That is surprising. Don’t expect this game to run well on Switch 1, lol.

Yeah, can’t argue with that. But I wouldn’t really mind which direction the solution came from.

At the same time though, I wish we could retain old versions, like how Ultra Street Fighter IV did. I know doing so is harder, but you can lose a thing you enjoy to a new version of the game that you don’t. I didn’t like Strive season 2, but fortunately, I liked every other season. I feel like Strive is in a really good place right now, and I’m nervous about this 2.0 update they’re talking about. If it’s a major update to the software and not the gameplay, then hell yeah, I’m on board, but I’m nervous that it could be another season 2.

That’s why SF6 has freak fights, MK has challenge towers and king of the hill, DBFZ has weird random modes on rotation, etc.

Even that is tricky though, because now you have to program the computer player to take bait. A computer Guile that can tell when you’re blocking and when you’re not could be just about unbeatable, and a human player can’t tell that, so they have to guess. In any case, I think the genre’s single player modes are lacking because we’ve only been taking them seriously for about 15 years. NetherRealm does what they do well, but they could still stand to do a better job of diagetically teaching you through the story mode like you’re saying. SF6 has its RPG mode, which I think is a better idea on paper than it is in how they executed it. RGG is talking a big game about the single player offering in the new Virtua Fighter, and I believe they’ll probably do a great job at it, because if you fork the code for Yakuza, you’re most of the way to a single player Virtua Fighter already; just make the plot something like Blood Sport.

You phrased it as “the newer generation of AI”, so it was unclear what you meant, but it seemingly referred to the AI we hear about all too often these days in the news. I do think there’s more room to get closer to approximating a human opponent in fighting games, and I know how I’d attempt to tackle it at a high level, but it must be harder than I think it is, or it would have been done by now; one potential pitfall would be having to update it every time you put out a balance patch, because that would affect how the computer player would have to behave.

Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they’d be pretty phoned in.

Yeah, it’s an article that makes you think it cites its sources and did its homework, but it doesn’t even examine why SF2’s success is so high, like that arcade revenue in the 90s is basically a cheat code compared to selling copies of console games, or that SF2 had a number of versions across that entire decade that all factor into that several billion dollars it earned. What the article refers to as “the dark ages” is actually a different era than what most would assign to the moniker to, misnomer though it might be. And it also states things as facts that aren’t; not just your Guilty Gear example but that somehow SF6 is the most homogenized SF game somehow. This feels like the author is just salty that they don’t care for the last few years’ offerings personally.

Guilty Gear is now a multi-million seller when every previous game didn’t even crack a tenth of that. Yes, what they did to Guilty Gear demonstrably worked. Tekken and Dragon Ball FighterZ are both huge. If I were a betting man, I’d say Marvel Tokon will do about as well as any of the other most successful fighting games out there.

I don’t want to be mean, but your best summary didn’t capture the counter system or the multi tiered stages. DOA rules as a fighting game.

I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.

I have, and the last Mortal Kombat that had a problem with infinite combos was 15 years ago. There’s also a structure to MK combos that reduces your need to memorize anything.

That’s neither here nor there, and it’s not much of a problem in the genre either.

It’s got to serve both masters. It should be fun when you don’t know what you’re doing, that person should always lose to someone who does know what they’re doing, and becoming the person who knows what they’re doing should be fun, too. When you don’t know what you’re doing in DOA, you’re still kicking people off rooftops and down the steps of the Great Wall of China.

It was a Sony show. They barely mentioned PC. There’s no listing for Volume 2 on the eShop, and to set your expectations accordingly, I would only expect this game to run on the Switch 2, not the Switch 1.

Not impossible but a colossal pain in the ass such that no one ever thought they’d dip into their pocketbook to fund the work.

It’s a handful of podcasts, and spoilers abound during GOTY in December.

I want to play it, but they made me wait past spoiler season, so I won’t be paying full price for it anymore.

The juice may not be worth the squeeze there, but there might be money in buying the IPs for pennies on the dollar and releasing dead games as self hostable with bots to fill out a match.

Not in multiplayer, at least. LAN was deliberately patched out, and we know from Alanah Pearce’s channel that this game in particular could have LAN back extremely easily if they wanted it.

And Peak was made in under a year.

This is by far the best use of a rabbid to date.

Skullgirls is very much still alive. I play it every week, and there are people still holding beginner brackets and such.

Not to try to dissuade you from your stance, because as an American who could not be more divorced from knowing anything about soccer, I only learned about Ronaldo when he was announced as a character for Fatal Fury; but a guy who can do mixups with a soccer ball is among the more interesting character designs in that game. Shame who it had to be attached to, but it wasn’t nothing.

But doesn’t it speak volumes about the genre of the eighth best selling game of 2023 can’t support three years of service (as in meaningful content updates)?

