White Man

After what Capcom has pulled in recent years, I'm going to wait until ASW has their employees break into people's houses and pee into their open mouths while they sleep before I give the company any shit over their PR practices. Since we know online play is a bust for the Vita port, I'll re-ask the question I put out when the JP version was released: Does Plus R come with ANY new single-player content? New training mode features, EX mode for Kliff/Justice, new illustrations, literally anything at all?

I always thought it would be neat if they expanded on the whole stat boost system by making the increases permanent and having your "leveled up" characters playable in other modes. Of course, it could be turned off and would be deactivated by default in any online or local versus mode—it would more or less be there to beef up the single player experience. I highly doubt they'll ever do this, but I might not get another opportunity to share this idea so there you go. For the increased lobby size, I suppose it's possible they might make it so spectators no longer take up player slots. That way you could have a full six-player room and still allow a couple of people to watch if they felt so inclined.

Plus R comes out for the Vita in the US on the 23rd. Some folks theorized that the console patch would follow soon after, but that was purely speculation. The official word from ASW is still set at a nebulous "spring 2013". Speaking of bugs in the game, can anyone confirm whether or not looking at the leaderboards in the 360 version still causes the game to freeze? I haven't been brave enough to check. EDIT: Hmm. Well, for what it's worth, the page on the official site where they originally announced the Plus R console patch has since been taken down (or at least moved). So take that "spring 2013" date with a grain of salt... :scared:

You're right, I forgot all about Isuka. BB characters obviously require more memory, but considering the PS3 is substantially more powerful than the PS2... Yeah, sorry Mori, you don't know what you sayin' bro.

I'm callin' bullshit on the "current gen hardware can't do 2 vs. 2 fighters" bit anyway. Skullgirls has shown us that the PS3 and 360 can support the memory requirements for six different characters with up to four of them on the screen at once, and SG sprites are twice the resolution of BB sprites. Not saying they should make BlazBlue Tag Tournament (in point of fact, I hope they don't), but the concept is definitely feasible on the existing hardware.

Apparently not. Guess I shouldn't have canceled that subscription to Chinese Business Review Monthly.

Truth. This one looks... Ehh, better than the CS menu style, at least.

I remember the days when someone making a brazen knockoff of your product would result in an attempted lawsuit rather than an invitation to work on cross-company promotional deals. Sad to see SNK is so poor they have to resort to making KOF X KOF: Chinese Bootleg Edition to stay afloat.

Some characters are specifically designed for the story, though. As in, they serve a purpose for the plot but wouldn't necessarily mesh well with the existing cast as a playable fighter. I think GG did just fine without ever making Crow and April playable.

OP was made almost two weeks ago. I had a joke about a tear in the space-time continuum all lined up, but then I thought it might be a little too esoteric even for a BlazBlue forum.

Technically wouldn't be an "upgrade" since your entire library of UMDs will be instantly rendered useless. Then how you gonna play the original Lumines with its exclusive Mondo Grosso tracks, huh? Huh? HUH?? *shoves*

Oh yeah, I forgot Makoto joined up with SS. Oh well, it probably doesn't even matter how many playable characters there are belonging to any given faction. If the trend from the story modes in CS/Extend continues, these will probably be 90% text with maybe two or three fights thrown in to make sure the player doesn't start dozing off.

Well, we're supposedly also getting a Sector Seven route, and the only active member of SS who's currently playable is Tager. Mixed feelings on the new characters. I like Kagura since BB really needs more designs that look like They belong in a fighting game rather than characters that get in solely for the story (hence the reason I'm not too eager to see Kokonoe join the roster). Plus he's basically Guile, and I have no problems with Guile. I'm not so sure how I feel about Terumi. Everybody loves his shenanigans, but it seems like kind of a waste to have more alt versions of existing characters make it in when we're still waiting on characters like Jubei that everybody's been wanting since CT came out. Pretty bummed to hear the game is gonna be PS3 exclusive in Japan. Even if other regions get a 360 version, the online playerbase is going to be virtually nonexistent.

I was going to vote for a character I liked, but then I found out you have to enter all this information and it looked too complicated so I said screw it. It was like last November all over again.

