AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited June 2013
Actually the F2P Tekken is not what I would call great at all. It uses one of those terrible exploitive "energy" systems in the form of tokens, which means you can only play it for a limited period every day without paying money. There is a considerable grind thrown on top of it to actually access anything and it can be really hard to find people playing it - probably because you need to be playing whenever others "energy" tokens are actually available. Killer Instinct is actually sounding a shitload better than the free to play Tekken actually is (assuming it has no similarly bullshit energy limits or similar ala Tekken).
the two free games a month think that MS announced at E3 is that a Xbox one thing or just a 360 thing until the launch of the xbox one?
The current program is pretty clear about it being for the 360 only, and only until the end of the year. No idea if the program will carry over to Xbox One, nor how it would look on that console.
They should launch the Xbox One by giving everyone who buys one every launch game for free pre-loaded on the console.
that might be just a tad extreme, but i'd be amazed if there wasn't a game preloaded on the console day one. the 360 had Hexic, the PS4 will have DriveClub(or a version of it at least), so its almost a given that there will be something available.
Killer Instinct will be available for free. Well, a cut-down version of it anyway.
It's actually the full version. sort of.
It is the full game with all the stages and all the opponents, but you can only play as Jago. Totally to completion, and against any opponent online.
You can pay a one time fee to unlock all the characters, thus turning it into the full game. You can also pay a currently undisclosed amount of money to unlock one character.
So chances are if you see yourself wanting to play with all the characters (or host parties with the thing) your best bet is to buy the full version unlock... but if you only go online, you might get away with unlocking the 3-4 characters you like for under 20 bucks, and have the full game YOU want to play.
Its a great model for fighting games, and on that Namco is adopting with Tekken as well.
I knew about only having access to the one character, but I didn't know you could play through all of the stages. That's good news. I like this model actually. It gives me a chance to play through the game for free. Although, I can guarantee I will pick up a few characters to beat down on a friend of mine online.
This model is a logical evolution of Shareware. I never get the hate and angst over F2P. I think it's one of the best upcoming trends in gaming. Basically pay what you want for a game.
Everybody knows that Glacius is the greatest fighter ever and will be worth the $60 price of entry.
0
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
Is that... One Must Fall? I don't remember individual character purchases for that one and the ability to play on or offline against other people based on the characters you purchased, but very cool if a dev pulled it off in the 90s.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
the two free games a month think that MS announced at E3 is that a Xbox one thing or just a 360 thing until the launch of the xbox one?
The current program is pretty clear about it being for the 360 only, and only until the end of the year. No idea if the program will carry over to Xbox One, nor how it would look on that console.
They should launch the Xbox One by giving everyone who buys one every launch game for free pre-loaded on the console.
that might be just a tad extreme, but i'd be amazed if there wasn't a game preloaded on the console day one. the 360 had Hexic, the PS4 will have DriveClub(or a version of it at least), so its almost a given that there will be something available.
Killer Instinct will be available for free. Well, a cut-down version of it anyway.
It's actually the full version. sort of.
It is the full game with all the stages and all the opponents, but you can only play as Jago. Totally to completion, and against any opponent online.
You can pay a one time fee to unlock all the characters, thus turning it into the full game. You can also pay a currently undisclosed amount of money to unlock one character.
So chances are if you see yourself wanting to play with all the characters (or host parties with the thing) your best bet is to buy the full version unlock... but if you only go online, you might get away with unlocking the 3-4 characters you like for under 20 bucks, and have the full game YOU want to play.
Its a great model for fighting games, and on that Namco is adopting with Tekken as well.
The thing that I'm most interested in with that model is how they will handle achievements. In most fighting games now you have an achievement list that includes unlocking all characters, or beating the game with all characters, or winning n times using a specific character and stuff. Are you going to have to buy the extras in order to get the full gamerscore out of it? Will those characters have their own achievements in their dlc pack?
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
the two free games a month think that MS announced at E3 is that a Xbox one thing or just a 360 thing until the launch of the xbox one?
The current program is pretty clear about it being for the 360 only, and only until the end of the year. No idea if the program will carry over to Xbox One, nor how it would look on that console.
They should launch the Xbox One by giving everyone who buys one every launch game for free pre-loaded on the console.
that might be just a tad extreme, but i'd be amazed if there wasn't a game preloaded on the console day one. the 360 had Hexic, the PS4 will have DriveClub(or a version of it at least), so its almost a given that there will be something available.
Killer Instinct will be available for free. Well, a cut-down version of it anyway.
It's actually the full version. sort of.
It is the full game with all the stages and all the opponents, but you can only play as Jago. Totally to completion, and against any opponent online.
