting game), and great, great mechanics. Yeah Ky is too good or whatever, but oh well. This is a masterpiece of fighting game design and deserves your attention if you have any interest in the genre at all.

2nd Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (playable on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 on PS2 and Xbox)

This game is much simpler than Guilty Gear, but there's something about it that holds up. It's still played in tournaments today, including the Evolution Fighting Game Series (www.evo2k.com). You can even check out my 30 minute video tutorial on this game, in the post before this one.

You can seriously still be reading this, so I'll end now. Congratulations to all the winners and losers.

--Sirlin

Evolution 2006 went even smoother than any of our past tournaments. There were of course lots of great matches, which maybe I'll get to talking about in a later post.  

For me, though, the highlight was finally playtesting in public the Street Fighter card game I've worked on for months. You can see from the pic that it was popular, and people even played money matches in it.  

The game uses a modified poker deck (so you can play poker with the same cards, too). Each deck represents one character, and there is no deckbuilding or card trading. This is a stand-alone card game not a tcg. It's not a tcg. It's not a tcg. That gets lost on a few people so I figure it's best to say it three times. The game is designed to test exactly two skills: 1) yomi (the ability to read the opponent's mind) and 2) appraisal/valuation (the ability to judge the relative value of pieces in the game). I figured nothing else was important so I threw out everything else to keep it simple.  

Oh and by the way, the game is based on paper, rock, scissors. After years of looking at how paper, rock, scissors worked and didn't work in various games (and writing articles about it...), this is me trying to demonstrate how to do it right. My tagline is "it's the best game of paper, rock, scissors that nature will allow."  

Now, what's very unfortunate is that there are already two other Street Fighter card games out there. One is by Score and distributed by exculsively by Blockbuster, and--surprise--it doesn't sell well (isn't Blockbuster obsolete by now?). The other SF card game is published by Sabertooth games as part of the Universal Fighting System. You can play Soul Calibur 3 cards, Street Fighter cards, and Penny Arcade cards together. That one manages to sell well, which is quite a hindrance to me. Check out this bad card from this bad game.

IF YOU ARE SKIMMING, NOTE THAT THIS IS TOALLY NOT MY CARD GAME, thanks.  

What really gets me is that Sabertooth has created a terrible, terrible game. It's clunky, bad at capturing the license, inelegent, and has lots of terrible art. I don't even know where to start with this "Yoga Short Kick" card. To be fair, it also has some great art by Udon, but much of it is copy and pasted from their comics. Anyway, this game is offensive to me as a game designer and Street Fighter player. It's kind of a toss up between the Sabertooth game and SF Hyper Fighting on 360 when it comes to what is damaging the Street Fighter brand name most these days. sigh.  

I will most likely move forward with a my own characters in an online version of my card game, and have the Street Fighter (and Virtua Fighter!) characters ready once (if) I can make the business deals with Capcom and Sega.  

In other card game news, details of the World of Warcraft TCG are out. I've followed them closely and I can't even tell you how impressed I am. I tried for literally *years* to make a card game as complex as Magic: The Gathering, yet better and different (my SF card game is not part of that; it's way simpler). Anyway, what I did come up with on that front looks disturbingly similar to what the WoW TCG is...except they did it better than me. They were a little more clever here and there and really made it come together. Simple and good resource system, good combat system, and good hero system. I will say that this game is so far the ONLY trading card game that has the potential to be better than Magic: The Gathering, in my opinion. Note that I'm not even talking about the Warcraft license, just the game mechanics themselves. Oh, and it also happens to have great art and great card layout.  

I'm not surprised to find out that Brian Kibler is one of the leads on the project. I read his articles and tourament reports for years. Brian, I still remember when you beat Jon Finkel at Pro Tour 2000 with an Armadillo Cloaked Rith for the win. They called you "the dragonmaster" back then. My hat is off to you guys at Upper Deck right now, more than to any other game developer out there. Coming up with a trading card game on par with MTG is about the tallest order you could have, and I think you guys did it.

