Sno

I don't think it's available on the 3DS in any capacity, but if you've never played LTTP, that's the game you should be playing in anticipation of the new one.

I think there are good reasons for why fighting games generally settled on four-to-six button layouts. (As a genre largely born in arcades, it wasn't limited by gamepad layouts.) You want to have those buttons always at your fingertips, you can easily hit any combination of buttons simultaneously and you don't have to travel your hand around searching for the right input.

The assertion that a controller that had as many buttons as keyboard might be better for a fighting game is a little horrifying, but i'm just going to stop here.

You're completely dismissing every other point that was made. I'm not trying to make you like fighting games, i'm just trying to articulate why it's the way it is. These are games that are trying to map dozens, if not hundreds of moves to a controller that might not have more than four buttons.

It's a lot more complicated than it seems. Changing the control would change how you play many styles of characters. (Grapplers and charge characters in particular.) There's also just the matter of this, the second half of the quote: Relative to a game like Smash Bros, you are actually dealing with much larger movesets in more traditional fighting games. Standing and directional inputs are actually already covered by a lot of basic moves. (Down kick, down forward kick, forward kick, standing kick, jump kick, all repeated with how ever many buttons the game uses. And yes, the moves usually all really do serve important roles.) So the simplest inputs are all claimed, and you kind of have to end up with some moves tied into special inputs, and the simplest special inputs tend to overlap with normal actions in frustrating ways. Back on Persona 4 Arena, that game has some real dedication for trying to map all of its specials to very basic special inputs, relying mostly on quarter circles and a few charge moves. The potential problem is that when every quarter circle action can combine with virtually any attack to result in a special, it ends up being really easy to throw out special moves accidentally, screwing up your match just as easily as failing the input on something more complex might. I mean, a quarter circle is as simple as moving from a defensive crouch to a forward walk. It honestly took me years to be able to reliably pull off a shoryuken when under pressure, i always screwed it up when it mattered, but i appreciate it now for being something that doesn't easily overlap with other actions.

The advantage in how they've built this system is that it requires literally no setup or cooperation from their "partners", it works on simple assumptions about public wi-fi at various business locations. That is why it can be so widely accessible, the existence of a silly loophole doesn't really trump that advantage.

Long combos are never the sole reason people win though, you still have to get through somebody's defense while successfully fending off their attacks Understanding the theory and mechanics behind a fight gets you a lot further in a fighting game than rote combo memorization, regardless of the game. (I am terrible at long combos.) Combos are also much more situational and flexible than most people realize, i think. There is virtually never just one combo you need to know. It's more about one move flowing into a bunch of other movies which themselves flow into a bunch of other moves. When you look at a faq and see a huge combo printed off in some arcane input notation, it's after the community has gone through and tried to optimize their play, and even then there will always be many situational combos presented. You can take bits and pieces of those combos and reshape and combine them into something you yourself can more reliably utilize, and they'll usually still work. Persona 4 Arena is freaking awesome. It makes some big concessions for newbies, but the game is no less deep than any of ArcSys's other games, and once you're ready to start looking at more optimal tactics, it's all there. I still have mixed feelings about the automatic combo in that game, but it's pretty easy to predict and pick apart players who try to abuse it without any variation.

I also think there's a bit of a skewed perspective at work. For people who play fighting games, inputting a shoryuken is a natural action that can be done on instinct, immediately and mid-combo. It's not seen as a difficult action, and in fact, by being a slightly more complicated input, you're not as likely to break it out by accident. (Which is a real problem, with the way input buffering has to work in a lot of games, simple inputs can be misread, especially if there are a lot of moves with similar, simple inputs.) The thing that is actually hard is combos, and that barrier of technical execution is what makes it exciting. If you were just locked into a full combo everytime somebody landed a hit, that would basically break the game. Instead, you're looking for a way out, waiting for a chance to capitalize on a dropped combo so you can punish the opponent's mistake.

I'm a pretty middling/low-end player when it comes to fighting games, so somebody could probably come along and tell me that i'm full of shit, but the way i see is that a lot of the input requirements generally force you into taking up certain postures in a match. The clearest example is that it's exceedingly difficult to play a rushdown style with a charge character, since you're constantly required to be holding back, which immediately puts you into that defensive posture. (You can alleviate that somewhat by buffering the input inside of other attacks, but it's still a factor.) If you could just hit down and A to break out Guile's sonic boom, you'd be playing a fundamentally different game.