Oh man, the five people in the US who bought a Vita are gonna be all kinds of jazzed over this. Presuming they all play semi-obscure Japanese fighting games, I mean. But back to more important matters, I love the way GG netplay is now. As someone who isn't terribly skilled at the game, the presence of lag gives me the same universal excuse for screwing up as the economic recession gives people who were incredibly stupid with how they invested their money. "Bet you're real proud of that double perfect, huh scrub. Before you go gettin' a big head there, let me just state for the record that I totally could have landed that elaborate FRC-overhead-into-a-midair-dash-cancel-unblockable-setup and slashback'd every attack you threw at me if it wasn't for all this goddamn lag. ASW did this on purpose to make American players look bad, FYI." This works so much better than BlazBlue where I have to pretend like I just got a call from the hospital saying my grandmother fell down some stairs every time I drop a combo.

The danger of training exclusively against AI in any competitive game is that there are limitations to what the AI can do. Because AI can't learn new strategies the way a human opponent can, you might find some little trick that works against CPU opponents in every instance and subconsciously make a habit out of using that tactic all the time—even when it would be counterproductive to use it in a match against a human player who will only fall for it once before punishing repeated uses. That said, I personally believe there's no such thing as a "bad" way to practice playing a game. Fighting the AI will help with hit confirms and reactions, as Moy said. And even if it does nothing else but help keep your reflexes sharp, at least that's something. As long as you remember that CPU tactics will generally differ from human tactics and are careful not to get too used to abusing tricks against the AI, I don't see any drawbacks to practicing against the computer. It's better than not practicing at all, at any rate.

I wouldn't recommend against playing Sol, but I'd be hesitant to call him an ideal "starter" character for the same reason I generally tell people not to play Ragna exclusively when they first pick up BB: their gameplay styles look deceptively straightforward, but are in fact fairly challenging with a lot of moves that are extremely easy to punish if used incorrectly and a heavy reliance on combos. Sol has decent health, at least, but he also has to deal with FRCs to maintain pressure and Sidewinder loops and all that stuff that exists to confuse the hell out of new players. Ultimately, though, getting over the crest of that initial learning curve in GG comes more from familiarizing yourself with the system mechanics rather than mastering any one character. I think the best route is just to screw around with whoever you like and focus on getting used to your movement options, managing tension, and landing basic combos. From there, it'll be much easier to start getting deeper into character-specific stuff.

Manly players start by learning I-No, Zappa, and Robo-Ky all at once. Godspeed on your journey, brother.

Yeah, I think one of the sets consisted of colors based on BB characters, and the other was random anime references or original colors or something. The original links to the pictures that were hosted on Yamanaka's Twitter have gone down, so I was wondering if anyone had saved them. (I was going to ask if the new colors were in the Vita version of +R, but folks who have that don't seem to like talking about the feature set for some reason.)

When this series first started, I thought it would be sweet if they could get Mike Z to narrate the Potemkin episode. Didn't really expect it to happen, though. Sometimes, April 1st is like Christmas on the internet.

That's pretty damn amazing.

On the official BBCP system guide page there's a screenshot under the description of UM mode that shows a selectable Course D. I suppose they're planning to add that in later. My prediction is they'll have you fight Unlimited Ragna 10 times in a row. No health regen between rounds.

Some folks only play fighters casually and don't care enough about getting to a professional skill level to justify the cost and time investments playing on a stick requires. Not everybody has the time to put in the amount of practice it would take to make the full transition from using a pad to a stick inside of two weeks, especially if they grew up playing on consoles and have never used a stick before. In any case, the guy specifically asked about gamepads. Telling him to buy a stick is a little like responding to someone asking what breed of cat they should get with "Cats are stupid, man. Get a dog instead."

I'm worried this has been posted elsewhere on the forums, but since I can't find it, here goes... Prior to the arcade release of +R, Takeshi Yamanaka posted some screenshots showing the new color palettes for each character (I believe there were two per character, presumably to take the place of the shadow and gold colors). The original links have long since gone down, so I figured I'd ask if anybody has those.

Ha, I had the exact same thought. Based on the silhouettes alone, these new designs seem even more misplaced in a fighting game than ponies. Oh well, I'll give it a chance.