This thread has convinced me to order the MvC3 guide! I was able to convince an Amazon rep to add the guide to an existing pre-order I have in order to take advantage of free shipping. Excellent deal for $11.55! I hope the MvC3 guide will be released in PDF format as well.
Milan
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I honestly don’t know what to say about this. You couldn’t possibly be more misinformed about fighting games than Mike Fahey. Like he seriously woke up in the morning and said “I wonder if I could write more stupid shit about fighting games…”
Yes I mad. He probably took one look at the preview guide and went straight to the combos. He should just quit spewing ignorance about this genre while he’s ahead.
At least he’s somewhat self-aware: “There are button mashers like me…”
He also seems to assume that a game guide should be “MvC3 for Dummies.”
Player’s Guide Experience!
Fantastic. This is my first post on SRK but I’m excited about the game, and excited to be able to get a nice guide to help me learn, especially at that Amazon price.
Also, wanted to share a story about one of my guide buying experiences. First of all, the only guides I’ve ever owned were Dragon Warrior Monster’s, and Yoshi’s Story for the N64.
Why Yoshi’s Story? Well, I was at the mall with my mom when I was younger, it was probably around 1999 and I was 10, and we went to an EB Games and the guy was like: “hey do you play Yoshi’s Story?” and I happened to have it and said yes, and he showed me this sale they were having on the guides, because they couldn’t get rid of them. Well, it was the best markdown I’ve ever experienced. How much did I pay for the guide?
$0.01
…
And so I bought like 5 of them for my friends and me.
Why I didn’t buy every single one they had and built a fort out of them or something, I don’t know…
Right, so why is he questioning the purpose of a strategy guide? Like he thinks Bradygames spent time making these combo lists with no incentive to explain the game mechanics?! What newbie is going to spend $20 to read a bunch of shit he/she isn’t going to understand right off the bat? If you are a game reviewer and you don’t want to spend the same amount of time to learn fighting games as everyone else, then you aren’t inept at making technical progress, you are just fucking lazy.
Just put down a pre-order at my local GS for the guide. Picking it up at Midnight along with my PS3/360 copies of the game.
Love that Frame Data is included.
Why is frame data so important? Does that show how fast moves come out? Yeah im a noob lol
To the regular joe, though, a really long combo like that does look pretty daunting… I’m just saying, as a fighting game scrub that combo looks horribly complicated to me. But you are right, it takes a lot of time to get to the point where you can look at that combo and be like, ‘Well, that looks easy’. Definitely not for lazy people, i.e. me.
As an aside, the previews look awesome and I’m glad that my 12 bucks is looking to be well spent.
^ He gets it.
You sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.
I proudlly salute you.
This is the only time I’m going to comment on conjecture, or who-did-what. How do you know whose decision including bio information was? It was my decision, and then no one involved objected. Plenty of people, including tournament players, love art and bio information in guides. Marvel and Capcom are also home to some of the most beloved characters in modern pop culture. I asked several pros who are good friends of mine what they look for most in a guide, and some of them surprised me greatly by basically saying “bios and art.” The last answer I expected from people who have placed in nationals, hah!
The point is, people pick up guides for all sorts of reasons. And let’s not forget that the hardcore audience is the minority, by a large margin. We are frankly very privileged and lucky that our publisher allows us to indulge in data and in-depth discussion beyond the scope of what most (any?) guides attempt, and what most consumers even care about.
It took like two minutes to write up each bio and set up each power grid, pulled directly from the game. Why not do it? I’d just appreciate it if there was less presumption about the decision-making process. The decision-making process was that we tried to cater to absolutely everyone. From the people who like art and quotes and bios, to the people who want invulnerability frames and 100% combos.
For what it’s worth, my co-authors and our editor had occasional fun joking about taking the cross-company match-ups seriously. I’ve even seen Seth joke about it in a couple interviews. I mean, look at just a couple of the reveal pairings. Chun-Li vs. Doctor Doom? Haggar vs. Phoenix? Of course these fights would last literally 1 or 2 seconds if we follow canon. But we’re not. So it’s just kind of amusing. See also: Remember when Thanos was bad in MvC2?
Finally, I took the Kotaku article as a compliment. Let’s not overreact. ;] And what the author hasn’t seen yet is that we have the largest, most thorough introductory and system mechanics chapters in the history of U.S. guides. If you are a novice or a casual gamer, the place to start isn’t really the character chapters, which assume you’re ready to rock. The place to start is the intro.
Got to take a look at the guide today at a local GS, so glad I preordered it. Freakin’ amazing.
Nice! I was one those that helped write the Alpha 2 guide. We did have the advantage of playing A2 for quite a while before writing the guide and were able to lightly include strategies that were tournament tested. I’m a complete noob at VS series so I will definitely pick up your guide. I’m sure it will be of tremendous help 
I must say that although Versus Books and the A2 guide was awesome, the best strategy guides in the business have to now go to Future Press. Those guides destroy everything out there lately so please check them out.
Yeah I was in rage mode yesterday :(. The point is that Kotaku has a large audience who reads their articles. Every time Mike Fahey makes one about fighting games, he always mentions how much he sucks at them. Just that alone intimidates his readers into thinking they themselves won’t be able to progress in skill from the ground up (which isn’t true because this marvel is the most accessible one yet).
And he is making an asinine generalization about the contents of a 200+ page strategy guide. Why doesn’t Kotaku make a preview article of MVC3 to give their readers a good understanding of the mechanics? That’s the thing I hate about Kotaku, fighting games don’t get much coverage from a game play standpoint. Since Mike apparently thinks strategy guides contain only combo strings, it’s safe to say he hasn’t been following media coverage of X-factor, tag combos, etc. Anything that doesn’t require good input execution.
I remember him being hype about Blazblue CS before making a video of him playing simple controls in arcade mode and even making that look bad (just because you are playing as Taokaka on simple doesn’t mean you should mash and fly around the stage like online players do >_>). A simple control scheme is good to begin with, but please don’t make a fucking review about the game when you haven’t transitioned into the normal mode yet. It just means you are good at mashing, which shouldn’t dictate the core gameplay of a fighting game, ever.
Seth Killian said himself that this game is excellent because it rewards players who have low execution skills with good strategy.
tl;dr
Kotaku makes bad hype, not good hype.
Fahey’s reaction to the preview was similar to mine in some ways. People opening the PDF will scan the whole thing and may well settle on what looks like the most complex thing. And if he hasn’t been following combo strings etc., how likely is it that the general public would?
Maybe Capcom should have released snippets of more simple pages. Perhaps they should have followed Eurogamers’ lead and made ‘basics’ videos of narrated gameplay and tactics, to lead people in. But they haven’t.
It’s been said for the past 15 years that most fighting game devs really really don’t understand/care about this. The new school Challenge/Mission modes are better than before, but they could still be a bit better in terms of gleaning newbies to the game and getting them actually versed in the system at a decent pace.
I thought the BlazBlue pack-in tutorial videos were amazing; shame the bigger devs didn’t follow Aksys example.
It’s not just fighting game devs. Multiplayer games in general are fucking useless when it comes to teaching new players the basics; and I don’t just mean mechanical basics (press punch, shoot gun) but tactical and strategic.
first post here :wonder:
anyone here got the guide from playasia?
It shows how fast a move comes out, how long it is active and stuff like how many frames of advantage you have (or don’t have) if it hits or is blocked. It is really important information to have for intermediate and advanced players. To have it in the guide at launch is huge.
What the hell is a KFC?