Oh, they could have, but this is NetherRealm Studios. This is the first time they went 4 years between fighting games. Ordinarily, they’re on a two-year cadence, and each game sells multiple millions of copies. Which do you think makes more money? Selling a game at $60-$70, or selling DLC to people who already bought an old game? The experiment they tried this past game was the big cinematic expansion, because it was successful for MK11, but they were going to do a series of episodes for MK1 that basically meant the story was never-ending; and they replaced the Krypt mode with Invasions, which was also intended to be never-ending. Neither of those things took off, and this big cinematic expansion also cost $50. Their average customer was not thrilled about Kameos, so it makes far more sense for them to just put out the next Injustice game, as long as their parent company can keep from collapsing long enough that DC superheroes are still intellectual property that this studio is allowed to use.

While there weren’t any Fatal Fury entries, the characters did have presence over the years via King of Fighters, and Mai and Terry were even in SF6.

King of Fighters games are not multimillion sellers. People being vaguely aware of Mai and Terry does a bit of help, but brand recognition takes longer than that. Fatal Fury didn’t get enough production value out of its development budget to do anything like SF6’s world tour mode, or NRS’s story modes, that would bring in the less sweaty players. Instead, it just got Saudi money thrown into marketing a game that was never going to make that money back.

SF6, arguably the biggest game in the genre, is currently in 60th place in the steam 24 hour charts. You might argue consoles have a higher share for the genre than games you find on steam, but still, that’s not totally mainstream.

No, in fact, that’s an old way of thinking. Since the pandemic, there have been a few ways where we’ve been able to measure the share of players on each platform in certain fighting games, and PC is the biggest one every time; I’m sure there are outliers, but PC is the largest platform whether we’re talking about fighting games or not. 60th place on Steam’s charts is phenomenal and not at all niche! There are so many games on Steam being played by about 140M people per month. Only being beaten by 59 of them is incredibly successful.

Except for Fatal Fury, which is a revival of a series that people haven’t heard of in decades, all of those games are tremendously successful and could not be counted as niche anymore. MK1 did poorly by Mortal Kombat standards, which still made it the eighth best-selling game of 2023. DBFZ sold over 10 million copies. The genre is not the problem; not even being a tag fighter is the problem. This game just didn’t take off, and free-to-play games need volume. If anything, the genre is in a gold rush, and there’s still more money to be made, but you’ll have to charge for it up front.

It released. They’ve been juicing fighting game tournaments, and somehow the game made its way to NorthernLion, so I don’t know if that was their marketing or not. I don’t know what they did differently here than marketing for something like Valorant, but I only really saw ads for Valorant around the time that it came to consoles, which 2XKO has now done.

Yeah, it’s not the worst deal in the world for them, but it does show how the game definitely didn’t take off like a free to play game needs to to survive.

If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don’t trust that for a minute.

By all means, challenge your government, but I’m not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.

Thanks. I’ll have to give it a trial run at some point soon.

For me, I think the thing that keeps Bluesky usable is that I can use it as a straight linear feed without an algorithm. It’s not truly federated, but the thing I’m always thinking about is that gag in South Park where they burn down the local Walmart and accidentally turn Joe’s Drugs into the new Walmart. Bluesky is safe from that as long as I’ve got the algorithm-less feed. Plus, Mastodon still works, always will, and I still use that too. Even if Discord users migrate to some other closed platform, it gives open alternatives more time to catch up to the most important features before that new platform takes a turn, too.

Migrations like this happen when the other thing sucks. Linux usage even on Steam has tripled in the past four years, and these days if I’m not coming across a PewDiePie or Linus Tech Tips video about switching to Linux, I’m hearing my least tech savvy friends come to me to say I was right for the past 9 years and that their next PC is going to run Linux, if not a Steam Machine. People switch to Bluesky or Mastodon when Twitter becomes all bots due to incentives that Musk put in place, or when his company-sanctioned AI generates CSAM. People will switch off of Discord when enough is enough, and requiring ID uploads to a database that will certainly be hacked one day could be it.

Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.

That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.

That’s cap.

I can convince my friends to try lots of things if I take care of the hard parts. Discord’s changes are not going over well in our server, so we’re looking for the parachutes. I understand it depends, but would you say it works well enough? Or is there even some other hack we can run where I’ve got OBS open in another window sending a stream out to something that isn’t Twitch, like our own video clients? If that’s easy enough to do, I could even convince my friends to do that.

How well does Matrix / Element work for screen sharing games?

How does it handle game windows? Presumably TeamSpeak cares more about such a use case, but I have to ask. How well does P2P screen sharing work for a group of about 10 people?

I’d like to see a 2026 release date for Marvel Tokon, even though there’s a very real possibility that PSN screws with Linux compatibility on PC.

Intergalactic isn’t due out for at least a year still, so we might see it, but we might not. Behind the scenes, there’s also that new sci-fi project from Sony Santa Monica that Cory Barlog has been working on, plus a Greek God of War 2.5D metroidvania from another studio. A release date for Wolverine is pretty likely, and we’ll probably see more of Saros, given how imminent its release is.

From third parties, aside from just seeing brand new announcements for games we didn’t know we wanted, which is always exciting, it would be nice to get release dates for the likes of Mina the Hollower and Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement.

Not anymore, but I doubt a graphic like the one they used would have cost a pretty penny.