Yeah, as i understand it, the streetpass relay exploit does essentially nothing that would put users at any risk, it's just a silly loophole in a system that doesn't really have a better way to work. (Unless you're explicitly entering in private/secure information in places where you shouldn't, an exposed streetpass does not represent a privacy/security risk, since the streetpass being exposed is the entire point of the streetpass system.) The thing that might actually be really bad, people figuring out the encryption on streetpass, hasn't happened. This question has been answered many, many times, but i'll give it another go - There are a lot of JRPG's available for the system, the 3DS is filthy with great JRPG's. Etrian Odyssey IV, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and Fire Emblem: Awakening probably stand at the top. (I feel FEA is the one that everybody should check out, it's maybe the best game on the system, and i think the best game i've played this year.) Mario & Luigi 4: Dream Team just came out too, the demo seemed really awesome. Beyond that, Kid Icarus: Uprising is something you'll love if it doesn't cramp your wrist. Super Mario 3D Land is a legitimately great Mario game. Mario Kart 7 is one of the better versions of Mario Kart. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is just about exactly what that game needed to be, and it's booming with personality. Resident Evil: Revelations is actually one of the best modern RE games. (Not a high bar, but it's still really good.) There's really a bunch of other things too. Then there's the eShop, which is also pretty healthy. The Guild games are the best place to start, probably. An anthology series of concise, experimental games from some really respected names in Japan.

I think even Dishonored's really terrible at being a stealth game. It makes you so proficient in combat and gives you so many tools with no other role than inflicting harm. It seems so at odds with itself, presenting you with the framework of a stealth game and giving you every opportunity and excuse to not play it as one. It's a stealth game that only works as a stealth game through self-imposed challenged, a player willingly going along with the charade. Doesn't that kind of make it an awful stealth game? I mean, and that's virtually every modern stealth game. It's even better when you consider that Keith David played a major character in the first Saint's Row.

Every time they talk about Nintendo games without having played anything on the 3DS, it hurts me a little. Also, have any of the thumbs played Teleglitch? Was that ever discussed in a previous podcast? If not, it seems like a thing they should check out.

Did you guys hear about the thing where people have figured out exploits in the streetpass relay thing? The key thing is that there's nothing actually on-site about how it works, it's all pinging a central Nintendo server that is identifying locations by SSID's and mac addresses. It's like the item exploit in Animal Crossing New Leaf where you just needed to change your router's SSID to one of the participating retailers to gain access to the exclusive items. So setup a router SSID with the name of a participating retailer or restaurant, your 3DS will then see that and then try to ping that Nintendo server through that wi-fi point. (Thereby accessing the "Nintendo Zone" thing and the streetpass relay.) Whatever mac address that central server was accessed from is basically then entered in as a potential streetpass relay location to store and distribute streetpasses through. People are doing this with cloned mac addresses being passed around on the internet to share streetpasses online.

Right? It feels like such an important game for Nintendo, but it's kind of sneaking out there with absolutely no fanfare. They seem to be intent on casting more attention towards that flippin` Wind Waker remake, which is super baffling to me.

There's a demo up on the eShop, if anybody is curious about the game not quite to the point of putting down however many dollars.

The first three games, which are the GBA to DS remakes in the series, are the ones i think most people would say are the best games in the series. As such, the problem i'm going to present you with is that the "cases" people remember most fondly are usually the ones at the end of each of those games. So do you feel like investing twenty or more hours into a game you're not sure you like, clinging to the hope that you'll grow to like it more? You probably do not.

That's right, right. The japanese versions do have an early variant of the localized text, but it's supposed to very rough relative to what ended up in the released english games. I was more referencing that there are some pretty significant story discrepancies between the japanese text and the english text, but that's obviously not a concern here. If you played and enjoyed Ghost Trick in the interim between trying those two Ace Attorney games, i'm surprised that the series still didn't click. Ghost Trick was from the same game director and shares a lot of similar narrative sensibilities.

Wait, did you... there's a few things i'm not clear about here. Did you play the first game? It's a series that should be taken in order. There's also some pretty huge differences between Gyakuten Saiban and the localized form of the series, so unless you actually played the japanese game, it's not really appropriate to call it Gyakuten Saiban. The first cases are also always just glorified tutorials, while the cases that immediately follow are likewise pretty low key. (There's usually four or five cases in each game.) That's all i'll argue for it, because it's still a pretty dumb thing and it's definitely not for everyone. I love that series though.

There's a demo for M&L4 up on the eShop right now, it seems pretty awesome. Also, ever since the streetpass update, i've been getting a pretty constant stream of new streetpass hits. Steamworld Dig on the eShop is apparently an awesome thing as well. I have a bit of money i could spare on it, but i'm still holding out hope that Kokuga will be released in Canada. (The G.Rev-developed 3DS shooter that is available everywhere... except Canada.)

I'm curious about this game, can you say anything else about it?

It's really nothing more than fan fiction, that post.

Heh, i forgot that there's a lot of easy deaths at the hands of SSSE's map gimmicks. Coin-op co-op might be a bit more difficult than it was in SS3.

Sure, that sounds good.

So are we still good for this?

It's also worth pointing out that nobody is actually playing, they're pitting against eachother whatever custom AI scripting these crappy, random MUGEN characters have, and they're often just totally, hilariously broken. (Tip: Short characters are often a safe bet because most of the AI's can't deal with the small hitbox.) It's amazing. Even if you don't want join in on the metagame, the twitch stream is hilarious.