Reminds me of what happened to MSHvSF. They went the opposite route and tried to “fix” everything. The end result, everyone played the same way… except for Wolverine and his speed up super redizzy infinite.
Lots of 2012 hindsight with that. The main thing that happened to MSHvSF is that MvC came out. Just like the main thing that happened to SF2:S was that ST came out.
MSHvSF fucking sucks lol, its like the Ultimate version of XvSF where they tried to fix everything. presentation sucks sound effects and bars ripped from xvsf
Problem seems to be that they half-assed it, like they’re prone to do.
Anyways, that game ain’t got nothin’ on borrowing assets from an older game.
The point I was trying to make, though, was that in most of these cases the reason a group stopped playing a particular game is because arcades only had so many cabinets, and tended to replace games with their sequels. People always want to assign a whole ton of reasons that weren’t really there to these things.
The games that have become the ‘classics’ now just happen to be the ones that had both wide distribution and also no direct follow-up.
To quote from Maj’s article on “the Classics.”
This isn’t just “2012 hindsight” this is something that’s been agreed upon for quite some time now.
Same reason that WolverineMaster’s XvSF CMV has that joke about MSHvSF.
“Agreed on” is meaningless, to be perfectly frank. One of the things I’ve learned in the process of looking into these things is that are ‘common knowledge’ in the FGC is wrong a surprising amount of the time.
Altho’ I note that in the Maj article, the classic is apparently always the most recent game (with a slight exception of SFA2), so it kind of falls in line with what I was saying, the only exception being that the argument would have to be made that all the ‘classics’ just happen to be the most recent game… every single time.
What’s considered classic is all about what happened to be the current games when all the companies quit making fighters.
And I admit this is kind of off at a tangent from the original subject, but it's also important. Certain games are 'agreed upon' to be good without a clear understanding of why they developed the way they did... and this leads to people saying 'well they must have been good because of XXX!' That of course leads us directly to why Killian has to lie out his ass all the time to keep the community happy.What’s it like in your world where people who aren’t saying the same things as you are wrong or lying?
VSav2, VH2, CFJ, CvS EO, 3rd Strike rev 990608 all say otherwise.
And among non-Capcom games, there’s the fact that KoF’98 and 2k2 are still considered the best in their respective communities.
How would IPS work in SFxT? The combo system is too rigid because it’s not meant to be a versus game, and the juggle potential system is supposed to take care of true infinites (like Xiaoyu sweep juggles that have no end until JP runs out). The only reason the current infinites are in the game is because they missed stuff with restand (Kazuya, Xiaoyu), they messed up frame data on one (Pacman, but good luck performing this infinite for any meaningful period of time), and there’s a straight up glitch with Kuro.
I just don’t see how IPS does anything in SFxT, really. The juggle potential system takes care of basically every case that matters (IPS would conflict with it), and the rest are basically glitches. Also, if you set IPS detection to something like 4, you’d get rid of Xiaoyu sweeps, Steve flicker cancel fierces and Bob granchi cannon, and if you set it to 6 or 7, you’d still have Kazuya infinite as a practical combo and after 7 it scales so much anyway, who cares. I’m sure it’s a great system in a versus game like Skullgirls, but it doesn’t seem applicable in SFxT.
Also… man, those comments in the Kotaku article are bruuuutal. A bunch of people who don’t play fighting games, trying to talk about stuff they don’t understand and sound smart about it. They forget that many infinites (including existing ones in the SF4 series, like Abel on Chun) are basically tool-assisted territory, plus incredibly spacing-dependent (hit a crouching person on counterhit with a meaty move!!!). Also, El Fuerte is not an infinite, even a tool-assisted controller can’t keep it up forever. Loops are not infinites.
Isn’t it funny how so many people think they would rather get hit by an easy 100% combo that has a theoretical end if you don’t die, rather than get looped in an infinite that won’t kill you for 40 seconds and is very droppable?
That all said, Kazuya infinite has to go obviously, it’s too easy to perform and too easy to set up for it not to be game breaking. They’ll also patch the other infinites which is fine, but nobody will ever hit Pacman infinite in a tournament.
It’s pretty great! Everything is so simple and clear! 
Seriously, there’s a theme though. The things that get me going, and get me into all these fights, they’re all really the same thing when you get right down to it… and that one thing is the way (in my mind) that the community has these collective narratives.
