His GGPO name is TurnOver. He used to play HDR on PSN under the name TurnThisOver. I’ve whooped his ass in HDR many times (he used Hawk and Dictator). Maybe that’s why he hates HDR so much. I’ve traumatized him…
Am I the last person who realized the intent of that acronym?
who is DSP? is he another player?
god damn you pap, if he’s a ****** I swear to god i’m going to spin you around like a ferris wheel by your scrawny little head.
I like ST because it’s absolutely merciless and brutal. That kind of game (like Accent Core, MvC 2 and a few others) encourages perfection. Either you play perfectly or you get destroyed. That ups the skill needed to play the game, and more skill is good. Traps and stupid overpowered shit force you to play to the limit of your skill. A trap or abusive strategy should only be removed if it’s stupidly easy and / or has no viable counters. Pretty much all of the stuff in ST that people think is inescapable is perfectly avoidable, but of course only if you play at level that’s high enough.
Also, execution is a really important and necessary part of fighting games. I don’t know why a lot of people think it’s something bad. It’s just another factor that enriches the experience and makes it more varied. If you just want strategy and no execution, dunno, maybe you chose the wrong genre? Turn based strategy games maybe should be more appropriate?
As for 360 motions, they are not the same as hcb, f, and not only from a execution standpoint. The new motion lets you buffer the motion over and over without ever jumping nor whiffing the throw, which is something that wasn’t possible in OG ST. Also, SPDs now require only 5 directions if you start them from crouching, like a half circle motion, instead of a 270 motion. The new motions altered how the moves work, for the worse IMO.
Also, the newer inputs sometimes involved nerfing the “easier” moves, such as DJ’s Machine Gun Upper. That’s a terrible design idea.
A lot of HDR characters are less entertaining and powerful, some of which were low tiers in OG ST.
The thing I like about HDR is Bison. Sirlin got it with this character, small but very intelligent buffs that make the character better.
Played ranked, with the default settings. Then wait for the game to connect you with someone who’s hosting a classic match.
Er, HDR is also “merciless and brutal.” I guarantee you that someone who has respectable knowledge of the game will hammer a significantly less knowledgeable player, and in fact, I have seen [media=youtube]gOxsnNRLImM]top players brutalize other top players[/u[/media] – in tournaments, no less. (Recall also the story told by Sirlin of SnakeEyez wiping the floor with skilled player after skilled player in casuals after his tourney win with Zangief. And lest we posit hence that Zangief is some manner of unbeatable monstrosity, recall that SnakeEyez’s Zangief didn’t even make top eight at the last SoCal Regionals.)
This notion that Sirlin’s changes have somehow made ST into an overly permissive scrub-fest, in which the veteran player has much to fear from the noob (“HDR Zangief is baby zone, he’s worse that O.Sagat and Claw!”), is largely just aristocratic mythology, propagated in large part by people who have invested so much time and social capital in ST (mostly with the aim of making or maintaining a name for themselves amongst Street Fighter’s sea of gamer nerds) that they cannot afford to see HDR become the gold standard.
HDR largely trades old toughness for merely different toughness. Chun-Li is easier to beat, but Cammy is more threatening. Boxer is a little less powerful, but Zangief and T.Hawk are significantly more fearsome. Claw’s wall dive ambiguity loops are less troublesome, but Guile just got real. I could easily answer every charge of HDR being “baby zone” with a charge that someone is just crying because his fights got harder.
Oh, well, I guess that Sirlin should have put more “stupid overpowered shit” in HDR, then – not less.
I play Cammy, the single worst character in ST. Sirlin should have given her an inescapable loop, right? I mean, make it hard to do, but put it in there.
Give Zangief one, too. Like T.Hawk, he was ranked bottom tier in ST.
Yeah?
EDIT: I might add that your observation here is really one-sided. I mean, if you’re playing O.Sagat, or Claw, or almost anyone vs. Cammy, then playing “to the limit of your skill” is not a factor in your case (though it probably will be for the other guy). By definition, if one person is having to deal with “stupid overpowered shit,” then the person wielding the overpowered attack is more or less kicking back (once he’s learned to perform the attack consistently, which is a cake walk in most cases). Call me crazy, but I actually like that Sirlin toned down the perversely lopsided match-ups. Now the other guy has to work a little.
There’s sh!tloads of execution in HDR. Just less of the gratuitous, line-crossing, game-designers-pulling-complexity-out-of-their-asses kind.
Yeah, tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger tiger TIGER UPPERCUT was massively entertaining.
[media=youtube]3j8srnmbdH8]Honda vs. projectiles, that was always a real [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO_NErhCuUM]nail-biter[/u[/media].
Dhalsim vs. T.Hawk, you just never knew how [media=youtube]osODoiig9g4]that fight[/u[/media] was going to play out. I mean, it was anybody’s match!
