Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:13AM The Yomi tournament this Saturday, August 27th, is free to enter and open to everyone. It's single elimination (in the interest of time), but it is best of 5 against each opponent. You can read about the tournament and sign up here.
Yomi's rulebook is at www.sirlin.net/yomi/rules
The online game is at www.fantasystrike.com
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 2:21PM Maybe read Archon Shiva's summary of this post first:
The way I read I, the original article had nothing against this release of Third Strike - he agreed with all design decisions that went into it, and I'm pretty sure David's not actually opposed to unlockable artwork. What he did attack was the attitude of some players that tweaking an unbalanced game into a balanced one was a net loss. At no point was it hinted that the original balance shouldn't be part of the release, or even that a rebalanced mode should have been in: he just said he feels the proper reaction is "too bad they didn't have time/budget to add it, but that's life!", rather than "thank god we didn't get a rebalanced mode selectable at the title screen, that would have ruined everything!"
This review of SF3:3rd Strike Online at 1up.com should be considered shameful. It casually embraces an attitude that's damaging to the quality of games we get to play. What's so wrong with what's said there? This (emphasis added):
Do the developers make adjustments to characters like Chun-Li and Yun -- who are leaps and bounds more powerful than the rest of the cast -- rebalancing them as to give characters like Q, Sean, and Hugo a fighting chance? Some argue this would allow newer players to ease into the game and even provide a fresh take on the series, possibly revitalizing the competitive scene.
At the same time, if they make changes to the game, even the slightest rebalance, players such as myself who have literally been playing the game for 10 years now, might feel it's an inferior port and not play it at all -- opting to continue to fight it out at the arcades or even on the PlayStation 2.
It's great that Capcom made such an effort to translate the game to a modern console. It's great they used the only reasonable kind of networking for a fighting game (GGPO). Well, strike that. It would be shameful and embarrassing for any fighting game to not use it, so it's more of a "phew, they did an obvious thing right there." It's great they did an obvious thing right with the way the button configuration screen works. There's really a whole lot of positive stuff to say here, and I agree with those saying those positive things. BUT...
There's a problem: 3s is one of the worst balanced fighting games around. I mean that literally. It's hard to even come up with worse balanced fighting game than it, yet if you throw a stick at a pile of fighting games, you'll hit a better balanced game. James Chen had this to say in 2008 about the Evolution tournament results:
Street Fighter III: Third Strike - This year [2008], in the Top 8, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, and Yun. In 2007, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2006, we had Yun, Yun, Yun, Yun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2005, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Yun, and Yun. I don't think there's anything left to say about this game.
Yeah it's pretty appalling. It's
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:59AM For the first time ever, the X-Play television show on G4TV is covering a card game rather than a video game. Fittingly it's Yomi! The coverage airs tonight on G4TV (on X-Play) at 6:30pm Eastern/Pacific.
As you probably know by now, Yomi captures the mind games involved in high level fighting gameplay in card form, along with several mechanics such as dragon punches, fireball traps, and even Guilty Gear's "burst." You can get it at www.sirlingames.com, find the rules at www.sirlin.net/yomi/rules, and you can play it online completely for free at www.fantasystrike.com.
Yomi won Game of the Year from The Dice Tower.
EDIT: Here's the web version of the segment.
Monday, July 25, 2011 at 4:32PM 
I was with a group of game designers and I said, "Probably I'm in the minority here, but I was really disappointed with Portal 2." To my surprise, everyone there (about 10 game designers) agreed, and not a single person was willing to take up the contrary position. I'll explain the complaints, but first I'd rather say what is great. This is all about the single player mode, by the way.
I think the mechanics are great. SPOILER of mechanics. I'll just casually mention some here, and you can skip this paragraph if you'd rather not know them ahead of time, in a strange world where you have somehow not played this game yet. Anyway, there are beams that you redirect through portals, bridges made of light you can extend through portals. There are three kinds of liquid goo that you can spatter around the world, each with different properties. I really liked the kind that let you portal off of otherwise unportable material. There are force fields beams that carry you over pits, and you can redirect those through portals. All of this stuff is great. My letter grade is A or A+ here.
The beginning of the game was probably pretty difficult to design. It has to kind of feel like the old game, also it has to have easy stuff that's like the beginning of the old game so new players know wtf is going on mechanics-wise. It also has to introduce some sort of story and tell us where and when (and who!) we are, relative to the last game. I think it succeeded on all these fronts. Another A grade.
The end (not like the last minute, I mean the last 20% or something) has to put together stuff we learned and give challenges that are more complex than the earlier ones. There's a lot of mechanics here, so it might have been hard to figure out just how to put these together for us in the last several puzzles. I think this was done very well, too.
