13 Remarks About PR I've Written This Thursday

1. If you aren't actually the Public Relations representative for a company, please don't claim you are.

2. If you are actually the PR rep, keep in mind that people will remember and talk about one bad experience more than ten good ones.

3. If you're not the PR rep but want to raise lots of noise at a grassroots level, remember that you are still representing the company.

4. If representing an organisation, product, company etc, everything you do in public view represents them.

5. If you don't have a stranglehold on internal information, everything you do in private also represents them.

6. You do not have a stranglehold on internal information.

7. We all make mistakes. Learn to be humble and accept feedback.

8. Treat consumers with respect. Your job is to be the shining beacon of light for the organisation you're paid to represent/have volunteered to represent.

9. If you respect consumers, you won't go leaping into their conversations about your product that haven't solicited you.

10. If there's some genuinely incorrect information being spread in a conversation, correct them in as gentle a manner as possible. People hate being told they're wrong, so correction needs to be about building a bridge, not a demolition project.

11. If you're representing a niche product within a niche community within a niche genre (like, say, an airdash fighting game with extremely long combos, large loading times and no netplay), don't expect to have an explosion in popularity overnight. Or over a year. You're playing a numbers game that requires a large amount of patience to find the audience at all, let alone draw them in.

12. No, your catchphrase is neither amusing nor endearing.

13. Never tweet.

On The Title Screen

As graphical and storage technologies have improved, it has become inevitable that the medium of videogames has gained a variety of conventions from film and television. Heavily scripted events allow for photographic techniques without fear of a player straying away from where the camera wants you to be. Visual filters can be crafted to give the illusion that a game is being recorded to 35mm film or recorded with a cheap digital camera. Games such as Dragon's Lair essentially take player input and decide which film to play. Cutscenes with no interaction themselves outright transform a videogame into simply being a digitally produced film. It would be easy to assume that the videogame title screen exists as a borrowed convention from film titles or opening credits. Let's take a quick look at  the two media's approaches and reasons for having them.

Oh Alright; Here's My Week 1 Rising Thunder Thoughts

Rising Thunder is a free to play 2D fighting game currently undergoing an open alpha test on PC. It is designed by Seth Killian, Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon. The latter two are the creators of the GGPO library, a toolset for rollback-based netcode. They're also key staff in the organisation of the Evolution (EVO) fighting game tournament. Seth Killian is also a long-time Capcom Fighters community member, as well as one of the lead designers for Vanilla Street Fighter 4. I've hit Gold rank in the alpha and figure I'll put some thoughts down about the game before I either run screaming or hurtle further into the vortex.

I can summarise the game for you in a single image. Here it is.

If you already have an opinion on the above title, you do not need to read further. However you feel about that game, you will feel about Rising Thunder. The game accentuates just about everything that defines the game before Ultra's release.

What is Fun?

"Fun" is a three letter word that I have seen create contention in all sorts of discussion. Particularly discussion of games, both tabletop and digital. What is fun? According to a running gag on the videogames section of a certain imageboard, "fun is a buzzword for when you can't actually think of any reasons why a game is good." If you talk about utilising all the tools in a competitive game available to win, someone may say that you're prioritising victory over fun. There's a saying that any game is fun with friends. Are these accurate statements? Can we quantify this fun? I want to unpack this word in relation to games.

"I Want to Play Fighting Games on the PC. What's there to play?"

This question pops up everywhere. Facebook groups, conversations at local nerd gatherings and even while I got my hair cut once. Let's run through this based on your needs.

Guilty Gear's Buttons: Here's the Rundown

Guilty Gear is one of those rare fighting games that uses 5 buttons by default. Naturally, this often leads to newcomers being thoroughly confused as to how they should configure their buttons or have difficulty grasping the traditional default layout. To help you work this all out, let's have a talk about what each button actually does in the game. If you're feeling uncomfortable when playing, hopefully this will ease some of that.

Rise of Incarnates is in Open Beta Now.

Remember when I talked about it? Bamco's attempt at bringing Gundam vs Gundam to the West? Remember how I said it had none of the things that actually make that series satisfying to play?

Well, at the end of the last alpha it brought in a pile of things from the Extreme Vs games. Things like super meter to gain refills. You can even cancel an attack into a secondary attack!

You know what you can't do though? Dash cancel projectiles.

You know what is the entire crux of what makes Gundam vs a thrilling footsie game conducive to high latency environments and a wonderful teamwork game? Dash cancelling projectiles.

Every addition so far has been a superficial improvement. The sort of thing that appears to provide extra depth but ultimately doesn't because the fundamental core of the game isn't in the game. To cap it off, Bamco gave us this wonderful message when announcing the date for the open beta:


"Faster gameplay and shorter hit stuns
This aspect has evolved the most since the Beta. Numerous testers brought up slow gameplay speed as a major issue, and we admit that we watered things down because we were cautious about introducing an entirely new style of gameplay. We were proved otherwise. So you can look forward to some very fast, intense gameplay!"

In other words "we thought that releasing a game on the same platform as Quake 3 wouldn't have an audience that could grasp a game about space control and goading people into overextending so they can get hit."

And then they left the pace of the game the exact same as the last alpha anyway.

Please, do not play Rise of Incarnates. Play some Push instead.