I wonder if I could release a card game through Upper Deck with similar rules but with a different license. Hmm...  

--Sirlin

I once read a review that said you could count the number of seconds of loading time on one hand in Sony's God of War (PS2). The PS2 has notoriously bad loading times, so I didn't see how this was possible...but after playign the entire game, I had to say it was true. The sum total off all my loading times probabaly added up to 5 seconds over 10 or 12 hours of playing the game. Wow! That definitely contributed to fun of that action-packed masterpiece.

Loading times ruin games. Check out this absurd video of the loading times in THQ's Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (PSP). I hope this is a joke, but somehow I think it's real.

http://www.innewsweekly.com/innews/?class_code=Ga&article_code=1172

It's hard to even play World of Warcraft without wading through all the chat about how this or that tactic is "gay," and yet Blizzard did not allow a guild to advertise that it's a friendly safe-haven for gay and lesbian players. The reason Blizzard gave is that such a guild could cause those members to be harassed, and that other players would not like that the guild is discriminating based on sexual orientation.

This is exactly the kind of thing that is completely embarassing about Blizzard policies and a perfect illustration of how bad our virtual worlds are right now.

Even though Blizzard has a history of trying to babysit every possible player behavior, I didn't think they'd attept to regulate player-run guilds. Maybe it's ok if a guild has only Christian players in it, as long as they don't advertise? Maybe the Gay and Lesbian guild could have "stayed in the closet" and been ok?

The irony is that decisions like these are meant to make the game a "happier, safer place," and yet they will eventually drive away reasonable people looking for a reasonable environment in which to interact. Blizzard already lost the founders of that guild as customers, and I guess they lost me too.

--Sirlin

I tried to play Guild Wars. It's just so unpolished, clunky, and full of rookie interface mistakes that I can't even take it seriously. The moment-to-moment feel is so off-putting that I can't stand it for more then 5 minutes before I quit in frustration. I wanted to like it so much, because it's based on the "right" concepts of fairness rather than being rpg-heavy and caring about time invested way more than ability.

Here's a quick list of its crimes:

I can't leave the game running and on screen while I click on things on my second monitor. I have to minimize the game access anything on my second monitor.

I can't figure out how to turn off click-to-move. Even when "click to move" is off, I left click on an NPC or Monster or loot on the ground and my character runs towards it. I never want to move unless I move myself.

When I hold the right mouse button down and move the mouse, the camera and character move as expected. When I hold the LEFT mouse button down and move the mouse, nothing happens. I should be able to move the camera WIHOUT moving the character with this method. It's very painful to be missing this feature. In World of Warcraft I do this constantly and can't even fathom that this similar game doesn't allow this very basic feature.

Left clicking on a monster attacks that monster. I want left click to select things and never interact with them. Right-clicking should interact with them.

The "unit frames" (HUD graphics at top of the screen when you select a unit) look absurdly bad. Also, when you have a unit targeted, its name appears over him in text. This text looks like a joke or placeholder. Should be in a nice-looking small popup window with a decent font.

The green exclamation points over the heads of quest-givers are too hard to see. Should be more bold.

Art style of humans in this game bothers me. Almost all my options to make a male character look homosexual. Way too many options are for characters that look slight, slender, and dainty.

The mini-map spins around as I turn. This is totally disorienting to me and I want it to stay still.

The game has no jump fucntion. Not that it's really needed for gameplay, but it contributes to the overal clunky experience of Guild Wars when you can't climb up a little lip, two inches high.

There are weird invisible walls all over the place in levels. Makes it feel very restricted, but is at least consistent with the overal clunky Guild Wars feel.

When you rotate the camera quickly with the mouse, then let go, the camera takes a brief moment to smoothly come to a stop. I want it to move instnatly. This is very subtle, but bothers me every time I move the camera.

Guild Wars was my most anticipated game of the year(!), but the simple act of moving the character around and attacking is so unpolished that I can't even have fun with this game. :(

Now all the Guild Wars fans can get mad at me.
--Sirlin

Uh oh, looks like another gaming injustice has taken place. Unfortuantely, I'll have to call you out personally on this one, Daniel James aka "Cleaver," creator of Yohoho Puzzle Pirates. Great game, great business story of how you got your game together, truly embarassing banning decision you just made.

