BlazBlue

[Sentura]

i'll take the rest of this discussion to PMs.

[Taylor]

Completed my 100th (console) match today. It's completely different than the arcade where people have years of hardcore fighting experience. There are people online who seem to play by spinning the stick 360 while spamming the drive button... It's kind of turned Noel into SFIV Ken. You can't read your opponent when they're just doing random crap with lots of invincibility, so you end up in a dry game of blocking and punishing (or blocking, punishing and then running away because Taokaka's guard is weaksauce).

Still haven't fought a single Carl online...

The netcode is fantastic, it's a really fast game but I can play people in Japan with no noticeable dropped frames. Unfortunately disconnecting is an even bigger issue than SFIV because you can do it while the game is loading the results screen and it still counts as a disconnect. It's pretty obvious who is going to disconnect (Jins with 100% win ratio and 50 incomplete games), but it still sucks. I guess if the game itself isn't hosting the matches it's hard to tell who disconnected, but the players should tell the server instantly when the win result comes up. The game also shouldn't track Player Match results, the whole point of Player Match is to try out strategies and fight people in a range of skill levels, the e-peen element makes them Ranked Matches with spectator slots.

[Taylor]

Tradewest Games SAS has announced today that BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger will be released in France for PC in the 1st quarter of 2010.

Frédéric Bichat, General Manager of SAS Tradewest Games added:

"We are particularly proud to have been selected for the exclusive distribution of ... BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. This partnership allows us to strengthen our line-up.."

It should be noted that BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger has not yet been released on Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 in Europe. That, also, is expected in 1st quarter 2010.

The game was released on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in North America and Japan in June of this year.

It is odd that the PC release of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger was announced for France, but we are certain to get announcements that it will release in other territories in the future.

http://iplaywinner.com/news/2009/11/13/ ... -next.html

Yeah, I know. It’s not first person and you can’t pretend to be an elf, but I think it’s interesting this is happening. Guilty Gear XX #Reload did get a PC release but it didn't sell well enough for the revisions to make the jump. Unfortunately in this case Calamity Trigger is a pretty broken game and it sounds like the upcoming revision, Continuum Shift, will fix a lot of problems. It’s still no Accent Core, though.

[Erratic]

Picked this up a week back, was a nice change of pace with it being so offensive and having a lot of basic movement options available to you but it still didn't pull me away from SFIV. I plan to get back to it one of these days, though I don't think time is going to help the online community stick around...

[Taylor]

I’m not really a fan of Street Fighter IV if I’m honest; it’s developed around contrived comebacks and fireball traps being the height of strategy. Coming from Guilty Gear and a bit of Street Fighter Alpha I just find SFIV to be too lacking in options, and ultimately that’s where depth comes from. Plus, it's so damn slow.

BlazBlue was basically an attempt to take all the awesome in Guilty Gear and compact it in a way that made it more accessible, which makes a lot of sense as it was a really complicated game. But while doing this the game became far too rigid as all the characters got locked to a particular play-style, bursting was too risky, and you can’t even run away the length of the screen without negative penalty kicking in. Plus the balance is atrocious, Rachel, Nu-13 and Arakune are leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. The characters also aren’t as interesting, even the ones they copy and pasted like Sol Badguy, Ky and Potemkin.

However, Continuum Shift is the next revision which is currently undergoing location tests in various Japanese arcades and it sounds like a much better game. They’ve been very aggressive rebalancing (pretty much deleted Nu-13 and started again), changed the burst system, changed the Guard Libra, added more flexibly and moves, etc. But for now I’m back to Accent Core and learning Dizzy.