Whatever.
Tit for tat, dude.
HDR Dictator is really annoying, but I agree that the changes to him are good.
The game would have sold a ton of copies without remixed mode. Half my friends just bought it because it was “zomg street fighter 2 that looks modern!”
Well, it did and they did.
I’ve posted on this kind of topic before in much greater detail but I can’t seem to find some of my old posts. Aside from some specific character changes that I didn’t agree with, my biggest gripe was always the diminished game play variety both through the decisions made in the individual character changes and with the outright removal of the old character versions. I don’t like how it has to be the game designer that makes changes to solve a problem that the player couldn’t do on their own. Fighting games are not fair and they are not meant to be fair. Too bad that there is an 8-2 matchup somewhere. This is called variety, not a problem that needs to “fixed”. This type of change makes the game much less appealing and fun to me, not to mention that some changes made the character in question play much differently and in a more brainless manner than how they worked in ST. And also why remove the old characters? I can’t see from a game design perspective why removing 16 characters from the original game is a good game design decision. How is that making the game better, especially when some of them play significantly different than their N. counterparts?
IMO the one game design change I can agree with are the easier inputs that don’t cause problems elsewhere. Stuff like changing hooligan throw, spin knuckle, and chicken wing motions are cool. I definitely do not like the SPD motion changes, though. These are very powerful moves that become much more so with the removal of an up direction. I think this is overkill.
re: the T. Hawk loop stuff, is this that much different than TOD combos that other characters have? Aside from a greater execution barrier, I’m not sure how this is so different. There are other characters that rank better than Hawk that can potentially kill you outright off of one mistake - why is this not such a big deal for them? Another thing that I think is lost in all of the talk is that it’s only one round. You still need to force the same mistake(s) again in a second round before you actually win. I totally don’t see the problem here and I’ll never understand why people could bitch about something like this.
Wha… Again we revisit the backward Bizarro world where ST has more variety than HDR.
Widely dispersed tiers means less variety, not more. I have consistently seen a greater variety of characters played effectively in HDR than I have in ST. Hell, just look at HDR tournaments vs. ST tournaments, for starters.
In ST, several characters have such a high barrier to entry, and are so poor against most other characters even at the highest levels of play, that you rarely see them used at all in serious matches.
Most of you are too young recall the days of playing Super Turbo in an arcade, where you frequently had long lines of quarters on the machines as people waited their turn to play. Guess what you saw? The longer the queue was, the less likely people were to play low tier or sometimes even mid-tier characters, because those characters were going to get vanquished. No one wanted to wait 15 to 20 minutes to play, only to have to work his ass off then get sent promptly to the back of the line after one match, because he dared to use Cammy or Zangief or Fei Long against Old Sagat or Dhalsim or Dee Jay.
ST is a fantastic game, but it is actually fairly hostile to variety. Four of the characters (not including Akuma) DOMINATE tournaments, eight of them make respectable showings though rarely actually winning, and there are another four characters who get spanked outright 90% of the time, at least three of whom you virtually never see in so much as the top eight. For some of the mid- and bottom-tier characters, there are players who often make very strong showings and impressive executive displays using those characters (Komoda Blanka, Nakamura Cammy, Toutanki T.Hawk, Jumpsuit Jesse Fei, Aniken Ken, etc.), but this is far and away the exception that proves the rule of O.Sagat, Claw, Dhalsim, Boxer, and sometimes Ryu coming out on top.
That’s 25% of the characters trouncing the other 75%.
'Sup, variety.
Then again, are we talking strictly about variety in character design? As in, a few characters have clearly dominant design, while another few are designed (intentionally or not) to be owned? If so, then I don’t see what’s attractive about design like that, where only some small subset of the tools available to the user can be used for consistently effective play. Pitting spear-wielding Zulu tribesmen, 17th century European infantry, and 21st century American military ground forces against each other would definitely make for some rather interesting variety in a battle, but the outcome would be pretty much predetermined.
Dude, I’m 30 years old. Don’t talk to me like I didn’t live through it “back in the day”. It’s 2010 right now and I can play at least 8 characters in ST competently enough to do well in a tournament or casuals. That works for me. If your Cammy was getting raped back in 1994, too fucking bad. You should have stepped your shit up. No need to hang that up on other people.
Also, nowhere in my post did I mention anything about tiers. That is not what I’m talking about because I don’t care about tiers. Never have and likely never will. I was coming from how fun a character plays, not where they stack up. I care about how fun and engaging the overall game is. I don’t care if Fei Long or T. Hawk sucked in ST by comparison to the rest of the cast. They sure are fun to play though, a lot more so than in HDR. I don’t know why you are arguing tiers and stuff with me.