There is a player in Puzzle Pirates known as RobertDonald. I know him as "Sloppy," as that's what the Street Fighter community called him. Sloppy was not very well liked, and I wouldn't say I'm really friends with him, so don't think for a minute this has anything personal to do with me looking out for a pal. Sloppy was always wierd and brought rubics cubes and strange dolls to tournaments. I never knew him to cheat in one of our tournaments, but we allow almost everything imaginble except bugs that crash the game, so it's pretty hard to cheat. Anyway, he would always find unfair things the games and exploit them to no end. Note that these were ALWAYS things that were technically allowed. I never lost to him in a tournament, but he certainly caught people off-guard a lot.

When I heard he was banned from Puzzle Pirates, I pretty much guessed how it all played out, even before reading up on it. After reading up on it, it's remarkable how much agreement there was about him, even from people who want him banned. Everyone says he always played within the rules. Everyone said he was always polite. Everyone said he was shrewd. He rocked the world of Puzzle Pirates so damn bad, that there were really two categories of players: him and everyone else.

Here's a thread all about it.

So it looks like he used this "blockade" tactic where you declare a blockade on an island that a guild (aka "flag") owns. 24 hours later, they have to defend the blockade in a match of 3 out of 5, I think. This takes hours. If Sloppy wins, he gets the island. Then gets to ruin the island by building a bunch of shops, but whatever. If Sloppy loses, the enemy keeps the island. Maybe there is some cost to the challenge, because everyone is talking about "dropping a chest" as part of a cost. In any event, Sloppy schedules these blockade attacks at times that are personally invonenient the enemy, then he just doens't show up, so he loses. He does this every week, basically attacking the enemy's real life schedule so they will be demoralized, bored, frustrated, and give up. Over time, they do give up. Meanwhile he has many business dealings in the game that allow him to keep up this pressure.

Sloppy is mopping the floor with these guys. He claims when people actually go to war with him and a real game is played (neaerly never) he wins 20-0, and I have little doubt that that is true. He claims that the game appears to favor medicore players, giving them insane defensive advantage, but that at a high level (that few people are aware of), attacking wins. Not sure if he meant attacking when you actually play, or attacking when you afk and bore the enemy. Such a distinction isn't really important though, since the game allows either tactic.

The creators of the game have long known of Sloppy's tactics. They have repeatedly changed the rules to stop his tactics, and he always adapts to the new rules. The creators were not able to list ONE SINGLE RULE he ever violated. No other players were able to list ONE SINGLE RULE he ever violated. So Cleaver finally played the ultimate cop-out card: Sloppy violated the nebulous "spirit of the game" rule. It's the last refuge of the scoundrel, inhabited by otherwise fun games such as World of Warcraft and now Puzzle Pirates. When an obviously flawed system is exposed, the "spirit of the game" cop-out is how a misguided game designer can solve the problem.

What's most confusing out of all this is that Cleaver himself admits the blockade system is broken. This is totally obvious statement since Sloppy's tactics should clearly not be allowed in the first place. Why is this game so dependent on people being awake at 4am on tuesday or whatever? Why are there no in-game protections from repeated afk attackers? I think 100% of people involved (remember, including the game developers) agree that the system itself is flawed. Why, then, is a player banned for exposing this flawed system while still staying inside the rules?

If there is another side to this (what could it possibly be?) then I'd love to hear it. Barring that, I request a formal apology from Puzzle Pirates staff be given to RobertDonald, that all his characters be reinstated with no penalty, and that a redesign of the blockade system (and any other offending system) be undertaken. Your best tester is RobertDonald, you know. He's forcing you guys to do better, and I know you can do better now that all these loopholes are exposed.

Sloppy, if you're out there, I will hire you as a "super expert ninja tester/game balancer."

