Card Games and Evolution 2006

Years later, Capcom would deny me the use of the Street Fighter license for this game.

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 exclusively 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.

This card damages the Street Fighter brand.

IF YOU ARE SKIMMING, NOTE THAT THIS IS TOTALLY 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, inelegant, 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.

This is the greatest card ever (not) created.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 tournament 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

Evolution East 2006 Report

The setup phase for Evolution East was tricky, but once the actual event started, it ran smoothly. We had plenty of space and a pretty good turnout of players for most games.

Dead or Alive 4 had 30 players this time (same as Tekken 5!), rather than 9, so there was actually somewhat of a real tournament. I entered, again with zero practice for months. I won some, lost some, and was eventually eliminated. I don't even really remember by who, as I wasn't serious about this tournament (and had already qualified from Evo West anyway).

At the last minute before the Guilty Gear XX Slash team tournament, Tom Cannon, the original founder of shoryuken.com asked if I'd join his team. Tom had never played even one game of the Slash version of GGXX and this was just a "for fun" thing. I rounded up Mopreme, another person who had never played Slash before, and we entered. I didn't really expect to get anywhere and I had already qualified for GGXX at Evolution West anyway. Little did I realize that the Evo East competition in GGXX wasn't anywhere near the level as the Evo West competition (sorry guys, not trying to trash talk, just telling it how it is). I beat entire teams by myself, sometimes losing only 10% life per round. Note that I went back to Chipp for this tournament, who I still claim is not at all good, but the Curse of Chipp dooms me to forever be a little better at playing Chipp than anyone else.

Anyway, we eventually played "team Yaa." Their first player plays Sol, and I'm sorry to say that he is one of the worst Guilty Gear players I've seen play the game, lol. Next they had a Testament player who I beat pretty easily. Finally, they had an Anji player who totally rocked me. He really had amazing mixups and good combos. He didn't even really need tricky mind-games because his mixups were so powerful, that eventually I'd guess wrong and die.

I thought I actually had a shot at beating everyone else there except for the Anji player and Marneto, but Marneto must have scrubbed out and lost, I don't even know to who. My team then somehow had to fight team Yaa, AGAIN. I beat their first two players easily again and was double eliminated by the Anji player. What a terrible way to be kept out of the top 4 teams for Sunday. During the Sunday matches (on stage, everyone watching just one game at a time), team Yaa inflicted the Sol player on the audience again and again. It was very hard to do commentary during this. I wanted to say "uh...so...nothing good is happing at all...not sure why this is a finals match...hmm....," but I mostly said nothing at all during those matches. The Anji player went on to get 2nd overall.

I somehow managed not to qualify in SF2 AE again. It looks like I had the hardest bracket again with Chris Li, NKI, Jeron, Julian, and other known players. While at Evo West, I fought against only Ryu and Dhalsim. At Evo East, I fought against only Champion Bison and ST Chun Li. I was ready to specifically beat Champion Bison, and I was looking forward to showing that "he's not all that."

I faced Jeron's Champion Bison and beat him 2-1, where I used Honda and ST Bison. I then faced him again and lost 2-1 with the same character matchups. If my honda made him block a good jump-in, I could usually ride that to 100% damage because Champion Bison can't get out. But when he knocked me down, he was able to do the broken cross-up psycho crusher on me over and over, and I just couldn't block it. One round, I took 100% damage to repeated psycho crushers that seemed unblockable. My total record against him was 3-3.

My other loss was to NKI, who went on to get 3rd in the overal tournament. NKI's Chun Li is legit and good. I did get a perfect on him with honda and won the first game, but I lost the next, switched to ST bison and lost. Ouch.

Some of the Champion Bison players didn't even know how to get out of another Champion Bison's lockdown. They sadly demonstrated that knowledge of the nuances of the game is not really necessary if you have the unfair psycho crusher and a scissor kick that combos into a dizzy and a redizzy. I'll finally admit that Champion Bison makes the game much worse than it would be without him.

My current opinion is that Champion Bison, CE Guile, and HF Ryu are the best 3 characters in the game.

Next year we'll surely have real Super SF2 Turbo rather than AE, as ST will be part of Capcom Classics Collection 2, produced by me.

--Sirlin

Evolution West 2006 Report

Evolution West was overall a great tournament. We had a huge ballroom that might have made us "the first fighting game tournament ever with too much space." Also, our new format of doing one game at a time worked exactly as planned. If was much easier to get the players in the right place at the right time with this method. Also, it was great that we had so many casual play stations in the same room as the tournament. This allowed players to practice for for their matches ahead of time.

As for my personal performance, I wish I had done better. I got top 8 in DOA4 (qualified), but hardly anyone even entered. I hope about 100 DOA players magically show up at our Las Vegas finals, because the total lack of support from the DOA community we've seen so far means we won't be able to feature the game next year. Too bad, as I think it's a pretty fun game.

