one-armed dwarf

Ok so here's the deal with the character, based on playing her and seeing her being played

She's supposed to be aggressive in both her stances (sort of repeating what I said but bear with me), in normal mode her f.s and 2h advance her forward. Some people seem to think that normal mode is about parrying and biding your time but it's not quite the whole picture. Yes you need to be patient, but not passive. Her 5H has huge range and is incredibly oppressive, it's like a Ramlethal button. She has a 236s which can rekka, but if you don't rekka it's safe on block and also advances forward. Similarly with her 236k, an advancing overhead that high profiles moves (I used it to jump over some Testament goo the other day)

Rage mode is aggression++. You play her like May. Same facts as above, but faster movement, incredible air links and oppression. You get the idea. But you got to make the right reads. When her meter depletes, she has 10 frames of recovery and is in a standing position where she can be fuzzy overheaded if you downback, free mixups for your opponent. That is going to be the biggest 'key' to this matchup at a mid level I feel like, people exploiting this and keeping an eye on the jelly gauge. 

Her keygrab move is not a grab, it's a strike. It's plus on block, but has miserable reach. However you can kara cancel it with a dash cancelled 5k or c.s, which again fits into the whole thing where you're moving forward constantly, even if it's by tiny bits at a time. Her pressure gameplan builds from this. 

The issue comes in the form of things like the system mechanics for defense, burst and 214D, what that means when interacting with zoners or anyone with zoning tools, and the reach of her less slow buttons. Her parry is not supposed to be used against blockstrings as it has tons of recovery, you can hit her with a blockstring, get parried, and PRC her and hit her with a CH. It's to be used when your opponent has more limited oppression options, like fireballs or far reaching normals, when you have a smaller mental stack to read and can use the parry safely to generate meter. But her parry isn't like Baiken parry, it's a pretty bad button. Incredibly situational and a bit of an odd end in her kit.

Her rage gauge decreases during actions, so her invulnerable move on 236h can be very wasteful, especially with how it spaces you out. Grabs as well, though there are things you can setup with that but you need a huge reserve of meter to do so. The fact that her non-5h normals have miserable range makes her very susceptible to spacing traps, where often the best she can seem to hope for is a neutral reset. 5H is 15 frames, 2H is 14 frames. She has a great anti air though in 2S, but it only reaches above her. Again, spacing is difficult. You need to be extremely patient with this character, which generally speaking in a game with such ignorant offense puts her at a disadvantage. Spacing traps are her biggest weakness I feel like, because defensive options in this game tend to be about creating space in the first place

Frame advantage on wall break, another difficulty with her. You can spend your super gauge near the wall, but then you do a stance swap. If you're in rage you lose your meter, no advantage. You can swap back to normal mode and super but I'm not sure right now the right setup for that. But a lot of ABAs end up using their 236D for HKD instead (which given her weaknesses wrt the defensive mechanics in this game might be the best option here)

Is she bad, no I'm dooming her a lot. The game should have more characters that require work, it makes the game more interesting. She's a polarising character like Nago and with some bad balance decisions she could end up ruining the game by being too much, and it takes a while for a meta to develop over how best to handle her kit. She also has some of the most easy to execute corner to corner high damage combos in the game, that cannot be downplayed (the kara links are really difficult though, and unstable). But does that mean she's really strong as well, I don't feel that to be the case. I like Hotashi's video

I've found this character interesting to play around with cause it's forced me to actually interact with defensive options against character gimmicks rather than responding with my own gimmick, like leaping over testament's zoning as mentioned. Also there's spacing-based reactions you can do against Baiken's mat (highly active attack, get hit early and its more minus, get hit late and there's a gap to stuff with f.s). I'm trying to learn to fuzzy guard against auto pilot Kys who cycle through stun dipper and foudre arc (block low, then high to get advantage on foudre arc's earlier active frames). There's other stuff I'm sure. 

