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There was a bit of a resurgence in the XSF scene about a year ago, due in large part to the efforts of SRK icon and renaissance man extraordinaire dog-face. He actually made the game look really fun and i almost got baited into learning it from scratch.

Why "almost"? Because i absolutely can not stand the flashing white screen gimmick during supers. That idiocy completely ruins the game for me. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put that into a fighting game?

I bet there's some epileptic kid somewhere in Japan, whose favorite comic book character is Gambit. And this poor kid has to cover his eyes every time he accidentally does Gambit's super, because the XSF designers keep trying to kill him.

200% infinite/combos. Throw into Throw from a combo w/o strict timing. the list goes on.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 just has that shitty normal soundtrack that Eidrian figured out how to change. Now it has custom colors and custom soundtrack. Too bad 50 out of 56 characters are still crappy.

Magnetro wrote:Too bad 50 out of 56 characters are still crappy.

Kinda begs the question of the glass half empty or half full.

Are 50 of the 56 characters crappy, or 6 of the 56 characters stupidly good?

6 are too good. only thing keeping marvel is alive is the violence and sheer hatred within the community.

what about arcane hearts? or monster?

Magnetro wrote:200% infinite/combos.

Any exploit that took over 3 years to formulate doesn't qualify as a "design choice" cuz there's very little Capcom could have done about it, apart from maybe hiring a fortune teller.

The XSF throw to throw timing might be a valid complaint but i don't think MvC2's narrow tournament character selection qualifies. That game has had a pretty impressive top tier timeline. Apart from Cable/Sent/Mag/Storm who are currently top four, MvC2 top tier has at one point or another included Doom, Blackheart, Strider, Spiral, Iron Man, Cyclops, Iceman, and i'm sure i'm forgetting a few. Too bad Viscant isn't here to bust out stories of how people thought Amingo and Thanos were top tier at one point.

I guess initial flaw for marvel was that the good characters are too good and the low tiers have absolutely no chance. i'm sure viscant can think up a few stories where low tiers were winning... but in situations were both persons know what they're doing (HAHAHAHAH) it's impossible to win with some characters. a perfect example is the dpc vs justin wong match. if justin w. knew the character's combos and what not, he woulda done better. if dpc knew them too he woulda done better. *shrug* so it was a pretty bad match overall (from my point of view [magnetrocombovideogodking])

Who said anything about low tiers? There's only one character who has been top tier for the entirety of MvC2's lifespan and that's Cable. And he's probably the weakest of the four at this point, plus i'm pretty sure he wasn't the first character to be declared top tier.

The game grew in a much more dynamic fashion than most people know. It's too bad there's no written history of the evolution of Marvel strategy. Sadly, most of the true innovators of the game aren't around to share stories anymore - image, Duc, Genghis, ShadyK, Scott A, etc., and Valle too since he mysteriously quit MvC2.

huh what? i'm talking about a giant flaw mvc2 has. low tiers are low and top tiers are too overpowered. i didnt say anything about one or more characters ALWAYS being good. I'm just saying that characters like Guile will never beat Sentinel (ahahahah that might not be true, fuck you maj).

iirc, keepaway characters like bh and doom were the first ones to be declared top tier, I remember ratanna (sp) beat a buncha people with Iceman cause iceman can chip the hell outta you + takes no chip damage which was the only way people did damage back then (?). Iono, it was just more about zoning. hell if i remember every little detail ask S...nevermind...

isn't it the same with cvs2 *involuntary yawn*? Isn't it once of those games where the top tiers are too overpowered? I mean i pretty much only see blanka *yawn* cammy *yawnyawn* and sagat *yawnyawnyawn* in tournies.
its fun to watch combofiend play lowtiers though

Well Iyo does really well in japan, with Dhalsim, Maki, Rolento, and by really well, I mean he beats people who would easily own the USA. I think the main problem is that no one in the US has enough commitment to cvs 2 beyond like Buktooth and a few others to bother learning how to play the lower tier well. In Cvs 2 most of the cast has a real competitive chance its just in the US no one cares enough to try. Anyway i didn't really read what you guys were really talking about I just wanted to put in my two cents

Magnetro wrote:huh what? i'm talking about a giant flaw mvc2 has. low tiers are low and top tiers are too overpowered. i didnt say anything about one or more characters ALWAYS being good. I'm just saying that characters like Guile will never beat Sentinel.