I don’t even want to comment on that other crap you have in your post re: character variety in tournament placing. You won’t win me over with that - I play Marvel. You and I are looking for two different things in our fighting games.
Bernie, completely agreed. I want to quote Daniel ?Clockw0rk? Maniago again:
Milo, balanced really not equal fun or a better game. Same goes for countering your argument regarding HDR having more variety (US) in tournament results (it’s just for now btw). I’m not sure how to make it more obvious.
If you look at all the fighting games out there, there is really not much correlation between balance, fun, and popularity.
A game can be balanced + fun + not popular, or it can be not as popular + fun but not perfectly balanced or it can be popular, not as fun but kinda balanced. (speaking that in the context of US, 2010)
Virtua Fighter
SF2
SF4
BTW, there are so few tournament viable characters (speaking in your mindset) in 3s and yet people love playing that game so much.
HDR, having its main goal to rebalance ST, was already having a false start because of aiming the wrong target to begin with.
If they are more ambitious, they should have used the budget to introduce two more characters to the game (like fei/cammy/thawk/dj), instead of spending it on the unprofessional new animation (they know how to draw comics but not animation) and rebalancing the game.
If they did that HDR could very much have already phrased out ST
While I agree with you so far as to say that I prefer ST over HDR, I think it is a bit problematic to try and quantify “fun,” the way you do here. Balance and popularity are things that, to a degree, we can measure. We can look at matchup charts, and while agreement isn’t always there on the specific numbers, we do get some idea from them, and seeing certain characters consistently winning in competitive play does give us some way to measure it, and if we’re aiming to tweak that, we can glean some idea of where to make the adjustments.
This isn’t something we can do with “fun” in as real a sense, because fun is so subjective. You and I find ST more fun than HDR; many HDR players find that game more fun than ST. The means of measuring and coming to a consensus is not there, let alone even beginning to allow changes to be made to increase the variable. When approaching a game that is already well-liked and a solid engine to work from, I can’t quite agree with the argument that aiming for “more fun” is a better goal than aiming for “better balance.” The basic mechanics are there, so you’re only dealing with specifics, and it is very hard to get people to agree on which specifics make for fun gameplay. You have a standard which is unmeasurable. Increasing balance by closing the matchup gaps is much more measurable, and has the result of making more characters viable (while time may prove that to not entirely be the case, I’d say HDR’s rebalance helps at least somewhat in that field), which means players who pick up lower-tiered characters are more likely to stick around. That’s not a bad goal. The problem for many of us is that the rebalance also lost a lot of what we liked, but aiming for a hard-to-identify standard of fun could have caused just as many, if not more problems as well.
Personally, I like to stay away from making a claim about what HDR “should” have been. It has found an audience, built a loyal following, and has shown some degree of staying power; despite me personally not liking it over ST, it has clearly done something right for a whole lot of people. While I generally dislike the new art, I also have to disagree again about it being the wrong move. HD art was a big selling point for the game, and it probably would have bombed pretty hard without it.
At this point, I find it best to just view HDR and ST as two wholly separate games. Each has its fanbase, and each deserves it. I love ST, and I love that it still has a passionate and enthusiastic following. At the same time, I can’t really begrudge HDR or its fans, and I’m honestly very happy that there is a game for those who like ST’s engine without ST’s extremes. It has been a great game for a lot of people, and more happy people is always a good thing.
I know that I’ve struck a chord when people who are old enough to maintain their composure nevertheless fail to do so.
I actually did really well with ST Cammy back in the 90s. I put in the work and eventually got good enough that James Chen started playing her (ask him, he’ll tell you who inspired him to play that character). I never won a tournament with her, but then I don’t know of anyone else who did either, here or in Japan; she wasn’t tournament material (which is part of my point). At least in HDR she has a fighting chance (which was demonstrated at the last SoCal regionals).
Then maybe you need to start your own personal thread, because we aren’t talking about your subjective preferences. This isn’t some circle jerk where you can argue against someone’s objective points by mentioning that you think the game is fun despite the brokenness. Please try to stay on point.
Not by itself, it doesn’t. The same goes for imbalance.
Given a choice, though, I would rather a designer move in the direction of balance, and away from imbalance.
I made the point back in the day (we’re talking mid 90s, here) that Capcom probably deliberately designed Street Fighter to be imbalanced. A lot of people like having a clear upper hand in a fight, and a lot of people like being the underdog, so why not let them go toe-to-toe?
And of course, there is the hook of letting a player create a sort of custom challenge for himself, by giving him the opportunity to use a less effective character against a clearly more powerful one. (This, in fact, is one of the reasons I picked up Cammy in ST, though not the main reason.)
To Dave Sirlin’s credit, he never sought to make HDR a balanced game. His objective was compression of the tiers, not their elimination, so that the overall flavor of the game would remain intact (which it has) while he addressed the more egregious match-ups.
