Oh No It's Blaugust

 No promises this year.

I've read a lot of Robin Hobb.

Maybe I'll just finish editing and start uploading the twelve episodes of a podcast I've taped so far instead.

Go play Mars Matrix.

The 2021 Pichy And Pals Computer Game Awards!

  

 2020 was a strangely kind year for me. 2020-2 (known to some as 2021) was the establishment of a new normal. Two whole years is the longest I have ever gone with stable employment, a consistent schedule and no immediate threats to income or relationships. As we enter 2020: Lightning Returns (known to some as 2022; not to be confused with 2020-2) I'm now teetering on the edge of a question: "Is this how my life is going to be for the next decade?"

If so, anything I write about games will be rather dull. Work and work-related routines take up 12 out of my 24 hours each day. Dealing with a group of miserable alcoholic men who in some cases have disturbing pro-apartheid views they love to express each day takes a ton of extra mental energy on top of my required tasks. By the time I'm home and done with the actions needed to stay alive I have the time to play a couple of credits in an arcade game then try to sleep. Maybe stream a galge if I really build up a head of steam beforehand.

 So with all that moping done, let's celebrate the extremely strange year for computer game releases that we just lived through.

 

Antisocial Networks: Fighting Game Lobbies And Isolation

"The scrolling shooter wasn't murdered. It was squeezed out of a market by fighting games' greater revenue potential. Why spend your money only to explode on a shooter's second stage when a single coin can carry you for hours so long as you keep winning fights? After all, you're the only Guile in your area who's worked out the double stun off jabs. It's not like anyone's going to know how to air throw you while standing..." - Some Clever Cat, 8/8/21

 The "King of the Hill" approach fighting games used to draw big money wasn't the sole reason they dominated the arcades. The arcade is a place of spectacle. If a machine blows feathers around with every turkey shot or flashes bright colourful lights with every beat of a 280bpm Speedcore dance track or provides gigantic buttons that make a satisfying clack with every tap it's trying to catch your attention. High quality, high stakes, risky play also attracts crowds. A single player stepping up to a challenge is exciting but it can become a stale story. Real people forming real rivalries over their play, only for newcomers to completely overturn the local balance of power with a single coin? That's a live soap opera performed for you live every time you walk into the venue.

With a single coin a player could become a character in a local scene's story. With enough skill,a main character. With a bit less and they're the pitiable fodder for a powerful villain. If they're a large enough jerk, they can be the bully a local hero thwarts on their way to the top. Even hanging around the machines in between sets is a role: that of the excited audience. The astonished commentator. Columns on fighting games can easily tell the tale of players as becoming Ryu or Son Goku but those who become the Krillins or Piccolos are as much a part of the tale.

The arcade was not solely the domain of fighting games; players can be as much or as little in the story as they desire. In between intense bouts of action a coin can always go into a shooter. A brawler. A weird challenge game like Bishi Bashi or Numan Athletics. Why not build up some cardio in a set of Dance Dance Revolution? Nor does a coin even need to be spent. If other players are also waiting for shots at a cab, why not talk to them? By standing near a machine, eyeing it off you've already established common ground to start speaking from.

Fighting games were created for and developed in powerfully social spaces. Even as regions are approaching decades away from their arcade birthplace, the broader fandom is still known as the FGC. The Fighting Game Community. Do we talk about the fans of Super Mario Bros. or Sonic The Hedgehog or even juggernauts like Counterstrike: Global Offensive or DotA 2 the same way? Those are fandoms first and communities second.

All this carries over in a post-arcade setting as well. Local offline meetups for fighting games have long outlasted the turn of the century LAN Party. Regional or National major open tournaments are practically conventions for fighting games. Over half the entrants will leave the tournament with zero competition wins so they need reasons to attend anyway. Creating art, contributing to broadcasts, meeting new players and learning new matchups are all incentives to attend. The tournament structure and big closing matches provide easy starting topics for conversation over more private meals shared together. I'm exhausted at the end of every month's Cheese League but after a 10pm round of Pepper Lunch with fellow organisers and the odd remaining attendee I know I can never stop this.

And then there's the worst part of modern fighting games. It's not the programming that all too often can't handle online latency properly. It's the entire matchmaking and lobby structure. It saps my will to ever play one of these games again.

I need to take a step back here. Many online computer games are built around degrees of transience to your time with other players. Gigantic PRESS X TO PLAY messages begin automated matchmaking. Currently popular games like Fall Guys, Fortnite and even most modern first person shooters drop a player into a pile of assorted others, algorithmically determined to have a similar skill level. Varying quantities of in-game emotes allow a quick greeting, a thankful message to the bus driver and maybe a laugh at a mishap or a dance to taunt a defeated opponent. For people who have experienced multiplayer computer games this way all their life, it's fine I suppose. I even enjoy slapping a few surprised Feylyne emoji when I play Monster Hunter myself.

Now think about this sort of experience when applied to a fighting game. Now reduce the player base a few thousand-fold. You are placed in a room of eight other players. The keyboard is too far away to reach with your arcade stick in the way. Console microphone support is still terrible to the point that using your voice is an identifiable category of Guy. Maybe you can kick a soccer ball around. After waiting for the previous match you couldn't spectate while your joining the room to end, you finally play a match.

You lose the match. Back of the line.

Like I mentioned before, at a local meetup or an arcade you can do other things in this time. You can talk to people, play a different game or even grab some food. If you do these things in an online fighting game lobby, you might miss your chance to accept your next match. There's nobody to talk to meaningfully in the default systems. Sure you can use third party communication tools but that won't make you new friends through the process of playing in the lobby. All you have is a barebones menu system, a few emotes to play, a match to watch and your own thoughts to stew in.