If you want for SF I can drop my 2 mains and play with a different character, not immediately but when you're comfy on system mechanics and have BnBs and stuff. I can try Aki

They aren't comic book stories when they are films though, sometimes you need the finality otherwise it doesn't have impact. The Iron Man death scene is great and a perfect sendoff to that whole thing. Sometimes the point shouldn't be that they need ways to continue indefinitely, stories should end. Heroes should die sometimes, in this medium specifically. They can't just hedge their bets 

I watched a movie with Seberg in it a while back, Breathless with Jean luc Godard. I heard she had a hard life and went through a nightmare filming some Joan of Arc movie but I did not know about the FBI spying on her.

Come and See (1985) - Late era Soviet anti-war film about the Nazi invasion of Belarus, where 628 villages were burned down by the Nazis. I didn't intend this to be a running theme with the movies I'm watching rn after Zone of Interest but there you go, this was on the watchlist for a bit after all. Very harrowing and not something super easy to summarise, it's less a story than a loosely organised narrative from the perspective of a very young recruit in the Belorussian army. One of the more infamous things about the film is its grueling filming process, with some truly awful looking scenes in a bog in particular but another where they used live ammo to fire overhead the actors. A lot of the film's horror comes from its subjective perspective, everything being experienced from the perspective of its main character, all the chaos, confusion and trauma of it. The sound design in particular becomes more surreal and distorted, for plot and theme reasons. It's the most impactful war film I've seen

As a palette cleanser, Everything, Everywhere All At Once (2022), which is like The Matrix but with Calvinball rules. It's about a contest for control of the multiverse but also how it uses that as a metaphor for smaller scale family conflicts 

It's an interesting but sort of overly busy film I thought that gets a bit lost in the sauce at times, or maybe that's just what they want you to feel, I dunno. It's really funny though and I like that it just plays by its own rhythm. I really enjoy the tricks it plays with aspect ratio and camera lens, and how it uses that to settle you in its different mashup of genres. There's a playfulness to it. At the same time, it changes contexts so much that it's sort of hard to settle on and ruminate on what it's going for, which became a bit of an obstacle for me when it came to the emotional core it was trying to express as I felt similarly pulled back and forth, unstuck in a different dimension to where the film needed me to be

Zato looking kinda thicc tho

I have a janky JP and Kim in SF, lmk when you want to mash buttons. I'm hanging up my key

Why, are you playing as A.B.A?

Maxxxine's long awaited trailer, it's a bit NSFW so I guess I'll put it in spoilers. This film has been madly hyped

I thought Pearl was good, but X not so much. This looks much better. No idea what the Psycho allusion is going for (Bates Motel) but imo 

Every UI they've had since PSP has been a different version of XMB. The difference is that PSP and PS3 had a simple form of it, vertical line is categories, horizontal line is directories of features and items pertinent to those categories

But on PS4 and 5 they stack additional layers of abstraction and submenus on top and within these other ones. It's also got a lot of weird scope creep that increases friction with its systems, like the activity cards and other weird things I'm not remembering now. Adverts too. It's not even that it's a bad UI tbh, it's just that they got it so right with PS3 that the downgrade is puzzling, even if the systems obviously handle patching far better and the grid based UI is better for looking at games. But the problems with the game UI on PS3 weren't super evident then as people were mainly physical buyers, and they still could have done a grid UI within a simpler system

This isn't me taking the piss or anything, what you say sounds pretty convincing and I've heard similar things elsewhere, that it's a rejoinder to everyone saying that these movies and series are cynical objects without craft, that this is anything but that. Apparently one of the animators or writers or whatever is a huge MVC fan and puts references to it in the show, which I think sounds pretty cool anyway

But what I also think is there can be a hype backlash with stuff like this, cause I bought into the hype with Loki season 2 and gave it a shot and it was one of the worst things I watched. I'm not saying X-Men is probably like that, but when Disney overwhelm viewers with a lot of bad stuff and make them lose interest, it can actually really hurt exposure for things where they get it really right.

Stuff like this needs room to breathe, I wonder if WOM can help it have legs

Outside of its bad organisation of games on the UI, the weird vertically scrolling list of things with blaring audio (MGS4 is a jump scare), I think the PS3 (and PSP) UI is the best they ever had. They should have iterated on it rather than the very bloated things they did with PS4 and PS5. It was easy to discover features and see how they are organised on PS3, and on PS5 I still get confused with its incongruent layout of stuff

If controllers count it would be the last couple of Dualsenses that developed drift after like less than a year of use. 

