Insights from Sirlin.net

Subtractive Design Article

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:33:29 -0700

My article about subtractive design appeared in Game Developer Magazine in March, but I kept forgetting to post it on my own site. A request for a digital copy of the article from a lead designer at Relic Entertainment finally got me to actually do the work. By popular demand, here you go.

Street Fighter HD Remix On Sale

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:47:59 -0700

Street Fighter HD Remix is on sale for $10 this week on XBLA, rather than the usual $15 price. Here's the long list of features that you get for this surprisingly low price.

If you're late to the party on this game, it's an update to Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo where the bottom tier characters are better and the top tier is just barely worse. Many lopsided matchups from the previous game are now less lopsided and move inputs like Cammy's Hooligan throw and Fei Long's flying kick ("chicken wing") are no longer difficult for the sake of being difficult. You even get SSF2T (without any gameplay changes) in the package as well.

You can read a lot more about the game here.

Buy One, Get One Free on XBLA

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:00:00 -0700

This offer is only for today, Monday June 15th 2009. Take advantage of it if you can though, because you get something free out of it. If you buy either Puzzle Fighter, UNO, or Street Fighter HF (not SF HD Remix unfortunately) on Xbox Live, then you get a second download code for free that you can give to a friend so you can play together. Neat. Remember to act fast.

Here's the link

Yomi Card Game Playtest to be at Evolution Tournament

Sun, 24 May 2009 13:18:06 -0700

(Larger version)

After years of the development, the Yomi card game is approaching its final form...slowly. At this point, I'm just waiting for Udon to complete the rest of the art (and waiting...and waiting...), though there is still time for minor balance tweaking in the meantime. This is a strangely familiar situation for me.

The deck boxes for the two main characters are pictured above, along with some of the cards. Looking good?

If you're going to this year's Evolution fighting game tournament in Las Vegas (www.evo2k.com), you'll get to see the game in-person, and playtest all 10 decks (not an official event, I just mean while you're waiting around). I won't actually be selling decks there--again, not all the art is there even though the gameplay is--but if you're going to attend the event and you're really intent on buying some decks rather than printing them out yourself, check out this thread.

Incidentally, you can print out playtest versions of all 10 decks yourself (currently one version out of date, but update coming within a week!) and find more information about Yomi at www.sirlin.net/yomi or just download the rules here.

Yomi: Fighting Card game is a simple card game that simulates the mindgames that occur during a fighting game. It's a fixed-deck game, so all you need is one deck and an opponent with one deck to play. There's no rip-off scheme of selling you rare cards in random packs. There will be 10 decks in the initial release, then 6 boss decks in a (much) later release. Each deck represents one character and can also double as deck of regular playing cards. The characters are from my Fantasy-Strike world, and they seem ripe to be in a fighting game someday.

If you are publisher/distributor and are interested in Yomi, or if you are would like to make a connection for me with publisher or distributor, use the contact form.

Stanford Seminar on Gaming

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:06:49 -0700

Today I was was a speaker/panelist at a Stanford University event called How They Got Game put on by Professor Henry Lowood of the Libraries and Academic Information Resources department. The theme was professional gaming, examined from several angles. We looked at the perspective of players and how they prepare for events, the challenges of managing teams and entire gaming leagues, and how to take professional gaming to the next level in North America.

Annie "Exstasy" Leung talked about the gaming competitions she's been involved in for the last four years, including Unreal Tournament 3 and Guitar Hero. She emphasized that practicing long hours was vitally important, and that playing games at home is quite a different matter than playing them at a competition with all the noise and distractions. She said she tried to create distractions at home while practicing to simulate this, and at events sometimes wears those big helicopter pilot earphones with tons of noise-canceling.

A professional Fifa player (his name isn't on the schedule, I'll add if when I find out his name) talked about the frustrations of having to learn different versions of a game. Fifa on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are very similar, one is a port of the other. But the PC version is substantially different, with different ball physics(!) so playing that is like playing a totally different game. Ball physics and lots of other things also changed between Fifa 08 and Fifa 09, so he said there is really no way to be good at a game with different physics than to practice it endlessly, even if you are already a master of the 08 version. He mentioned one ridiculous tournament where the organizers required the players play the game using a different camera angle for television purposes, but this of course throws out their months (or years) of practice and is clearly unacceptable. Luckily, the later rounds were played using the standard camera angle because the organizers did find a way to broadcast with the camera angle they wanted while the players played using the standard view.

A top European Quake player joined us via video conferencing

UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 14 (Final Week)

Fri, 08 May 2009 21:22:49 -0700

In the last class of the semester for UC Berkeley's StarCraft class, several students gave their presentations.

Zergling Rush

The first student's topic was the Zergling Rush. The point of this strategy is to take advantage of Zerg's window of dominance at the very beginning of the game. Zerglings are weak, but you can get them out so early that your opponents might very well have little or nothing to defend with.

There are two main varieties of the zergling rush: the 4-pool and the 6-pool. 4-pool means that you only have four drones (resource collectors) when you build your spawning pool (the building that lets you produce zerglings). So you start the game by gathering resources for a bit, not building any drones, and going straight to spawning pool and zerglings. This is an "all in" strategy though. If you don't win with it, you are so severely behind economically, that you will probably lose. The reason to choose this strategy over a slightly more conservative 6-pool rush is if you think getting the zerglings to the opponent a few seconds faster will allow you to win the game on the spot.

The 6-pool strategy is still risky (putting you behind economically if you fail), but you can recover from it if things don't go as planned. The build order is to first build two drones (getting you to six total), then mine a bit, then build a spawning pool as soon as you can, then build another drone to replace the one that you just turned into a spawning pool, then build an overlord. If you do this correctly, these things will happen simultaneously: 1) your overlord finishes building, 2) you have all three larva ready to build units, 3) you have 150 minerals, the exact cost of building 6 zerglings from your 3 larva.

The student said the first goal of a zergling rush is to end the game immediately if you can. As soon as you arrive at their base, you probably have a good idea if this is even possible. If it's not, your next goal is to disrupt their economy. Remember that your economy is already disrupted by you doing a zergling rush (rather than building up your own economy) so you'll have to disrupt theirs just to stay even. If you can't disrupt their economy much, the next priority would be to at least force them to change their strategy or force them into a certain strategy. For example, they might have to build sunken colonies or bunkers right away to survive. And failing all that, at the very least you should harass with your zerglings and force the enemy to spend a lot of clicks to deal with you. The student also pointed out that there is some value in getting the opponent angry or flustered here, too. Zergling rushes are considered "cheesy" by some, so that's great to

Malcolm Gladwell and Playing to Win

Mon, 04 May 2009 13:04:50 -0700

Gladwell strikes again. He's wonderful at summarizing a field of research, often pulling from boring sources that he makes interesting by synthesizing an overall picture of what's going on. Normally, I would have great appreciation for this, but he tends to do it for fields that I myself have researched, then beats me to the punch, which I find highly annoying. This is of course that's no fault of Gladwell's, only mine. This time though, he covers ground that I have written about for years (sirlin.net/ptw), summarizing it in this skillfully written New Yorker article:

How David Beats Goliath

He is talking about the "playing to win" mindset, familiar ground for me. I summarize the mindset this way:

If you want to win, then you should do whatever gives you the best chance of winning...within the rules of the game.

