Price is fine for Brazil, so I’m buying this tonight and hopefully playing a bit in the weekend. People are complaining about crashes when trying to play online, though - maybe the servers are offline or having load issues?
Sounds like temporary issues.
Other Fighting game news today:
KOF introduced a cool new character.
Also, the best KOF game is confirmed to be getting rollback in KOF98UM
Also, it’s looking like Blazblue is getting rollback as well.
Yeah, the KOF news is all good. I’m very much looking forward to XV. I’ll be in on that. 98UM news is amazing also.
the long combos in Melty were absolutely unsafe at any speed for me. It’s beyond the limits of what I’m willing to learn, especially since I have games I’m satisfied with right now.
I refunded it.
What do you mean by that, if I may ask?
So I’m a handful of hours into learning and playing with Melty Blood: Type Lumina now and while I’m liking it a lot, it is not for everyone. I’m not disparaging it at all when I say that it kind of feels like a great introductory fighting game. The characters that I’ve played operate very similarly and have smaller movesets, the tutorial and mission modes exhaustively teach the game mechanics and character-specific moves and combos, and the auto-combos (rapidly hit any of the three attack buttons more than twice to progress a long string of flashy moves) make button-mashing a more enjoyable experience for the masher and the… mashee?
In particular, I’m really digging how the auto-combos mesh with the dedicated shield button. When playing online, I can get panicked without being dead-in-the-water and have a moment to recompose. And when playing with my 5-year-old, he can have a blast with auto-combos and shielding while I practice countering and evasion. Normally when we’ve tried in the past, he ends up getting frustrated because guarding and specials are hard, and I don’t have much fun inventing ways to get hit.
It feels kinda like UNICLR-light. Less flashy and expansive, but really solid fundamentals.
Considering I’m someone who loves fighting games but sucks at nearly all of them because of difficulties in execution, I love the sound of that. ;)
I should mention that while there are a handful of insanely long combos taught for each character, I believe that most of them break down the same way and are easy to intuit, if still tricky to execute:
- Start with an improvised normal combo (mix up the three attack buttons with optional direction without repeating any inputs).
- The final attack in the improvised combo launches you and the opponent into the air.
- Use an improvised air normal combo (mix up the three attack buttons while airborn up to twice)
- Jump cancel (tap the up direction to halt the last attack’s follow-through animation)
- Use another improvised air normal combo with a throw finisher (mix up the three attack buttons while airborn three times)
Sometimes they start with a special launcher or end with a special finisher, but basically by practicing steps 3-5 over and over again I was able to reliably execute all the combos I’ve seen so far.
Well, that’s not quite as bad as the GTAV online load times, but it’s still terrible. I wonder how they managed to implement rollback netcode but still botch something this basic. Japanese developers definitely need to do long distance network testing (or simulation of slow connections) because the speed of their local internet infrastructure hides issues like this.
Holy hell, that’s a lot of network for a fighting game menu to initially load. It’s the kind of mistake they’ll fix in future games, though, because it’ll be easy to mitigate now that they’re aware.
I was going to comment that I’m glad Nintendo games don’t seem to have this kind of issue, but then I started to wonder if Animal Crossing multiplayer and eShop load times are casualties of the same latency blindspot.
It’s getting fixed next weekend according to devs.
I had a friend who was pretty close to the Japanese fighitng game dev scene (though she had to leave Japan yesterday- her student visa expired), and she told me how bad the coders were over there.
The sheild in Melty is compared a lot to reversal edge in Calibur, but I think RE was a deeper mechanic (still pretty shallow though)
They have to. MBTL loads so fast that it really exacerbates the problems with loading time in Strive.
The fix came in today
Halves the startup, so now around 1 minute for me
The totsugeki mod still works on top of this, reduces it to 30 seconds
Unga-Bunga variation of it cuts it to 15 seconds
In more news: the next game to get rollback is my favorite of the oldschool 2D games, KOF98 Ultimate Match.
It will be $7.50 next Tuesday, when a beta starts for the online.
Not only the fix, but a major patch dropped for Strive. Lots of changes in that one, some much needed buffs and some head-scratching nerfs, but it seems most people find the changes to be positive.
I might play a bit this weekend. We’ll see.
I gotta say the price of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is making absolutely sure that I don’t purchase the game. If it was $20 or $30 i might get it, but honestly it hasn’t got reviewed that great, I’d play it for the novelty though. But $50 is just ridiculous
I think most of the appeal of Nickelodeon is as a response to complaints about competitive Smash – they’ve made a big deal about the netcode, wavedashing, etc. But watching it, it just looks so cheap in comparison. Like, hits seem to register weird, there’s all kinds of unbalanced combos… it just doesn’t look like it’s aiming much higher than “Smash knockoff”.
Maybe it is super deep with a high skill ceiling, but… I’d just rather play Smash.
I read a thing that noted that there’s no voice in the game, just generic placeholder-y fighting biffs and pows. I guess probably they couldn’t afford the original voice talent and maybe didn’t want to or weren’t allowed to use soundalikes? Even the sound effects that are there lack impact. It definitely contributes to the cheap feeling.
I think PC has modded the voices in already, but the game isn’t well-regarded,
News of this way:
KOF98UM has a really good lobby system now in its beta, which might be better than what anyone else has done in terms of function. All-play, spectator, and quick rematch options. Very nice.
Guilty Gear has Happy Chaos (new DLC character)
Characters are being revealed for a new fighter called Dungeon Fighter Duel based off a Korean MMO. The designs look pretty good. Will have rollback.
I think this is the one that’s Arc Sys, and basically looks like Guilty Gear with serial numbers filed off? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.