Last week I watched the indie film documentary: “High Score”.
If you’ve seen King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters (as covered in Did You See #1) then it’s a similar tale of “a guy [Bill Carlton] wants to make a name for himself and beat a long standing world record high score in a classic arcade game [Missile Command].
The similarities end in the above synopsis though, as this is it’s own story, and not just some sort of wannabe replication of the cult classic “King of Kong”. King of Kong had a lot more prominent arcade high score legends in it, as well as the back history within that crowd. This brought with it some controversies, some rivalries, and some good content for that film.
Although with High Score, it is mainly focused on 1 regular small town guy, and his quest to beat the score. In place of any personal drama within people is substituted with the drama of being able to secure a working “Missile Command”. The film is very well presented though, and gives you a very open and personal look into Bill Carlton’s life, as well as his drive to achieve this goal. It’s also a good general documentary about people that strive for high scores and the sacrifices they make, plus it gives a nice contrast of the video game cultures of now and then.
If you’re interested in Video Game related documentaries, and/ or you liked “The King of Kong” then you should certainly like this too.
As there are a couple of game related things on my mind, so I figured I’d do the third installment of This & That.
First up ! ! !
OnLive
I’ve not really been following the progress of OnLive after it’s early days announcements and such.
Yet, too my surprise. I see the service is now LIVE for PC and Mac’s (only in America at present).
Now for those of you who are unaware as to what OnLive is…
It is basically a service that will allow you to play games on a computer without actually needing the ‘specs’ to run the game. Essentially a high end server will run the game for you, and all you do is stream the game to your computer (meaning as long as your PC can support video streaming, you can play the latest PC games without needing to have the high end PC to run them).
When it was first announced it sounded a bit too good to be true. Plus many people feared that the service would be riddle with lag. Seeing as you don’t have the game running right in front of you, you would perhaps expect a bit of lag to come between you pressing the buttons and the game registering your inputs.
From reading ‘this blog post‘, it does seem there is the slightest bit of input lag when playing the games, whether that can be worked out, or if it just requires a faster internet connection, I don’t know…but really, lag is one of the worst problems a game can face. It can lead to a lot of detrimental problems in terms of online multiplayer, and will certainly be an issue with twitch sensitive played games, where the action is fast paced. I guess this is a game by game problem though, as I can imagine playing something along the lines of an RPG wouldn’t cause any frustration through this type of service.
Another thing to think about in regards to OnLive is that you will never actually own the games. You’ll be streaming the games…meaning you have no hard copy of it, and if OnLive ever went out of business, your copy of the game went out too. From what I’ve gathered the games you get are on a rental-like service, *where you’d pay something like £5 (in the UK) and get the game for a week or something. That’s cool I guess, for games you would only really play through once, but I personally find it’s nice to have some games sat in my collection at home, so I can replay the multiplayer whenever I want, or go back to replay harder difficulties, or explore new things, or even get some extra achievements/ trophies or something if I’m looking for further reasons to replay something.
*Obviously I’m just guessing these UK price plans at this stage.
It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve for OnLive, and I’ll keep an eye on it’s UK launch here. OnLive also plan to release a sort of console equivalent/ set top box version, where people get the box, and a controller, and can play the games through there TV’s. These will apparently cost much less than the home games consoles cost, so it will also be interesting to see just how much this cuts into the home console market.
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Next up, I want to briefly speak about the new XBOX 360 “slim”. My little bro got one for his 8th birthday just last weekend. The 250gb model (which I believe is the higher end model). Yet too my surprise!! It didn’t even come with any High Definition cables inside. It only came with the standard composite (red, yellow, white) inputs. I remember when I got my ’360 elite’ over 2 years ago that at least came bundled with a Component cable (offering nicely upto 720p).
Now the issue I want to raise is…why the hell would they release a high definition capable video game system, in todays market, without a high definition capable cable??
It is currently hooked up to the High Def TV in the front room of our house with it’s crappy 90′s-tastic component cable. HDMI cables are cheap as hell these days so I’ll pick them one up soon.
On a positive note, the console does look very cool sat on a TV stand, with it’s glossy look (although it collects dust like crazy). Plus the new touch sensitive buttons are very cool, and the little beeping sounds it makes when you press them are great .
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Lastly, I was thinking the other week about how if my 10 year old self could meet me today, he would freaking love me!
Firstly he’d be more crazy with excitement than the N64 kid over seeing the modern day consoles…
However mostly I would totally love just how many consoles I have still hooked up, to my big screen, with surround sound. Plus just the amount of games I have here ready to play at any given time.
Now…what would your 10 year old self think if they met you now?