Ten years ago, when people first read my articles about playing to win, many objected that the message was just too obvious to write down. The huge popularity of those articles and enormous amount of debate they spawned show that it's not so obvious after all. Gladwell's article does the same. In basketball, stock market software, war, and computer simulations of battle, Gladwell shows that most people are appalled at playing to win. I mean it's just not done that way! There are social conventions you know, and even though what you're suggesting isn't against any rule, and even though it is highly effective...it's just not done!

That idiocy shows up in pretty much every "game" you can think of. It's amazing how bad people are at figuring out that if you want to win, you do what gives you the best chance of winning (within the rules). Gladwell's examples show basketball coaches who reject this because it leads to not learning "basketball skills." Funny, I thought winning was a basketball skill. If your "basketball skills" aren't letting you win against my team's "non-skills," then the last thing you should be doing as a coach is throwing chairs and getting mad at me. Try playing to win instead.

Even more pathetic are the participants in Gladwell's example of the military simulation game. A tournament gave each player $1 trillion to buy fictional military equipment, pitted against the equipment of other payers in a mock battle. One player discovered a very unusual strategy that's "socially horrifying" in the real world, but is highly effective given the rules of the game. Predictably, the people involved are not able to grasp the simple concept of playing to win here. Players are outraged at the winner because the way he played does not fit with their social conventions, even though all agree that he broke no rules. Then the judges chime in with that familiar cry of the scoundrel: "but it broke the spirit of the game!" They said they would not hold the tournament anymore if that player was going to keep entering with outlandish strategies.

These people have managed to misunderstand not only the "playing to win" mindset, but also the concept of game design. If the rules of your game allow players to play in game-breaking ways that make the game less interesting strategically, or that make the game simply feel terrible or unfun, then you should seek to design better rules. Blaming the players for making legal moves that help them win is lunacy. They should have thanked this unusual player for exposing the flaws of their game design so they can create a better ruleset. (Sidenote: thanks to all the SF HD Remix testers and Yomi card game testers who discovered game-breaking stuff that I was able to fix.)

Enjoy Gladwell's article on this subject of playing to win, and remember how difficult it is for people to understand:

If you want to win, then you should do whatever gives you the best chance of winning...within the rules of the game.

UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 13

Sun, 03 May 2009 13:10:30 -0700

This week's StarCraft class didn't exactly go as planned. Students were supposed to give their final presentations today, but only one student who signed up for today was there to attend (the others preferred to fail the class apparently?).

The student that actually did present talked about strategy of containment in StarCraft. By his own admission, he is no top player, but did the best he could to understand when and how containment is useful and when it's not. He said he has about 150 APM and plays Protoss.

First, what does containment mean? It means trapping the enemy in his base, however you can. The student gave these advantages for using a containment strategy:

Good for low APM players (like him). It usually doesn't take a whole lot of clicks to set up containment, but it can take a huge number to bust out of one.
Takes advantage of superior flux. You set up your units just right (at choke points or in semi-circular formations) so that all your units will be able to attack at once while the enemy will probably not be able to accomplish that, given the terrain.
Gives you map control. If the enemy is stuck in his base, you have free reign of the rest of the map so you can expand.
Reduces the cone of uncertainty. If the enemy is stuck in his base, there's just fewer things he could possibly be doing.
Reduces your scouting burden. Similar to the last point, scouting becomes less critical when the opponent is mostly stuck in one place.
Stalemates help you. If you are containing the enemy, then there is a battle where both sides lose many units, even a statemate is acceptable to you. That's just more time going by where you can expand anywhere you want and the enemy cannot.

He listed these disadvantages to containment:

Resident Evil 5 Versus Mode

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:39:26 -0700

Resident Evil 5's story mode is nice, but versus is where it's at! The $5 add-on for Resident Evil 5 is awesome, and I've been playing it tons. It has a million problems, sure, but somehow it manages to be extremely fun.

Let me sort out some of the confusion of what we're even talking about here before going into the details. Resident Evil 5's main mode is a story mode that you can play single player (with an AI partner) or co-op (with a human partner) over system link, split screen, or online. When you beat the game, you open up a new mode called "mercenaries." Mercenaries mode is distilled to be just actiony goodness. No story, no RPG-leveling-your-weapons bullshit, no grinding of any kind. Just pure action and the challenge to score as many points as you can in a given time.

Remember, that mode is part of Resident Evil 5 (without buying an addon) and comes in single player and co-op flavors. There are 8 levels and 10 characters to choose from. Buying the versus mode addon allows you to play mercenaries mode with four players instead of just two and adds competitive options rather than just cooperative. You can choose between 2v2 and free-for-all (1v1v1v1). In either of those modes, you can choose between the horribly named "Slayer" and "Survivor" modes. My friends constantly forget which is which between those two modes, so we stopped using the official names entirely. My handy mnemonic is "Slayer mode is the mode where you don't slay the other players as much." We call it deathmatch (aka survivor) and either score attack or just "mercs mode" (slayer) because mercs mode used to mean the score attack mode before the versus update.

Free-for-all games inherently have the problem of being about who gangs up on who with alliances and kingmakers. I've played 2v2 about 99% of the time to avoid that, most of it with an awesome guy named Blicen who's in the military in real life. Maybe that's what makes him so good with the sniper gun, I don't know. We played the deathmatch mode a bit, and it's actually better than we expected, but score attack is where it's at.

First, a description of deathmatch mode though. You start with only

UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 11

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 11:54:01 -0700

This week's StarCraft class was about deception.

Professor Feng used these terms. leading up to deception:

Level 0 - Use micromanagement, macromanagement, look around the map for various map features, you aren't taking the opponent's actions into account.

Level 1 - Scout the enemy, build correct counter units based on what he has, position your army well given the position and direction of movement of the enemy's army

Level 2 - Deception and reading the mind of the opponent.

Two main types of deception in StarCraft are:

Army deception. Either a) get their defensive army to leave when it shouldn't or b) get their offensive army to attack at a stupid time or place.

Build order deception. Force the opponent to build the wrong units.

We already looked at one example of build order deception in a previous class. The Zerg player used an overlord to scout an expansion base, but was chased off so the overlord could only see the edge of the minerals at the expansion, rather than the whole base. The Terran player then sent SCVs from his main base to mine the expansion minerals to fake that he had an expansion. This caused the Zerg player to expand, thinking he was safe for a while when in reality the Terran had no expansion at all and a sizeable army to rush with.

Here are several more examples of deception. In this video, the Zerg player has 4 lurkers. The natural place to put them is at the top of the ramp, but he splits his force into 2 lurkers at the top and 2 before the ramp. He then puts the lurkers at the bottom of the ramp on "hold" but leaves the ones at the top in their usual attacking state so the opponent will know about them. This coaxes the opponent into gathering a large force at the bottom of the ramp (right on top of the two lurkers down there). Notice the amazing willpower of the Zerg player in the he gets an entire pack of marines right on top of his lurkers...but he still doesn't make them attack. Instead he waits until there are TWO entire packs and uses his mutalisks to bait them into standing in just the right (or wrong!) place.

Here's another similar example, also showing some willpower on the Zerg's part. The Zerg player allows the Terran to destroy his sunken colonies even though the Zerg could take his lurkers off "hold" and have them attack. When the last sunken colony is destroyed, he finally

Subtractive Design

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:24:52 -0700

(This article originally appeared in Game Developer Magazine.)

Subtractive design is the process of removing imperfections and extraneous parts in order to strengthen the core elements. You can think of a design as something you build up, construct and let grow, but it’s pruning away the excess that gives a design a sense of simplicity, elegance, and power.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." —Albert Einstein

First let's look at the theory behind this idea to see why designers in many fields often think in terms of negatives (subtracting things) rather than positives (adding things). Then let's look at several successful subtractive designs so we know what to aim for. Finally, I'll discuss why subtractive design often breeds controversy.

