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"anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. " Yes.
An evening playing Street Fighter IV with Steve revealed that, whilst he’s got a pretty dangerous Cammy, and my Abel is not half bad, what SF4 really needs is some way of quantifying the amount of bullshit players sling at each other.
You know what I mean: those endless command-throws that have you swearing at the TV whilst your opponent giggles into their headmic; endless repeated moves that you should be able to block, even if right now you’re failing; all those moments where you realise your understanding of move-priority isn’t quite in line with the game’s.
That sort of thing. “Oh no,” Steve would say, “you hit me with your bullshit again!”
What if we could take that bullshit and turn it into a game mechanic?
Enter: the Bullshit Meter.
You can see the Bullshit Meter up the side of the screen. The supposedly-accessible SF4 is already festooned in meters, so one more in the only available space we’ve got won’t make much difference, right?
Let’s do a crash course in all the meters on screen, just to clarify the Bullshit Meter’s purpose.
At the top, you’ve got your health bar. That starts full, and decreases when you take damage; when it’s empty, you’re KO’d.
At the bottom-left or bottom-right you’ve got your revenge/ultra meter. This starts empty, and fills up as you receive damage. When it’s half-full or more, you can perform an “Ultra combo”. Basically: taking damage will eventually allow you to perform your most powerful move.
At the bottom, you’ve got your super meter. This charges as you perform special moves, and serves various purposes around making specials more powerful (“EX attacks”), performing a “Super combo”, and cancelling Focus Attacks. We don’t have space to explain it here much more.
And at the side, we have the new, improved, Bullshit Meter. There are two ways to charge the Bullshit meter.
Firstly, by performing repeated moves. Every time a player performs two identical moves in a row, their opponent’s Bullshit Meter charges a little. Standard attacks (eg: repeated jabs) make barely any dent in it; special attacks (eg: Shoryukens) make a bit more of an increase.
If a player mixes up the power of their attacks, the increase in the Bullshit Meter goes up less than if they just repeated the same strength special. For example: Ken performing jab-Shoryuken into fierce-Shoryuken fills the Bullshit Meter much less than two fierce Shoryukens in a row.
The second way to fill your opponent’s Bullshit meter is through certain “Bullshit Attacks”. Every character has one (or more) moves designated as “Bullshit Attacks”, and these make significant impact on the Bullshit meter.
Examples of Bullshit Attacks include Ken’s Shoryuken (particularly in its Fierce variety), Zangief’s Spinning Piledriver, Abel’s Tornado Throw, Honda’s Ochio Throw, and practically every special El Fuerte has.
You can see that Ken players spamming Fierce SRK are going to get punished thricely by the new Bullshit Meter.
As a result of all this: performing Bullshit slowly fills your opponent’s Bullshit Meter. This has only one effect:
when your Bullshit Meter is totally full, hitting all six attack buttons at once (preferably with your fist) will instantly quit the match.
This can, of course, be combo’d with other attacks, as it uses all six buttons; for instance, performing an Ultra attack with six buttons, instead of three (eg: QCF, QCF+PPPKKK) will perform an Ultra Bullshit Ragequit Finish.
I don’t know if Capcom are listening, but I hope we can get the Bullshit Meter into a future title update for SF4.
Disclaimer: I love SF4 just as it is, thankyouverymuch, and you don’t need a Bullshit Meter to punish the hell out of any Flowchart Kens you come across. It was an entertaining-enough idea to wrap a game mechanic around, though, if only in jest.
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"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.
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"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.
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"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.
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Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.
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Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.
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David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.
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Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.
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Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.
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"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".
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More on the phenomenon that is Ken Fighter Ken.
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This is a pretty accurate explanation of the state of the majority of SF4 online. It's also quite funny, and is the reason the phrase "Flowchart Ken", used to described a particular kind of player, is already entering the SF4 Lexicon.
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"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.
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'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.
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A first, rather long, post on the S&W Blog, in which I talk to Jack about a project he's been working on for a while.
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"This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK." Epic Eegra thread taking the Dante's Inferno-shaped ball and running a very, very long way with it.
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Full version, no out! The beta was lovely, so I'm looking forward to this a lot.
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"[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks," Furino explained. "It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way." Gosh, that's lovely, if not totally unexpected from Arronofsky. Lovely interview, too.
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Requires a chunk of configuration, but this is not half bad: allows you to use PHPUnit from the command line to actually, properly test CI models. Even lets you use YAML configuration files. Not bad.
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There are not expletives strong enough. In a nutshell: it's a pyramid scheme for following people you don't know on Twitter. It asks for your username and password. Terrifying.
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"Warning – this is a collection of half-formed thoughts, perhaps even more than usual." They seem pretty well-formed to me, even if the blogpost is a dense infoburst. Lots of solid gold in here, worth reading twice, slowly, and thinking on. And then working out what the conclusions are.
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"…you go to any page on Wikipedia; a "start" button appears on the page. You click it, and it sends you to a random Wikipedia page, and then displays your "target" page in a box at the bottom of the browser window (as shown in the illo above). Your goal is to navigate from the start page to the target page, using only links in the main body of each article; the game is timed, so presumably you're attempting to do it in the minimum amount of time." A Greasemonkey/js entrant to the Global Game Jam – unusual, to say the least, and an interesting move.