Just a quick short post to say that some minor updates will be being rolled out on here over the next week. So please be patient with any downtime, it should be minimal, or hopefully un-noticeable, but it’s just a small tidy up to try and improve some behind the scenes constraints with the article format here.
Secondly, if you’re not already, please follow us on Twitter. It’s a convenient way to get a reminder of when an article goes up on here. Although more interestingly so…I occasionally post links on there to other cool video game related stuff around the web on there, so there are some cool reads/ videos/ etc that you may be interested in that get mentioned on the twitter feed.
It’s spam free so don’t worry about your Twitter feed blowing up with crap.
Lastly, if you’re interested in writing video game/ gamer related articles, and want to contribute here… Or if you’re creating other such video game related media and want some extra exposure, hit us up via e-mail [currentlyplaying[at]kusohappens.com].
As a constant poster -slash- lurker on the GameFaqs.com message boards. I see many topics popping up complaining about “Lag Switchers” (mostly in the Super Street Fighter IV message boards).
Personally I was unaware as to what specifically was being mentioned here at first, although I did kind of get the jist of what was being implied, as ever since my first foray in to online PC gaming back in like 1999, I’ve been aware of what Lag is. If you’re unaware, then see below.
Definition of Lag: In computer networks, lag refers to delays in information transmission between network nodes. Latency is the time taken for a sent packet of data to be received at the other end.
Today I came across a topic on lag switching, that linked to a video, that not only showed me what a lag switch was, but also taught the viewer how to make one.
I swiftly “thumbs down” rated that video as soon as I realised it was the real deal, and I was happy to see a lot of the recent comments on it (at the time I watched it) where hating on the guy for posting such a tutorial.
I CANNOT believe the lengths at which some pricks will go to in order to obtain an anonymous online victory. Nor can I believe how they can climb the online leaderboards and actually feel any sort of pride in what they’re achieving. Super Street Fighter IV is not a game where online leaderboards are seen as a true measure of skill in the first place (it’s face to face tournaments held globally where players prove dominance, in a 100% lag free environment), and it’s no wonder why when you have assholes like these “lag-switchers” in circulation.
Another example of how the leaderboards in SSFIV aren’t a true measure of skill is how the currently #1 player on XBL (in terms of overall player points) has been many a times referred to as a “rage quitter”. I’m not going to name and shame this person in question in this blog, simply because I haven’t fought that player personally, and no one has uploaded video evidence of this on YouTube, although with so many people backing up the accusation (and with allegations of this rage quitting user dating back to the Soul Calibur IV days) it seems highly likely.
Rage Qutting: The act of exiting the game/ turning off your console/ disconnecting your internet whilst you are losing before an online game/ match is finished. This saves you from having a loss put on your record, and causes the winning player to not receive his win.
**Rage Quitting and Lag Switching is not limited to fighting games. It is used in FPS’s, sports games, and many others.
It would bring me great pleasure to watch, or play these players who have such glamorous online records (through cheating methods) in real life, and see them exposed for the cheating scrubs that they are.
If/ when I have children, if I ever caught them playing video games online doing tactics like the ones mentioned in this topic, I’d take away there copy of that game, or worse yet take away there online gaming privileges. I don’t condone this kind of behaviour at all.
Video games are meant to be a source of fun/ entertainment. If you put enough time into a game and develop great skills at it, then that’s awesome. However, if you want to cut corners, cheat, and effectively live a lie through the game, then you’re the urinal cake of society, whom I and many others would love to pee-on.
Apologies if anyone was offended by the increase in profanity in this post, but it really is a topic that just called for it.
I was linked to an interview on Videogamer.com with Capcom’s Yoshinoro Ono yesterday in which he [Ono] mentioned that he feels the entry barrier to fighting games needs to be lowered for them to truly capture a big audience.
Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that in terms of game sales, what he said is true. Although on the contrary, speaking as a long time fan of fighting games, it is almost a tradition that any good beat em up will need to be learned for me to have any chance of succeeding within it.
I personally know quite a few people who have picked up fighting games over the years due to hearing good things about them, or because they had seen someone else play it and liked what they saw. Yet once they take the game home, they’ll give arcade mode a try once or twice and then from there they’ll just let the game collect dust on there shelf.
I’d say about 75% of the time the game they’ve bought is a solid game that providing they had stuck with it, they could have potentially lost many many hours immersed in it’s great gameplay. Yet because they didn’t stick around to learn the game, they got bored out of frustration with it and left it behind…
For me personally the fighting series I’m most familiar with is Street Fighter, as I’ve dove into various Street Fighter games at several points in my life I have learned the fundamentals to playing a lot of 2D fighting games. Even still…I know when I pick up a new 2D fighting game, one with a fresh fighting game engine in comparison to the games I’ve played before, that within the game will be a lot I will have to learn (and I’m talking many hours of learning here).