This image is simple, powerful, and without extraneous detail.

Why Subtraction?

Designers in many fields, not just games, often think in terms of negatives (subtracting things) rather than positives (adding things). Design is creating a form (a game in our case) that fits a context. There isn’t just one boundary we have to check between form and context though, there are infinitely many. Is our game easy enough to learn? Does it have the desired amount of strategy or depth? Does it appeal to the intended age-group? Is it cheap enough to make in both time and money? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Do the aesthetics help the player understand how to play the game? Do the mechanics work well with each other? Do they require the desired amount of dexterity? The list goes on.

We first come up with a design that might fit all the requirements. Sometimes this comes from the intuition of a designer who has internalized all those forces and somehow spits out a new answer. More likely, we start with something pretty well established so that we know it solves many of the requirements already. That’s how genres, sequels, and remakes help us make good (but not necessarily new) designs.

Once we have something, we have to evaluate how good our design is. Does our form actually fit the context? Architect Christopher Alexander had some choice words on this subject in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form:

We should find it almost impossible to characterize a house which fits its context. Yet it is the easiest thing in the world to name the specific kinds of misfit which prevent good fit. A kitchen which is hard to clean, no place to park my car, the child playing where it can be run down by someone else’s car, rainwater coming in, overcrowding and lack of privacy, the eye-level grill which spits hot fat right into my eye, the gold plastic doorknob which deceives my expectations, and the front door I cannot find, are all misfits between the house and the lives and habits it's meant to fit. These misfits are the forces which must shape it, and there is no mistaking them. Because they are expressed in negative form they are specific, and tangible enough to talk about.

Alexander explains that when a misfit occurs, we are able to point at it specifically and describe it. When we instead try to explain what a good fit would be like, we’re often reduced to generalities that are hard to act on.

With this in mind I should like to recommend that we should always expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfit.

/// Ico

This isn't the real box cover for Ico, but it probably should have been.When Fumito Ueda designed Ico, he did not start with a list of everything the game should have. Instead, he started with the core idea that it should be

Super Balance Articles II Turbo

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:49:53 -0800

I was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix. This is a collection of all 20 articles I wrote about designing the game. Together, they are even longer than my book. CLICK ON THE PORTRAITS BELOW for each character's article. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

Special thanks to all the Evolution tournament players who playtested the game and helped it be what it is.
(Text-only version of this page here.)

Street Fighter HD Remix Features

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:16:32 -0800

You get a hell of a lot when you buy Street Fighter HD Remix, way more than you might realize. Lets go over all the goodies.

1) Two games in one. You get the gameplay of the classic Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, just like the arcade, and the brand new sequel to that game, Street Fighter HD Remix, both in one package. (They are called Classic and Remixed in the menus.) That means you get the nostalgia of the old, awesome gameplay AND you get a new, rebalanced game guided by the wisdom that tournament pros have accumulated over the last 14 years.

2) HD graphics. Every single piece of art in the game is redrawn in 1080p HD. That includes backgrounds, characters, endings, menus, and—well—everything. Udon Comics drew most of it.

3) Remixed music. All the music in the entire game is new. Every stage, every ending, and the menus. It’s from the OCRemix community, so the fans really contributed here.

4) Widescreen mode. On an HDTV, you can play the game in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, or switch to widescreen mode to fill your screen during gameplay. Widescreen mode zooms in and has slightly different camera behavior, but has no affect whatsoever on gameplay.

5) Every combination of the features above. Whether you’re playing the Remixed or the Classic game, you can turn HD sprites on or off. If you turn them off, you’ll get the original game’s sprites scaled up in all their blocky glory. This has no impact on gameplay, it’s just visual. Regardless of whether you play in Classic/Remix and HD sprites on/off, you can also turn remixed music on/off. If you prefer the original game’s tunes, go for it, it’s up to to you. Finally, no matter which of any of those modes you’re in, you can play in widescreen mode or 4:3 mode. All of this stuff is independent so you can customize these options however you want.

Also note that when you play online, your opponent won’t even know what your choices are regarding HD sprites on/off, remixed music on/off or widescreen mode on/off. All three of those affect your experience only, and your opponent might have different settings for those options on his end.

6) Advanced networking. The art delays in this project gave us a chance to experiment with several different networking techniques and we chose the best. We went with a predictive/rollback system that has the advantage of reducing input delay. I know that sounds pretty jargon-filled, so in plain English, it makes the game feel responsive and usually look smooth even during lag. We were able to refine this from the feedback on our open beta test, and also from a few experimental things we tried in the patch to the open beta.

The final version of the game has another feature called “smoothing” that lets you turn the input delay up or down. We found that best results were generally when there’s a very small input delay of 2 frames, as that leads to smooth network play that it is still so responsive that it feels instant to most people. You can set this to suit your own tastes, but try the default setting (2 frames) first.

7) Double-blind character selection online. When you’re playing online, don’t you hate it when your opponent refuses to pick a character until the last possible moment because he’s trying to make you pick first? He wants to see who you pick so he can pick the best character to beat yours. In HD Remix, all online play has double-blind character selection. That means that you cannot see who your opponent picked or even where his character selection box is until both of you finish picking your characters. Now there’s no reason to stall on this screen, you might as well just pick your character right away.

8) 8-player tournaments. As you saw from the open beta test, you can create your own 8-player, single elimination tournaments. The results go in the leaderboards. Those results don’t contribute to any kind of actual rank (you get to choose who enters your tournaments so we can’t really make them ranked) but after the tournament is over, anyone can see the bracket to verify who won.

9) A new announcer. We got overwhelming feedback that people did NOT like the voice of the high-pitched announcer in the original game. He’s usually referred to as “Big Bird.” We replaced him with a more gruff sounding voice. While we were at it, I replaced Guile’s girly sounding “Sonic Boom” with the more manly version from Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Give this one some time, and you’ll realize that almost anything is better than Big Bird.

10) Revised endings. Udon revised and rewrote the story and text of the endings to make them consistent with the current canon. And of course they redrew the endings, too.

11) Original costume colors. The original game has 8 costume colors for each character, but these costumes do NOT include the original iconic colors from the first Street Fighter 2. So if you want to play Ryu wearing white or Ken wearing red, your only choice was to play the “old” versions of those characters by using a code. The old versions had slightly different (usually worse) gameplay. First of all, you no longer need a code to select the old characters in Classic mode, you choose between two different game logos: Super Turbo and Super SF2.

The cooler news here about the costume colors in the Remixed game though. You can’t play the old characters at all in that game, but of course you want to be able to pick those iconic colors. You can. Select your character with the jab button to get that character’s old-school costume. If you want the color that used to be on jab, hold any punch button for 2 seconds. That means in the Remixed game, you have access to 9 different costume colors in total.

12) The CPU difficulty. In the original game, the difficulty of the computer AI is ridiculously hard. It’s harder than in any other Street Fighter game ever. Beating the first opponent is hard and beating the third one is usually beyond hard. Well, it’s just as hard as ever if you pick Classic mode, but in Remixed mode, I fixed up the difficulty so that easy is actually easy, medium is actually medium, and so on. Try playing the HD Remix arcade mode (where you fight all the CPU opponents), then if you want to risk breaking your controller in frustration, switch to Classic arcade mode.

