Professor Sirlin and the Fourth Amendment

On October 21st, 2008, I gave a lecture at Hastings Law School in San Francisco to first year law students. My lecture was first about the concept of competition in law school and second about analyzing a hypothetical case that the students would have to write about for class. You might think that me not being an actual lawyer was some kind of drawback in leading a discussion about the law, but the professor who asked me to speak didn't think so.

Competition

You don't have to treat every situation like a tournament finals.I heard that the students at Hastings were acting overly competitive, to the point that it was hurting their development. I explained my background, my business and math degrees from MIT, that I am a fake scientist, a fake psychologist, a fake lawyer, and a real game designer. In addition to that, I am a competitor, and I'm knowledgeable about competition and which types of people do well in competitions.

Whether the arena is political debate, legal argument, or video games, the people who win tend to have things in common. There's a lot I could say about the things that winners do during competition. They get into the head of the opponent and predict their moves. They know when to attack, when to defend, when to stall. They know when to look for "critical points" to blow open a match (or a debate) when they are losing, and when to avoid them if they are winning. There is a lot to say about the strategy of competition, but that is not what I focused on with the students.

It's the other side of competition that their professor and I thought they needed to hear about: continuous self-improvement. When you enter any competition, be it legal or a video game, you hope that the rules are fair to all sides. But the things that don't have to be even--aren't supposed to be even--are the skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience you bring with you to the competition. By improving and improving, eventually winning becomes incidental. Just stop by and win easily, if you are that far ahead of everyone else.

If I look through a crystal ball to the future and discover that you end up being great--as great as Gandhi--how did you get there? You turn out to be a great fighter for the constitution, action figures are made of you, children want to grow up to be you. How did you get there? Was it by putting down other students? By trying to give other students disadvantages so that your own mediocrity appears slightly better? No, that's ridiculous. You got there by developing an excellence in yourself regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Ortiz vs. Sirlin

I remember feeling the full effects of this against fighting game player Ricky Ortiz. Ricky played a certain game, I played a different game. Then a third game came out (Capcom vs. SNK) that we both played. I was older, more experienced, and better than Ricky. I understood Ricky's advantages (better dexterity, better reaction time, and better ability at judging precise distances), and I played around them. Ricky was good, but not a real threat to me.

Then, months later, I entered a tournament in this game. I faced Ricky in the finals. Finals matches are usually best 3 out of 5 games. Ricky won 2 games, and he won them decisively. He crushed me. Onlookers yelled out congratulations to Ricky he won the tournament, but I said, "wait a minute, I thought it was best 3 out of 5." The tournament organizer then informed us that this particular tournament was 2 out 3 finals. Then Ricky said to me that if I thought it was 3 out of 5, he would play more games. I almost couldn't believe it because he had every right to declare victory on the spot, but I took his offer. Ricky then crushed me one more game and won the tournament.

Ricky was demonstrating that it didn't even matter what went on in the game. He brought to the table an excellence that I simply could not compete with. It had nothing to do with putting me down, or giving me disadvantages. It had everything to do with Ricky's amazing development as a competitor. You [the students at Hastings law school] need to develop that kind of excellence in yourselves, I said.

There's one more Street Fighter story I thought they had to hear before getting to the topic of the law. When I played Street Fighter at the MIT arcade, most players tried to keep secrets from each other about techniques and tricks. I disagreed with this mindset and I did not keep secrets. Instead, I told my competitors everything I knew so that we could all practice against everything. Why? Because the MIT arcade was not the REAL competition. It was the training ground. When I went to play at an international tournament in Japan, that was a REAL competition. The only way to be prepared for something like that is to develop your skills as much as you can in your training ground.

This is the reason that law students should not hide their research from each other. Human nature might compel you to hoard the good secrets you found, but that is the path of trying to be slightly less mediocre than your training partners. Instead, know that a high tide raises all boats and that when law students get together, share research, and discuss cases, they reach a level of understanding of those cases that is far deeper than would be possible without the discussion.