In Guilty Gear, my team got 3 place, qualifying for a spot in the final brackets at Las Vegas, but this was mainly due to my teammate Ruin's performance. (XenoTiger also did well). I wanted to play first in our rotation, but Ruin was certain that he should play first, so he did. His plan was to single-handedly beat the entire field, and he practically did. His Eddie ripped through victim after victim, including top players like Ken I (Potemkin), Justus (Zappa), and Deuce (Faust). I played Potemkin and didn't accomplish much, unfortunately, except 28 wins in casual play, lol.

Going into this tournament, I thought Eddie was top tier, despite what everyone else says. I'm more sure than ever now. The ability to lock down an enemy while controlling two characters at once (Edddie) is just too good, even with all the nerfs in GGXX Slash.

Also note that before the tournament I ranked Slayer as top tier. Paul Kugler (slayer) was on the 2nd place team in the official Evolution West tournament and he also *won* the unofficial singles tournament. Slayer just flat-out does too much damage. Aba was my other pick for top tier, and Combofiend's Aba got 2nd in the singles tournament. I know that this isn't enough data to conclude tiers, but my predictions are sure looking good so far.

I said Ky was 2nd tier (despite everyone in the world saying he's top tier) in Slash, and after seeing Heidern's Ky (wow!), I finally get it. I'll finally put Ky in the tier 1 list. Sol still seems tier 2, but Said (aka ID) puts him at the bottom of tier 1. Semantics, really.

SF2 AE was pretty disappointing for me. I'm not happy with getting 9th, as I really wanted at least top 8. I ended up losing to the 2nd and 3rd place finishers: Alex Wolfe and Alex Valle. Even though I planned to play mostly ST Honda and ST Bison, I ended up playing HF Ryu almost the entire tourament as a counter to other people's Ryu's. It worked in the early rounds, and then I faced Alex Wolfe's Dhalsim (the only non-Ryu I'd face all day). I picked HF Ryu and Alex kind of laughed. I started the round with 8(!) consecutive helicopter kicks, demonstrating that the move is too good. I gave Alex Wolfe the opportunity to throw away the game here, but he cleverly did nothing and ducked almost all of them. Anyway, I beat him decisively in the first game. He stuck with Dhalsim and he won game 2. I really should have stuck with Ryu, but I switched to ST Honda and lost. Most of the game, I couldn't get in, and I finally got one ochio throw in the corner (should lead to 100% damage), but I did stand jab too slow as he got up (Dhalsim gets up slightly faster).

Against Valle's ST Ryu, I played HF Ryu and won the first game. He then switched to CE Ryu and won the next two. I think HF Ryu is clearly superior to HF Ryu, but whatever. Valle used Valle skills and won.

Here is what I wanted to say before the tournament about character rankings:

* HF Ryu's helicopter kick is one of the best, if not the best, moves in the game.
* CE Guile might be the best character in the game. WW Guile is almost as good, but he only has one sonic boom speed and can't do reversal attacks.
* HF Zangief is "secretly" good, but nearly no one has the skill to play him. Ironically, Alex Wolfe does, but he plays Dhalsim as his main so no one even realizes the Zangief threat.
* Chamption Bison is the most overrated character in the game. He isn't even as good as ST Bison. CE Bison has faster scissor kick startup and can combo after the scissor kick, leading to a dizzy and redizzy. He also has weird properties on his torpedo that make hit randomly hit as a crossup. But ST Bison has a super (CE has no reversal attacks AT ALL). ST Bison has better crossup attacks that lead to an easy dizzy combo. ST Bison's stand short allows him to tick into throw (usually untechable, too, unless the enemy is an ST character). ST Bison had a high priority jump strong. CE Bison is a one trick pony who can't get out of traps and has no reversal. There's no need for an "I win more" button, when what you really need is a little more defense.

*ST Vega would be good, but his input recognition on the off-the-wall attacks are broken. Same goes for HF Blanka.

*ST Honda is pretty good, but he still can't beat Guile or Ryu, really.

*HF Sagat is pretty good, and straight up better than CE Sagat.

After the tournament, I still believe pretty much all of that except the CE Bison part. Even though CE Bisons lost more than they won at Evo West, I finally saw the power of "scissor kick lands = you die." It is admittedly scary. Also, a perfectly executed CE Bison trap (scissors, low strong, stand forward, repeat) is *very* hard for an enemy bison or dhalsim to get out of. Watson demonstrated this on stage in a tournament match against Dhalsim.

It's interesting that the top 2 finishers in SF2 AE (Graham Wolfe and Alex Wolfe) both played ST characters (ST Balrog and ST Dhalsim).

Anyway, thanks to everyone who came out for the event. I hope to see even more people at Evo East, and I look forward to facing the competition there.