You can pay a one time fee to unlock all the characters, thus turning it into the full game. You can also pay a currently undisclosed amount of money to unlock one character.
So chances are if you see yourself wanting to play with all the characters (or host parties with the thing) your best bet is to buy the full version unlock... but if you only go online, you might get away with unlocking the 3-4 characters you like for under 20 bucks, and have the full game YOU want to play.
Its a great model for fighting games, and on that Namco is adopting with Tekken as well.
I knew about only having access to the one character, but I didn't know you could play through all of the stages. That's good news. I like this model actually. It gives me a chance to play through the game for free. Although, I can guarantee I will pick up a few characters to beat down on a friend of mine online.
This model is a logical evolution of Shareware. I never get the hate and angst over F2P. I think it's one of the best upcoming trends in gaming. Basically pay what you want for a game.
F2P is great if used correctly. I hate the "booster packs" and "energy packs" model. If they give me the game and a small piece of something but everything else plays normally then I'm okay with that. That way I can just purchase one part at a time if I actually enjoy it.
Actually the F2P Tekken is not what I would call great at all. It uses one of those terrible exploitive "energy" systems in the form of tokens, which means you can only play it for a limited period every day without paying money. There is a considerable grind thrown on top of it to actually access anything and it can be really hard to find people playing it - probably because you need to be playing whenever others "energy" tokens are actually available. Killer Instinct is actually sounding a shitload better than the free to play Tekken actually is (assuming it has no similarly bullshit energy limits or similar ala Tekken).
See, in comparison to killer instinct, Tekken is actually Crippleware. Ha, that's a term I don't think people have used in decades. In their prime, there was a big distinction between shareware - feature complete but content deficit applications - and crippleware - feature complete (and possibly content complete) but time restricted applications. By the early 90's, shareware had become the dominant model over crippleware because developers realized that providing timed demos essentially limited access to their form of advertising (the title itself). Hopefully they'll come to the same conclusion.
I like all these retro models coming back. Some of my best PC gaming memories came from Shareware. I think people who fear these models may have been too young to actually have experienced them in their prime. The end result for gamers is a near-endless supply of free content.
Everybody knows that Glacius is the greatest fighter ever and will be worth the $60 price of entry.
I can barely remember playing the game, but I will make a note of this.
KI: Gold was the only arcade fighter I could get into. Glacius was the only fighter I could beat the game with on the hardest difficulty (I think it was like Extreme or something).
Is that... One Must Fall? I don't remember individual character purchases for that one and the ability to play on or offline against other people based on the characters you purchased, but very cool if a dev pulled it off in the 90s.
You got a base character with the shareware demo - the Jaguar. Then you could buy the full game and get a huge pack of characters, and then after that, you could buy individual booster pack characters directly through the epic BBS. There was plans to eventually release a full (as in every character) boxed set but I don't think it ever released.
I'm fairly sure I was able to play TCP/IP battles in the shareware version. I may be mixing up my memories, though, because I ordered the full version back in the day as well. I fucking loved that game.
Another fighting game to use the same model but is probably much less well known:
Shadow Fighter on the Amiga. I'm not sure, actually, if the individual character packs ever released, but the demo came with 2 characters, the full version came with 20, and 30 additional individual character packs were planned (and advertised on the back of the full version box, too).
0
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
I like all these retro models coming back. Some of my best PC gaming memories came from Shareware. I think people who fear these models may have been too young to actually have experienced them in their prime. The end result for gamers is a near-endless supply of free content.
Back in the day I ran a bulletin board, and was on a distribution network that mailed CDs filled to bursting with shareware packages that I would tie into the download section of my BBS, leaving the discs in a 7 CDrom tower because Hard drive space was expensive, yo.
Sooo many great memories of Epic Pinball, Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem (the original, not the 3d one)... and hundreds of other great little free bites of software.
I mailed more than a few money orders I scraped together through allowances to buy the games I liked off those collections.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
That's the beauty of the system. People who feel like buying every character when they use only one might not fee the worth in spending the extra cash for (to them) useless characters, so they just don't purchase the game at all. Meanwhile, people who prefer to buy every character's purchasing habits (theoretically) don't change at all. For it all to work, the system can't be abused (i.e. nickle and diming people into paying $90 for a full game is shit) but if they price individual characters and full character packs accordingly, it basically lets the consumer pay exactly as much as they want for the game they want. That can dramatically increase the population of a community for a game.
It's such a great model. When used correctly, that is. I, personally, will buy full character packs, not individual characters.
+2
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
The problem is free to play has so many worrying connotations to it, like Tekkens bullshit energy system, that I am always skeptical of it. I am very skeptical about a lot of things these days by default.
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
I dunno, when I play fighting game I constantly stick with one or two characters for about a thousand matches.
this model totally works for me.