What's the damn problem then? Everything sounds pretty great! Well, there are three things. The first is that there's this pretty long middle section of the game that kind of throws away what is good about Portal. Instead of small environments where you can portal off of almost anything, it's large environments where you can portal off of almost nothing. These environments look great, so whoever implemented them did a great job, but their very existence makes for a worse experience, in my opinion. Sometimes these parts felt more like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle of just finding the tiny thing that I'm allowed to shoot a portal on.
One designer raised the point, "Whether the environment is large with few portable surfaces or small with many portable surfaces, it's solving a puzzle either way. In both cases, there is usually going to be one correct solution to the puzzle, so does the objection really matter?"
We were all quick to say, "Yes, it matters." The best articulation of this point was that in a small room with nearly all portable surfaces, you are surrounded by choices that are wrong. It takes thinking to figure out what would be a right thing to do. But the feeling is not the same in a large environment with very few portable surfaces. There, you have very few choices and you can solve a puzzle by performing the only real legal moves, not even knowing exactly why it worked. Sometimes not really having to think about it.
Why do these large areas even exist at all? My guess is that there was an executive decision to sell a boxed $60 game, and that game design should just figure out what to do. I hope I'm wrong in that guess. A more sensible approach would be to make the best game possible, and sell it for whatever price made sense. At $60, I am guessing Valve thought people needed to feel a more grandiose experience. And further, that the game needed to be at least a certain length and a series of small test rooms would feel too monotonous for $60's worth of length, whatever that means. So to vary the experience, maybe they thought, "What if you could portal around a Half-Life-like environment?!" Nice idea maybe, but I think some subtractive design would have removed that, for the better. There's something pleasing about the idea that the Portal 1 world is all portable, except for specifically marked black material. The long middle section of Portal 2 teaches us that any old random material is not portable, only the white texture is portable. It just feels sad, like it's not following through with the really bold concept of "if you can portal off everything, how is there still a game?" Portal 1 answers that, but Portal 2 is like afraid to fully embrace it during this middle section.
The above was my strong objection. There were two other objections by other designers. One was that the game is just too easy. I hadn't thought much about that, but when he said that...yeah it did seem pretty easy overall. You could say the market has spoken, and they want easy games. That's not a very satisfying answer to me though. A game like Rez shows how it can be hard (score attack, trying to get 100% shot-down), easy, or even zero difficulty with "traveling" mode. What if I wanted a harder Portal 2? Why can't I have that?
I'll tell you why I can't have it. Because if a puzzle is too hard, it will stop all progression. There is no way around it, given the structure of the game. I think this is where Portal can learn something from Braid. Braid faced that same design problem, but it had a different solution. In Braid, you can progress past a puzzle you're stuck on, you can just skip it basically. Maybe something will click for you later, and you'll go back and finish it (you want credit for all those puzzle pieces after all!). This type of structure allows the designer to make harder puzzles and get away with it. I kind of wish Portal 2 had done this.
This brings us to the last objection I heard, and it's the most subtle one. The objection is that Portal 2's underlying goal is sort of the wrong one. The design goal appears to be to give the player that "aha!" moment (ok, great) but to not care too much about how he got there. The claim is that a better goal would be to primarily care about the transmission of an idea from the designer to the player. This is a pretty interesting point, so let's look at what's really being said here, and how it differs in Braid and in Portal.
Jonathan Blow has said publicly several times that Braid is not about making the hardest possible puzzle. He isn't afraid of having a hard puzzle, and as we discussed earlier, giving the player a way to skip a puzzle, keep going, then come back later allows the puzzles to be harder than they'd be allowed to be in a strictly linear game. Anyway, he says the point is to have INTERESTING puzzles, which is a different concept than hard ones. Braid is trying to communicate ideas about time to the player. When a new mechanic is introduced, the puzzle is usually something that makes the player realize the logical consequences of whatever time-thing is going on. By realizing that, the player can solve the puzzle.
Let's go back to Portal now, and use some more concrete examples. One of the very first things in both Portal 1 and Portal 2 is situation where you see the orange portal in front of you, on the other side of a pit. You have the blue portal gun, but not the orange gun. (Or maybe you do have the orange one in the Portal 2 version of this, I forget). Ok so you shoot a blue portal right next to you and this lets you come out the orange portal, on the other side of the pit. Yay!
But now there's a left turn and another pit between you and the way out. The very first moment I saw this in Portal 1, there was a split second where I thought, "Ok, so I need the orange portal gun." I was thinking that I just came out of an orange portal, so I need to put an orange one on the far wall. But of course after just a moment, I realized that's not true. All I need is the blue portal gun because I can go *in* the orange portal I just came *out* of and it will lead to the room's exit as long as I put a new blue portal past the second pit.
Another way of describing this is that in this moment, I learned the concept of using one central portal to go in and out of, while you move the position of the "satellite" portal. This is almost too easy of a concept to write so much about, but it's an example of the right kind of thing. I don't think this first "puzzle" had any challenge whatsoever, but it caused me to think something and understand something, so it was a very good thing to have in the game.