This seems daunting at first, because generally we play video games for fun, and steep learning curves can be a big turn off. Another issue is the fact that playing against computer opponents is nowhere near as fun, or a true measure of skill, as fighting human opponents is.
Before the advent of online gaming it was something of a necessity for your friends to have the same beat em ups you have, so that you could learn to play the game at home alone, then hook up with friends to play some multiplayer and test your skills out. Ideally, if you lost, you’d be determined to improve and learn more, then come back for redemption. If you didn’t have people to play with though, the hard work you’re putting into learning that game is going to go unnoticed, and unless the game in question has put a lot of unlockable rewards or incentives to pat you on the back for your play time and skills, then you might not have been driven to keep at the game for that long.
Moving back to the original interview that inspired this post though…
When you’re lucky enough to find that special [fighting] game, one that several of your friends have, and thus enabling you to have some truly amazing competitive matches, that time you’ve put into the game, and into getting good with specific characters becomes very worthwhile. In the past 2 years I’ve been playing a lot of the Street Fighter 4 series (naturally only Super since that came out), and with that came a lot of new things to learn about the game. Not only do I need to learn about the fine mechanics of the game play, but I also need to learn many many match ups. I need to know the advantages and disadvantages the character I use has against all of the other in game character choices, and beyond that there are differences in how people can use certain characters (some could be aggressive and offensive, some may be defensive and more tactical).
I have been lucky that I have local friends who play the game whom I can test my skills against in some intense and very fun multi-player sessions. Local multi-player has certainly been a catalyst for my devotion and time spent on the game. Although Super Street Fighter IV definitely benefits from having a decent matchmaking system online, so I can always find opponents to spar with, whether I want to specifically face people of a similar skill level, or just take on anyone who comes (whether much weaker or much stronger).
Super Street Fighter IV is a very deep and finely tuned game. So much so that it would take a lot of time to try and break it down, and even if I tried I’d probably miss something.
The in game ‘challenge mode’ does a fairly good job to teach you a character’s moves (ranging from the basics to the advanced combo’s), the in game ‘training mode’ has a great offering of options to allow you to practice things and try out new things that even the challenge mode didn’t teach you too.
As good as those 2 modes combined are though, it’s not enough to turn a fresh newbie to the game into a good competitive player.
Now…
Finally on to the question of lowering the entry barrier in fighting games.
Yoshinoro Ono said the following in that interview:
“What I mean by broadening the appeal is that where hardcore players are at the moment, with all their hyper super techniques, that seems to isolate themselves from the rest of the players. What I want to do is connect those people and casual players together so that the progression is a bit more continuous than it is at the moment, where a few of the elitists deem their skills amazing and don’t want to play with other people.”
Reading that has me [as a fighting game enthusiast] a bit worried. Is he implying that perhaps the deep level of gameplay that we’ve come to expect from a high level fighting game needs to be dumbed down to be more simple and accessible for new players? I encourage you to sound off in the comments section on how you interpret this.
If and when Street Fighter 5 is to be announced, it would shatter my faith in it being a good game if I was to hear it was being made simple to play. I would want it to be like all traditional games in it’s series before it, and require me to put a lot of time in return for me realising that I have definitely improved myself along the way.
If Capcom wanted to capture a wider audience and attract a new crowd to the genre, then I’d much rather they make some sort of fun party game type beat em up (like Mario Kart is to racing games), heck “Street Fighter Kids” or something. Give them a balanced and fun to play game in the fighting game genre that just doesn’t require an extensive amount of time to learn. Then if these players enjoy that, they can then move on to Capcom’s other games (it’d sort of be like going up in difficulty like you would in Guitar Hero or something).
Alternatively! and this would be my preference here.
Keep making these amazingly deep, satisfying to master games. Just make sure that you deliver an in-depth training mode, yet make it interesting and fun for them to sit through it.
A lot of great fighting games, in fact a lot of the best (imo) fighting games do very little in regards to teaching you the game. For me, guides in game magazines, or better yet; internet forums. Those have been quite vital for me to become good at the games I’ve wanted to be better at.
Another option would be to do what Super Mario Galaxy 2 has done in Japan/ Europe… Include an optional tutorial DVD with the game. Mario Galaxy 2′s training DVD is provided to help people who have never played a 3D Mario game before, it also teaches them all of Mario’s available moves, and eventually builds its way up to advanced creative tricks that even some veterans might not have even thought of trying.