13) Hitbox display. In training mode, you can turn on a display of the game’s hitboxes to see what’s really going on under the hood. Blue boxes are where your character can be hit and red boxes are where you can hit the opponent. This is my gift to the hardcore community, so they can refine their strategies more than ever.

14) Game speed. The game speeds match the arcade version of the game, but this is confusing so bear with me. In SF HD Remix, speed 3 is the default and is intended for tournament play and online play. It’s the same speed as Japanese arcade speed 3, which is also known as US arcade speed 2. You don’t really have to understand what’s going on with all that, just play at the default speed 3 and be happy that it matches the arcade.

Furthermore, there is a speed 0 in there for the hardcore players. On all speeds except 0, the game uses its own system of dropping frames in order to increase speed (we didn’t touch this, the arcade version did it too). This does affect whether some combos are possible/impossible. Speed 0 is slow, but it will let combo masters and makers of combo videos take frame-dropping out of the equation when they are trying to figure out which crazy combos are possible.

15) Dipswitches. The Dreamcast version has several secret dipswitches for turning bug fixes on and off. We took the dipswitches that actually affect gameplay and put them in a menu for you to adjust, if you want. These only affect offline matches, so you can’t use them online. For example, they let you turn on or off the ability for Chun Li to “store” her super. Note that the default setting for many of these is for a given bug to be fixed in Remixed mode but still unfixed in Classic mode (have to stay true to the original!).

Here's a list of the dipswitches you can toggle:

Ability to throw an opponent who was dizzied by a throw
Ability to store Honda's super
Ability to store Honda's command throw
Ability to store Chun Li's super
When Bison does a headstomp that hits a rising opponent only a few pixels above ground level, he briefly pauses
Old Characters in Classic Mode can cancel the same normal moves into special moves as...Super/Super Turbo characters
Slowdown during hit-stun
Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ryu's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ken's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Akuma's air hurricane kick is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's horizontal ball is unblockable
Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's vertical ball is unblockable
Vega's super drains the meter when he...touches wall/grabs opponent
Ability for Sagat to perform a reversal Super
Can do Sagat’s super using a kick button during a 1 frame window
Dhalsim’s reversal super
Ken’s reversal super
Some moves, such as Chun Li’s throw, which normally require a forward/back input can be done with an up input.

16) The dipswitch “hat.” I didn’t want to have to worry about tournament situations where someone changes the dipswitches to their advantage without anyone realizing it. In SF HD Remix, if you change even one dipswitch, a blue dot with a chrome enclosure will appear at the top middle of the screen, above the KO box. It looks kind of like a hat for the KO icon. Anyway, if you see that, you immediately know that someone has changed the dipswitches. Dipswitches don't affect online play, so you don't have to worry about any tricks there.

17) Button config. You get the best button config screen we could think of. Both players can set their buttons at the same time. It’s NOT that horrible kind of button config where it lists the buttons, then you have to scroll through various functions for that button. That kind is bad because when it says Y Button, or whatever, you might not even know which button that is if you have an arcade joystick. Even if you know, it takes a moment to think about it and figure out what is what.

Our button config works like this. You don’t have to know what any buttons are called and you don’t have to care about the layout on your controller or joystick. You simply press the buttons on your controller in this order: jab, strong, fierce, short, forward, roundhouse. That’s it. You don’t even have to tap down in between: we do that for you automatically. Furthermore, after you press those 6 buttons, you’ll end up on something called “unassigned.” If you press the remaining two buttons on your controller, we’ll unassign those for you so they don

’t do anything if you accidentally hit them. If you unassign those (so you did 8 presses total) then we’ll move the menu highlight to ACCEPT for you automatically. Also note that we even support mapping more than one button to a function if you want. If you want two fierce buttons, then go for it!

18) Competition. I hope Street Fighter HD Remix becomes the new standard of fighting game competition and that you'll have plenty of online opponents to play against. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was still played in tournaments 14 years after its release, so I hope that you’ll be playing SF HD Remix for that long as well.

Thanks for your support and enjoy the game.

--Sirlin

Professor Sirlin and the Fourth Amendment

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:42:00 -0800

On October 21st, 2008, I gave a lecture at Hastings Law School in San Francisco to first year law students. My lecture was first about the concept of competition in law school and second about analyzing a hypothetical case that the students would have to write about for class. You might think that me not being an actual lawyer was some kind of drawback in leading a discussion about the law, but the professor who asked me to speak didn't think so.

Competition

You don't have to treat every situation like a tournament finals.I heard that the students at Hastings were acting overly competitive, to the point that it was hurting their development. I explained my background, my business and math degrees from MIT, that I am a fake scientist, a fake psychologist, a fake lawyer, and a real game designer. In addition to that, I am a competitor, and I'm knowledgeable about competition and which types of people do well in competitions.

Whether the arena is political debate, legal argument, or video games, the people who win tend to have things in common. There's a lot I could say about the things that winners do during competition. They get into the head of the opponent and predict their moves. They know when to attack, when to defend, when to stall. They know when to look for "critical points" to blow open a match (or a debate) when they are losing, and when to avoid them if they are winning. There is a lot to say about the strategy of competition, but that is not what I focused on with the students.

It's the other side of competition that their professor and I thought they needed to hear about: continuous self-improvement. When you enter any competition, be it legal or a video game, you hope that the rules are fair to all sides. But the things that don't have to be even--aren't supposed to be even--are the skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience you bring with you to the competition. By improving and improving, eventually winning becomes incidental. Just stop by and win easily, if you are that far ahead of everyone else.

If I look through a crystal ball to the future and discover that you end up being great--as great as Gandhi--how did you get there? You turn out to be a great fighter for the constitution, action figures are made of you, children want to grow up to be you. How did you get there? Was it by putting down other students? By trying to give other students disadvantages so that your own mediocrity appears slightly better? No, that's ridiculous. You got there by developing an excellence in yourself regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Ortiz vs. Sirlin

I remember feeling the full effects of this against fighting game player Ricky Ortiz. Ricky played a certain game, I played a different game. Then a third game came out (Capcom vs. SNK) that we both played. I was older, more experienced, and better than Ricky. I understood Ricky's advantages (better dexterity, better reaction time, and better ability at judging precise distances), and I played around them. Ricky was good, but not a real threat to me.

Then, months later, I entered a tournament in this game. I faced Ricky in the finals. Finals matches are usually best 3 out of 5 games. Ricky won 2 games, and he won them decisively. He crushed me. Onlookers yelled out congratulations to Ricky he won the tournament, but I said, "wait a minute, I thought it was best 3 out of 5." The tournament organizer then informed us that this particular tournament was 2 out 3 finals. Then Ricky said to me that if I thought it was 3 out of 5, he would play more games. I almost couldn't believe it because he had every right to declare victory on the spot, but I took his offer. Ricky then crushed me one more game and won the tournament.

Ricky was demonstrating that it didn't even matter what went on in the game. He brought to the table an excellence that I simply could not compete with. It had nothing to do with putting me down, or giving me disadvantages. It had everything to do with Ricky's amazing development as a competitor. You [the students at Hastings law school] need to develop that kind of excellence in yourselves, I said.

There's one more Street Fighter story I thought they had to hear before getting to the topic of the law. When I played Street Fighter at the MIT arcade, most players tried to keep secrets from each other about techniques and tricks. I disagreed with this mindset and I did not keep secrets. Instead, I told my competitors everything I knew so that we could all practice against everything. Why? Because the MIT arcade was not the REAL competition. It was the training ground. When I went to play at an international tournament in Japan, that was a REAL competition. The only way to be prepared for something like that is to develop your skills as much as you can in your training ground.

This is the reason that law students should not hide their research from each other. Human nature might compel you to hoard the good secrets you found, but that is the path of trying to be slightly less mediocre than your training partners. Instead, know that a high tide raises all boats and that when law students get together, share research, and discuss cases, they reach a level of understanding of those cases that is far deeper than would be possible without the discussion.

And now it's time to demonstrate that.

The Case of the Woman Who Was Searched

Here is a pdf describing the case and the requirements of the legal memo the students had to write about the case. Read it to know what the rest of the article is talking about.

The case at hand is about the Fourth Amendment rights of Phoebe Thorne. It's a fictional case that is representative of and very similar to real cases. In this case, Ms. Thorne lands in San Francisco on a flight from Bogota, Columbia. She is questioned, searched, detained, and ultimately held long enough to have a "monitored bowel movement" to see if she passes any drugs. She did in fact pass a large number of pellets containing heroine. Her case challenges the validity of various parts of her search.

The first and most important thing to understand here is why it's important that we care about the rights of Ms. Thorne, a known drug trafficer. In the law, the ends do not justify the means. You can't just say that because she did have drugs, it's ok for the government to treat her any way they wanted, ignoring her Fourth Amendment rights. There are rules for when searches are legal and when they are not, and those rules protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

You might only care about the rights of innocent people to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. You might think that a case where a person turned out to be guilty is not that important in the grand scheme of civil rights. The trouble is, only guilty people can really bring these cases to court. When guilty people are searched unfairly, they have standing to sue, real incentive to sue, and there are reasonable remedies they can seek (for example, "don't put me in jail.") Innocent people could have their Fourth Amendment rights voilated routinely, but the courts can't stop that without a case. So cases exactly like Ms. Thorne's are what set the precedent for how we will ALL be treated. You need to care about her rights because her rights are YOUR rights.

Street Fighter Mini-Site

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:19:49 -0800

I was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix. This is a collection of all the articles I wrote about designing the game. Together, they are even longer than my book. Enjoy.

--Sirlin

Introduction

Character Balance Articles:

Putting it all together:

Special thanks to all the Evolution tournament players who playtested the game and helped it be what it is.

Street Fighter HD Remix: Akuma

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:18:45 -0800

Akuma is so powerful in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) that he's banned in all US tournaments. I’ve noticed that when players of other games read about this, they think that is some kind of hypocrisy to the general theory that we should ban as little as we possibly can. But Akuma is not like whoever the best character is in whatever other game you play. He’s not just the best, but he’s miles and miles and miles above the rest of the cast. He was never intended to be fairly balanced in ST, and it shows.

In HD Remix, Akuma is our chance to get a 17th playable character. By taking him down several notches to make him fair for tournament play, we get 17 new matchups in the game. I even put him on the character select screen so you don’t have to do a code to pick him. In a nod to his fake-secrecy though, he’s “hidden” above Honda’s selection box.

So how do we balance Akuma?

Air Fireball

Akuma has a lot of completely unfair things, but the air fireball is the main one. Most characters just can’t deal with it at all. My first idea was kind of an experiment. What if the air fireball was the only non-super move in the game that used up super meter, rather than gave super meter? Let him keep the unfairness of the move, but limit its use. The idea is sort of like an EX move from other Capcom fighting games.

I thought of this version of the move kind of like Millia’s hairpin in the fighting game Guilty Gear. In that game, Millia wants to rush you down. She has a hairpin move that has a similar trajectory to ST Akuma’s air fireball. Hers travels insanely fast though, and forces the opponent to block while she uses that time to get in. The catch is that she then has to pick up the Hairpin to do it again, so she can’t keep doing it over and over in a row. ST Akuma’s fireball is so hard to deal with that I thought allowing even a few of them would be pretty powerful because it would allow him to teleport or crossup or whatever other tricks he felt like. I tried making the move cost 25% super meter, but the air fireball itself was just as strong as ever.

Odds and Ends

There was a bunch of other stuff to fix up:

Akuma’s ducking kicks no longer have invulnerable legs(!)
Akuma can now be dizzied like any other character
Akuma’s Hurricane Kicks don’t have invulnerable startup and can’t hit on the way up
Raging Demon super tuned to go slower than the secret version of him on Dreamcast, but travel farther
Teleport no longer has random input window and can be done with 2 punches or 2 kicks rather than 3 punches and 3 kicks (drawback: can't use "piano method" for Dragon Punch)
Teleport has vulnerability in the head so he can’t run away forever with it, and it builds no super meter.
Stray hitbox that was floating in the air on his medium kick is fixed
Akuma takes more damage than other characters
Red fireball recovery made way worse so it can’t do inescapable lockdown
Blue fireball startup and recovery made closer to Ryu’s
Knockback effect on his fierce blue fireball only happens from very close range
Timing on Raging Demon command much more lenient

All of this definitely brought him down to Earth. He wasn’t overpowered anymore, but all the fun was balanced out of him too. More testing revealed that he was probably the worst character in the game.

Air Fireball, Take 2

The air fireball is Akuma’s signature special move, yet he could hardly even do it because of the meter restriction. That was a failed experiment. Next, we tried to make an air fireball that he could use as much as he wanted, like any special move, but that was somehow fair. It needed a much more downward angle for starters. The problem is that even when the angle was right, he could do really nasty lockdowns with repeated air fireballs. Making the fireballs travel faster or slower didn’t help at all. All it did was change the way he did the nasty lockdown.

The real trick to making that move work is the slight upward hop we added as he releases the fireball. This increases the time between two consecutive air fireballs, and it’s what lets opponents actually get out of any traps he might do. It took about 5 or 6 tries of tuning this move, but suddenly it clicked and seemed right.

At this point, I also added back in his hurricane kick’s ability to hit on the way up, so that it can hit ducking opponents and lead to a juggle. I also toned down his damage penalty so he didn’t take quite as much as before.

This version of Akuma was pretty good. It was definitely more fun to be able to do the air fireball more and try to set up tricks with it. A few months past and I started to think that Akuma was still the worst in the game, though. He has no super fireball like Ryu, no overhead, and no fake fireball. Akuma had some advantages, but just not enough to really justify picking him.

Version 3 Akuma

Then I made one small change that made a world of difference. I allowed his air fireball to be performed very low to the ground. In the original game, it has a minimum jump distance before it can come out, but I removed this. Now it became possible to do a “tiger knee” air fireball, meaning you roll the joystick from down to forward to up/forward (for a jump), then wait a moment for Akuma to barely leave the ground, then press punch to get an immediate air fireball. This turned out to be way more fun and versatile than I realized it would be.

Akuma can attempt many, many traps and setups with this. An example is immediate air fireball (I’ll call it TK air fireball, referencing the tiger knee motion), then land right next to the opponent with the cover of the air fireball. Then do, say, low strong, TK air fireball and land right next to them again. Then do low strong, low strong (pushes you farther away), and TK air fireball to reset the trap. This time, after you do a normal move or two, jump straight up and do an air fireball.

I just listed three different air fireball situations there: one TK from close, one TK from farther, and one where you jump straight up and don't do the tiger knee technique. Many characters have to do a different move or act at a different time in order to deal with each of those situations. Against new players, I can create what looks like an inescapable lockdown, but really it’s a mixup that gives the opponent several chances to get out. It’s all an illusion.

