Digital Watches

So much salt in this thread. Calm your tits, the two of you.

That is also funny for other reasons.

I can bring a fighting game featuring a penguin.

BaneFang: I can bring a PS2/USB converter if you need it (Er, not the keyboard kind).

I hear sarcastically rephrasing what someone said is a good way of proving it's not the case. Much better than making cogent and thorough arguments using specific examples, or demonstrating the merits of what you're saying empirically.

That guy is like the king of flowchart play. Wow.

You can hit people from long range, but you can't fight at long range. Just like you can hit people at short range, but you can't fight at short range. Basically, Axl has a weird set of tools that operate mostly in mid-range and as anti-air. This lets him disregard a lot of people's zoning games, because the area control you can apply against other characters doesn't work against Axl's tools. Combined with having the silly dhalsim normals people get the idea that you're going to want to sit back and keep people out and play a zoning game from neutral. Of course, the problem is that that doesn't work. Your options at long range are very punishable and stuffable. Your options once they close the gap and put you in pressure are abysmal. Your job is not to keep people out, because the longer you trade damage for distance, the more chances they have to guess right and get their game started on you, and your tools force you to commit to your first guess. Except against like, Potemkin, you're not trying to keep your distance, you're waiting for an opening. Axl is what's called a "morphing" character, which means that you're not trying to force the game back to neutral (Where zoning characters excel), you're trying to get offensive momentum and keep it.

"Axl has a DP... sort of. If you're a beginner, you should probably just pretend he doesn't."

Tataki contacted me a while ago to consult on the script for the Axl episode of the Guilty Bits video series. In the interest of getting the best information possible, I'm putting the script open for comment here, and will be editing it when I have the free time. If you feel anything is mistaken or have something to contribute, please comment here and I'll edit stuff in if I think it makes sense to. Obviously anyone whose contributions I use will be credited. Contributors as far as I know: Tataki Digital Watches

Yup. I'll put what we have on the forum and mess with it some more personally when I have some free time. To avoid the issues mynus mentioned, I'm going to just post the script as a thread, allow open discussion, and edit it with whatever I see as appropriate and worthwhile to mention. It's not *exactly* democratic, but it fits with how this forum handles such threads normally.

I think that'd be the best way to go about it, if Tataki is okay with it.

I think it's known that the exact input-to-screen delay on the PS3 version of AC is 3 frames, as opposed to the 4 frames on PS2 and 360. Other factors, like the actual framerate of the game and such, may have been fixed to be more like the arcade version in more recent ports as Amadeous stated.

What about those of us who rely primarily on taste cues?

@Derq: I dunno.

Well, it sounds like SG got the funding, so it might be kind of a moot point. They're still obviously welcome to use the engine I'm writing, it being open-source and all, but it's probably not in as polished a state at the moment, so if they're happy with the SG engine I encourage them to use whatever works best for them.

A'ight. Booked a good ol' redeye flight, arriving at 9ish AM on thursday. That is to say, I am confirm.

Any word, Sophisticat?

I can always count on reaver to say something smart and then say something dumb. It's definitely worthwhile to point out that just because a matchup is in your favor doesn't mean it's easy to play well, (Though a bad matchup against a good player who knows the matchup is still inherently harder to win, by definition). But tiers are based on results, not difficulty, and at a high level of play, you do see a tendency for higher tier characters to win more. That is the definition of high tier characters. To say that tiers are irrelevant is logically equivalent to saying that they don't exist, by the way tiers in fighting games are defined, IE by the sum of the relative observed performance in matchups of a given character compared to other characters. What's impressive about guilty gear is that the tiers aren't as strong as in many other games. You don't see a lot of 8-2 or so matchups, and they aren't clustered around single characters generally, so more often than not, the mere heuristic that is a character's "tier" isn't enough to completely predict the outcome of tournaments as falling within the top few characters. This is impressive compared to games like third strike, but it doesn't mean that, ceteris paribus, Eddie isn't still more likely to take a given individual match given no other information than I-No is. Tiers have some predictive value, and to say otherwise is to ignore facts. Many people misunderstand exactly what that predictive value is, or why it works the way it does, or how much it actually matters in an individual match or tournament, but that doesn't mean that it's not there. That being said, the game still is balanced enough that you shouldn't pick your character based on their tier ranking.