The point is that Sentinel was not always considered top tier. In fact when the game was first released, Guile WAS considered top tier and all the mall scrubs picked him. It took a long time for Sentinel to become what he is today. Back in the day he used to be a ground-based character and his main offense was drone traps. Flying was used primarily as a way to shorten recovery on ground normals.

Also since you brought up Guile vs Sentinel, there was a point where Guile AAA was considered a counter to Sentinel cuz it cut through a lot of Sentinel's main flight path. Well, since then people have gotten a lot better at maneuvering around obstacles - both from practicing execution and from technical innovation.

Yes it's cool that the top four in MvC2 represent a diverse range of play styles, but the winding path taken to get to this point is the real reason people kept playing. It's easy to forget that when you say things like "situations where both persons know what they're doing" as if Valle should have know about fast-fly before it was invented.

Doom was considered top tier at a certain point in time because he dominated Marvel as it was understood at that time. He was overpowered at that stage in Marvel's evolution. Even if he's low tier now, the fact is that Doom players did get to have their fun. If you overlook that, then you're missing out on a big part of what made MvC2 so dynamic.

I know i'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to MvC2 but i was a SHGL regular through the most active/unpredictable phase of its tournament level development. It was cool seeing it unfold the way it did.

So yeah, i totally disagree that MvC2 is flawed when it comes to balance, cuz it's nothing short of a miracle that it's held up as well as it has for as long as it has. What more you can ask from the developers of a game that has been "broken" a hundred different ways by a hundred different tactics and managed to bounce back every time?

If you need a reference point, just compare to CvS1. How many major strategic shifts did CvS1 survive? Exactly one. People played random teams until they started noticing that Ratio 1 characters are way too difficult to kill. The game almost died to 4 on 4 turtlefest. Then Nakoruru was unlocked and she provided a counter to that mindset. But nothing beats Nakoruru so that was the end of CvS1's evolution. In fact it's even debatable whether the "CvS1 = R1 x4" step should count because maybe people would have gone straight to the "CvS1 = Nakoruru" step if she had been accessible in the beginning instead of being a time release hidden character.

I think I was thinking of flaws in the game that are evident NOW, not when the game was released. You're right about the Guile vs Sent thing though, I remember I started off with guile...activating flight mode with sentinel was considered an accident lol.

As for situations about people knowing what to do, I was talking about now, since people have the ability to download videos for the most obscure things in MvC2. I wasn't in any way talking an old situation...the comment i made about the dpc vs justin thing is more of an off topic thought that came into my head 'cause i was thinking of low tiers vs top tiers IN TODAYS MVC2

I think MvC2's case is common knowledge by now, the game is so messed up it's balanced in a few ways, low tiers vs low tiers is a lot of fun, top tiers vs top tiers is a lot of fun in its own way. Top tiers vs low tiers (nowadays) in marvel is gruesome if both people know what they're doing (nowadays) when they're playing against each other (nowadays). Like stuff to punish, when to punish, how to abuse low tier weaknesses. The biggest reason low tiers sometimes win nowadays is because the people that play vs them don't know what the fuck an Amingo or a Shuma-Gorath is. You don't need to know 95% of the game to be good at it. So yeah, I'm definitely talking about TODAY. But you're right, the game was way different when it came out. The only thing I say for sure is that roll has always been bad. and ahvbx5000 is pretty old too

OK.

SSF2 - "Let's slow the speed back to CE days" = RETARDED decision. This game still makes me mad.

3s - Making projectiles/attacks have their own "side" so that you have to remember which side it came from and block it accordingly aka unblockables. Didn't ruin the game, but it's still a terrible choice none the less. I don't know why the 3s programmers made attacks have individual assigned "sides" instead of doing it the old fashion way, which is blocking everything by holding the back direction relative to the direction the character is facing.

KOF2k2 - Letting the super meter fill back up if you attack while in custom-combo (was it mode combos as they called it?)mode. Resulted in retarded long combos (infinites included) because you can break the stock into custom combo mode, build it back with the custom combo and keep cc-ing because the game lets you cancel into CC mode.