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And Kanye's datamoshing too. This is a bit more subtle and polished than the Chairlift video, but ideally suits the song.
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"Solid Snake, the special operations agent who frequently amuses himself by hiding in cardboard boxes, has been taped up and shipped to a warehouse in Oslo, Norway. Details are scarce at this point, but it appears Mr. Snake, famous for single-handedly dismantling Outer Heaven and destroying countless Metal Gears, made an error while shipping classified documents overseas and was picked up by a Fedex truck. The rescue operation has proved fruitless as of the time of this writing."
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"Sometimes, when the wind is warm and low, when the gear ratio is perfect and the tyres pumped, and when the road is soft and quiet, I feel weightless."
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"A few lonely zombies are looking for love on the Bay Area Craigslist." Lovely.
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"…while there will no doubt be a small but vociferous core of Third Strike veterans who cry foul over the series' apparent simplification, they will be vastly outnumbered by those players who get to fall in love again with the Street Fighter of their youth: one that's easy to pick up and play, yet near-impossible to master. As a result this is, in almost every way that matters, the perfect Street Fighter." Very excited. Very, very excited.
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"I've had too many conversations with game-makers (particularly from my Scottish locus) who, when presented with a range of possible game motivations and scenarios that don't involve spectacular male violence in urban settings, shake their heads and say, "just don't see the game in that, Pat. You gotta see the game." I've always suspected that this was male geek laziness on the industry's part. Incidentally, this report is based on a sample set that was 85% male." Maybe; but sometimes, "seeing the game" is an important part of game design. That doesn't always call for free-roaming urban-carnage, but I'm not sure I can entirely agree with Kane's quotation here.
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"Designing a game for a limited platform is not only a great exercise for a development team, but can often give real insights into how to take an existing product into a whole new area — often with great improvements to controls and the whole user interface and experience." Denki on porting from low-spec digital TV boxes to even-lower spec digital TV boxes. Some good stuff in here, particularly around constraint.
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"…once WoLK came out and half the guild went completely insane and started chasing the really silly achievements, it was clear we were going to need an RSS feed of the things. So I built one. It’s based on the Armory, like most WoW tools, and is a complete kludge, like most of my tools. But here are my notes anyway." Hurrah! Tom wrote his magic tool up. It's great, it's daft, and I love the Armory's crazy XML. Alas, my achievements are few and far between…
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"it seems to me Criterion, in particular, has identified and implemented a strategy that works remarkably well in the current games marketplace: release the best product you can and stand behind it; improve the quality and player experience with frequent upgrades; offer additional value-added content worth charging for; nurture the relationship between your consumers and your development team; and give folks what they want."
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"Translator 'tempestas_caput' doesn't seem to offer any explanation as to why he's translated Zelda II into Latin, so we just won't ask. But it's not the only game getting his "sleeping language" treatment: he's also he's also gone alone, dangerously with the original Zelda, and is making his way, even more ambitiously, through Final Fantasy III." Brilliant!
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"…if the future of games is to become entertainment services, then are subscriptions going to fall away in favour of upfront payments and free updates?" Some good thinking from Duncan.
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"Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage."
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"So, you finally caved. You've accepted a friend request from your Mom, Dad, crazy Aunt Ida, and your college roommate’s newly divorced mother. Well here's your chance to get back at them for taking away your public privacy."
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Daft, lovely, and hypnotic to watch.
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Fantastic, all of it.
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Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.
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"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.
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"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
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"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.
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"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.
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"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.
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"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.
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I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.
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"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.
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"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.
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Roo writes up his first experiments with his microprinter. The barcode stuff is particularly interesting.
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"Hackers across the country are buying up old old receipt printers and imaginatively repurposing them into something new. We call them microprinters." pbwiki site for gathering resources around microprinters. Nice! Still waiting on mine (from the same load as Roo's) to arrive, though…
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"With that in mind, I present to you a gallery of paintings made by one Hoenikker J. Troll, hunter at large and painter at other times. He dragged an easel and paints all around this world. Of Warcraft." WoW screengrabs run through artistic filters. Some are really quite pretty, as, to be honest, is the source material.
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"…video games are driven by the player, experientially and emotionally. Fictional content–setting, characters, backstory– is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place– the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking." Some commentary on the scale of storymaking games offer, from Steve Gaynor. Also: I like the word "storymaking", as opposed to "storytelling".
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A pretty comprehensive list, I think.
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AASM is "a library for adding finite state machines to Ruby classes. AASM started as the acts_as_state_machine plugin but has evolved into a more generic library that no longer targets only ActiveRecord models." And as a result, I might be using it a bit.
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"Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag." Entertaining explanation of the changes in the White House in the style of World of Warcraft patch notes. No, really.
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"News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period."
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"Drop7 combines the easy fun of casual drop-and-break games with the smart, brain-stretching enjoyment of simple number puzzles." Chain Factor as-was hits the iPhone. It's very, very good. It's also $0.99 or 59p right now, so you should buy it.