All Right, Fine

It was my intention to hold off on posting until such time as Pat has fulfilled his contractual obligations to me. Unfortunately for all of us he hasn’t gotten around to doing it yet and I am very bored at the moment. If the universe is just and fair (which it isn’t) some of your ire will turn towards him.

The thing with Pat is, of course, an excuse. As usual I’ve had nothing interesting, entertaining, important or even particularly intelligible to say for weeks, but if comments are something to judge by vapid banter is better than silence. I’m not sure why this would be.

Anyway, this will signal a return to regular posts that will almost certainly be entirely devoid of anything entertaining. That’s not to say there won’t be the occasional gleam of relevancy in this infinite sea of pointlessness, but I can assure you that such glimpses are likely to be both fleeting and wholly unsatisfying.

You’ve got to aim high.

By The Way…

As long as I’m posting again I might as well clarify something for those of you still having problems with the commenting system. I was being deluged by spam posts in the past and therefore switched over to a validation posting style. This means that if you post from a different IP address than one for which I’ve already approved a comment it will most likely end up in the moderation queue rather than just posting straight away.

Also, those of you who continue to enter cute little phrases instead of e-mail addresses and names are more or less intentionally placing yourselves in the moderation queue. If you want your comments to show up without hassle then simply use your name and e-mail address all the time and it will rarely filter you. Don’t worry about spam – no one besides me sees your e-mail address and I already know most of them anyway.

I know that it’s partially my fault because I still haven’t fixed the cookie issues and it doesn’t enter the information for you. I will see if I can do something about that in the future.

Continued Suffering

I’m not entirely sure what I did to swing my karma so far into the negative – to be fair, I suppose I probably deserve it, but it would be nice to have some sort of itemized list that outlines the various values of sins I commit. You know, so that I could avoid the big ones in the future.

Apparently it’s been decided that it’s not enough that I dislike the classes I take. No, said classes must also punish me physically by starting at eight o’clock in the morning. Really, it wouldn’t be so bad if the class in question hadn’t been originally scheduled at eleven thirty. However, the time slot conflicted with Cryptography (a math class that is in no way shape or form required for CS) and enough people bitched that they moved it to the offending time so as to accommodate everyone.

So, because of a class that I will be taking this summer anyway I now have to wake up ass-early in the morning during freezing blizzards two days a week.

I’d like to know how much longer I have to put up with this before I finally get some good news for once.

Slowly But Surely

Sorry for the lag from the last post to this one but I think you’ll all agree that, for me, this can still be considered regular posting. At this point I don’t start to feel the least bit bad until it’s been more than a month.

Regardless, I do have a decent excuse: I’ve been spending the majority of my time writing Java code for my game design enterprise group. Shockingly enough it’s actually been…fun, almost. After weeks of hand-wringing because no one in the group seemed to understand the complexity and time required to implement a full game engine I stopped waiting for help and did it myself. I ended up completely changing the system we were going to use and so far I’m quite happy with the results – you can walk around, clip against objects, and interact with NPC objects. All the classes and interfaces are there, now it’s up to the rest of the group to actually do something with it.

Also, I know that Soul Calibur 3 came out almost three weeks ago and that I have yet to do a write-up on it. Rest assured that I will (probably tomorrow). It’s been a rough couple of weeks but I feel like I’m starting to finally ease around a corner. Perhaps I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Until then, I’ll just keep talking about nothing.

SC3 Write-up: Part One

I said I would write about Soul Calibur 3 and, lo and behold, I have. Be forewarned: unless you are at least peripherally interested in the game (or at least the genre) this will be at best boring and at worst impenetrable jargon. That said, those of you who enjoyed SC2 should find it a bit interesting, at least until I start to rant about the results of the changes vis-à-vis Talim.

And now, onward and upward.

If you played SC2 at all SC3 should be pretty familiar; a lot of the changes aren’t in any way apparent unless you leaned more towards the hardcore set. Initially I’ll stick to the obvious changes before moving into “hardcore” territory where I’ll make reference to a few of SC2’s glitches and how they affect SC3.

For starters, the Guard Impact (GI) system has gone back to the way it was in the first iteration of the SC series – 4 total options, high/mid parry, high/mid repel, low/mid parry and low/mid repel. They’ve also added a new “Perfect GI,” which is essentially a just-frame (JF) GI. The frame required to get it off is different for every move, thus it probably isn’t something that most people will see regularly. However, when it happens you get a big bright flash and a huge advantage over your opponent. Overall I think the change is positive – it gives you more options and offers a tasty morsel for those really great GI’ers.

Next is the change to the ground game, and this is really the most noticeable of them all – even those who only played SC2 casually will probably feel something very different. The biggest difference comes from the fact that you can no longer execute While Rising (WR) moves from a grounded position. Additionally, you can’t GI to get up instantly. Together this means that getting knocked down is a much more dangerous situation that it was in SC2. Before, top-tier players could occasionally turn wakeup mixups to their own advantage, but more likely than not SC3 will see much less of that. If you get grounded, prepare to take some damage.

Another big difference is the expansion of the stun system. In SC2 there were a handful of moves that would result in either double-over or fall-back stuns, of which the former was shakable, or occasionally the stranger spin-stun. All three are back in SC3 but there are significantly more moves that result in some sort of stun. The idea here is that you can use stuns much as you would use launchers – to start up a big-damage combo. The SC series has always lacked a potent combo system and this seems to be Namco’s attempt to incorporate one without fundamentally altering the greater fighting system. Whether or not it works remains to be seen.

As for the glitches, both step-G (which is the “sorta” glitch) and 2G remain in the game. The former is a major disappointment because it shows a seeming disregard for the vertical/horizontal system SC is based on. The latter is just as annoying but points more to Namco’s shitty playtesting than it does any lack of understanding.

For those not “in the know,” step-G is when you begin to sidestep by hitting up or down and then immediately hit the Guard button. The result is that you can “cancel” your step, but you only do so if an attack connects. Thus you can get the benefit of step and the benefit of Guard all in one maneuver. In reality it’s not perfect protection but it is annoying in that it breaks the “horizontals kill step, step kills vertical, vertical breaks horizontal” system that SC is based on.

2G (or G2) is a technique that allows you to block moves that would not normally be blockable. Unlike step-G it is a glitch in the engine that by all rights should have been fixed in SC3. The two techniques are similar but used in different situations: 2G can be used to guard normally after a whiffed GI – that is, you attempt to GI but guess wrong, but instead of being at a disadvantage and unable to act you can guard normally by quickly tapping down then guard in a small window. G2 is similar – it allows you to block follow up attacks in certain “natural combos” (combos that, when the first hit connects, the rest are un-blockable). G2 is harder to do because it requires memorization of the combos in which it will work and thus it is less talked about.

Okay, it turns out that this was longer than I anticipated. Instead of moving on to talk about the changes to Talim I’ll instead leave that for a separate write-up later in the week. If this interested you at all (and you enjoy painful rants) you’ll want to check that one out. Sufficient for now to say that I am not a happy Talim player. In fact, I’m not a Talim player at all anymore.

A Brief Update

I yet live, but I am currently residing at my parents’ house in Novi. As such internet access is limited – in fact, it was non-existant until I finished repairing the family computer. For those of you keeping track this is sort of a ritual for me…I’m not sure I can remember the last time I came here for a break and didn’t have to fix their system.

This post is mostly to demonstrate that my shiny new notebook does, in fact, work, and that the Novi Public Library’s WiFi connection is shockingly strong and fast. More on the specifics of my wonderful toy in the future.