And now it's time to demonstrate that.

The Case of the Woman Who Was Searched

Here is a pdf describing the case and the requirements of the legal memo the students had to write about the case. Read it to know what the rest of the article is talking about.

The case at hand is about the Fourth Amendment rights of Phoebe Thorne. It's a fictional case that is representative of and very similar to real cases. In this case, Ms. Thorne lands in San Francisco on a flight from Bogota, Columbia. She is questioned, searched, detained, and ultimately held long enough to have a "monitored bowel movement" to see if she passes any drugs. She did in fact pass a large number of pellets containing heroine. Her case challenges the validity of various parts of her search.

The first and most important thing to understand here is why it's important that we care about the rights of Ms. Thorne, a known drug trafficer. In the law, the ends do not justify the means. You can't just say that because she did have drugs, it's ok for the government to treat her any way they wanted, ignoring her Fourth Amendment rights. There are rules for when searches are legal and when they are not, and those rules protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

You might only care about the rights of innocent people to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. You might think that a case where a person turned out to be guilty is not that important in the grand scheme of civil rights. The trouble is, only guilty people can really bring these cases to court. When guilty people are searched unfairly, they have standing to sue, real incentive to sue, and there are reasonable remedies they can seek (for example, "don't put me in jail.") Innocent people could have their Fourth Amendment rights voilated routinely, but the courts can't stop that without a case. So cases exactly like Ms. Thorne's are what set the precedent for how we will ALL be treated. You need to care about her rights because her rights are YOUR rights.

Click to read more ...

Street Fighter Mini-Site

I was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix. This is a collection of all the articles I wrote about designing the game. Together, they are even longer than my book. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

• Introduction

Character Balance Articles:

• Ryu
• Ken
• Guile
• Honda
  
• Blanka
• Zangief
• Chun Li
  
• Dhalsim
• Cammy
• Dee Jay
• Fei Long
• T.Hawk
• Balrog (boxer)
• Vega (claw)
  
• Sagat
• Bison (dictator)
• Akuma
  

Putting it all together:

• SF HD Remix Feature List
• Complete Change List

Special thanks to all the Evolution tournament players who playtested the game and helped it be what it is.

Street Fighter HD Remix: Akuma

Akuma is so powerful in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) that he's banned in all US tournaments. I’ve noticed that when players of other games read about this, they think that is some kind of hypocrisy to the general theory that we should ban as little as we possibly can. But Akuma is not like whoever the best character is in whatever other game you play. He’s not just the best, but he’s miles and miles and miles above the rest of the cast. He was never intended to be fairly balanced in ST, and it shows.

In HD Remix, Akuma is our chance to get a 17th playable character. By taking him down several notches to make him fair for tournament play, we get 17 new matchups in the game. I even put him on the character select screen so you don’t have to do a code to pick him. In a nod to his fake-secrecy though, he’s “hidden” above Honda’s selection box.

So how do we balance Akuma?

Air Fireball

Akuma has a lot of completely unfair things, but the air fireball is the main one. Most characters just can’t deal with it at all. My first idea was kind of an experiment. What if the air fireball was the only non-super move in the game that used up super meter, rather than gave super meter? Let him keep the unfairness of the move, but limit its use. The idea is sort of like an EX move from other Capcom fighting games.

I thought of this version of the move kind of like Millia’s hairpin in the fighting game Guilty Gear. In that game, Millia wants to rush you down. She has a hairpin move that has a similar trajectory to ST Akuma’s air fireball. Hers travels insanely fast though, and forces the opponent to block while she uses that time to get in. The catch is that she then has to pick up the Hairpin to do it again, so she can’t keep doing it over and over in a row. ST Akuma’s fireball is so hard to deal with that I thought allowing even a few of them would be pretty powerful because it would allow him to teleport or crossup or whatever other tricks he felt like. I tried making the move cost 25% super meter, but the air fireball itself was just as strong as ever.