--Sirlin

One of my character flaws is my giddy delight when I get to expose retarded ideas. I'm calling you out personally Justin Blanchard, Commissioner of the CPL, for posting this rule:

"In one-versus-one deathmatch competitions, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) expects all players to remain competitive and engaged in combat throughout the entire match. Stalling and/or hiding in an effort to keep your opponent from finding you or to stall game play, is unprofessional and not acceptable during tournament matches.

"This also includes hiding in locations not normally accessible or visible during standard game play (via normal running/jumping). A player using these tactics to prevent an opponent from engaging in battle or hiding in map locations not normally reached or seen during regular game play will be penalized based upon the tournament administrator's discretion.

"If a tournament administrator has reason to believe that any unsportsmanlike tactics are being used, the player will face penalties, which may include forfeiture of the match, expulsion from the tournament and/or suspension from the league."

http://forums.thecpl.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=27;t=000343;p=

I don't even know where to begin. As I wrote in my articles, something must be Discrete, Enforcable, and Warranted for it to be banned. This fails all 3 of those tests. Hiding in corners is a part of the game. Sniping from secret locations is a part of the game. The game does not need vague rules imposed on it, creating many situations where the player can do something the game itself deems legal, but the tournament organziner deems illegal.

Not only is the rule completely impractical, but it flies in the face of Playing to Win at all. Do you think Sun Tzu's Art of War has a section explaining that when you are close to victory, you should expose yourself to possible loss? If you are ahead in points and time is running out, it's only common sense you should do everything possible to avoid the opponent. Yet now, you must "sort of avoid him" because if you "avoid him too much" then you will be banned. The natural forces of the game tell you to do one thing (run and hide) and the Commissoner of the CPL tells you to do another thing (expose yourself to the enemy).

I guess the CPL needs to take a hint from the Evolution Fighting Game Championships (www.evo2k.com) which I help run. We encourage our players to do whatever they need to do to win, short of a few game-ending bugs. Some players attack relentlessly, some players run away relentlessly. It's all part of the tournament experience to face radically different play styles.

A few players wrote me asking for advice on this issue. I guess I'd have to say "play to win anyway and ignore this new rule. If you or anyone else actually gets penalized for it, then the entire tournament becomes invalid, and you should find another tournament." Sorry guys.

--Sirlin

I love Capcom--I really do--but I have to give two of this year's E3 awards to them. First there's the "Worst Controls in a Game" award. Killer 7 pulled ahead of all other games this year in that category. You're going to think I'm kidding when I tell you how it works. The d-pad moves the character, sort of. Up makes you go forward. Down makes you turn around (then you press up to go forward in that direction). So far only somewhat bad. Left on the d-pad does *nothing*. Right on the d-pad does *nothing*. Hold the R button to enter aiming mode (ok, that part is fine). To move the aiming reticule you have to use the left analog stick. That's right, you can *only* more the character with the d-pad and you can *only* aim with the analog stick, so you have to contstantly switch. The explanation for this was "It makes it feel like you're in a movie."

The next award is for "Worst Game Trailer." The game "Gun" wins honorable mentions here, for having a trailer that neither shows in-game or cinematic footage. It just flashes images at you so fast that you can't see any of them, shows some trite text, then the big logo: "Gun." Also, the game is named "Gun" which is pretty bad, too.

But none of that could match Capcom's Devil May Cry 4 trailer. It is the only trailer I've ever seen at E3 that the audienced actually boo'ed, or however you spell that word. After a 15 minute countdown, you get to see a few seconds of Devil May Cry 1, 2 and 3 footage (wtf??) followed by a 1 second animation of the new Dante pointing a gun, then the game's title. The footage from the old games is displayed in a very small window, black and white, and grainy. Also, I should point out again that it's Devil May Cry 1, 2, and 3 footage, because that's bad enough to point out again. There were boos all day over this trailer. (Note to Capcom: I really like DMC3. Don't make 4 so hard, and don't make me buy continues. Thanks!)