A more complicated example is concept of momentum through a portal. At some point, Portal 1 shows you that if you put a portal way down at the bottom of a pit and fall into it, then you can come out of some other portal somewhere else really fast. Maybe fast enough to fly across some other pit. Again, that puzzle isn't really about it being hard, it's about communicating that idea to me. That idea is a tool, and I can now use that tool in my arsenal as I progress through the game.
Portal 2 does have moments like this, but I almost think they are a side-effect rather than the entire point of the game design. There are so many other moments that are more like shooting around at whatever available where's-waldo surface, and somehow progressing. Progressing in a situation like this can be "wow, it worked!" and it seems Valvle polished up those moments to be all they can be. But "wow, it worked!" is just not the same depth of experience as "wow, I get it now!" Portal 2 does have those moments, but I think it has way too many of the "wrong" kind of wow.
To put it another way, I felt Braid was trying to educate me, in a way. Portal 2 seems more concerned with entertaining me. Being an entertainment product, it's hard to fault a game for being entertaining, but the worst parts just feel...more shallow or something than the experience from the education moments. In both Braid AND Portal 2, the education moments are are very satisfying, so it seems that should have been more of the goal.
Despite all these complaints, I still recommend the game. It's highly polished, has great mechanics, and is...well...entertaining.
Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 1:36PM This is an interesting paper about the differences between men and women. You might set aside some time to read it.
It addresses the delicate point that there seem to be more men of ability in some areas (science, Chess, genre-creators in music, etc) with a much more plausible explanation than the conspiracy theory that throughout all cultures and times, men have kept women down. The author explains that the entire notion of "men vs. women" is a screwed up way to look at it, and that the actual evolutionary issue is "groups (that contain men and women) vs. other groups (that also contain men and women)."
The author suggests three main reasons we see such a disproportionate number of men at the top of so many fields. My summary is as follows:
1) Nature plays dice much more with men than women. Men are at the top of a lot of things, and they are also at the very bottom of a lot of things. Most people in prison are men. Even with height, it varies more with men in BOTH directions (meaning there are a lot of men way shorter than the male average, moreso than women way shorter than the female average). Though there appear to be more men at the top levels of IQ, there are more men at the BOTTOM levels as well. In the set of people who are mentally retarded, the more severe the case, the more likely the person is to be male, and below a certain point, it's basically all male. Though the average in IQ and many other things can be the same in both sexes, it's males nature takes chances on and ends up with more extremes in both directions. Also, I thought his notes about how deceptive the stats for minimum wage and grade point averages were interesting.
2) Evolutionarily, men need to stand out. The author presents a staggering statistic about how many of our ancestors are female as opposed to male. Twice as many are female! Although half the people who have ever lived were female, that's not the same stat. 80% of females who have lived passed on their genes (passing on genes means "ancestor" here), while only 40% of the men who have lived passed on theirs. Men are in a tough situation, and would do well to separate themselves from the pack, perhaps by accumulating wealth or power or skills, or something. The author says the number of times a group of 100 women have gotten together to build a ship to sail to far-off-lands is basically never, though men have done this many times throughout history. If you have an 80% chance of reproducing, it's just a better strategy to play it more safe and pick amongst the many men who are available to you. No need to build a ship or conquer some other land. And so evolution gave men a REASON to peruse all the crazy things they do, and to be passionate about them. To put it another way, the set of women geniuses who are just as able to be great at science as men contains fewer who WANT to devote themselves to such things.
3) Men's "relationship spheres" are different than women's. Women care about deep 1-on-1 relationships, and lucky for us, this has allowed our species to actually survive. Having families and raising young is pretty central to carrying on the species, so this preference of women's is not "worse." Quite the contrary, it's mission critical. Men's preference is to have a larger sphere of more shallow relationships. If you look at violence in the home, women actually commit it more. If you look at violence amongst "shallow relationships" such as going to the mall and getting into a knife fight, men commit it radically more. In each case, it's just the sphere that gender cares about more.
While the woman's sphere has allowed us to perpetuate the species, it has mostly stayed the same over the centuries. But the men's sphere is what enables science, trade, corporations, and so on. The men's sphere over time allows a culture to accumulate knowledge, wealth, and power. When your group of men+women is competing against other groups of men+women, your group is going to be in great shape if the women are great at their sphere (necessary for survival) and the men are great at theirs (not necessary for survival, but bring power to your group overall).
Given these three points, it's not hard to imagine that most CEOs (and even Chess players) would be men, even if the average intelligence of a man is exactly the same as for a woman (which is does appear to be). I know it's a delicate subject, but I think the author does a great job of not even mentioning any morals about what "should be," only looking at what is, and explaining how evolutionary forces created these specializations. To any particular man or woman who wants to excell at the other's stereotypical sphere: go ahead! Anyway, if you have comments, better to aim them at what the paper says, rather than my imperfect summary.
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