Odds and Ends

There was a bunch of other stuff to fix up:

• Akuma’s ducking kicks no longer have invulnerable legs(!)
• Akuma can now be dizzied like any other character
• Akuma’s Hurricane Kicks don’t have invulnerable startup and can’t hit on the way up
• Raging Demon super tuned to go slower than the secret version of him on Dreamcast, but travel farther
• Teleport no longer has random input window and can be done with 2 punches or 2 kicks rather than 3 punches and 3 kicks (drawback: can't use "piano method" for Dragon Punch)
• Teleport has vulnerability in the head so he can’t run away forever with it, and it builds no super meter.
• Stray hitbox that was floating in the air on his medium kick is fixed
• Akuma takes more damage than other characters
• Red fireball recovery made way worse so it can’t do inescapable lockdown
• Blue fireball startup and recovery made closer to Ryu’s
• Knockback effect on his fierce blue fireball only happens from very close range
• Timing on Raging Demon command much more lenient

All of this definitely brought him down to Earth. He wasn’t overpowered anymore, but all the fun was balanced out of him too. More testing revealed that he was probably the worst character in the game.

Air Fireball, Take 2

The air fireball is Akuma’s signature special move, yet he could hardly even do it because of the meter restriction. That was a failed experiment. Next, we tried to make an air fireball that he could use as much as he wanted, like any special move, but that was somehow fair. It needed a much more downward angle for starters. The problem is that even when the angle was right, he could do really nasty lockdowns with repeated air fireballs. Making the fireballs travel faster or slower didn’t help at all. All it did was change the way he did the nasty lockdown.

The real trick to making that move work is the slight upward hop we added as he releases the fireball. This increases the time between two consecutive air fireballs, and it’s what lets opponents actually get out of any traps he might do. It took about 5 or 6 tries of tuning this move, but suddenly it clicked and seemed right.

At this point, I also added back in his hurricane kick’s ability to hit on the way up, so that it can hit ducking opponents and lead to a juggle. I also toned down his damage penalty so he didn’t take quite as much as before.

This version of Akuma was pretty good. It was definitely more fun to be able to do the air fireball more and try to set up tricks with it. A few months past and I started to think that Akuma was still the worst in the game, though. He has no super fireball like Ryu, no overhead, and no fake fireball. Akuma had some advantages, but just not enough to really justify picking him.

Version 3 Akuma

Then I made one small change that made a world of difference. I allowed his air fireball to be performed very low to the ground. In the original game, it has a minimum jump distance before it can come out, but I removed this. Now it became possible to do a “tiger knee” air fireball, meaning you roll the joystick from down to forward to up/forward (for a jump), then wait a moment for Akuma to barely leave the ground, then press punch to get an immediate air fireball. This turned out to be way more fun and versatile than I realized it would be.

Akuma can attempt many, many traps and setups with this. An example is immediate air fireball (I’ll call it TK air fireball, referencing the tiger knee motion), then land right next to the opponent with the cover of the air fireball. Then do, say, low strong, TK air fireball and land right next to them again. Then do low strong, low strong (pushes you farther away), and TK air fireball to reset the trap. This time, after you do a normal move or two, jump straight up and do an air fireball.

I just listed three different air fireball situations there: one TK from close, one TK from farther, and one where you jump straight up and don't do the tiger knee technique. Many characters have to do a different move or act at a different time in order to deal with each of those situations. Against new players, I can create what looks like an inescapable lockdown, but really it’s a mixup that gives the opponent several chances to get out. It’s all an illusion.

I tested this trap against all 17 characters and every single one can get out. Ken can do a medium dragon punch (invulnerable on the way up) to ignore the entire situation. Zangief can use his green hand. Bison can just jump strong. Everyone can do something. Also remember that if these air fireballs hit, they deal only a couple pixels of damage. If they hit as Akuma lands, he can attempt to go into a damaging combo, but due to the way the game intentionally slows down when fireballs hit, this combo will fail about 50% of the time no matter how good you are.