I like all these retro models coming back. Some of my best PC gaming memories came from Shareware. I think people who fear these models may have been too young to actually have experienced them in their prime. The end result for gamers is a near-endless supply of free content.
Back in the day I ran a bulletin board, and was on a distribution network that mailed CDs filled to bursting with shareware packages that I would tie into the download section of my BBS, leaving the discs in a 7 CDrom tower because Hard drive space was expensive, yo.
Sooo many great memories of Epic Pinball, Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem (the original, not the 3d one)... and hundreds of other great little free bites of software.
I mailed more than a few money orders I scraped together through allowances to buy the games I liked off those collections.
The silver-age of PC gaming as far as I'm concerned (if only because today is the golden age). There was that period in between the DD revolution and when shareware died when PC gaming just felt wrong. That's commonly when people claim PC gaming was "dying" or "dead."
Shareware is awesome. I love its return under the F2P title. I hope it catches on big again.
+3
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
That's the beauty of the system. People who feel like buying every character when they use only one might not fee the worth in spending the extra cash for (to them) useless characters, so they just don't purchase the game at all. Meanwhile, people who prefer to buy every character's purchasing habits (theoretically) don't change at all. For it all to work, the system can't be abused (i.e. nickle and diming people into paying $90 for a full game is shit) but if they price individual characters and full character packs accordingly, it basically lets the consumer pay exactly as much as they want for the game they want. That can dramatically increase the population of a community for a game.
It's such a great model. When used correctly, that is. I, personally, will buy full character packs, not individual characters.
5-6 years ago, when I lived around a bunch of fighting game friends, I would have done the exact same thing.
This time, I am going to beat the game with Jago a few times, see how the other characters fight, and probably buy the ones that interest me the most.
Or buy all of them because the game is amazing and I want to reward the developer for a job well done.
Either way, they win, because they will be getting some money from me as opposed to no money because I didn't get the chance to test-drive the game first.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
0
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
I dunno, when I play fighting game I constantly stick with one or two characters for about a thousand matches.
this model totally works for me.
I do the same thing as well, but I just like having the options available to me if my choices don't work out well - like changing from Catwoman in injustice to playing (depending on circumstances) Wonderwoman, Hawk Girl, Superman, Aquaman and Batgirl whenever I felt like it. If I couldn't try every character for a substantial amount of time, how would I eventually learn that WW and Aquaman were probably the two characters that felt best.
It feels to me like playing Russian roulette, given how sensitive move lists are and similar to how a fighter works.
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
That's the beauty of the system. People who feel like buying every character when they use only one might not fee the worth in spending the extra cash for (to them) useless characters, so they just don't purchase the game at all. Meanwhile, people who prefer to buy every character's purchasing habits (theoretically) don't change at all. For it all to work, the system can't be abused (i.e. nickle and diming people into paying $90 for a full game is shit) but if they price individual characters and full character packs accordingly, it basically lets the consumer pay exactly as much as they want for the game they want. That can dramatically increase the population of a community for a game.
It's such a great model. When used correctly, that is. I, personally, will buy full character packs, not individual characters.
5-6 years ago, when I lived around a bunch of fighting game friends, I would have done the exact same thing.
This time, I am going to beat the game with Jago a few times, see how the other characters fight, and probably buy the ones that interest me the most.
Or buy all of them because the game is amazing and I want to reward the developer for a job well done.
Either way, they win, because they will be getting some money from me as opposed to no money because I didn't get the chance to test-drive the game first.
I like to go through and learn every character in a fighting game, even to this day. When I first got SFIV and MK9, it was such a blast from the past to spend an entire week just making my way through each character one by one. I will absolutely be doing that for Killer Instinct. They better bring back TJ Combo, though. He was always my main.
Am I the only one who likes unlockable characters/stages? I think that was one of the main reasons I didn't like PS: All Stars, because every one was unlocked immediately after turning it on.
+1
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Am I the only one who likes unlockable characters/stages? I think that was one of the main reasons I didn't like PS: All Stars, because every one was unlocked immediately after turning it on.
Yeah, you may have to be alone on that one :P I prefer the model where you just get everything up front and can choose whatever you like to start with. I find it a lot more fair and it means you can jump straight into vs. multiplayer or whatever with the character that appeals to you most. It also means you don't run into someone playing a random unlocked character you have never played and can't work out. In Injustice, if I had trouble beating someone I just started playing with it and watching how my opponents beat me (of how they tried to). Then apply that to my own characters.
An idea that doesn't work very well when not everything is available to you for one reason or another off the bat.
This is good news. More interesting though is the game audio coming out of the new controller port. This has been mentioned, but I would love to be able to have a headset play game audio and chat audio without having to be tethered to me TV and console. This is great.