--Sirlin

The Man Who Would Solo a 40 Man Raid

This is NOT the story of those who made this video; it's the story of a mad-genius who watched this video and his plan.

Xzin, a World of Warcraft player, is contemplating graduating from "epic" to "ledendary." He already regularly pvp's by controlling 5 characters at once: one priest and four mages. I've seen one of his videos and I'm impressed. Note that he leveled them all up by controlling all five in instanced dungeons. Note that he has no tank, just mages and a priest. Xzin his his priest and his mages are Azin, Bzin, Czin, and Dzin. His guild: Army of Zin.

Zin is now planning to scale up his efforts to take down Ragnaros, the boss of Molten Core, all by himself. He'll need to buy 40 copies of World of Warcraft, by 40 monthly subscription fees (about $600/month), have enough computers to run 40 instances of the game, and use 40 monitors (most of them will be 8.4" monitors). He'll need a physical space that can accomodate all the equipment, and by his estimates, he'll need at least the equivalent of two T1 internet connections for bandwith, which you can't really get from residential dsl or cable. I'm guessing that the hardware and software costs will be more than $20,000.

This is also quite an interface challenge and micromanagement challenge. I think he plans to use one keyboard to controll all this and an assortment of (legal) macros. Just planning and executing a UI setup to accomodate this task is probably a full time job, in my opinion. Of course, he's already proven himself in controlling 5 characters at once in pvp and in instances, so perhaps it's just a matter of scaling up what he's already been doing for a year.

His gameplan premise is to have 35 of his 40 characters be mages, lol. He hopes that with high enough dps (that's damage per second for the jargon-impaired), he will be able to end the fight against Rag before the 120 second mark, when it gets a lot more hairy.

Xzin, to me, sounds like some kind of Batman character. I'm sure right now he's building his super computer setup deep in the batcave, illuminated by the glow of 40 monitors. He's wealthy enough that he can spend time and money on hobbies without being bound by the drudergy of the common man. His entrepreneurial spirit gives him the will to believe that "it can be done" and to actually stick with it until it happens. I don't know why such a totally ridiculous and silly thing should be so inspiring, but somehow, I think it is.

Incidentally, since it's proven extremely difficult to find anyone much of a clue who wants to pvp with me on ysera (horde), maybe I'll try the Xzin route myself on a smaller scale, lol.

Ok, for reference, here's the link to Xzin's post (those posts aren't saved very long though)

The text of his first post on the subject is below.

--Sirlin

Xzin said:

I posted this a little while ago and I wanted to get the take of the WoW community at large.For those of you who don’t like to take the time to read anything - I want to solo 40 characters at once. Meaning - I want to play an entire raid - by myself. This is not a statement about WoW - this is a challenge and I like challenges.On to the background:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Q u o t e:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9024435764919244981

Rag has about 1.1 mil hit points, give or take a few hundred thousand. 35 mages, with buffs and decent gear and a 76 second kill = 14,473.68 dps. That means each mage is doing 413.53 dps, including resists, crits, etc. Not out of the realm of possibility with every major buff (Oxy head, ZG, etc).I wonder if I could solo rag with enough mages……..

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A bit of background. I solo 5 characters right now. At the same time. 4 level 60 Mages and 1 60 Priest on a PvP server. I have been doing this since release and I have been pretty successful with my setup over the last year or so. I pretty much destroy Alterac Valley fights but the whole time invested factor being the primary reason people advance in PvP is a very poor game mechanic but that is aside the point right now. Anyway -

I had a thought. I looked around and seeing that I already have much of the hardware, I thought to myself - what if I took it a step further and bought 35 more accounts and connected the computers needed to run 35 more accounts and I leveled up 35 more accounts to 60? A bit of a tall order but nothing outlandish. I leveled up at the same time, soloing instances all the way to 60. I can solo DM North (full tribute) as well as UBRS, most of LBRS, etc….. without any tanks - just mages and a priest. So I know this can be done, atleast leveling up 5 at a time, seven more times to get 40 level 60s.

This begs the question -

Could I actually “solo” 40 players at once? Would I want to? When I get some time off, I will most likely do so. Aside from details like the $600 per month fee and the hardware and networking requirements needed to perform said feat - I wanted to hear from the community about what you thought about this.

Note: I do not bot, I will of course NOT be using any third party programs, I have no intentions of selling or farming (nor would I make any money doing that anyway - and trust me, my time is worth far more than that). I doubt I would even PvP with this setup - it would be basically me soloing raid instances…. mostly just because it is a pretty unique challenge that I believe I can accomplish. Very few people multibox on a level that I do already, let alone take things to this level. So what about it?

What do you as a community think? Do you think I will meet great success or fail miserably? Any particular problems that I am not thinking about? Vael, Domo might be a tough fight, etc. Brainstorm with me - positive or negative I am interested in hearing what you have to say.