The air fireball was a hit with playtesters because it’s so fun and feels so powerful, yet is actually beatable in many ways.

Raging Demon

Somewhere in the middle of development, we discovered that it was possible to make the Raging Demon super a guaranteed throw in many situations, such after a jump roundhouse. By adding some startup time (9 frames, same as CvS2), we thought we fixed this. Toward the end of development, we realized that we really didn’t and the Raging Demon was still guaranteed in lots of ways, most dangerously after any blocked air fireball! This made it the most powerful thing in the entire game and we had to do something. Unfortunately, the technical limitations surrounding this are big because it’s very difficult to mess with things like throw timing in the circuitous assembly code.

The solution we were able to implement is not quite ideal, but it’s definitely workable. In general in the SF2 series, when you hold up on the joystick, your character does not leave the ground immediately. Instead, he goes into a “pre-jump” state that lasts 2 to 5 frames, depending on the character. You can be thrown during pre-jump frames. The only change we made is that pre-jump frames are now invulnerable to the Raging Demon specifically.

That means if you hold up and you aren’t locked into doing a move or recovering from a move, you will always be able to jump out of Raging Demon, even from close on reaction. This makes the move a little weaker than intended, but it’s a preferable situation to being the best move in the game. This means the best time to use the super is when the opponent has committed to doing a move, such as a fireball or sweep. To help you land it, the Raging Demon is completely invulnerable and unthrowable. Even though opponents can jump out on reaction, it’s still possible to land this super by baiting their attacks first.

Conclusion

Akuma has a solid ground game with fireballs that stand up to Ryu’s, juggling special moves, an incredibly versatile air fireball, and a tricky super. He does take more damage than any other character, but not by a large margin. We finally have a 17th character.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Bison

Bison always seemed strong in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) because he can suddenly win matches out of nowhere, and he can keep up the pressure against most characters...if he can get things going his way. If he lands a solid jumping roundhouse, he can combo into low forward, then psycho crusher for a dizzy, then follow up with another combo for the win. If he lands a cross-up attack, he can do a different (admittedly difficult) kill-combo. His standing kicks and scissor kicks let him keep up the pressure.

But Bison can’t always put that offense together. Getting out of Ryu’s fireball trap in the corner once it starts is extremely hard. Even getting near Old Sagat is extremely hard. And Honda has a huge advantage over Bison because Bison has no way out of repeated Ochio throws other than his super. In short, Bison lacks defense. He’s the only character in the game with no special move that can be used as a reversal. Even Dhalsim has a teleport to get out of trouble.

I always liked Bison’s character design though. In theory, a character who is all offense and no defense is an interesting addition to the game. In practice, he just has too many matches of disadvantage and he’s not used that often in tournaments. He’s not even considered a second tier character. What to do about it?

Suggestions

A few people suggested that his psycho crusher become a reversal attack (some invulnerability and/or active hitting frames at the start of the move). This is way too powerful and mostly just turns him into Honda. The most common suggestion was to make the headstomp a reversal that can go through fireballs. Even this is too powerful because it means an attempted fireball trap against Bison leads to Bison getting guaranteed damage (the headstomp is fast and would hit fireball throwers during their recovery). Yet another common suggestion was to give Bison a teleport because he has that move in later games. This would allow him to escape from trouble, but not get any free damage. Even that is too strong, in my opinion. Yes he needs a way to get out of trouble, but it should not lead to guaranteed damage and it should put Bison at some risk.

Reversal Devil’s Reverse

The devil’s reverse is that move that hardly anyone uses where you charge down, then up + punch. It makes you leap into the air, then you can press punch again to fly around with your blue fiery arm extended. In HD Remix, this move now has a few invulnerable frames on startup. Bison can use it to escape a fireball trap, but he’s also committing to a devil’s reverse, and gets no guaranteed damage. He can try to reset the situation with this move.