Modern controllers are a racket. It introduces such unwanted tedium when dealing with them. Terrible controller.

Tournament level of this game is a snooze

Same characters every time with the same linear gameplan, except that one really good Faust player

They should make a tournament where only the most mid of characters can be chosen

DD2 looks great, it has ray traced global illumination and shadows really enhance the scenes in the towns, as does how everything is shaded. It's very cohesive looking.

In FFVII, stuff just sort of 'glows' all hideously and objects just stick out awkwardly and is unreactive to light sources, and the textures are dogshit. It's a shit looking game imo, one of its big flaws, worse looking than remake even

SB has a weird energy around it given that they apparently fired workers for criticising its character design, which is a big part of why it's gotten scrutiny like that. In DD's case it probably helps everything is unisex, see my earlier photo of my lion man running around with a wedgie

They feel very random, you have to spend a bunch of ATB to summon them, more ATB to use their unique skills, then a random Hellfire or whatever happens at a point in the fight where an enemy is not staggered and they don't get interrupted or pressured either. Their moves can be good but they don't let you get on with your main character's gameplan. eg, Tifa can't be doing her combos if she's telling Ifrit to burp fire

imo, they sort of feel like a comeback mechanic rather than something you can use strategically. Rebirth is also like that unfortunately, except one character get a cool abiliity to use with them

(rebirth spoiler)

If I was going to revamp this system I would give the summons their own ATB gauge, still have them be AI allies but also make it so summoning them costs lots of mana rather than being this weird timer thing that activates and have their abilities scale from the character who summoned them (so high magic === high fire damage). Something closer to FFX's system maybe. They've kinda been all over the place with summoning systems since FFXII, which also had a bad mechanic. XIII had a terrible system, and XV was the weirdest most stupid one of all. 

JP

I spent a week on this character, I think even speaking without the deep meta knowledge that others have she is a really shit feeling character all around. 

Playing her feels like micro-dosing depression. Her install with the jealous rage thing makes her very powerful, with crazy air links, but it's a very difficult thing to establish a gameplan around cause it's over so fast. She has this amazing armoured move which invulns against DPs and has huge conversion potential, but it's such a long animation that you lose so much meter if its blocked and it puts you at a shit spacing to push your offense. So there's a huge learning curve in terms of how you are going to leverage those opportunities into conversions. If you're good, those conversions will demolish your opponents health bar. But you have to spend your meter on getting a hard knockdown at the wall, which loses you your rage stance and makes that HDK pointless, or do that new 236D thing they added. On that note, you really don't want to be bursting much cause well it just leaves you in a really bad position. 

So it's possible with a lot of experience and learning and patience you turn her into something amazing, but I ain't seen the evidence of how that can happen yet. I think taking execution out of the equation, which is a limiting way to look at difficulty, she's the most difficult character I've tried to learn. Even when you win the gamefeel is just kinda terrible, given that this is a game where the cast have pretty straightforward and ignorant offensive strategies, just limping around the place begging for a crumb of neutral is great at producing the bad brain chemicals. It's the first character where I've actually seen the time out screen, more than once as well. 

The thing with it is I think you're actually supposed to be aggressive in both character stances, the install and the I'm-literally-dying stance, cause of the way her normals cancel into forward moving specials that can be pretty safe on block. But like, it's not a very interesting approach. So it's this thing where the character feels difficult to play, but there's not much sign of interesting depth to explore. 