It always ends up feeling like we can’t even begin to talk about things seriously because the ‘accepted myths’ preclude discussion.
In this case its the myth that the existence of infinites is good for games, because they… show creativity is possible I guess? The logic isn’t entirely clear to me
This is all intensely egotistical I know, but hell we're all convinced we're right, that's the way of it. Its just that in my case, 'accepted opinion' and 'so'n'so (insert name drop here) said it!' simply don't cut it as arguments... and maybe I"m missing something, but that seems to be a major thrust of the argument.
Given compelling argument, I will actually back down and admit I"m wrong :p (it's happened a few times, most recently with IPS, which I was sure people were gonna break immediately, but seems to have held up substantially better than HSD models have). It just has to be a *really good argument*.Keep in mind the audience Seth is talking to. He’s talking to a person at a media outlet who has never touched a fighting game competitively and has no idea how combo engines work, and this person is going to report it/try to sound informed about it in his article, which is written for people who have ALSO never touched a fighting game, but who think they have some opinion on how they work.
He has to explain why infinites exist (they’re leftovers of an open-ended combo system), and then he has to explain why open-ended combo systems are good and shouldn’t be universally abandoned… even if sometimes infinites find their way in. Open-ended combo systems being fun and good seems like something so obvious that you don’t even have to say it, but for Kotaku, you can never assume anything about their intelligence.
This article is not written for people who understand fighting games. The “guh? damage scaling?” line emphasizes that.
When an infinite is found or at least people are trying to find an infinite/break the game is like the old timey stuff of a doctor slapping a newborn’s ass: it shows we’re breathing/functioning still.
If the community isn’t pushing the game to its limits, getting in every nook and cranny and dissecting it, it’s a sign that the community for the game isn’t interested. We all know QA isn’t catching everything.
You can try to talk about how “good” can be measured or quantified but that isn’t true. Each region has their own “good games”.
Casuals/Nonexperts all act and sound the same in any hobby/field.
I have to grant you kof, although I gotta still suspect that part of that is that '98 was waaay more common than the later ones were in arcades.
Vsav2 to my understanding had a substantially limited release compared to vanilla (correct me if I’m wrong, pretty sure I’m not though, if nothing else I’m sure there was no US release at all))
CvS2 EO was a console port, so doesn’t even fall under discussion.
Capcom Fighting Jam I’m not sure what you’re counting as a revision of.
608 I have to grant too, but I’d suspect it has to do with availability again, I spent some time looking for how common and quick the update was. My impression is that 512 was way more common (and thus was solidified as the standard), but I’m not sure.
Embarassingly, I am totally drawing a blank on “VH”. I’ts probably something blindingly obvious, but its late right now
Hah, hilariously I have argued in the past to great depth that having combo systems be too open is bad, but we can chalk that up to me being old and a weirdo.
I understand totally that infinites are a pretty much inevitable side-effect of open combo systems, but to me that’s still different from saying they’re actually a good thing… and that’s what bugs me with his statement I think. They go out of their way to patch and remove the infinites because they actively make games worse, and that shouldn’t get spinned (spun?)
And yeah, again I embrace the argument that ‘infinites are what happen with these systems, and we like these systems’, but it’s gone beyond that. People are saying that infinites themselves make games more hype, and that’s not really too great.
Kotaku is really swinging for the fences on this one
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Will you be arguing the same thing when somebody breaks IPS? 
I totally agree that infinites are inevitable in any open combo system game, if not always practical. That doesn’t mean that the developers should just give up or write them off as a good thing. They’re a necessary evil, its a whole different thing.
Also, seriously, my position is kind of the opposite from what you’re saying, good absolutely cannot be quantified or measured in fighting games. They’re simply too complex. Many times already, we’ve seen games that should be total turds on paper turn into these amazing things.
That’s why I always say that the important thing for a game is to have a lot of people playing it, a healthy community. A game becomes good if you have a ton of competition and culture develop around it.
The thing I’m objecting to is that I think people often get it backwards, and take the qualities of a game that was played for various other reasons (ie in this case the arcade availability argument I’ve been making above) and argue that those qualities are what made the game good. They’re not.
When companies try to copy ‘what made the classic game good’, we get things like MvC3.
