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hey if you didnt know Street Fighter III at EVO went crazy this year

sfiii has never been this cunty before and its all thanks to one 41 year old man playing hugo. not only is he serving crazy on stage he also did what i can only describe as the follow up to EVO Moment 37

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Battleaces is a whole lot of fun, it's a MOBA, it's an RTS. It's fast and explosive and deep and amazing

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i love fighting games

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On this 2024/01/25 I figured I should take a moment and articulate my thoughts and feelings coming into Tekken 8 later tonight. I can see a world in which Tekken 8, despite doing it all right, repeats history like T4. But to start with the optimism. The arcades look wonderful, I had so much fun trying it in the Demo, and I look forwards to seeing if the game manages to help players come from button mashing-> thinking about their neutral -> using all 3 dimensions available. Or at least more use of the plane. -> More player choice here. But ultimately the game still needs to teach combos and frame traps and setups to their players. But these... Are complex concepts to understand, or are mechanically demanding tasks that require practice and development. In this regard the training arena at least looks incredibly promising. Learning how you lost in Tekken 8, and what might have been possible combined with their replay system revamp. I saw what this did in Starcraft 2, and short of being able to recontrol the game with 2 players, it is incredibly similar. The game of course, looks and feels amazing, smooth fluid Tekken gameplay all the way down, but of course this is the part of the game that BNE has established in the early 00's. But this is where I get into my fears. Heat and chip. Playing some of the demo, and to clarify I do not mean the crack (my raven ass has been playing Kazuya I can show the ghost.) Heat is amazing. It has minor elements of bursts re guilty gear, but they remind me more of reversal guards from Soul calibur 6 after some time recently replaying that. And in that comparison really does draw some alarm, especially considering they were not that well received there either. However my fear is not with the heat engagement so much, I think heat will prove to be much more invaluable in combos. I know in the CBT with Raven using 3+2 to get an extra tornado inbetween something akin to fF3 fF4 tornado and a 41bt4 or b242 can lead to insane wall carry and damage. With Kazuya changing my combo from df3 df1DF2 and adding in heat burst to fF2f allowed me to still throw in whichever ender I wanted. This meant that a launch near half could result in a death between the added damage, wall carry and potential wall combo/oki. This combined with the impact of chip are my two main concenrs. As it stands there are 3 major chip categories I have seen from my play and the community. First is the non-existant impact. A game where the chip damage never matters, it plays out with little impact because either 50/50's are hitting, the recoverable health is not being capitalized on, or your landing mostly clean hits instead of combos or counters and it has little impact. Secondly while I did not play the CNT, the utility of oppressive moves, with crazy on hit 50/50's with lots of chip made their MU's incredibly difficult and forced more movement. While I like Tekken because of it's movement, these matchups were toxic in their forcing your hand to fear a tactic that already gave you disadvantage. However the interest in chip has hit, there have been games I have had where we both get low, with recoverable health, and the battle becomes much tighter because of it. But I feel like this is more of an issue with casual Tekken anyways. Where players do not want to do slow things because they are less flashy. I think Tekken 8 has the promise to really help players who want to learn and ge elbow deep into the meat of Tekken do this. I think the fear however is that getting elbow deep into Tekken is a death knell for the game that requires it.

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when gamers say "gg" at the end of a match it means good girl

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On this 2024/01/25 I figured I should take a moment and articulate my thoughts and feelings coming into Tekken 8 later tonight. I can see a world in which Tekken 8, despite doing it all right, repeats history like T4. But to start with the optimism. The arcades look wonderful, I had so much fun trying it in the Demo, and I look forwards to seeing if the game manages to help players come from button mashing-> thinking about their neutral -> using all 3 dimensions available. Or at least more use of the plane. -> More player choice here. But ultimately the game still needs to teach combos and frame traps and setups to their players. But these... Are complex concepts to understand, or are mechanically demanding tasks that require practice and development. In this regard the training arena at least looks incredibly promising. Learning how you lost in Tekken 8, and what might have been possible combined with their replay system revamp. I saw what this did in Starcraft 2, and short of being able to recontrol the game with 2 players, it is incredibly similar. The game of course, looks and feels amazing, smooth fluid Tekken gameplay all the way down, but of course this is the part of the game that BNE has established in the early 00's. But this is where I get into my fears. Heat and chip. Playing some of the demo, and to clarify I do not mean the crack (my raven ass has been playing Kazuya I can show the ghost.) Heat is amazing. It has minor elements of bursts re guilty gear, but they remind me more of reversal guards from Soul calibur 6 after some time recently replaying that. And in that comparison really does draw some alarm, especially considering they were not that well received there either. However my fear is not with the heat engagement so much, I think heat will prove to be much more invaluable in combos. I know in the CBT with Raven using 3+2 to get an extra tornado inbetween something akin to fF3 fF4 tornado and a 41bt4 or b242 can lead to insane wall carry and damage. With Kazuya changing my combo from df3 df1DF2 and adding in heat burst to fF2f allowed me to still throw in whichever ender I wanted. This meant that a launch near half could result in a death between the added damage, wall carry and potential wall combo/oki. This combined with the impact of chip are my two main concenrs. As it stands there are 3 major chip categories I have seen from my play and the community. First is the non-existant impact. A game where the chip damage never matters, it plays out with little impact because either 50/50's are hitting, the recoverable health is not being capitalized on, or your landing mostly clean hits instead of combos or counters and it has little impact. Secondly while I did not play the CNT, the utility of oppressive moves, with crazy on hit 50/50's with lots of chip made their MU's incredibly difficult and forced more movement. While I like Tekken because of it's movement, these matchups were toxic in their forcing your hand to fear a tactic that already gave you disadvantage. However the interest in chip has hit, there have been games I have had where we both get low, with recoverable health, and the battle becomes much tighter because of it. But I feel like this is more of an issue with casual Tekken anyways. Where players do not want to do slow things because they are less flashy. I think Tekken 8 has the promise to really help players who want to learn and ge elbow deep into the meat of Tekken do this. I think the fear however is that getting elbow deep into Tekken is a death knell for the game that requires it.

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Ubisoft, one of the most garbage trash things ever, thinks we should "get comfortable" with not owning games as it tries to push subscriptions onto us. Trouble is, we've seen where not owning our other media has gotten us - a horrible and confusing digital dystopia.

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WE LIVE IN A HELL WORLD

Snippets from the article by Karissa Bell:

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing thousands of performers, has struck a deal with an AI voice acting platform aimed at making it easier for actors to license their voice for use in video games. ...

the agreements cover the creation of so-called “digital voice replicas” and how they can be used by game studios and other companies. The deal has provisions for minimum rates, safe storage and transparency requirements, as well as “limitations on the amount of time that a performance replica can be employed without further payment and consent.”

Notably, the agreement does not cover whether actors’ replicas can be used to train large language models (LLMs), though Replica Studios CEO Shreyas Nivas said the company was interested in pursuing such an arrangement. “We have been talking to so many of the large AAA studios about this use case,” Nivas said. He added that LLMs are “out-of-scope of this agreement” but “they will hopefully [be] things that we will continue to work on and partner on.”

...Even so, some well-known voice actors were immediately skeptical of the news, as the BBC reports. In a press release, SAG-AFTRA said the agreement had been approved by "affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community." But on X, voice actors said they had not been given advance notice. "How has this agreement passed without notice or vote," wrote Veronica Taylor, who voiced Ash in Pokémon. "Encouraging/allowing AI replacement is a slippery slope downward." Roger Clark, who voiced Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, also suggested he was not notified about the deal. "If I can pay for permission to have an AI rendering of an ‘A-list’ voice actor’s performance for a fraction of their rate I have next to no incentive to employ 90% of the lesser known ‘working’ actors that make up the majority of the industry," Clark wrote.

SAG-AFTRA’s deal with Replica only covers a sliver of the game industry. Separately, the union is also negotiating with several of the major game studios after authorizing a strike last fall. “I certainly hope that the video game companies will take this as an inspiration to help us move forward in that negotiation,” Crabtree said.

And here are some various reactions I've found about things people in/adjacent to this can do

And in OTHER AI games news, Valve is updating it's TOS to allow AI generated content on steam so long as devs promise they have the rights to use it, which you can read more about on Aftermath in this article by Luke Plunkett

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BG3 GOTY OFFICIAL

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Digital media is fragile - perhaps the most fragile media format we have, considering how tightly controlled and whimsically removed it is thanks to corporate interests. As PlayStation users just got told they're losing tons of Discovery content they paid for, we have to examine the utter scam of digital ownership

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Honest to god to anyone reading this: the gachas are not worth it. The timesink it terrible, the MONEYSINK is terrible. If you like the characters and stories you can always go online and find them. If you play them bc it's the only thing you can run in your devices there's emulators for phones and an infinite library of old games.

I'm not going to look down on anyone with a genuine addiction, god I would be lying if i said wasn't pissing away my free time 4 years ago on FGO everyday, but take this post to give some thought about how and when you might want to try getting rid of gacha games in your life.

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Hopefully with game actors going on strike this may spread to better standards for gamedevs as well. So many horror stories about games being released too early and devs being overworked and underpaid (especially for the big AAA games) have come out after releases.

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Have you ever seen such audacity?

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“it’s weird for queer minors to be friends with queer adults” oh my god. ohhh my god.