- Flying screen as an attempt to solve the infinite problem. It never worked, no matter when they let you set it or what restrictions they imposed, and it never will. Look at how limiting it was in MSF, which just made the game un-fun, and still didn't help with infinites. It's all about tweaking moves and things that change your trajectory in the air instead. I admit it looks cool, but not having your combos arbitrarily ended (in COTA) was much more fun.

- Entering in normal-jump mode in vs games was a design choice. Shortening the startup and recovery of the HVB when done in the air (as an extension of that effect happening to other supers) to the point of brokenness, and leaving Shinkuu Hadoken alone from the ground version was a design choice. Having Sent move faster when flying than most characters walk was a design choice. Limiting the height at which you can airdash was a design choice, but not a good enough one. Making Chun's s.Fierce do medium-attack hitstun was a design choice, so was removing her air super. Nerfing Wolverine even further; allowing the DHC into supers that have lag on startup to eliminate that lag for some supers (see: Hail vs. Timeslip); having Rocket Punch knock you up when it causes FS; turning some people's cost-a-bit-of-meter special moves from COTA into Supers (Colossus, SS), some into free specials (Sent, Iceman) and axing some entirely (Spiral, SS again, Psylocke) were design choices. MvC2 is full of amazingly bad design choices (assists, DHCs), which is not to say there weren't any good ones (assists, DHCs ;^) or that they didn't somewhat balance each other out, but a LOT of the more major flaws were known or at least suspected during beta testing.

- Capcom's attempts at nerfing previous top tiers are usually unilaterally terrible design choices. Look at the evolution of Wolverine from COTA to MvC1, or Chun from XSF to MvC1. Still broken as hell in each game. Even Ibuki from SF3:NG to 2i to 3s (got better, then went to crap), or Sean from 2i to 3s (UGH!), or Yun from SF3:NG to 3s (didn't change much).

Mike Z

Oh this should be fun! I have two perfect games for this subject, too...

(Ikusat plug your ears)

I kinda don't feel right about knocking this game due to the fact that it's a doujin. But on the other hand it's so fucking unfun to play I just have to. Plus I currently play three doujin games and they are all stupidly fun and way better designed than BBB. So here goes.

Big Bang Beat:

- Allowing every move to be air blocked except 5B (standing medium attack). This gives rise to ungodly amounts of chicken-blocking and the counter measure of 5B spam. What's even more stupid is they gave most characters terrible jump arcs and trajectories, plus above average knockback on air-to-air blocking and therefor made it very difficult to follow your opponent into the air and force a guard break. But the worst part is there's no air throws! Brilliant!

Unless you play Ryoga who has the only other move in the game that can hit an air-blocking opponent, which happens to be an anti-air grab move similar to 3S's Alex anti-air grab.

- Boosting. Stupidly bad concept for allowing people to extend their combos. Roman Cancels were a slightly better idea, but Boosting just made it plain stupid. Cancel just about any move into a forward/air dash. And the first Boost doesn't prorate your damage at all. What's even more stupid is you give one character in the game a ground-based boost with zero startup a short hop, giving him instant overheads. Brilliant.

- B-Escape (bursting) that allows you to cancel out of hitstun into a forward or backward moving hop off any kind of hit (at the cost of meter) that instantly recovered as soon as you landed. What kind of crack are they on. Some supers in the game, and even some special/normal moves, aren't cancellable into anything (even boosts), therefor if you "burst" out of these on reaction you're guaranteed a retaliation combo. Brilliant.

- Unlimited Wallslams and one OTG limit. Do I really need to explain this one? They may have implemented scaled pushback, but they did not implement scaled knockback on sweeps, and they did not implement scaled gravity. Therefor unlimited wallbounce plus one OTG means you can do some really fucking stupid loops, where the only limitation is your P-Gauge. Brilliant.

- Speaking of P-Gauge, all specials, airdashes, and Heavy attacks cost a little bit of your P-gauge which you fill manually by "charging". This is a god aweful way of limiting combos. If you run out of P-Gauge you're limited to Light and Medium attacks only, and literally nothing else is possible, even throws and supers inexplicably. Brilliant.

- No air throws! Brilliant!