That said I'll probably stick with her for another week, cause I do like the experience of trying the game from a different perspective and it teaches you a lot of things. There's a lot of ways a character like that can develop I think and it's clear the skill expression here is in the very numerous decisions you can make with regard to going in and out of jealous rage, when and how. But impressions are she's dogshit, the experience of this keyblade struggle is toxic af. When I go back to Bridget or even Testament it will be like breathing for the first time, this game is too ignorant for a character like this to be more than mid imo. I suspect there'll be an adjustment to how quickly the meter is depleted, but not gained, if they patch her

Watched a bit of Driver 2 to remember. I definitely don't remember the chopiness as such but the really disappointing 'get out of the car' gameplay was like, whats the point. But on the other hand it enabled you to change your vehicle, which was a massive deal

For as forgotten as this game is now, it's directly responsible for me not giving much of a shit about GTA3 cause it felt like it had already been done. Except GTA3 did it smoother lol, and the on foot gameplay actually felt solid.

Isn't it the opposite, they think it looks way better

In fact, don't you play with that shit turned on? Huh!?

14 minutes ago, Maf said:

No way. I  think most people couldn’t tell the difference even with controller in hand. I don’t most of the people today can tell the difference if you just put a controller in hand and said tell me if it’s 30 or 60.

 

i can’t back it up, but I’m just not a believer 

You're fixating here on the 'no way they can tell the fact that it's 30 and 60', which isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying they can tell the game plays way smoother, is more responsive, can be seen more easily in motion and that they don't need to understand that it's because of framerate that they can appreciate that.

I'm saying this cause that's literally how me and my friends felt with our PS2s. I'm talking about motion clarity, not whether the frametime is 33ms or 16ms. It's like you don't need to know the theory to appreciate its implementation

(Now tbf, the framerates we are talking about here are probably more like 20fps on ISS and 30fps on PES, but that is a massive uplift all the same. I don't actually know for sure what speeds these games ran at though and can't find out online)

edit chatgpt says PES on PS2 ran at 60, but you never know with these AI, could be talking shite. 

Finally someone is talking about the ending, imma paste what I said somewhere else

No, I don't agree with this. I don't think you need to know the technical detail and theory of why a game is running smooth to appreciate its smoothness. You could definitely put a dualshock in someone's hand and have them appreciate how much better PES is to play than ISS. 

Is this information and its availability weaponized in weird ways by overly brand loyal twitter dickheads, yeah definitely. But my memory of the early PS2 gen definitely was 'wow, 3D games feel so smooth now'. The motion clarity was mindblowing, much moreso than the static image detail. Even my dad noticed it. 

If you didn't notice it, you didn't notice it, but a big part of the 'next gen-ness' of a game like Jak and Daxter compared with Crash Bandicoot was its framerate. You didn't need to speak the language of refresh rates and stuff to notice this.

The other part was its draw distance, but the fact that it rendered far distance stuff while also running smooth was what made it feel like a future game.

Felt it also comparing games like ISS on PS1 to Pro Evolution Soccer on PS2, the immediate thing you notice is it's much smoother. Everything is more fluid and intricate. In fact iirc a big part of why it could have been popular was I feel like it ran smoother than FIFA at the time, but I'm finding that hard to verify online

Other than it's slight camera pauses on screen change, there's nothing really that choppy about RE2 imo. I think a lot of stuff should be contextualised better here cause that generation of games was a groundbreaking one, pushing the medium forward, and so it's much easier to accept that there were titles that didn't run well. It was all very new. Even now I don't really have an issue with the fact that these old 3D games run the way that they do cause imo it's clearly all justified by what they were doing at the time

PS2-etc gen had tons of games which ran great, however, while you go into the gen after and stuff often ran worse. Like you would play Assassin's Creed on PS3 and it had tons of screen tearing and judder and was just generally a pretty shit feeling experience. It was easy to tell. 360 was a lot better at least.

The PAL NTSC stuff is being mentioned, I became familiar with that first through Capcom games, cause DMC1 was slowed down and had a crushed aspect ratio. But if you left it on the title screen you would see an FMV of the 'real' game, all fast and shit. You'd read later on that it ran at a 16.6% higher speed and framerate on NTSC regions. Fucked up shit. But it was even worse before then, cause at least by PS2 some companies were making more of an effort. 

I think it's selling people short to say that they would not notice the difference without it being told to them. Before I knew what framerate was I definitely noticed that Snake Eater ran like half as smoothly as Sons of Liberty. 

Ew, a Roche hater 😔