Yomi: Testers Wanted

Yomi: Fighting Card Game is suffering from endless art delays, but balance testing is on-going. The testers asked for some new blood though, so join them! (They are a friendly bunch.) You can learn about the rules of the game and see all the decks here. To play online, you can use the virtual card table program called Lackey. Information on how to setup Lackey to play Yomi is here. And stop by sirlin.net/chat to ask for help and for opponents. There are tournaments about every week, but of course casually playing whenever you want is fine too.

Here's the newest version of Jefferson DeGrey's character card.

DeGrey is an educated, noble diplomat who fights for the rights of the oppressed, no matter who they are. He's from an earlier time, so he knows more than anyone how much worse his land has become. Long ago, at the moment of his death, his bargain with the Nox Oracle (a future Yomi character) granted him unnatural, long life and enough time to right the wrongs he's so passionate about. His female companion in life now watches over and aids him--even after her death--as her obligations in this world are not finished either.

DeGrey's character ability in Yomi is called Moral High Ground. His special moves (face cards) deal 1 extra damage for each extra card his opponent has in hand, compared to number of cards in DeGrey's hand. Even when he's low on options, DeGrey still has the Moral High Ground. And if all else fails, he can Pilebunker for a ton of damage.

To get started playing DeGrey and the other 9 characters, read about the game here and about playtesting online here.

Kongai: More To Come

In case you haven't heard of Kongai, it's Kongregate.com's site-wide virtual card game. By playing various games on Kongregate. you win cards for Kongai. Or, you can just buy Kongai cards straight up if you prefer. You can even go straight to Kongai, pick a few free cards, then earn cards while playing Kongai itself. Anyway, we're working on the game again.

Right now, we have 20 new characters and 20 new items in development. (Remember, a character card in Kongai is a lot more substantial than a card in other card games. It contains not just an ability and character stats, but also four attacks for the character, each with their own abilities and stats.) This new set of cards doubles the size of the game. With 800 1on1 matchups, and many times that if you factor in that you can also choose an item card for each character, it's a lot to consider! And factor in that games are played with 3 vs 3 characters or 5 vs 5, and that's a ton of combinations of things that can happen!

We're fixing bugs and balance issues every day now, in both the new set and the old cards. I've made over 100 changes in the last 4 days alone, and I'm completely exhausted from it, but we'll keep going. As usual, the balancing goal is to have no "god tier" characters (so powerful that you must play them or lose), no "garbage tier" characters (so weak that it's unreasonable to ever pick them), and to have the difference in power level from the strongest to weakest characters be a small as possible. We're actually so buried under bugs right now that we probably don't need more than a few beta testers, but soon we'll expand the beta test to more and more people, and then push it to live servers in what's hopefully a good state. Ok, back to work now.

More of My Evolution 2009 Matches

First up is Sirlin vs. Damdai in the team tournament. Damdai is an excellent player and I think it's helpful that I can show both a loss and a win against him. You can see what it looks like when I'm trying to get in and what it looks like when I am applying pressure. Too bad I let him jump in a couple times without even trying to flame kick it, and one time I was waiting for the jump in and pumping the stick for my anti-air super, but missed it. I should have just tried flame kick in that case. Anyway, here are the matches:

Here's another comparison case of a win and a loss against the same player, this time Chris Doyle. I had never

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Some of My Matches From Evolution 2009

After all the talk on forums about how bad Fei Long is, I played him a lot at Evolution. Here's the first match from the team tournament, Sirlin vs. Ryan Hart (of Tekken fame).

Sirlin vs. Thelo, aka "best defensive Honda." People seem not to know who Thelo is, but they should! He's a sirlin.net regular and annoying down-back player. Is Fei Long vs. Honda impossible?

Sirlin vs. Psychocronic's Bison. I miss the

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Daigo on SF HD Remix

Some people have asked if Daigo talked to me about SF HD Remix at Evolution. Yes, he did. It started with Japanese player Kuni asking a few questions about the game, then I pointed Kuni to sirlin.net/sf for all the detailed information about the changes. The next day had read some of it and I think passed on some info to Daigo. I'm not actually sure how much or little Daigo played at that point, but he told me face-to-face what he thought:

Daigo said when a game is altered, a lot of the time it loses the essence of what made it good. In SF HD Remix, he says the essence is still there, with new things he likes, too. Then he said that if the game were released in Japanese arcades, he thinks it would be a hit.

In Japan, a console version isn't *that* important to the competitive scene, while an arcade version is necessary. Not true in the US anymore, but very true in Japan. Even the console version isn't available there, though. Kuni told me that some players have a North American Xbox (silver) account, so that lets them purchase SF HD Remix, then they can switch back to their Japanese account to actually play it. It's a hassle though, so they'd certainly appreciate a real console release, but what they *really* want is an arcade release.

If there's demand, maybe Capcom Japan will do it, who knows.