Since it runs on a version of Windows, I can't imagine it would be too much engineer work for at least wired 360 controllers and arcade sticks/etc to work on the system. If it supports the PC Dongle for Wireless 360 controllers that would be pretty amazing. It's kind of crazy to me that they didn't spend the time to make this work. There aren't any new buttons or anything, though the new controller does have stuff that is new I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for them to make the old stuff work in some capacity on the new platform.
Am I the only one who likes unlockable characters/stages? I think that was one of the main reasons I didn't like PS: All Stars, because every one was unlocked immediately after turning it on.
That's actually a core tenant of post-crash game design - constant change. The illusion of progress is linked to change - giving the player just one more thing to reach for beyond where he currently is. You can achieve this on a per-screen basis by having the backgrounds constantly change - moving the player, for example, in one stage from the outside in the sun to inside a cabin to back outside only now at night to suddenly making it rain and so forth. Unlockables are a great example of change that encourages progression.
When unlockables don't exist - either because they're behind a paywall or because everything is unlocked from the get-go, no matter how much content you have, it always feels like there is nothing more to do for the player. I remember reading an article way back when Mortal Kombat Trilogy came out - at the time, the biggest fighting game by roster - where a reviewer compared it to Eternal Champions on the Sega CD. Even though MKT had more characters from the get-go (albeit slightly), he said that EC felt longer because youd have to play the game like 20 times before you wound up with a comparable roster, and that, paradoxically, it made the game feel bigger.
F2P shouldn't take the place of unlockables. A good mix of both is healthy. The way MK9 and SFIV did it was almost perfect - there were unlockable characters in addition to DLC characters. If they could have offered the base game as a freemium engine, they would have been the perfect example of a modern fighter.
Actually, VF5FS does all this to absolute perfection. You can begin the game by paying nothing, there are loads of unlockables, and you can purchase characters either individually or in packs.
Am I the only one who likes unlockable characters/stages? I think that was one of the main reasons I didn't like PS: All Stars, because every one was unlocked immediately after turning it on.
Nah, unlockables are cool.
If they added some kind of in-game credit system to KI that allowed you to purchase the characters with then I think it would probably smooth some of the backlash over.
Or make it entirely random... hehe...
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Am I the only one who likes unlockable characters/stages? I think that was one of the main reasons I didn't like PS: All Stars, because every one was unlocked immediately after turning it on.
Nah, unlockables are cool.
If they added some kind of in-game credit system to KI that allowed you to purchase the characters with then I think it would probably smooth some of the backlash over.
Or make it entirely random... hehe...
But then everyone would get Sabrewulf and complain.... Rightfully so, but still.
0
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
This is good news. More interesting though is the game audio coming out of the new controller port. This has been mentioned, but I would love to be able to have a headset play game audio and chat audio without having to be tethered to me TV and console. This is great.
Since it runs on a version of Windows, I can't imagine it would be too much engineer work for at least wired 360 controllers and arcade sticks/etc to work on the system. If it supports the PC Dongle for Wireless 360 controllers that would be pretty amazing. It's kind of crazy to me that they didn't spend the time to make this work. There aren't any new buttons or anything, though the new controller does have stuff that is new I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for them to make the old stuff work in some capacity on the new platform.
I absolutely don't want the old 360 gamepads to be common (or at least easy to use) on the XBO because the people using those will not be able to take benefit of the rumble stuff, which is kind of neat and I hope devs use it.
Also, there is something in the new controllers (no idea what) that can track which one is player one via the kinect, which is a useful feature with regards to having your gamertag stick to whatever device you happen to be holding. I am imagining some future rockband like game, where there is a guitar, drum, mic, etc... and whatever one you pick up is automatically tied to your gamertags and earning cheevos for you.
Swapping players on the 360 was a bit of a pain in the ass, especially with DLC song lists tied to user accounts, and if the drummer wanted to sing the next round... there was a lot of shuffling.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I honestly can't say I understand the point of a fighting game where I don't have all the characters unlocked. While there are always characters I don't like or don't want to play with for whatever reason, every single genuine fond memory I have with a fighting game is playing it with people in the same room. The 99 stock battle in smash brothers with my flatmate, the hilarious beat down my wife gave my friend from NZ when he stayed in injustice etc etc. I may not like x, y, z characters but I would hate for one of my friends to pick up the game, be unable to play a character they like the look of and then lose interest.
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
I dunno, when I play fighting game I constantly stick with one or two characters for about a thousand matches.
this model totally works for me.
I do the same thing as well, but I just like having the options available to me if my choices don't work out well - like changing from Catwoman in injustice to playing (depending on circumstances) Wonderwoman, Hawk Girl, Superman, Aquaman and Batgirl whenever I felt like it. If I couldn't try every character for a substantial amount of time, how would I eventually learn that WW and Aquaman were probably the two characters that felt best.