Xzin, Azin, Bzin, Czin, Dzin

New Super Mario Brothers

Unfortunately, I have to give the New Super Mario Brothers (DS) a 7.9 rating out of 10. My first impression, like pretty much everyone else, was somewhere around 9.5. The game has *great* presentation and plays as well as ever.

 Mario has a million game mechanics now. Really huge mario, really tiny mario, wall slide, wall jump, butt stomp, floating after jumping on springboards, diving from the float, ability to carry springboards, sidling on ledges, tightrope walking and jumping, one way floors, one way doors, turtle shell Mario, and so on and so on. All sounds great so far.

I have three main criticisms. First, I do not like the philosophy behind the secrets in this game. Every level has 3 large secret coins to find (sounds good), but the methods used to hide these coins are just not up to par. They are similar to the methods used in Donkey Kong Country 1, rather than the much better DKC2. NSMB has far too many cases where you really have no way of knowing if you should have done this or that thing to get to the coin, then you see you guessed wrong and now you must do the level over to get it. Even DKC2 had some of this with the forced-advancing levels, but NSMB has tons of it. I got really tired of seeing that I rode the wrong platform or whatever, and realizing I'd have to restart the level to get the secret coin I just passed. Secrets should encourage exploration, not constant restarting. DKC2 remains the best platform game at hiding secrets.

Not liking the methods used to hide secrets might not seem like a big deal, but it is in fact the central goal of the player. I take the entire goal of the game to find these secrets, so if they are about a 7.9/10 fun to find, then that's unfortunate.

Second, the emphasis on pits that kill you. Yes, the original Super Mario Brothers has lots of pits that kill you, but we're not in the 1980s anymore. Dying and doing the level over and over is a dated mechanic, and I expected NSMB above all other games to show us that. Unfortuantely it doesn't and is full of those familiar instant death pits, the concept of lives, and restarting levels. Just like God of War shows that a game is fun when dying makes you repeat as little of the level as possible, NSMB *should* have showed us that platform games are about exploring to find secrets, rather than lots of instant-death pits.

I can imagine some people disagreeing with my second point, but there is really no excuse for the third: you can't save anywhere! The only times you can save the game are when you beat a castle for the first time (end of world), beat a tower for the first time (middle of world), or pay secret coins to open a mushroom house. This is really, really bad.

For example, let's say that i just finished a level and got 1 of thd 3 secret coins because I jumped down the wrong shaft to get this coin or killed the only turtle that could be used to get the other one, or whatever. Then I play the level again and accidentally fall into a pit of instant death and die. Then I play it again and fall into some other instant death pit. Then I play it again and die again and again, because that's what happens in this game. Ok, I finally get the other two secret coins, yay! Now I repeat that entire process on the next level. Now I feel like playing some sudoku on Brain Age or my girlfriend wants to play Nintendogs. But NSMB won't let me save the game! I have to beat a tower or a caslte or spend coins on a mushroom house (which I probably wanted to save for some specific use).

One year, Shigeru Miyamoto was kind enough to appear at the Game Developers Conference and give a keynote lecture about game design. I still think about that lecture. In it, he said the #1 rule of game design is "When you press the jump button, the character should jump." He isn't kidding. In the original Tomb Raider, you don't jump when you press the jump button. Instead, you jump the next time that your running animation reaches the point in your stride where jumping would "look good." You should jump when you PRESS the jump button. He's really talking about having responsive controls in general, and doing stuff like having a basic attack come out when the button is released or something, as opposed to pressed.

Anyway, it's a great rule that reminds about responsive controls. Here's my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supercede the player's real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever. In NSMB, an example way to handle this would be to allow the player to save the game in the pause menu at any time. It wouldn't have to save your position in a level or the state of enemies in the level or anything so fancy. The only thing that really matters is if you finished the level or not, and which secret coins you found on the level.

In fact, they even have a mechanic in place already that would prevent you from getting the coins in a way the designers didn't intend. There are some coins you can get by jumping into a pit or something and getting the coin on the way down just before you die. Interesting to note that you don't actually get the coin until a couple seconds after you touch it, because it has to fall down to the coin holder on the bottom screen. So even if you got a coin, paused the game and saved right before you died in the pit, you wouldn't really have the coin. That's fine because you weren't SUPPOSED to jump into the pit to get the coin. The real puzzle was to do some certain jump or throw a turtle shell at it or whatever, and adding this save feature wouldn't diminish that.

Anyway, the game is fun and great looking and all that. Secrets should have been hidden much better, the game should have graduated from the 1980 idea of instant-death pits everywhere, and there is really no excuse at all for the save system. Believe me, I wanted to give this thing a 9.5 as much as anyone else.

--Sirlin