Edit: And expert is kind of tricky to use in these discussions. A fighting game expert is good at one or more specific games. That most definitely does not extend to an understanding of game design principles or making a game ‘good’. The community experts almost always say a ‘good’ game is like the specific game they’re invested in.
If someone breaks IPS, it’ll be fixed and come back stronger so yes, it is a good thing.
I edited that bit out, I normally HATE when people make that kind of ‘hypocrite call’ argument, so sorry (its so easy to fall into bad habits in these late night forum discussions!)
VH is Vampire Hunter.
CFJ is counted as a revision of CvS.
Also, a game being common in arcades does have something to do with perceived quality. If a new game isn’t received as well as an old one, operators simply put the old one back in and/or didn’t order any more boards of the new one.
In reality, infinites are actually a side-effect of having a system with links. Abel on Chun in SF4 and Pacman in SFxT isn’t the result of anything open-ended, it’s just frame data that loops back onto itself. You get infinites in versus games because of similar things, but because of the way air combos work, frame data looping onto itself is really easy, so you need mechanisms to control that (because having fun air combos is important in versus games).
In order to TRULY get rid of infinites, we need to get rid of links, basically. Or design your combo engine to be incredibly stale so combos end after like one or two links.
You’re just being way overly pedantic here. He’s saying they have to go out of their way to patch “bad” infinites (ones that are easy to set up and easy to execute), but “good” infinites (spacing dependent, tons of 1f links, impractical in any real match) don’t automatically break a game. One type actively makes a game worse, the other doesn’t.
And how will that happen? Skullgirls is already full of basically ToD combos after week one, and it will only get more developed in time. Someone’s gonna break IPS and… get an infinite that kills you too?
IPS has a hard and fast limit… there are a finite number of moves that can start a chain, so there are a finite number of things you can do before you will trigger IPS. It’s basically unbreakable as a concept, unless it was coded incorrectly. But in Skullgirls, people are killing characters long before they run out of new moves to loop with, so all it does is make people do an “honest” combo to kill someone… which is probably all Mike Z wanted from it.
Oh, duh. I always think of it as Nightwarriors, that’s why it didn’t come to mind. The ‘2’ revision, like VS2 was really damn rare.
And in my experience, in the period before things solidified, having the ‘new’ title was what was important… this was also before the arcade implosion, which makes a big difference, there were plenty of folks to play the newest game from any major series.
Even counting CFJ as a sequel to CvS2, it was very late and there weren’t many arcade copies floating around at all… which ties back to availability.
Obviously a game that didn’t get quarters was gonna get pulled and replaced (I remember one arcade owner I knew who refused to buy Soulcalibur because he lost money on a Soul Edge machine), but I can’t think of any time in the important period where arcade owners went backward in the way you’re suggesting. I’m sure it happened a occasionally, but that’s simply not the way it went in any of the arcades I can think of (and I hit a lot of them in the period, too).
Edit:
I’d say that ‘good infinites’ as you describe them are rather ‘meaningless infinites’. The combos not being practical doesn’t mean they’re ‘good’.
With links, that’s just not true. There are plenty of games that have links, and don’t have infinites. Combo systems are a sliding scale anyways… the more open the system is the more likely there are to be infinites that slipped through playtesting. The issue with ‘open’ combo systems is that the number of possible combinations goes up exponentially, and so it’s effectively impossible to preclude infinites, which just can’t be said in a normal linking situation.
In a ‘standard’ linking system, for an infinite to happen you need a situation where the the loop initiating move has fewer startup frames than the ‘closing’ move has in hitstun and additionally moves you forward more than the either move’s pushback (or have the frame advantage to be so goofily large that you can fit a dash and the startup of the looping move)… it’s not as difficult to avoid as you’re implying, there’s a fairly specific set of circumstances you have to match. The SF4 infinites kind of happened because they intentionally designed links to have follow ups (you especially see it with the Abel one). SF2 and 3 both have links, but aren’t exactly known for infinites.
And seriously, either I’m not communicating what I’m saying well or you’re not getting it (or both!). I totally accept that infinite combos are the cost of doing business in most modern combo systems. That’s entirely different than saying they’re an actively positive thing.
**My solution to infinites: Understand some will slip through, patch them out if they're gamebreaking. **Capcom is of course under a lot of pressure to patch them ALL out simply for PR reasons. Of course people also believe that patching a game is anathema, so that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms.