eRonin

It's not a gameplay trailer that gets me excited (in the sense that it wasn't an adrenaline-filled rush like most game trailers these days), per se, but I did like what I saw. I'm not fussed about sparseness, we saw literally less than 5% of the world, even counting that landmark in the distance.

Oof, my friend won't be happy about this. He only has an Xbox One and isn't into PC gaming. Just yesterday he said he wanted to get serious with Street Fighter.

Villager has amazing recovery, so don't be afraid to jump and and throw out a side, up or down-air attack to edgeguard and float back on with balloons. Also you can plant a sprout and instead of cutting down the tree, wait for them to get back on and grow the tree, which hits really hard as well.

Take a closer look at the Melee tier list - It goes S, A, B, then skips C-E, and goes straight to F. The implication is that any character in the first three tiers have a decent chance at winning a tournament in the hands of the right player. The ability to win for F-tier characters are almost non-existent. Melee has a tool-set of engine exploits and other included mechanics like L-cancelling that make even a low-tier character like Mewtwo viable. So that answers your question about a sweet spot of potential, I think. With Brawl, the lack of an overall game-wide tool-set makes the distinction between different characters clearer, so there is a more gradual drop in the potential of characters as you go down the tier list.

Maaan I used to play Tetris so damn much. I was definitely affected by the Tetris effect. And to an extent I was able to play a game of tetris in my head because I could produce random tetriminos in an unbiased way and could store the visual image of where previous tetriminos settled. I'm not sure if it was truly random, or if they were permutations based on the countless games that I had played.

Villager is absolutely my favourite newcomer (but online, mostly I play as C. Falcon because I am more confident with him). Don't forget that while you have the tree up, you can use the axe any time you want, not just to cut the tree. It's a very strong attack that comes out much faster than your normal F-smash attack, but is a bit weaker and can't be charged. But it is FAST. Also the tree sprouting has a huge and extended hitbox too. The tree overall is quite versatile! Pocket is great because you are actually invincible during the duration of the pocket. You can even defend yourself from Final Smash attacks with pocket.

I withheld on commenting about the data presented, despite being pretty into the Smash Bros competitive scene. Partly because I don't agree with how the data is presented, including the X-axis representation, like you say. I'm also not involved with the production of the rankings and I know there is a lot of discussion that happens to produce this information, much of which would go over my head. My understanding is a "backroom" of select users, mostly on the Smashboards forums, assigns a ranking to each character after some deliberation. The rankings from each backroom member is averaged out and then this is presented as the tier list ranking. Here's the current tier list for the first three games (I imagine no preliminary consensus has been reached with Smash 4): http://www.ssbwiki.com/Tier_list Note that Metaknight has a 1.000 ranking average, meaning a unanimous agreement that he is the #1 ranked character in the game. In fact he is in a tier of his own. The Melee tier list is less segregated, and there are 8 characters in what is considered the highest tier (however note that there is a large gap between Peach and C. Falcon's rank average, this is somewhat important). What none of this data show explicitly is the fact that in Melee, there is a group of "5 Gods" who individually are famous for one or two characters, representing the top 6 characters. (PPMD: Falco, Mango: Fox/Falco, Mew2King: Sheik/Marth, Armada: Peach, Hungrybox: Jigglypuff). Jigglypuff is an interesting character because on paper it looks very weak, but has a devastating combo game against Falco and Fox especially, hence its meteoric rise from low tier to high tier. Because of the existence of the 5 Gods, major tournament winners are almost always these six characters, because these five players are considered to be above and beyond the rest of the players. There is a lot of discussion about who would round out a top 10, but essentially those players also likewise represent a character from the S class or upper part of the A class, e.g. Axe with Pikachu.

Yoshi is widely accepted in the competitive community to be one of the best characters, so stick with him a bit more! Marth definitely got the short end of the stick though. Little Mac is deceptive in a way; a lot of newcomers see him as being really strong but he has such poor recovery and aerial game, that according to Sakurai's data on For Glory, Little Mac actually has the lowest win percentage.

Here's the article, folks: http://forrestthewoods.com/unbalanced-design-of-super-smash-brothers/

Marvel is doing a sale for Marvel Unlimited with the first month for 75c. It'll auto-renew at $10/month, but you can always cancel before that happens; there is no contract period. Unfortunately the app is piss-poor compared to Comixology/Marvel's own non-subscription digital service, but 75c for all you can read in a month is a pretty good deal.

Haha, unfortunately I got that spoiled when I snooped around seeing what the other endings were like. In any case, I uninstalled the game already and have moved on to my next single-player game (Tomb Raider)

I finally finished Mass Effect 3 yesterday. I played with the extended cut, and I was pretty happy with the ending. I feel I would have been happy (in different ways) regardless of whether or not I had the extended cut though. I think a high-profile game that finally lets you . But again, I did like the ending that I got and felt it was a nice way to cap off a series that I had devoted quite a lot of time to. Kai Leng was a dick though. I could have done without Kai Leng.

Mmm I can really go for a shower now (I just started this game today) EDIT: It's Tomb Raider, can't believe I didn't say that before... (this is on "normal" settings with textures set to high for those who care)

Finally got around to playing Smash Wii U. The graphics are amazing and 8 player is a blast! I only had three friends with me though so we played 4v4 against computers. Didn't try out Smash tour. I kinda forgot about it, but I heard it's kinda boring anyway eh?

Smash Bros is at its core a combination of fighting games and platforming games. So movement is a huge factor in what makes a Smash game considered good by pros. Melee had a huge plethora of movement tricks that were glitches/exploits in the way the engine was built. A lot of people have heard of wavedashing but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are also things like fox-trotting, moon-walking, wave-bouncing, etc. Brawl went in the opposite direction and removed aerial momentum from a dash, and all those other fancy tricks. Instead, they introduced tripping, which was infuriating. Brawl did add some interesting things like the foot-stool jump and buffering (inputting a command within frames of the previous action completing will allow you to perform it at the fastest possible moment). Another thing is that the overall hitlag is reduced, removing the possibility of many combos, which made the game boring to play and watch since it mostly came down to people just taking turns hitting each other. Shielding and dodging on the other hand was massively improved, which led to the game being heavily defensive-oriented, i.e. super boring. Smash 4 3DS and Wii U is clearly a descendant of Brawl, not Melee, but they removed tripping and has a lot more combo potential. Melee will probably never be topped in terms of competitive depth and how exciting it is to watch, but Smash 4 is an excellent companion and moving forward (big tournaments will host both games), more and more things will be discovered and it can only get better from here =) Of course, this game has more characters and more items and cool stages and 8 player and holy shit I can't wait to play that (not out in Australia yet!)

My internet is shoddy so thankfully I have the most fun when playing 1v1 no items on neutral stages (Battlefield, Yoshi's Island etc.) I have only played the 3DS version and for the most part I'm having fun in For Glory (played ~500 matches) and against friends.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the StarCraft scene "matured", so to speak, in Korea, not a Western country. The Korean e-Sports scene was ruled with an iron fist, so much so that typing ANYTHING other than "ppp" (please pause) or gg (good game) (or the Korean variants) will result in an instant forfeiture of the match. When SC2 first came out and it was clear that Korean players will continue to dominate, many "foreigners" (non-Korean) lamented the lack of personality in the Korean players. As such, several Korean players such as MC and PartinG has over-compensated by putting on a persona of a crass and aggressive attitude. For the most part they act within the confines of what is considered to be acceptable manners, and when they edge the line, it's usually seen as an endearing act, which I think is somewhat patronising. Given the sea of otherwise well-mannered players, it's understandable when a player tries to carve a niche by being the "bad boy" of the scene, but in this particular case it backfired and I think the player involved recognises that he overstepped a boundary and has apologised.

Where were the other drugs going?!

Anybody else reading Spider-Verse? I'll be honest, I'm preeetty confused as to what's going on but the action is great and I love me some Olivier Coipel.

Oh geez, those Yoshi sound effects. I would be okay with the cast just having fun and making funny noises, but NONE OF THAT sounds anything like Yoshi D: The toad sounds from Danielle sounded pretty spot-on though! Also the best Pokemon game to start with is whichever came out most recently! So grab Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire (don't get both unless you hate money) and be prepared for TOO MUCH WATER.

Gamefreak, that's how you get me to succumb to your now-annualised franchise. Gotta get them Musketeers.

Someone showed that Luma takes 13 seconds to respawn in the Wii U version, so the 3DS version will probably be changed to match that. It is currently 8 seconds.

Man I am so excited for all the Nintendo games coming out in the next half year or so.

The best Smash Bros ad of all time just got better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bSrvDv1hNo Warning: 4 minutes of your life that you can never top.

I enjoyed TF2, but when my friends stopped playing it, that was it for me. Unless I can find a handful of friends to play this with me, I'll prbably skip it. It looks fun though.