I tested this trap against all 17 characters and every single one can get out. Ken can do a medium dragon punch (invulnerable on the way up) to ignore the entire situation. Zangief can use his green hand. Bison can just jump strong. Everyone can do something. Also remember that if these air fireballs hit, they deal only a couple pixels of damage. If they hit as Akuma lands, he can attempt to go into a damaging combo, but due to the way the game intentionally slows down when fireballs hit, this combo will fail about 50% of the time no matter how good you are.

The air fireball was a hit with playtesters because it’s so fun and feels so powerful, yet is actually beatable in many ways.

Raging Demon

Somewhere in the middle of development, we discovered that it was possible to make the Raging Demon super a guaranteed throw in many situations, such after a jump roundhouse. By adding some startup time (9 frames, same as CvS2), we thought we fixed this. Toward the end of development, we realized that we really didn’t and the Raging Demon was still guaranteed in lots of ways, most dangerously after any blocked air fireball! This made it the most powerful thing in the entire game and we had to do something. Unfortunately, the technical limitations surrounding this are big because it’s very difficult to mess with things like throw timing in the circuitous assembly code.

The solution we were able to implement is not quite ideal, but it’s definitely workable. In general in the SF2 series, when you hold up on the joystick, your character does not leave the ground immediately. Instead, he goes into a “pre-jump” state that lasts 2 to 5 frames, depending on the character. You can be thrown during pre-jump frames. The only change we made is that pre-jump frames are now invulnerable to the Raging Demon specifically.

That means if you hold up and you aren’t locked into doing a move or recovering from a move, you will always be able to jump out of Raging Demon, even from close on reaction. This makes the move a little weaker than intended, but it’s a preferable situation to being the best move in the game. This means the best time to use the super is when the opponent has committed to doing a move, such as a fireball or sweep. To help you land it, the Raging Demon is completely invulnerable and unthrowable. Even though opponents can jump out on reaction, it’s still possible to land this super by baiting their attacks first.

Conclusion

Akuma has a solid ground game with fireballs that stand up to Ryu’s, juggling special moves, an incredibly versatile air fireball, and a tricky super. He does take more damage than any other character, but not by a large margin. We finally have a 17th character.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Bison

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:29:44 -0800

Bison always seemed strong in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) because he can suddenly win matches out of nowhere, and he can keep up the pressure against most characters...if he can get things going his way. If he lands a solid jumping roundhouse, he can combo into low forward, then psycho crusher for a dizzy, then follow up with another combo for the win. If he lands a cross-up attack, he can do a different (admittedly difficult) kill-combo. His standing kicks and scissor kicks let him keep up the pressure.

But Bison can’t always put that offense together. Getting out of Ryu’s fireball trap in the corner once it starts is extremely hard. Even getting near Old Sagat is extremely hard. And Honda has a huge advantage over Bison because Bison has no way out of repeated Ochio throws other than his super. In short, Bison lacks defense. He’s the only character in the game with no special move that can be used as a reversal. Even Dhalsim has a teleport to get out of trouble.

I always liked Bison’s character design though. In theory, a character who is all offense and no defense is an interesting addition to the game. In practice, he just has too many matches of disadvantage and he’s not used that often in tournaments. He’s not even considered a second tier character. What to do about it?

Suggestions

A few people suggested that his psycho crusher become a reversal attack (some invulnerability and/or active hitting frames at the start of the move). This is way too powerful and mostly just turns him into Honda. The most common suggestion was to make the headstomp a reversal that can go through fireballs. Even this is too powerful because it means an attempted fireball trap against Bison leads to Bison getting guaranteed damage (the headstomp is fast and would hit fireball throwers during their recovery). Yet another common suggestion was to give Bison a teleport because he has that move in later games. This would allow him to escape from trouble, but not get any free damage. Even that is too strong, in my opinion. Yes he needs a way to get out of trouble, but it should not lead to guaranteed damage and it should put Bison at some risk.

Reversal Devil’s Reverse

The devil’s reverse is that move that hardly anyone uses where you charge down, then up + punch. It makes you leap into the air, then you can press punch again to fly around with your blue fiery arm extended. In HD Remix, this move now has a few invulnerable frames on startup. Bison can use it to escape a fireball trap, but he’s also committing to a devil’s reverse, and gets no guaranteed damage. He can try to reset the situation with this move.

A couple notes about the new Devil’s Reverse. Bison is as vulnerable as ever as he leaves the ground, so you can jump kick him as he leaves the ground to stop him. Ryu can actually still keep up a trap against Bison by alternating fireballs and then jump roundhousing (or jumping strong for juggles) when expects Bison to try to Devil’s Reverse out. This is preferable to the situation in ST though, because it requires both players to make careful decisions, as opposed to the fireball trap just winning flat-out.

In fact, it can’t escape jumping attacks very well at all. Earlier versions in development did allow Bison to avoid cross-up combos most of the time, but this was really never supposed to the be reason for changes to the devil’s reverse. I rolled back the invulnerability to be about as little as possible while still allowing him to escape fireball traps with it.

For many months of development in HD Remix, the devil’s reverse put the opponent into a juggle state if it actually hit. That means you could follow up with two jumping strongs and then nick them with one hit of a super if you have super meter. On the one hand, no one should really get hit by devil’s reverse because it’s enormously telegraphed. On the other hand, the entire sequence (with super) did more than 40% damage, and it was just uncomfortably much. You’ll have to live without this one.

Fake Slide

Bison also has a new move: the fake slide. His regular slide from ST is unchanged, and you can still hold down/back to charge up as you (regular) slide up to your knocked-down opponent (a common Bison maneuver). The command for the new fake slide is hold diagonally down/forward and press roundhouse. This means you are charged for a headstomp or devil’s reverse, but you lose your charge for psycho crushers and scissor kicks when you fake slide. I actually originally wanted the fake slide to be performed by holding the roundhouse button down for X frames when you slide, which would have allowed him to keep all four special moves charged. We had technical difficulties with this, but maybe it’s for the best, because the move is good enough as it is.

Why have a fake slide at all? Bison is about offense, so here is one more offensive tool. This move isn’t really intended to change his position in the rankings though. I don’t think it allows him to beat characters he couldn’t beat without the slide. It’s more to reinforce what Bison is about. When you pressure the opponent with standing forward and standing roundhouse, you are also at just the right range to fake slide, then throw. The fake slide recovers much more quickly than the real slide, travels a shorter distance, and it does not put the enemy into blockstun because it can’t hit at all. It’s just a way to travel quickly (and then usually throw!).

I actually call this one of Bison’s “circus tricks,” meaning it’s something you can randomly throw into an attack pattern and hope for the best. Though it’s not a super-solid lock down (it can’t even hit!), it will catch people off guard and we already know people will call you cheap when you use it to throw. It should be great fun.

Miscellaneous: Jump up Strong and Stand Jab

Two other odds and ends. In ST, Bison’s jumping strong punch can air juggle for 3-hits. This is true for his jumping toward and jumping away punches with strong, but not true for his jumping straight up strong. This always seemed like an oversight to me, because his fist has that same blue fiery graphics during the jump straight up version. Now the jumping straight up strong punch has the same ability to juggle.

Finally, Bison’s standing jab is slightly higher priority. This does not give him any extra air defense (the new anti-fireball startup of the devil’s reverse is quite enough defense for him). The purpose of this change is to let his standing jabs reliably hit Honda’s torpedo and Blanka’s roll. Bison has trouble against Honda, so any tiny advantage like that helps. Besides, Balrog’s standing jab beats both of those special moves easily, every time, and it really looks like’s Bison’s should, too. I just extended the hitbox slightly so that you can now jab incoming Honda torpedos and Blanka balls.