It feels to me like playing Russian roulette, given how sensitive move lists are and similar to how a fighter works.
injustice is a good example. I played nightwing only at first. then, after fighting online, I saw characters whose moves I liked, looked up combos on youtubr, and tried them. if injustice let me just buy the characters I was interested in I would have. because I will never play as aries or grundy, I wouldn't mind saving a few bucks on half a roster of characters I will never play.
My main concern is things like arcade sticks/etc - which are too expensive to feel like buying a new version.
Fully agreed, and I suspect that since the language very clearly said that all wireless accessories are not backwards compatible... they left the door open for things like arcade sticks.
Only time will tell on that one, though.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
That seems to work out better for me. If the characters you can purchase are also unlockable by playing the game then I'm happy.
My favorite part of playing Smash Bros is seeing "A New Challenger Approaches!"
Sometimes simply unlocking a skin is enough to fool you into thinking it's a new character. Like Cyrax in MK9 - his pre-cyborg model was so fucking awesome that, to me at least, it honestly felt like an entirely different character. Even though he played the same. It was enough of a cosmetic change for me to feel satiated.
I can see that sort of stuff becoming bigger as F2P goes further. Maybe you'll stop unlocking totally new characters, but you'll hopefully still be able to unlock stuff that fools you into thinking it's new.
To me it wasn't enough... At least in PS: All Stars. They had costume unlocks, but it didn't really offer enough of a change. But it's probably better on arcadey fighters than it is.... What would you call PS: All Stars in terms of fighting games?
The game is basically Smash Bros before Smash Bros, and has since been ported around and updated a bunch (most recently, looks like someone ported it to XBLIG). The 1996 game is a great 2-player game. The developer has long since removed the shareware component and released the game as freeware, but originally you got the base game and the full version basically introduced more weapons and some additional duelist skins.
To me it wasn't enough... At least in PS: All Stars. They had costume unlocks, but it didn't really offer enough of a change. But it's probably better on arcadey fighters than it is.... What would you call PS: All Stars in terms of fighting games?
Well the costume unlocks in PS:ASBR was just a skin. In MK9, they were enormous changes. Not only did the models change, but the animations changed. It's hard to explain, but they really looked and behaved nothing alike, pre and post-cyborg. Except they played the same. So like, this move might hit in this specific area, with this hit box, in this number of frames... but the animation and model and skins were all 100% different. It's like one move had Cyrax pulling his arms back and standing straight up while his chest opened up and a spiked blade rotated around him, but when he was human, he was actually doing a round-house cartwheel with a blade in one hand.
It was easily the best implementation of this sort of cosmetic change that I've ever seen in a fighting game. If you haven't checked out MK9, you should at least give it a rental to see what I'm talking about. Several characters have similarly large cosmetic changes.
EDIT: Here, a good video showing some of the difference between human and cyborg cyrax:
Can someone clear up a bit of confusion me and a friend were having?
So, when PSN+ became a thing, and people ranted about how the free game aspect alone made it worth it, I had a minor caveat: they weren't giving you a free game, you're buying a subscription to a pool of free games, Netflix style. If you drop PSN+, you no longer access those games. I completely understand if people don't care about the distinction, I do (I've always made a point of following the exact details of licensing and rights to the best of my ability).
I think this is still the case. Now, XBL Gold has started doing the same (most recently, Fable 3 was free for Gold members). Now, I assumed this was like PSN+: 'free' game, sure, but if I canceled Gold, then I don't have access to those games (I don't expect I would, but the point is still valid). As such, it's not like the free games posted on Live, which are free regardless of your account standing.
My friend said this isn't true, and so long as you actually acquired a license to the game, its yours, gold or not--in effect, it's no different from any game purchased on XBL (including free ones), where licenses don't care if you have gold or not.
From what I understand with the Games for Gold stuff - once you get it as part of your Gold subscription and apply it to your account, it is yours even if your gold subscription lapses. They are giving you the game, it's not just a rental or whatever like PSN+.
Can someone clear up a bit of confusion me and a friend were having?
So, when PSN+ became a thing, and people ranted about how the free game aspect alone made it worth it, I had a minor caveat: they weren't giving you a free game, you're buying a subscription to a pool of free games, Netflix style. If you drop PSN+, you no longer access those games. I completely understand if people don't care about the distinction, I do (I've always made a point of following the exact details of licensing and rights to the best of my ability).