____

Anyhow, I could talk plenty about Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, but seeing as how it's: (1) Still in it's "demo" stage and not "final", I don't really feel right about knocking it.. yet. And (2) It's another doujin so you kinda gotta cut it some slack.

- Trijumps, by the way, meaning airdashes that you can angle downwards, are never a fucking good idea. Just look at MvC2 and Jojo's (Kakyoin). Uhg.

Magnetro wrote:I think I was thinking of flaws in the game that are evident NOW, not when the game was released.

That's cool, but i'm only trying to clarify what the thread topic is supposed to be about. It's one thing to say that Doom's air Photo Shot needs to have one more pink line added slightly behind him in order for Doom to be competitive NOWADAYS. But you can't blame the game designers for omitting it, when everyone thought that APS was way overpowered for like six months of MvC2's early lifespan. Adding that extra pink line would have done more damage than good, cuz it might have caused a lot of people to quit in frustration before modern counters were discovered.

laugh wrote:3s - Making projectiles/attacks have their own "side" so that you have to remember which side it came from and block it accordingly aka unblockables. Didn't ruin the game, but it's still a terrible choice none the less. I don't know why the 3s programmers made attacks have individual assigned "sides" instead of doing it the old fashion way, which is blocking everything by holding the back direction relative to the direction the character is facing.

Wow, that's easily the best explanation i've ever read for 3S unblockables. Why does everyone else try to make it seem so much more mysterious?

Mike Z wrote:- Entering in normal-jump mode in vs games was a design choice. Shortening the startup and recovery of the HVB when done in the air (as an extension of that effect happening to other supers) to the point of brokenness, and leaving Shinkuu Hadoken alone from the ground version was a design choice. Having Sent move faster when flying than most characters walk was a design choice.

A lot of that stuff made sense at the time though. From today's standpoint it might seem like a better idea to enter in superjump mode, but i'm sure that would have caused all sorts of havoc early on. Plus it took a really long time for that guard break nonsense to become prevalent. You might have a point with the Cable thing, but your Ryu example is flawed because Ryu is strong, and it's gonna take a hell of a lot more than frame data to change that.

Sent's flight speed wasn't a bad design choice. I mean, he is one of the slowest characters in the game and he doesn't have an anti-air move. It was totally necessary for him to stand a chance. I remember it taking a really long time to find ways for Sentinel to cope with Cable. Plus he's one of the most unique aspects about MvC2 and he's a lot of fun to use. He's also a nightmare for most of the cast, but you gotta admit that he's one of the major reasons why MvC2 has a completely different flavor from the previous Versus games.

You don't remember when Sentinel used to be considered one of the "honorable" characters in the neverending battle against evil scrubby Cable?

Xenozip. wrote:- B-Escape (bursting) that allows you to cancel out of hitstun into a forward or backward moving hop off any kind of hit (at the cost of meter) that instantly recovered as soon as you landed. What kind of crack are they on. Some supers in the game, and even some special/normal moves, aren't cancellable into anything (even boosts), therefor if you "burst" out of these on reaction you're guaranteed a retaliation combo. Brilliant.

Haha that sounds rediculously bad, along the same vein as SvCC Guard Cancel Front Step making 3/4 of the attacks in the game utterly useless. Some of the other stuff you said about BBB sounds like they were trying their best to build a good RPS system but they couldn't quite manage to hide the seams.

Maj wrote:Haha that sounds rediculously bad, along the same vein as SvCC Guard Cancel Front Step making 3/4 of the attacks in the game utterly useless. Some of the other stuff you said about BBB sounds like they were trying their best to build a good RPS system but they couldn't quite manage to hide the seams.

Well here's a quick example clip of how these features work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acFSDWsGXTM

They were recorded in 1.01 but it hasn't changed in any version up to 1.06 AFAIK.

Normal-jump guard breaks have been known about and used since XSF. Witness Sabretooth's free kill on your 2nd character. Somewhere in there they could have fixed the not-being-able-to-block part EVEN if you still enter in normal jump.

Mike Z

I do remember similar XSF references being made back when the Cable guard break setups started seeing widespread use. I guess the question is whether XSF guard breaks were well-known enough to be appearing in the arcade down the street from Capcom of Japan's offices or whatever. In their defense, maybe they thought they had handled the guard break infinite problem by eliminating infinites, which of course didn't stick. Either way, you're right - leaving the same glaring exploitable vulnerability in four consecutive games is a dumb oversight.