Conclusion

The new Bison can still practically kill you with a solid hit, if he ever gets one. He can still perform various “circus tricks” such as randomly jumping around with strong, or headstomping, and now we can add fake sliding and devil’s reversing to the list. He now has at least some way to attempt to get out of lockdown traps, but not without risk. In HD Remix, he feels like even more of a pressure character (yay for fake slide), and a slippery fish when he’s forced into devil’s reversing on defense.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Sagat

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:27:11 -0800

Sagat—well actually “Old Sagat”—is one of the best characters in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). He’s even soft-banned in Japan, meaning there’s a tacit agreement not to play him, even though you are technically allowed. He might not be as strong of a character as Balrog or Dhalsim overall, but the problem is that there are several matches where he just dominates. His tiger shots (fireballs) are so powerful that many characters spend the entire game trying to get around them. I think everyone knew that this nerf was coming.

Tiger Shots

Sagat now has fireball recovery that’s better than New Sagat and worse than Old Sagat. In ST, the difference in recovery times was about 12 frames between Old and New (huge), and Remixed Sagat’s recovery is about 4 frames worse than the terror that was Old Sagat. It’s still very good, but not as abuseable. It’s similar to Ryu’s fireball recovery.

Various Boosts

In exchange for this loss, Sagat has several new bonuses. First, he is based on ST’s New Sagat, so he now is able to soften throws and he has a super move (with the reversal bug fixed, even). Furthermore, the super travels farther than in ST and it always knocks down on hit. It’s now a viable tool. He also has ST New Sagat’s ability to cross-up with medium kick. This gives him a way to apply some up-close pressure.

Remixed Sagat has Old Sagat’s fierce tiger uppercut, meaning it hits only once for good damage rather than juggling five times for low damage. The five hit juggle can be fun, but one-hit version is just more effective in most situations. As with all dragon punch motions, the tiger uppercut has a more lenient (non-random) input timing window.

Tiger Knee

Finally, his tiger knee is now performed with a dragon punch motion, it always knocks down on hit, and (as a result of that) it can juggle for three hits. Usually this means if he hits with tiger knee, he can do one more because either the first or second knee will get 2 hits. This is good damage and it pushes the opponent back into the corner. I reduced the tiger knee’s damage and dizzy power because of this juggle.

I didn’t really intend this juggle to exist in the first place, it was just a consequence of fixing the 2-hit moves that don’t knock down when they should. I did this very early in development and the tiger knee juggle seemed fun, so I kept it and balanced Sagat around having this.

Although the knee doesn’t have any better frame stats or hitboxes than before, several playtesters said “Wow, is that higher priority now?” when they play against it. I think the ability to walk forward and do it because of the dragon punch command, coupled with the usefulness of scoring a knock-down even on a glancing blow makes it a much more useful tool. And no, you can’t juggle with a super after a tiger knee unless you’re making a combo video.

Normal Move Cancels

Old Sagat could cancel his stand short, stand forward, and stand strong into special moves, while ST’s New Sagat could not cancel any of those. (Well, he could only cancel the first hit of stand short and stand forward, not the second hits.) Remixed Sagat cannot cancel the second hit of standing forward because that was only used for combos anyway, and the ability to juggle with tiger knees is good enough already! He also cannot cancel the second hit of standing short, which is a somewhat controversial decision. In ST, this is mainly used in the following strategy:

Tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger, stand short because enemy got near, cancel into tiger, tiger, tiger.

If the enemy gets near, he deserves his chance at Sagat without having to block a very far stand short cancelled into another Tiger Shot. Remixed Sagat can, however, cancel his standing strong into special moves. This is mainly useful against Dhalsim and Balrog, which is fine, and Zangief.

Conclusion

Playtesers said that playing against my Remixed Sagat was actually fun. I think this was because standing in place and doing nothing but tiger shots wasn’t as effective, and the lack of a cancellable stand far standing short makes it even harder to keep up the old iron defense. In HD Remix, it’s better to mix in tiger knees, cross-ups, supers, and even jump ins, so it feels like more is going on when you fight Sagat.

Despite his slightly slower fireball recovery and loss of stand short cancel, Sagat still seems very strong, just not dominating like before. Plus, more characters now have more options against fireballs, such as Cammy’s spinning backfist, Blanka’s faster “rainbow roll,” Fei Long’s short flying kicks, Dee Jay’s machine gun upper, and Honda’s jab headbutt. Sagat managed to go to one of the most boring characters (to me) to one of the characters I have the most fun playing.

–Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Vega

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:26:44 -0800

Vega is sometimes considered top tier in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), or at least in the top of the 2nd tier. He’s fast, has many good pokes, a good slide, and his off-the-wall attack is versatile and powerful. In keeping with the design philosophy of HD Remix, Vega is only barely weaker now, and he has harder competition all around from other characters.

The Wall Dive

Vega’s wall dive no longer knocks down. In ST, after you get knocked down by the wall dive, Vega can do it again as you get up and force you do block a tricky cross-up. If you get hit again, he can do it again, and so on. Vega is actually perfectly capable of winning without this abusive, repeatable tactic, so losing it isn’t crippling.

Note that if Vega hits you out of the air with the wall dive, of course you will be knocked down (same as any air-to-air attack). And his izuna drop (throw) from his wall dive still knocks down, so if you get hit by either of those things, he can threaten one more wall dive as you get up, but even if that hits, you’ll be able to stop his next attempt much more easily.

While it is possible to combo a low strong after you hit with a wall dive now (because the dive doesn’t knock down), it’s position-dependent. You usually end up hitting a little to high with the wall dive to actually combo a followup, but with good timing, you can. I didn't specifically intend this combo to work, but adding more delay at the end of the wall dive would mean you could hit back Vega too often, even when he hits you. Overall, I think it's much preferable to fight against a Vega who sometimes gets an extra hit of low strong, rather than a Vega that traps you in a knockdown loop.

Flip Kick

In ST, Vega can “store” his flip kick command. First, charge down/back, then hold back. You can hold back as long as you like and you can still do the flip kick by taping forward+kick. It’s so hard for some characters to actually get close to Vega, that he really doesn’t need what amounts to a (Guile) flash kick anti-air while walking backwards. A couple Japanese top players as well as several Americans all requested that this be removed, so it is. The only command for Vega’s flip kick attack is now charge down/back, then forward + kick. I personally never even used this technique, and really don't think he needed it to win.

Fake Wall Dive

Vega does get one new toy to play with: the fake wall dive. First, execute the wall dive (charge down, up + kick), and after Vega touches the wall, press kick again. Vega will hang for a moment, then drop directly down. This is marginally useful in avoiding Ken’s fierce dragon punch or Blanka’s vertical roll.

An earlier version of the fake wall dive allowed Vega to slightly steer whether he dropped forward or away (rather than just straight down) and it dropped down something like three times as fast as it does now. After some players complained that it was too powerful in a playtest, I gave my usual response of asking for someone to beat me with it, or at least make me afraid of it. I chose Ryu and took on all comers, which included many well-known Evolution tournament players. No one beat me one single game with their Vega. In fact, no one beat me even a single round. I was not remotely afraid of the fake wall dive. I’m not telling you this as a form of bragging, I’m just letting you know how balancing happens.

Why was I not afraid? Because doing repeated fake wall dives left my opponents with no real advantage over just sitting there and doing nothing. Yes it’s tricky in that you never know which wall dive will have teeth and which will be fake, but I mostly ignored it and jump roundhoused (or air hurricane kicked) at them anyway.