I think this is still the case. Now, XBL Gold has started doing the same (most recently, Fable 3 was free for Gold members). Now, I assumed this was like PSN+: 'free' game, sure, but if I canceled Gold, then I don't have access to those games (I don't expect I would, but the point is still valid). As such, it's not like the free games posted on Live, which are free regardless of your account standing.
My friend said this isn't true, and so long as you actually acquired a license to the game, its yours, gold or not--in effect, it's no different from any game purchased on XBL (including free ones), where licenses don't care if you have gold or not.
Does anyone what the case is?
The Xbox free games do not require you to maintain a subscription to play them. Once you download them, they are yours for good.
"
Asked whether he was cautious of comparisons with PS4 by our editor Jon Hicks, Penello pointed out that few players really buy consoles for the specs alone. "The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless," he told us. "Because this isn't like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit.
For me, I'd rather not even have the conversation, because it's not going to matter," Penello went on. "The box is going to be awesome. The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it's a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don't know about. They're not [head silicon engineer] Nick Baker or [corporate vice president of IEB hardware Todd Holmdahl], and I'm not [lead PS4 architect] Mark Cerny, so why are we having this discussion?"
Penello feels consumers will pick a console for the games it offers, rather than for its capabilities on paper. "Here's what you care about," he said. "You bought a system to play great games and have great experiences. I feel like our games and experiences are going to be every bit as good, if not better, technically - on top of all the magic we're going to add with the instant switching, and the power of the cloud.
Albert Penello is MS's Xbox product planning boss. Link via gaf..
This is exactly the kind of cloud bullshit that I hate. If MS cared about how many CPU cycles they had for games then they should have worked out a way for their TV stuff to take less than 3 of the 8 cores.
That said, games are much more important than hardware specs. Then again, maybe the XBO being weaker wouldn't be as big a deal if it wan't more expensive.
lowlylowlycook on
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
the two free games a month think that MS announced at E3 is that a Xbox one thing or just a 360 thing until the launch of the xbox one?
The current program is pretty clear about it being for the 360 only, and only until the end of the year. No idea if the program will carry over to Xbox One, nor how it would look on that console.
They should launch the Xbox One by giving everyone who buys one every launch game for free pre-loaded on the console.
If you have PSN+ Sony are giving Drive Club and 3 of their indie titles for free on the launch of the PS4. I forget which games it is exactly. I would absolutely expect Microsoft of thinking of doing something similar given some of the changes they are making (dropping patch fees, making development easier and I suspect they will be announcing indie self publishing soon).
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This model is a logical evolution of Shareware. I never get the hate and angst over F2P. I think it's one of the best upcoming trends in gaming. Basically pay what you want for a game.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The thing that I'm most interested in with that model is how they will handle achievements. In most fighting games now you have an achievement list that includes unlocking all characters, or beating the game with all characters, or winning n times using a specific character and stuff. Are you going to have to buy the extras in order to get the full gamerscore out of it? Will those characters have their own achievements in their dlc pack?
I can barely remember playing the game, but I will make a note of this.
F2P is great if used correctly. I hate the "booster packs" and "energy packs" model. If they give me the game and a small piece of something but everything else plays normally then I'm okay with that. That way I can just purchase one part at a time if I actually enjoy it.
Otherwise I abandon it.
See, in comparison to killer instinct, Tekken is actually Crippleware. Ha, that's a term I don't think people have used in decades. In their prime, there was a big distinction between shareware - feature complete but content deficit applications - and crippleware - feature complete (and possibly content complete) but time restricted applications. By the early 90's, shareware had become the dominant model over crippleware because developers realized that providing timed demos essentially limited access to their form of advertising (the title itself). Hopefully they'll come to the same conclusion.
I like all these retro models coming back. Some of my best PC gaming memories came from Shareware. I think people who fear these models may have been too young to actually have experienced them in their prime. The end result for gamers is a near-endless supply of free content.
KI: Gold was the only arcade fighter I could get into. Glacius was the only fighter I could beat the game with on the hardest difficulty (I think it was like Extreme or something).
So many blisters from that game.
You got a base character with the shareware demo - the Jaguar. Then you could buy the full game and get a huge pack of characters, and then after that, you could buy individual booster pack characters directly through the epic BBS. There was plans to eventually release a full (as in every character) boxed set but I don't think it ever released.
I'm fairly sure I was able to play TCP/IP battles in the shareware version. I may be mixing up my memories, though, because I ordered the full version back in the day as well. I fucking loved that game.
Another fighting game to use the same model but is probably much less well known:
Shadow Fighter on the Amiga. I'm not sure, actually, if the individual character packs ever released, but the demo came with 2 characters, the full version came with 20, and 30 additional individual character packs were planned (and advertised on the back of the full version box, too).
I would be buying all the characters by default if I wanted the game, so it's not really anything special for me anyway.