DVD guides like that are pretty much irrelevant to veterans of a series [MEGA64: Video parodying the Mario DVD], but I can certainly see how they would be beneficial to new players, and helps ensure they’re not so alienated by the hardcore player.
If you didn’t know, the weekend just gone saw one of the biggest events of the year take place.
No, I’m not talking about the World Cup (kudos to Spain on that). I’m talking about the Evolution Championship Series or “Evo” as it’s more commonly referred to as.
Evo is the world’s biggest yearly tournament on the fighting games calendar, where every year players from around the world gather together to show there skills at some of the greatest fighting games of our time.
Tidbits:
Held in Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas
This year players from over 30 countries gathered.
There were 7 brutal knock out tournaments covering 6 games (Super Street Fighter IV, SSFIITHDRemix, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, Tekken 6, Blazblue, Melty Blood Actress Again).
Thousands of people entered, Prize money was it’s biggest yet.
Capcom showcased a mini invitational tournament for the current build of Marvel vs Capcom 3, as well as allowing the public to play it.
People from Capcom and Namco where at the show to watch the finals and tease people on upcoming projects, as well as MarkMan23, a dedicated beat-em-up fan from MadCatz who’s brought the fighting game community some great products.
Being located in the U.K meant I was 8 hours behind Vegas time, and meant I had to sacrifice any decent sleeping pattern in order to follow the live streams over the weekend of the event. This was the first time I’ve followed “EVO” live during it’s weekend, usually I would catch the highlights and matches on the internet the weeks after. However I believe this has been the best year yet in terms of production value in it’s coverage. Thanks to the guys at Level Up Series, as well as the great commentary thanks to people from SRK, Seth Killian from Capcom, and various other knowledgeable people from the heart of the fighting game community).
It definitely has the potential to be an amazing weekend of professional gaming worthy of full TV coverage if you ask me. Unfortunately there just never seems to be enough video gaming coverage on TV these days, although Evo 2010 did get some time under the limelight as the American cable network G4TV are doing a short feature on the event.
As I’m very much fond of Capcom and the Street Fighter series, I do a lot of reading within the message boards of the fighting game community and I’ve read a number of great write ups from people who attended the event regarding their impressions of it. So with all the great things I’ve heard and seen I am now very enthusiastic about attending my first ever EVO (as well as my first ever trip to Vegas) in the summer of 2011.
Street Fighter II HD Remix Finals: DGV (Ryu) vs (Zangief) Snake Eyes
Super Street Fighter IV Men’s Finals – Daigo Umehara (Ryu) – (Rufus) Ricky Ortiz
I also personally got a reply by tweet from Yoshinori Ono (Producer at Capcom for Super Street Fighter IV) regarding a possible Nintendo vs Capcom cross over game.
I like how he smiled. Now excuse me whilst I find how to contact Masahiro Sakurai at Nintendo on getting this project started.
Firstly, it CAN’T RROD. This isn’t to say it can’t break, it’s just Microsoft have removed the RED L.E.D’s inside the console. Meaning you won’t be greeted with that legendary visual indication of your 360 having died with the new version console.
[source: GameTrailers]
In an effort to keep the new 360 slim from meeting an untimely end, Microsoft have implemented a temperature fail safe shut down for the console. Meaning if the console detects it’s getting too hot it will shut down.
[source: Play.tm]
Microsoft have now listed a price for “Kinect”. According to the official Microsoft store Kinect will set you back $149.99 [USD]. This translates today at roughly £101 (or €122). However, things rarely ever simply translate costs that way overseas, and with import taxes and such I can see Microsoft marking that up somewhat to approximately £119.99 when it’s released in the UK.
[Source: Microsoft]
You will also need to make sure you give at least 6 feet of free room between Kinect and yourself to make use of the device (for games at least) as on that item page it states:
An event where Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all gave reasons as to why we should own and have money ready for their consoles over the next year. Also an event packed with some cringe-worthy and time consuming presentations on motion controls or hardware that can only really be done promotion justice with actually hands-on playing of said devices (i.e. Microsoft’s Kinect, or Nintendo’s 3DS).
I wouldn’t say there was an outright winner of E3, although I do feel Microsoft were the weakest this year…
I say Microsoft’s was weakest mainly due to the fact they were a bit TOO extensive and cheesy with the Kinect demo’s, plus it’s hard to judge quite how well the device works from there presentations, obviously Microsoft will feed us the idea that it works amazing, and we all should buy it, but things of this nature are never quite as good as they lead us to believe. Still, Kinect differs itself from the Wii and PS3′s take on motion controls, and the minority report style menu navigation is cool, so it has potential.
