SF HD Remix is A+ and Sirlin.net is Top 5

1up.com gave Street Fighter HD Remix a score of A+. Wow!

Super SFII Turbo HD Remix Video Review

Meanwhile, Wired says my website is one of their 5 most favorite game-related blogs. In the coming months, I'll muck it up with a bunch of psychology stuff, then we'll see what they say!

Street Fighter Mini-site

All my articles about Street Fighter HD Remix are now in one handy place, accessible from the top navigation bar and at the easy-to-remember url www.sirlin.net/sf

There's 17 character balanace articles, plus the introduction, the feature list, and the complete change list. I revised and updated every article, so consider this the definitive repository of SF HD Remix information. Together, these articles are longer than my book, so that's a pretty incredible amount of information about the game's design. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix, First Review

Here's the first review of Street Fighter HD Remix, from IGN. It sounds like they like it.

Xbox 360 and PSN text reviews, and also a video review:

Buying Kongai Cards

Kongai is the card game I designed for Kongregate.com. It's the metagame that ties their site together. Winning challenges in other games on Kongregate lets you win cards in Kongai. You can read about the game's design here.

On the one hand, it's a simple game because you only make two clicks per turn (choose your range, then choose your main action). On the other hand, skilled players can rack up some impressive win-rates!

When the game was first released, many complained that it was too hard to get the cards. Since that time, Kongregate has really come a long way on addressing that. Now you can get cards all these ways:

1. Win challenges in other games, there are two challenges available each week (so 2 cards / week)
2. Play Kongai itself. Every time you win a game, you have a chance to earn a new card. If you have very few cards, the chance is much higher, to get you started.
3. Buy the cards directly for about $1 per card. (new!)

Buying Cards: Be Happy About It, Not Upset

First, let's get it straight that buying cards is not "cheating." Unlike Magic: The Gathering, there are no intentionally bad cards. All the cards are intended to be at the same level. Right now, all the characters in Kongai are viable in a tournament quality deck, except maybe one or two, and those will soon receive updates. Collecting more cards lets you build different kind of decks with different gameplay, but it's not like you're buying power rares (there aren't any).

Also, keep in mind that buying cards is just an extra option. There are two free options to gain cards (winning challenges in other Kongregate games and winning games in Kongai itself) and these options aren't going anywhere. These free options are fun for a lot of people, but if they aren't fun for you, there's the option to buy. I want you to accumulate all the cards so you can play around with different types of decks, and now there's plenty of ways you can achieve that.

How You Earned Your Cards

I think it's important to give people recognition for how they earned their cards. Right now, there's an icon that distinguishes if you earned a card through challenges or through winning games in Kongai. When you buy a card, it currently has the same "K" icon as if you got the card by winning games in Kongai. Jim Greer from Kongregate informs me that this is changing (yay) and there will be a new "Kreds" icon (Kreds are the currency on Kongregate.com) for cards you buy. So your ability to show-off will remain intact after all.

I also hear that this means you'll be able to buy a copy of a card you already own. In the initial implementation, you can only buy cards you don't yet own, but once the bought-cards are part of the new "Kreds series", you'll be able to buy that second Scroll of Inner Focus, or whatever other item you might want two of.

How to Buy?

First, buy some Kreds here.

$5 gets you 50 kreds
$10 gets you 110 kreds
$20 gets you 225 kreds

Next, go to your card album because that's where you add cards to your shopping cart. Here's garcia1000's album:

http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/garcia1000/card_album

You actually get a discount if you buy several cards at once (not to be confused with the other discount you get for buying a lot of Kreds at once):

When you complete a set of Vampires, or whatever, by buying 3 or more
cards, you are eligible for a discount of 1 kred per card. So two
vampires cost 10kr * 2 = 20kr, and three Vampires that complete a set
would be 9kr * 3 = 27. Four would be 36kr, etc.

From your album, click on the "buy card" button under each card you want, then the shopping cart link to checkout.

Completing the Set

A deck in (the main format of) Kongai consists of only 3 characters and 3 item cards. The item cards are optional, but they give your characters a boost, so you want to include them if you have them.

There are currently 20 character cards and 26 item cards in Kongai. You get 3 cards of your choice for free just for signing up, and you can win the Mindreader's Chalice item card for beating the CPU (you can put the Chalice item on any character in the game). So you can realistically play the game for free just by winning a few challenges and winning some matches in the game itself. And if you want to buy the cards--even if you bought ALL of them--it's not really that much. It's at most $1 / card, but it's really less considering the above two discounts.

There's also a whole new set of Kongai cards in the works, but no I don't know the release date. In the meantime, head over to Kongai and test your mind-reading skills. Or if you're a certain type of player from 2+2, you might prefer to test your poker-like valuation skills. Either way, enjoy.

--Sirlin

Fake Professor Sirlin Teaches Law

Here's a long article about my adventures as a guest lecturer at a law school.

I'm always telling my lawyer friends that I'm sort of a civil rights lawyer, just without the piece of paper saying so. There was a moot court in San Francisco where law students argued a free speech case a while ago. I really loved that case because it was a real test of who actually believed in free speech and who just paid lip-service too it. The free speech involved was unpopular and took place at a public school, which is government property. The (fake) authority at the school was trying to supersede the actual authority of the US Constitution, but it took some fire in your gut to really believe in the free speech side. I believe that side had the stronger case, if you looked closely.

I knew some of the judges involved in the moot court and asked if I could be a judge or a lawyer. They said no, that only real lawyers or law students are allowed. I said I'd challenge any one of then to a "debate-off" and that we should choose it by actual merit rather than who has a piece of paper. I was mostly kidding because of course they would say no, and they did say no. The judges later told me the students on the pro-free speech side didn't have arguments as good as mine, so they had to find for the other side.

But then later, another opportunity came up, this time about the 4th Amendment, or what's left of it. That's the one saying that the government can't do unreasonable search and seizures, and that there is some concept of privacy. You might be unaware that the 4th Amendment is a hollow shell of its former self. The government currently has unlimited power to search any and all of your possessions (including everything other than the human body) with no suspicion or reason whatsoever if you are at an airport or a border. Yeah, I really mean that.

And if unlimited search power at borders (and airports) was not enough, this now--somehow--extends to searches taking place with in 100 miles from a border. I would think that crossing a border is a trajectory, not a position. For example, I life near San Francisco, so as I type this, I am 100 miles from a border and I qualify for the no-rights search even though my activities have nothing to do with border crossing. In fact, almost 2/3rds of the entire US population lives in this "constitution-free zone," as the ACLU (rightly) calls it. This is not the kind of "protection" I'm looking for from a government. Quite the contrary--the kind of protection I'm looking for comes from the US Constitution.

This issue hinges on a case called United States vs. Arnold, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the finding of that case is a crazy as I do.

If you want this to feel a little more personal, here's an actual US citizen who can tell you about it.

Anyway, my goal was to help the law students think critically enough about these issues that they'd be prepared to question the validity of questionable searches. Maybe one of them will grow up to be a judge someday and defend our rights. Here's that really long article again.

--Sirlin