Back in the day I ran a bulletin board, and was on a distribution network that mailed CDs filled to bursting with shareware packages that I would tie into the download section of my BBS, leaving the discs in a 7 CDrom tower because Hard drive space was expensive, yo.
Sooo many great memories of Epic Pinball, Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem (the original, not the 3d one)... and hundreds of other great little free bites of software.
I mailed more than a few money orders I scraped together through allowances to buy the games I liked off those collections.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
That's the beauty of the system. People who feel like buying every character when they use only one might not fee the worth in spending the extra cash for (to them) useless characters, so they just don't purchase the game at all. Meanwhile, people who prefer to buy every character's purchasing habits (theoretically) don't change at all. For it all to work, the system can't be abused (i.e. nickle and diming people into paying $90 for a full game is shit) but if they price individual characters and full character packs accordingly, it basically lets the consumer pay exactly as much as they want for the game they want. That can dramatically increase the population of a community for a game.
It's such a great model. When used correctly, that is. I, personally, will buy full character packs, not individual characters.
this model totally works for me.
PS - Local_H_Jay
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The silver-age of PC gaming as far as I'm concerned (if only because today is the golden age). There was that period in between the DD revolution and when shareware died when PC gaming just felt wrong. That's commonly when people claim PC gaming was "dying" or "dead."
Shareware is awesome. I love its return under the F2P title. I hope it catches on big again.
5-6 years ago, when I lived around a bunch of fighting game friends, I would have done the exact same thing.
This time, I am going to beat the game with Jago a few times, see how the other characters fight, and probably buy the ones that interest me the most.
Or buy all of them because the game is amazing and I want to reward the developer for a job well done.
Either way, they win, because they will be getting some money from me as opposed to no money because I didn't get the chance to test-drive the game first.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I do the same thing as well, but I just like having the options available to me if my choices don't work out well - like changing from Catwoman in injustice to playing (depending on circumstances) Wonderwoman, Hawk Girl, Superman, Aquaman and Batgirl whenever I felt like it. If I couldn't try every character for a substantial amount of time, how would I eventually learn that WW and Aquaman were probably the two characters that felt best.
It feels to me like playing Russian roulette, given how sensitive move lists are and similar to how a fighter works.
I like to go through and learn every character in a fighting game, even to this day. When I first got SFIV and MK9, it was such a blast from the past to spend an entire week just making my way through each character one by one. I will absolutely be doing that for Killer Instinct. They better bring back TJ Combo, though. He was always my main.
Yeah, you may have to be alone on that one :P I prefer the model where you just get everything up front and can choose whatever you like to start with. I find it a lot more fair and it means you can jump straight into vs. multiplayer or whatever with the character that appeals to you most. It also means you don't run into someone playing a random unlocked character you have never played and can't work out. In Injustice, if I had trouble beating someone I just started playing with it and watching how my opponents beat me (of how they tried to). Then apply that to my own characters.
An idea that doesn't work very well when not everything is available to you for one reason or another off the bat.
Since it runs on a version of Windows, I can't imagine it would be too much engineer work for at least wired 360 controllers and arcade sticks/etc to work on the system. If it supports the PC Dongle for Wireless 360 controllers that would be pretty amazing. It's kind of crazy to me that they didn't spend the time to make this work. There aren't any new buttons or anything, though the new controller does have stuff that is new I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for them to make the old stuff work in some capacity on the new platform.
That's actually a core tenant of post-crash game design - constant change. The illusion of progress is linked to change - giving the player just one more thing to reach for beyond where he currently is. You can achieve this on a per-screen basis by having the backgrounds constantly change - moving the player, for example, in one stage from the outside in the sun to inside a cabin to back outside only now at night to suddenly making it rain and so forth. Unlockables are a great example of change that encourages progression.
When unlockables don't exist - either because they're behind a paywall or because everything is unlocked from the get-go, no matter how much content you have, it always feels like there is nothing more to do for the player. I remember reading an article way back when Mortal Kombat Trilogy came out - at the time, the biggest fighting game by roster - where a reviewer compared it to Eternal Champions on the Sega CD. Even though MKT had more characters from the get-go (albeit slightly), he said that EC felt longer because youd have to play the game like 20 times before you wound up with a comparable roster, and that, paradoxically, it made the game feel bigger.
F2P shouldn't take the place of unlockables. A good mix of both is healthy. The way MK9 and SFIV did it was almost perfect - there were unlockable characters in addition to DLC characters. If they could have offered the base game as a freemium engine, they would have been the perfect example of a modern fighter.
Actually, VF5FS does all this to absolute perfection. You can begin the game by paying nothing, there are loads of unlockables, and you can purchase characters either individually or in packs.