A couple notes about the new Devil’s Reverse. Bison is as vulnerable as ever as he leaves the ground, so you can jump kick him as he leaves the ground to stop him. Ryu can actually still keep up a trap against Bison by alternating fireballs and then jump roundhousing (or jumping strong for juggles) when expects Bison to try to Devil’s Reverse out. This is preferable to the situation in ST though, because it requires both players to make careful decisions, as opposed to the fireball trap just winning flat-out.

In fact, it can’t escape jumping attacks very well at all. Earlier versions in development did allow Bison to avoid cross-up combos most of the time, but this was really never supposed to the be reason for changes to the devil’s reverse. I rolled back the invulnerability to be about as little as possible while still allowing him to escape fireball traps with it.

For many months of development in HD Remix, the devil’s reverse put the opponent into a juggle state if it actually hit. That means you could follow up with two jumping strongs and then nick them with one hit of a super if you have super meter. On the one hand, no one should really get hit by devil’s reverse because it’s enormously telegraphed. On the other hand, the entire sequence (with super) did more than 40% damage, and it was just uncomfortably much. You’ll have to live without this one.

Fake Slide

Bison also has a new move: the fake slide. His regular slide from ST is unchanged, and you can still hold down/back to charge up as you (regular) slide up to your knocked-down opponent (a common Bison maneuver). The command for the new fake slide is hold diagonally down/forward and press roundhouse. This means you are charged for a headstomp or devil’s reverse, but you lose your charge for psycho crushers and scissor kicks when you fake slide. I actually originally wanted the fake slide to be performed by holding the roundhouse button down for X frames when you slide, which would have allowed him to keep all four special moves charged. We had technical difficulties with this, but maybe it’s for the best, because the move is good enough as it is.

Why have a fake slide at all? Bison is about offense, so here is one more offensive tool. This move isn’t really intended to change his position in the rankings though. I don’t think it allows him to beat characters he couldn’t beat without the slide. It’s more to reinforce what Bison is about. When you pressure the opponent with standing forward and standing roundhouse, you are also at just the right range to fake slide, then throw. The fake slide recovers much more quickly than the real slide, travels a shorter distance, and it does not put the enemy into blockstun because it can’t hit at all. It’s just a way to travel quickly (and then usually throw!).

I actually call this one of Bison’s “circus tricks,” meaning it’s something you can randomly throw into an attack pattern and hope for the best. Though it’s not a super-solid lock down (it can’t even hit!), it will catch people off guard and we already know people will call you cheap when you use it to throw. It should be great fun.

Miscellaneous: Jump up Strong and Stand Jab

Two other odds and ends. In ST, Bison’s jumping strong punch can air juggle for 3-hits. This is true for his jumping toward and jumping away punches with strong, but not true for his jumping straight up strong. This always seemed like an oversight to me, because his fist has that same blue fiery graphics during the jump straight up version. Now the jumping straight up strong punch has the same ability to juggle.

Finally, Bison’s standing jab is slightly higher priority. This does not give him any extra air defense (the new anti-fireball startup of the devil’s reverse is quite enough defense for him). The purpose of this change is to let his standing jabs reliably hit Honda’s torpedo and Blanka’s roll. Bison has trouble against Honda, so any tiny advantage like that helps. Besides, Balrog’s standing jab beats both of those special moves easily, every time, and it really looks like’s Bison’s should, too. I just extended the hitbox slightly so that you can now jab incoming Honda torpedos and Blanka balls.

Conclusion

The new Bison can still practically kill you with a solid hit, if he ever gets one. He can still perform various “circus tricks” such as randomly jumping around with strong, or headstomping, and now we can add fake sliding and devil’s reversing to the list. He now has at least some way to attempt to get out of lockdown traps, but not without risk. In HD Remix, he feels like even more of a pressure character (yay for fake slide), and a slippery fish when he’s forced into devil’s reversing on defense.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Sagat

Sagat—well actually “Old Sagat”—is one of the best characters in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). He’s even soft-banned in Japan, meaning there’s a tacit agreement not to play him, even though you are technically allowed. He might not be as strong of a character as Balrog or Dhalsim overall, but the problem is that there are several matches where he just dominates. His tiger shots (fireballs) are so powerful that many characters spend the entire game trying to get around them. I think everyone knew that this nerf was coming.