Those thoughts are thinking about the loss that put you here. If it's only three players in the lobby you'll be stewing for three minutes. If it's eight, that's closer to twenty. Twenty minutes of processing the stages of grief as you lost. You lose your next match? That's another twenty, restarting the process all over. It's frustrating. It's tiring. It's miserable.

It's all the worst emotional aspects of fighting games with none of the positives.

I haven't written this to demand structural change to fighting game lobbies. There's certainly steps that can be taken to have the things be faster, more social or more uplifting. That doesn't resolve any of the current games with current forms of lobbies. Nor does it change my feelings about them.

I've been playing, competing and talking about fighting games for a long, long time. Yet I've felt a distance from a lot of the current scene for a few years. It's partly me aging, my priorities shifting. It's also because I just can't do the random matchmaking and large lobbies. The time:learning ratio is just not worthwhile when I have so much else going on in my life. To me, the online lobby isn't about community.

It's about atomisation.

Off The Cuff Thoughts On Rebuild Of Evangelion 4

 For reasons that'll be clear if you listen I decided to voice my initial thoughts on the movie with my voice. Listen here!

CW For Tomorrow's Post

 Buckle up fuckos; it's time for some game theory.

In Which I Complain About Gloomhaven

Demon's Souls and Dark souls are two of my favourite games of the last ten-ish years of computer game releases. You trudge through a miserable husk of a world ravaged by monsters allowed to run amok after years of systemic abuse by the monarchies who claim to be in charge. Levels are often designed with devious traps (both terrain and often very funny enemy placements) and an oppressive tone no matter if the architecture is Medieval or Gothic styled. Almost every one of the scant humans willing to talk to you are grifters, liars or extremists. All punctuate their often cryptic conversations with unsettling laughs. Whether you're playing as a pragmatic ranged archer/spellcaster, a damage tanking warrior wielding a heavy weapon or abusing the invulnerability frames on a lightweight roll, there's plenty of room to find your own voice in the combat.

I've been in a game of Gloomhaven for a few months now. It's a grid-based tabletop RPG with a map that slowly fills with information as you complete combat instances. There's a miserable tone to all the flavour text and a sense that you're trying to make as many material gains in the fight as you can before you're out of your scant resources. I'm sure to plenty of people who enjoy From Software's various Souls games, Bloodborne and so on there's a lot to love in both games and they take to Gloomhaven with ease.

I do not care for Gloomhaven.

Running Out of Event Commitments

 Well, that's both Australian Speedrun Marathon 2021 and Shmup Slam 4 behind me. What's next for hot Gaming News from ol' Pichy?

Well for a start we have dates booked to run a national fighting game event in October. Sadly, the world has still ended so we're probably just going to run a bigger local tournament. This does give me two full days to propose whatever nonsense fighting games or weird versus games I feel like. Study up on your Dark Awake. Learn a shmup and show it off while there?

There's also an online exhibition during the period that was supposed to be the PAX Australia convention in Melbourne. Currently my list of speedruns I can demonstrate are:

 - Mr. Driller: Drill Land All Level 1 (get that runback!)

 - Fantasy Zone (Regular, Master System Bosses)
 - Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Maxim Any%, Maxim All Bosses. Latter is cursed.)

 - Shippu Mahou Daisakusen/Kingdrom Grand Prix.

Current works in progress include:

 - Metal Slug 7 (stages 5-7 are very tight routes to get what you need done)

 - ESP.Ra.De (Stage 4, man. Stage 4.)

- Fantasy Zone 2 DX

So Fantasy Zone 2 DX is a full remake of Fantasy Zone 2 for a modified build of the first game's Sega System 16 arcade board. It was developed by M2 while they were working on a PS2 collection of everything Fantasy Zone related and is the feature piece of that bundle. It's a radical reworking of FZ2's systems as it's intended to feel like the full arcade sequel Opa Opa never had.

The original Master System/Sega MkIII Fantasy Zone 2 has all the flourishes you expect from a console STG. Life bar instead of health, recovery items, three variations of every stage that must all be completed if you want the best ending. In comparison, the M2 reimagining is shorter, harsher and extremely cool. I'm still in the early stages of research and routing but it's going to be wild. There's risk/reward routes, secret item shops and a wider range of permanent upgrades that may make suicides less worthwhile than they are in the first game's boss rush.

I'm not sure how long it's going to take but I'm glad to say I finally have a new method of capturing the footage. My Open Source Scan Converter arrived.

Thesebeauties (what are you doing to my formatting, OSSC photo?) provide a lagless means of adapting analogue videos ignals to modern HD displays with far better scanline and dithering options than most HD ports of old games. They're pricey but the impact's been large so far. Take one of the roughest HD ports of a Cave game: the Muchi Muchi Pork and Pink Sweets bundle.

 

Terrible as my photography may be, I think you can see there's a difference. The photo on the left with the smeared sprites and washed-out colours is actually the HDMI 1280 x 720 feed. The right is a 480p output using a component cable.

Since my rotating monitor is a picky old jerk, capturing all those 3:4 vertical shooters I love was a bit of a pest. I have to output using a DVI signal which means the OSSC can't transmit audio through the HDMI cable. I've got some jerry-rigged solutions for that so I'll be able to capture everything from Fantasy Zone 2 DX through to ESPGaluda.

We can of course merge the feed with my stream layout from June to create works of beauty.

 

 

Buckle up, gamers.