Much obliged. Turns out I do have a passport, so if you can confirm that, I might just buy a plane ticket before the price goes up.

Official GG tournament, you say? Non-zero chance of making this. Since the plane trip is decidedly of non-trivial expense (And there's no way I could get enough time off work to bus it), is there anyone who wouldn't mind putting up a guy for like, well, the weekend? I promise I'm not ax-crazy.

Okay so this topic of discussion is played the fuck out, so rather than recommend some easy characters for you, I'm gonna explain some stuff about why it's kind of a moot question. People talk about easy characters in terms of reliance on combos, execution barriers, what basic task is required to learn the specifics of how to play. People also talk about how "tiers don't matter that much in guilty gear." They're sort of right. Except that tiers matter plenty. Playing against a good #R Millia or AC Testament is harder for a reason. Guilty Gear is a really fine-tuned game, and there's a lot of work probably that went into balancing characters over revisions and such, but one of the reasons it's able to have a rich and diverse competitive metagame, where you can win a major tournament with a low-tier character, is because it's a complicated game. Every character has a lot of tools at their disposal. And I actually don't buy that it's about the system mechanics. A lot of games have similarly robust systems, and in all cases, they're not actually leveling the playing field. They're just adding another dimension on which some characters have an inherent advantage. There are some characters who can more effectively utilize certain system mechanics than others, as with any game, even when the mechanics are available to everyone. What makes guilty gear interesting is that the characters are complicated enough that, even if they have a provably inferior (by measures like tiers, statistics, etc.) toolkit than some other character, it's a complete toolkit, and it's different enough that most matchups aren't insanely one-sided. So when it comes to the question of learning curves, you're going to find that a lot of these characters have very different ones, and it's tempting to say "Beginners should play this character because for x and y and z reasons, it's easier to get over this particular hump of the learning curve." That might be true of a lot of fighting games, it is probably not true for guilty gear. I am personally of the opinion that the fastest way to get good at this game is to choose a character you like (Watch some match videos if you're not sure) and learn them thoroughly. No matter how "easy" the character is, there are any number of details, hitconfirms, spacing games, ambiguity games, momentum tricks, conditioning games, throw games, pressure games, situational reversals, and so on and so forth, that will win you matches, and that you will need to devote some time to learning a character to get down. What's more, the large option set also makes it pretty close to impossible to keep everything you and the opponent could possibly do in your head at once. All this means that the fundamentals, unlike some fighting games, are going to be very different in application from character to character, despite being the same fundamental games you'd expect from street fighter at a meta level. So picking up a character that you don't intend to play competitively means you're giving yourself things to unlearn. Habits that aren't even about what the command for a given move is or when the FRC point is or whatever, but about what decisions to make, how to think about approach, defense, what to do in a given situation. If you want to play a bunch of characters and get some variety that's great, but in my honest opinion, the fastest way to get good at guilty gear is to pick the character you want to play and get good at them.

What year is this

Block. Or 5H. Or airthrow. Or block. You've almost got this one right. But next time, instead of throwing something out, block more. Rensen-Rensen is almost always either too much time to react or a waste of meter. For frametraps, learn to use Meaty 2H, 5K-5H, 3P~5K, 5H~D, stuff like that. Learn to keep them scared of throws, and make a lot of false gaps at mid-range, where Axl wins most exchanges. Benten FRC is actually a good tool for frametraps, but hard to learn. You need to know when they can and can't tech, give yourself time to recover, and throw something that's going to hit them regardless of which way they tech. I'll get back to you on the vids when I get time.

Well, it isn't so much extortion as uh... exploitation? You know, pandering to a fanbase, which there's nothing particularly unethical about. Unless they're like, hardcore FOSS people. Which would be hilarious.

Still haven't heard back from them on twitter. Then again, it's twitter, so that's to be expected.