If you look objectively at what I and other HDR proponents have written, instead of extrapolating our position to mean that we espouse getting rid of tiers, you won’t find perfect balance to be one of our selling points. No one wants that. But we HDR lovers do realize that imbalance is not good when the distance between the best and worst characters is too great. That’s one of the main things that Sirlin wanted to rectify, and in my opinion he just about knocked it out of the park (again, without going too far and totally upsetting the tiers).
@je110, in general good points. While fun is in certain degree subjective, it is still quite measurable. It’s like cuisine - people have different preference. But generally most folks would agree what is a good dish and what is a bad dish.
And no, MVC2 on xbox360 has no new artwork. It sold better than HDR.
And the enhanced blitter filter option on fba make ST looks WAY better than HDR on my 24" 1920x1200 high res monitor, IMHO.
So worst in HDR what is it? 7-3 ? 8-2? Again look at countless examples of other fgs. It’s not as important as you think. Are 3s fans out of their mind? MVC2 fans? ST fans? UMK3? T6? We’re missing something that HDR fans get?
And compression of the tiers == to make it more balance, not sure why you think otherwise
I guess the it comes down to this - Balance or not doesn’t make people hate or love the game more (i.e. not a important factor)
But HDR alienated a lot of ST fans because it takes away quite a bit good stuff from ST (some people would not accept those tradeoffs, like just the artwork pisses me off, or removal of o char that bernie wants), while, you can say these might be subjective opinions, it adds little value of its own to justify these tradeoff for some of us.
Considering just how completely the SF2 followers are split on the issue, I’d say this is one of those cases where “fun” can’t be measured and applied to one more than the other in any sort of objective way.
Regarding the graphical overhaul, I don’t think ST has enough of a following outside of the Fighting Game community to really gain a big audience without some sort of graphical update. MvC2 has always had a more enthusiastic following from outside the core community, and it’s a game that doesn’t look quite as old as ST does. I really don’t like the outcome of that graphical update in HDR’s case, but those early screenshots are a big part of what sold the game to the average joe gamer.
Why not? Less variety of characters. Some characters have simpler strategy because a few moves are buffed. Those can be reasons that some people consider it less fun.
HDR didn’t convert majority of ST players over, period.
It has every thing to do with the final product. Yeah a 1080p graphics update sounds sexy on paper. I wish it could be as exciting as it sounds too. There is no point to say “it could potentially turn out good”. It’s already done.
Now i want to give another point of view.
Let’s be honest…HDR is DYING, thats not a good sign for a game that was intented to be ST replacement, despite years ST community is still growing, players with HDR background are migrating to ST, when i decided to get a xbox 360 i thought HDR will be full of players but i was wrong, so damn wrong, besides i don’t like to play on that crappy pad. Invest in a 360 arcade stick + gold membership, is not good news for my wallet :P.
PSN community is still pretty active through the clan called No Honor Crew compared to XBL. GGPO ST room has more active players than PSN and XBL.
IMHO, HDR will be completely dead in one year or two, too bad because i really like the rebalancing job.
Balance is good, the problem is how it was achieved. There is just no way you can tell a Fei Long player that even though his cool combo game off rekka kicks are gone, the game is funnier, cos landing that shit and a few of his other (many) tricks was what made the game fun for them.
First of all, all old characters were removed. A number of them are strictly worse than their new counterparts, so it would not create any balance issues to remixed versions if they stayed. O.Sagat could just be fixed to become the Sagat from super (no cancels off basically anything), then increase the recovery on the tigers a bit, and he was fine. O.Boxer, O.Sim and O.Claw were still good characters, but I do not know if they warranted any changes. If they did, something similar to what was done to the remixed versions would certainly suffice.
Secondly, Cammy did not need completely safe drills: she just could use better recovery so that the distance to make them safe is not so strict. Her hop backfist was her way around projectiles, as it would get swept/SRKed/supered on reaction every time, just make it so the backfist will only be made if you hold punch or the like.
Fei lost to Ryu but would beat Ken while Gief would beat both, it looked like these facts were not taken into account for HDR. Same for Dhalsim beating Cammy. Thus, the game did not simply get its tiers compressed: a few matches did get worse, or if they did not, it was pure luck.
Purists aside, people wanted subtle changes, not changes that made characters play differently - which basically meant substituting them for others - and certainly not having different versions removed. In fact, as pretty much no-one played O.Blanka, O.Cammy, O.Claw, O.Dee Jay and O.Dictator, those were the characters that could have used more pronounced changes. These people loved ST already, so it is not like anyone thought ST had major issues.
Dhalsim caused trouble to many characters with his drills. Why not change the drills instead of all others? Shit like 3 more start-up frames would not make the character suck.