Now it's time for a follow-up segment. Last year, I awarded "Most Potentially Disasterious Game of the Year" to Marvel vs. EA, which is now called "Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects." It's not a disaster, since it has somewhat of a powerstone feel to it. But seeing the EA people in that booth actually believe they had something that should be called a fighting game was really very sad. They talked about how you don't have to memorize a bunch of different commands (were the incredibly simple controls of Soul Calibur too hard?). They talked about how instead of balancing the characters, they made 3 classes: bad, ok, and good. This supposedly makes it "fun." (I should award that "Worst Idea in a Fighting Game.") I also heard this line from an EA rep: "Everyone loves this game. Not one single person has had anything negative to say. It's great!!" I had to bite my tongue not to present my award right there:

"Worst Game Design Decision of the Year" goes to Marvel vs. EA: Rise of the Imperfects. Here's the design decision you've all been waiting for: this is a fighting game with ONE attack button! Hahahaha. The face buttons are block, dodge, object interaction/throw, and attack. One shoulder button is a shift button that alters what the other buttons do. For example, instead of bland punches with Logan, you get bland claw swipes with Logan (shouldn't he have been dressed up in Wolverine gear?). So yeah, a fighting game with one attack button.

I feel bad for them. They have a great license. They have some cool animations, a nice engine, and cool effects, but they need some help when it comes to making a competitve game that will hold people's attention for more than 2 minutes. (Note to EA: now that my snide comments are out of the way and you totally hate me, I'm available for combat design consulting.)

Those are all my awards for now.

--Sirlin

The other day I had a brief debate with a co-worker when he said the original PlayStation Dual Shock controller was the best game controller of all time. His reasoning was that it introduced the (now standard) right analog stick, as well as extra shoulder buttons (aka trigger buttons). He also added that the controller was very sturdily constructed. He is right on all those counts, but I took a somewhat different stance: that the original PS Dual Shock Controller is, in fact, the worst controller ever.

First of all, it has the absolute worst d-pad ever seen by a first-party controller on any system. The whole concept of replacing the full cross on a d-pad with weird disconnected buttons is just crazy. You might be "used to it" by now, but it's a fundamentally flawed idea. Some games (like fighting games) really need either a full cross or a full circular pad like the Xbox's. There are no games, though, that benefit from the terrible PS d-pad design. The NES, SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, Xbox, and even the GameCube all have better d-pads. While the PS version is now "the standard" in some sense, it doesn't make it less terrible.

Next, the PS controller added 2 extra shoulder buttons. Shoulder buttons are those annoying hard-to-reach buttons on the top of the controller, for those who don't know. The Saturn used those two buttons on the face of the controller, where I can actually reach them, but the PS's "innovation" was to move perfectly reachable buttons to an annoying place.

The right analog stick is great for games that I like to call "1.5 analog," meaning that character movement is on the left analog stick, and camera adjustment is on the right, but the game is designed so that you mostly use the face buttons on the controller and only occasionally move the camera around. Mario Sunshine, Prince of Persia, Ratchet and Clank, and Grand Theft Auto 3 are some examples. N64 did fine with the little yellow c-buttons in Mario64, Banjo Kazooie, and Donkey Kong 64, but hey, the right analog stick does a little better, I guess.

But the right analog stick also has given rise to most vile of all control schemes: the true dual analog game. This includes first person shooters like Counter-strike, and other such games that are suited to being played on mouse/keyboard, rather than a game controller. Sometime when I wasn't looking, true dual analog fps games on game controllers went from "obviously a terrible idea" to "ok" to "pretty popular." That original PlayStation Dual Shock controller planted the vile seed.

So now I give you the actual greatest controller of all time. Great d-pad. Those extra two buttons aren't obnoxious trigger buttons, but instead are right there on the face. Also, the 6 face buttons are all the same size, and not laid out very "ergonomically." ("Ergonomic" is just a code word for "totally wacky and terrible," I've noticed.) Also, the controller doesn't even have that pesky right analog stick that started the unfortunate trend of dual analog fps games on console. I give you...the Super Pad 8.

Now that's a sexy game pad!
--Sirlin