My favorite part of playing Smash Bros is seeing "A New Challenger Approaches!"
Nah, unlockables are cool.
If they added some kind of in-game credit system to KI that allowed you to purchase the characters with then I think it would probably smooth some of the backlash over.
Or make it entirely random... hehe...
But then everyone would get Sabrewulf and complain.... Rightfully so, but still.
I absolutely don't want the old 360 gamepads to be common (or at least easy to use) on the XBO because the people using those will not be able to take benefit of the rumble stuff, which is kind of neat and I hope devs use it.
Also, there is something in the new controllers (no idea what) that can track which one is player one via the kinect, which is a useful feature with regards to having your gamertag stick to whatever device you happen to be holding. I am imagining some future rockband like game, where there is a guitar, drum, mic, etc... and whatever one you pick up is automatically tied to your gamertags and earning cheevos for you.
Swapping players on the 360 was a bit of a pain in the ass, especially with DLC song lists tied to user accounts, and if the drummer wanted to sing the next round... there was a lot of shuffling.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
injustice is a good example. I played nightwing only at first. then, after fighting online, I saw characters whose moves I liked, looked up combos on youtubr, and tried them. if injustice let me just buy the characters I was interested in I would have. because I will never play as aries or grundy, I wouldn't mind saving a few bucks on half a roster of characters I will never play.
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Only time will tell on that one, though.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Sometimes simply unlocking a skin is enough to fool you into thinking it's a new character. Like Cyrax in MK9 - his pre-cyborg model was so fucking awesome that, to me at least, it honestly felt like an entirely different character. Even though he played the same. It was enough of a cosmetic change for me to feel satiated.
I can see that sort of stuff becoming bigger as F2P goes further. Maybe you'll stop unlocking totally new characters, but you'll hopefully still be able to unlock stuff that fools you into thinking it's new.
PS - Local_H_Jay
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http://mduel2k5.spadgos.com/mduel96/
The game is basically Smash Bros before Smash Bros, and has since been ported around and updated a bunch (most recently, looks like someone ported it to XBLIG). The 1996 game is a great 2-player game. The developer has long since removed the shareware component and released the game as freeware, but originally you got the base game and the full version basically introduced more weapons and some additional duelist skins.
Well the costume unlocks in PS:ASBR was just a skin. In MK9, they were enormous changes. Not only did the models change, but the animations changed. It's hard to explain, but they really looked and behaved nothing alike, pre and post-cyborg. Except they played the same. So like, this move might hit in this specific area, with this hit box, in this number of frames... but the animation and model and skins were all 100% different. It's like one move had Cyrax pulling his arms back and standing straight up while his chest opened up and a spiked blade rotated around him, but when he was human, he was actually doing a round-house cartwheel with a blade in one hand.
It was easily the best implementation of this sort of cosmetic change that I've ever seen in a fighting game. If you haven't checked out MK9, you should at least give it a rental to see what I'm talking about. Several characters have similarly large cosmetic changes.
EDIT: Here, a good video showing some of the difference between human and cyborg cyrax:
keep in mind that they're both the exact same character. The difference is purely cosmetic.
Can someone clear up a bit of confusion me and a friend were having?
So, when PSN+ became a thing, and people ranted about how the free game aspect alone made it worth it, I had a minor caveat: they weren't giving you a free game, you're buying a subscription to a pool of free games, Netflix style. If you drop PSN+, you no longer access those games. I completely understand if people don't care about the distinction, I do (I've always made a point of following the exact details of licensing and rights to the best of my ability).
I think this is still the case. Now, XBL Gold has started doing the same (most recently, Fable 3 was free for Gold members). Now, I assumed this was like PSN+: 'free' game, sure, but if I canceled Gold, then I don't have access to those games (I don't expect I would, but the point is still valid). As such, it's not like the free games posted on Live, which are free regardless of your account standing.
My friend said this isn't true, and so long as you actually acquired a license to the game, its yours, gold or not--in effect, it's no different from any game purchased on XBL (including free ones), where licenses don't care if you have gold or not.
Does anyone what the case is?
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Fable-III/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8024d5308d6?noSplash=1
If you look at Fable 3 right now - you are "buying" it for free. It's the same as any other digital purchase.
The Xbox free games do not require you to maintain a subscription to play them. Once you download them, they are yours for good.
Albert Penello is MS's Xbox product planning boss. Link via gaf..
This is exactly the kind of cloud bullshit that I hate. If MS cared about how many CPU cycles they had for games then they should have worked out a way for their TV stuff to take less than 3 of the 8 cores.
That said, games are much more important than hardware specs. Then again, maybe the XBO being weaker wouldn't be as big a deal if it wan't more expensive.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I do have PS+. It's pretty amazing, really.