I did like the idea of the ESPN service shown, although I’m doubtful on if that will actually be released in Europe.
The new 360 slim looks nice for those who may want to update, with it’s (finally) in-built wi-fi support, 250gb Hard Drive, and better connectivity for Kinect (due it requiring extra leads on the older 360′s).
Although they showed off some good games, they spent the most time focusing on COD: Black Ops, Halo Reach, and Gears of War 3 in. As promising as they all look, it was a bit crowded in terms of shooters if you ask me.
I also feel like they should have highlighted XBLA. The MS presentation basically ignored XBLA (although it did have some showings on the show floor at least). I do feel as though this years Summer of Arcade line up is a bit weaker than the previous years, however it still has a chance of being good, and I’m quite certain Xbox live arcade is a nice money maker for Microsoft. I just think it would’ve been a nice refreshing thing to add in between the other game announcements for them to cover the success of XBLA in the past year, the upcoming Summer of Arcade, Game Room, and what else is on it’s way…
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Sony didn’t have a problem with game range. Gran Turismo 5, Little Big Planet 2, Agent, Twisted Metal, Infamous 2, Killzone 3…to name a few, as well as a better Dead Space 2 bundle, and a surprise announcement of Portal 2 getting the better version and potentially some sort of Steam support on PS3.
PlayStation Move got it’s fair share of coverage, and although it is pretty much just PlayStation trying to get a piece of the Wii market, so the concept isn’t too exciting, although they do have the advantage of having a much more powerful system, so when it comes to games such as Tiger Woods 2011…then providing the controls are equally on par (no pun intended), Sony would especially win if a purchase decision should come down to a visual comparison.
Sony were also bold enough to admit the PSP hasn’t been as strong as they’d have liked, although they’re still fighting with it, announcing a lot of support was still incoming for the console, mainly a new PSP God of War.
Still, Sony didn’t seem to rely on Move to ‘wow’ people as much as Microsoft did with Kinect, so with Sony’s strong showing of games they had a good E3 presentation.
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Nintendo showed off there new Zelda, which looks very promising (although the live presentation was ruined due to the show lighting interfering with the Wii sensor bar). Donkey Kong Country 4, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn look to be some amazing 2d style platformers. A new Wii exclusive “Goldeneye” is an exciting prospect, although whether it amounts to be a worthy successor or just another name hogging mediocre-fest like Goldeneye: Rogue Agent we shall see.
The highlight of Nintendo’s show (as well as one of the highlights of E3 overall) had to be the unveiling of the new Nintendo 3DS though. It’s always exciting when a company has a new console to show, and this was no different.
Some key 3DS features:
The 3DS graphical capabilities look to be at least on par with Nintendo Gamecube, plus on a small screen it’d look great.
Top screen is wide screen, and the 3D effects have a slider to control how great the 3D is.
Analogue Control, as well as in-built motion sensors.
Many big 3rd party companies are already at work on 3Ds games, a new Metal Gear Solid and a Resident Evil are just the start.
Much better wi-fi support, seems to be hinting at Nintendo offering something as good as XBOX live connectivity between users.
The ability to watch 3D movies, “glasses free”.
Has 2 camera’s on the outside allowing people to take 3D pictures. Those whom have used this function at E3 said it was a very cool feature, and who knows…if ‘glasses free’ 3D picture frames are made, the Nintendo DS could perhaps pioneer the 3D camera movement.
Nintendo says it’s battery life should be the same as that found on the DSi.
Cart’s are supposed to average at about 2gig in size (where as the regular DS only went upto 256mb I believe).
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That’s it for this round up.
Round 2 will consist of some of the cool games and announcements from the many game developers/ publishers out there.
Although with High Score, it is mainly focused on 1 regular small town guy, and his quest to beat the score. In place of any personal drama within people is substituted with the drama of being able to secure a working “Missile Command”. The film is very well presented though, and gives you a very open and personal look into Bill Carlton’s life, as well as his drive to achieve this goal. It’s also a good general documentary about people that strive for high scores and the sacrifices they make, plus it gives a nice contrast of the video game cultures of now and then.
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Firstly, it CAN’T RROD. This isn’t to say it can’t break, it’s just Microsoft have removed the RED L.E.D’s inside the console. Meaning you won’t be greeted with that legendary visual indication of your 360 having died with the new version console.
The new 360 slim looks nice for those who may want to update, with it’s (finally) in-built wi-fi support, 250gb Hard Drive, and better connectivity for Kinect (due it requiring extra leads on the older 360′s).