Tiger Shots

Sagat now has fireball recovery that’s better than New Sagat and worse than Old Sagat. In ST, the difference in recovery times was about 12 frames between Old and New (huge), and Remixed Sagat’s recovery is about 4 frames worse than the terror that was Old Sagat. It’s still very good, but not as abuseable. It’s similar to Ryu’s fireball recovery.

Various Boosts

In exchange for this loss, Sagat has several new bonuses. First, he is based on ST’s New Sagat, so he now is able to soften throws and he has a super move (with the reversal bug fixed, even). Furthermore, the super travels farther than in ST and it always knocks down on hit. It’s now a viable tool. He also has ST New Sagat’s ability to cross-up with medium kick. This gives him a way to apply some up-close pressure.

Remixed Sagat has Old Sagat’s fierce tiger uppercut, meaning it hits only once for good damage rather than juggling five times for low damage. The five hit juggle can be fun, but one-hit version is just more effective in most situations. As with all dragon punch motions, the tiger uppercut has a more lenient (non-random) input timing window.

Tiger Knee

Finally, his tiger knee is now performed with a dragon punch motion, it always knocks down on hit, and (as a result of that) it can juggle for three hits. Usually this means if he hits with tiger knee, he can do one more because either the first or second knee will get 2 hits. This is good damage and it pushes the opponent back into the corner. I reduced the tiger knee’s damage and dizzy power because of this juggle.

I didn’t really intend this juggle to exist in the first place, it was just a consequence of fixing the 2-hit moves that don’t knock down when they should. I did this very early in development and the tiger knee juggle seemed fun, so I kept it and balanced Sagat around having this.

Although the knee doesn’t have any better frame stats or hitboxes than before, several playtesters said “Wow, is that higher priority now?” when they play against it. I think the ability to walk forward and do it because of the dragon punch command, coupled with the usefulness of scoring a knock-down even on a glancing blow makes it a much more useful tool. And no, you can’t juggle with a super after a tiger knee unless you’re making a combo video.

Normal Move Cancels

Old Sagat could cancel his stand short, stand forward, and stand strong into special moves, while ST’s New Sagat could not cancel any of those. (Well, he could only cancel the first hit of stand short and stand forward, not the second hits.) Remixed Sagat cannot cancel the second hit of standing forward because that was only used for combos anyway, and the ability to juggle with tiger knees is good enough already! He also cannot cancel the second hit of standing short, which is a somewhat controversial decision. In ST, this is mainly used in the following strategy:

Tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, stand short because enemy got near, cancel into tiger, tiger, tiger.

If the enemy gets near, he deserves his chance at Sagat without having to block a very far stand short cancelled into another Tiger Shot. Remixed Sagat can, however, cancel his standing strong into special moves. This is mainly useful against Dhalsim and Balrog, which is fine, and Zangief.

Conclusion

Playtesers said that playing against my Remixed Sagat was actually fun. I think this was because standing in place and doing nothing but tiger shots wasn’t as effective, and the lack of a cancellable stand far standing short makes it even harder to keep up the old iron defense. In HD Remix, it’s better to mix in tiger knees, cross-ups, supers, and even jump ins, so it feels like more is going on when you fight Sagat.

Despite his slightly slower fireball recovery and loss of stand short cancel, Sagat still seems very strong, just not dominating like before. Plus, more characters now have more options against fireballs, such as Cammy’s spinning backfist, Blanka’s faster “rainbow roll,” Fei Long’s short flying kicks, Dee Jay’s machine gun upper, and Honda’s jab headbutt. Sagat managed to go to one of the most boring characters (to me) to one of the characters I have the most fun playing.

–Sirlin