And yet one thing they demonstrated was important. James Chen showed that in ST with Vega vs. Cammy, if Vega does blocked low jab, cancels into off-the-wall (opposite wall) then holds back to stay away, Cammy can still cannon spike him. In other words, he cannot use the wall dive to turn his low jab into a safe runaway tool in ST. But the same setup in HD Remix with the fake wall dive did allow him to be safe vs. the cannon spike. Even though no one demonstrated anything in real gameplay, the mere potential for more Vega runaway was enough to show that we needed to weaken the move.

It turns out, the move had to be slowed down significantly to prevent it from being completely safe in the sort of situation I explained above. Since then, I’ve seen no one able to run away with the fake wall dive, but it can occasional trick the opponent into attacking at the wrong time, so it seems about right.

Vega’s Competition

A few top players have wondered if Vega is too strong, even still. Time will tell of course, but he does seem about right to me. His most abusive tactic is weakened, and he has a (kind of slow) fake wall dive in return. But what’s much more relevant is the field of characters he must now face.

Zangief is more able to fight him than ever. Guile used to have no real answer to Vega repeatedly sliding. (I wonder if anyone has any tournament matches of me doing something like 12 slides in a row vs. Choi’s or Jeron’s Guile in tournaments.) But now Guile has 2 answers: roundhouse flash kick and the new overhead. Cammy, Fei Long, and T.Hawk all got huge boosts and are just more threatening overall to Vega and to everyone else.

That said, Vega is still Vega. His speed, range, and wall dive keep him in the game, but he should be less dominant than in ST due to his adversaries being more equipped to fight him than before.

--Sirlin

Street Fighter HD Remix: Balrog

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:08:11 -0800

Balrog is generally considered to be tied for the best character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). Pretty much everyone ranks Balrog and Dhalsim as top, with some Americans adding in Old Sagat, some Japanese adding in Vega, and a few people claiming Chun Li. But there’s not much debate about Balrog (or Dhalsim) being top.

The knee-jerk reaction is to nerf, nerf, nerf (that’s internet-speak for “reducing the power level” of something). I want to leave the top characters top, so it’s been quite a test of willpower to avoid bringing down the hammer on Balrog.

Before you read the actual nerfs, I’d like you to consider what might have happened. By far the most common suggestion for Balrog was to reduce his overall damage by about 20%. Almost everyone who said anything about Balrog said this. But reducing the overall damage of a character by 20% is mostly just another way of making him 20% worse, and does nothing to remove the tactics we’d like to tone down. So the good news for Balrog players is that he still does a whole lot of damage and is not a 20% worse Balrog.

Throw Loops

After Balrog’s headbutt hold, he can do a mixup where he either walks under the opponent (to get on the other side) or not walk under and say on the same side. He can threaten to do a low roundhouse from either side, resulting in a knockdown. This part is fine. He can also do a low forward or low strong and then attempt another throw, resulting in a loop. This part is too abuseable.

As with Ken, it was a tough decision, but I think it’s more fun if Balrog gets to keep his mixup, yet loses the power of a repeatable loop. His low strong, throw, low strong, throw sequence could be done from literally so far away that some characters cannot counter throw. The change is that Balrog’s throw range is now shorter, and the first hit of the hold does less damage. The walk-under tricks still work, as do the throw tricks after whiffing a short dashing punch, but if you want to attempt a throw loop, you a) have to be close enough that your opponent might counterthrow and b) deal less damage when you successfully do it. Balrog’s relentless offense is so good that a slightly worse throw game should leave him plenty powerful.

Safe Attack, Safe Attack

Another problem with Balrog is this sequence: low rushing punch, then jab headbutt. The low rushing punch is fast, damaging, must be blocked low, and is safe on block. The command for the move leaves him charged to immediately do a Buffalo Headbutt. So not only can you not hit back the low rushing punch on block, but if you even try, you will probably get hit by the headbutt (it’s an invulnerable startup move, somewhat like a Dragon Punch). If you block the headbutt, it too is safe on block. And to make matters worse, he gets a huge amount of super meter for doing that sequence. And to make matters worse than that, he has the best super move in the game. Something has to give!

I thought for a very long time about removing the ability to charge for a headbutt right after a low rushing punch (or some method of making sure you couldn’t do those two moves right in a row). In the end, I have to say that the fun-factor of that sequence is good, and the problem is the safe-on-block jab headbutt. This feeling was corroborated when I asked multiple-time tournament champion and Balrog player Graham Wolfe what the most abuseable Balrog thing is. His answer, “Safe jab headbutt…and Daigo said so too.” (Note to Daigo: If you never really said that, I hold Graham Wolfe responsible!).

The jab headbutt now has more recovery and can sometimes be hit back on block. It actually ended up not that much different from ST though. To keep things in line, the strong headbutt also has worse recovery (and can now go through fireballs), but the fierce headbutt is not changed. All three headbutts also generate less super meter, and the first few levels of the turnaround punch also generate less super meter. Note that all the rushing punches generate just as much super meter as ever though. So when you do low rushes (Balrog’s bread and butter), you have the same priority, same speed, same damage, and same super meter gains as ever.

Super

Balrog’s super is probably the best in the game in ST. It’s high priority, full screen range, goes through fireballs, and is safe on block almost all the time (except notably against Zangief). In HD Remix, I tinkered with it several times to make it worse in various ways, but in the end I reverted all those changes except one: it now does about 50% damage rather than 60%, putting it in line with most other supers in the game in HD Remix.

Turn Around Punch

To be consistent with the rest of the game, this move can now be performed by pressing and releasing just two punches or two kicks, rather than three. I don’t want to allow Balrog to access fierce and roundhouse while he charges turn punches though, so here’s how that works. While you are holding two punches (or two kicks) to charge the turn around punch, you CAN press the third punch (or kick) and get it to work. But once you’ve held the buttons long enough that you’re actually charged for a turn around punch, pressing the third button will do nothing at all.

You don’t really need to grasp that though. The point is that you can either do the move the same way as always with three buttons, or just use two, but no one can really exploit this by charging up a final-punch while doing fierces and roundhouses at the same time.

The New Move That Didn't Happen

Every character in the game got at least something in HD Remix. I gave Dhalsim a mostly-useless new upflame (and made the control motion easier to do) as way of giving him something, even though he is such a top character. For Balrog, at one point I planned a "cross-counter" move like Dudley's in Street Fighter 3. This would make him totally vulnerable to low attacks or throws, but if you hit him out of it any other way, he automatically attacks you. Another idea was to make the turn around punch with the kick buttons have different properies. I thought about making it so holding the kick buttons would immediately make it so Balrog did his (vulnerable) turn around pose, as opposed releaseing the buttons triggering that. So holding the kick buttons has the drawback of locking you in place, but has some advantage such as giving you a higher level turn around punch than you'd usually get for how long you charged.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to implement these for schedule reasons. You might wonder how that's possible because the game was delayed so long because of the art, the programmer who would have been able to implement those things was put on another project, so I had no resources to make it happen. And even if I did have the resources, I'm not sure if it would have panned out anyway because those ideas are fairly powerful and Balrog is very good already. You'll have to settle for the top character being mostly the same as last time around.

Conclusion

In closing, Balrog remains incredibly powerful. His throw game is barely weaker, but his throw tricks are still intact. His ability to generate super is a little worse, but the power of his super is still intact. His general ability to rush you down is also intact, as is his high damage, so I expect him to remain near the top.

–Sirlin