Re: SSF2 speed: IIRC, that game was actually in development before HF, and by a different team. Since as you might know, HF was kind of a spur of the moment thing to get business back from all thouse hacked CE's floating around (Rainbow, etc.)

The thing is in XvSF guardbreaks are escapable though, when you block in the air you can hit up + 3punches and you do a superjump.

Toxy - Perfect guardbreaks, where you hit the opponent off the screen and they enter the stage already not blocking, aren't air-glitch-jump-able, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also, that's a bug in itself, and it wasn't in MSF/MvC1, so not fixing it by now (where "now" is MvC2) is sorta weird.

Mike Z

Maj wrote:

Mike Z wrote:- Entering in normal-jump mode in vs games was a design choice. Shortening the startup and recovery of the HVB when done in the air (as an extension of that effect happening to other supers) to the point of brokenness, and leaving Shinkuu Hadoken alone from the ground version was a design choice. Having Sent move faster when flying than most characters walk was a design choice.

Sent's flight speed wasn't a bad design choice. I mean, he is one of the slowest characters in the game and he doesn't have an anti-air move. It was totally necessary for him to stand a chance. I remember it taking a really long time to find ways for Sentinel to cope with Cable. Plus he's one of the most unique aspects about MvC2 and he's a lot of fun to use. He's also a nightmare for most of the cast, but you gotta admit that he's one of the major reasons why MvC2 has a completely different flavor from the previous Versus games.

You don't remember when Sentinel used to be considered one of the "honorable" characters in the neverending battle against evil scrubby Cable?

Sentinel may be one of the slowest characters in the game but that is only when he is walking. Hardly anybody who knows how to play Sentinel ever walks with him. Samething with Dhalsim. A good AA for Sentinel is his HK drones. Sentinels are only on the ground to do a d.hp, rocket punch, super or a random launches. Plus he has super armor. And that damage he inflicts. Damn he is CHEAP!

Giving Sentinel the ability to hp, super, hp, super, hp, super, hp, super, hp, super was a bad design choice.

Four buttons in CvS1.

I still am not sure what they were thinking.

Midway through the beta test of OMF:BG, they slowed down all special movement by maybe 40 percent and added a stun bar penalty to running and jumping. For a game fought inside cavernous arenas made for 8-16 players, where the only way to reliably hit an opponent was to circle around behind them, this was not the wisest choice.

At the time, the testers were too distracted by other big changes (like a revamped combo system, the ability to aim and charge projectiles, and the addition of entire new characters) to give the proper feedback. As a result, the game now feels like a medieval joust, where you either spend 10 seconds running toward them to get smacked by a fireball, or spend 10 seconds aiming fireballs hoping to hit the guy running at you, and THEN you start fighting.

If there's one thing i hate about SFA1/A2 and love about SFA3, it's having to press two buttons to perform lvl2 supers and three buttons for lvl3 supers. Not only is it annoying during match combos, but it's damn near impossible when using a computer keyboard. CvS1 is guilty of this as well, though thankfully CvS2 remedied the problem.

It's cool that the SF3 series gives you so much freedom temporarily after KO, but maybe it wasn't such a great idea to let players taunt. Everyone does it, almost by force of habit. It's pretty much become the Street Fighter equivalent of wearing a band t-shirt to their show. Sometimes when people do that to me, i taunt at the beginning of the very next round just to show them how they ought to be doing it.

If you're trying to show off, then parry something dangerous mid-match. If you're trying to annoy opponents, then hold Up/Back for twenty seconds to make them do something about it. If you're trying to be gutsy, then walk up and throw from half screen away.

Taunting will always be a blunt instrument, especially after KO. It's like honking when someone does something annoying in traffic. Nine out of ten times, they have no clue what it is you're trying to say to them. There are more precise (and less played out) ways of conveying a message to someone within a match. It just looks ugly to me, like taunting after every combo in a combo video. Skill Smith did enough of that to last us at least until 2029.

Yeah i can't think of any situation whatsoever where i'd consider it anything but lame. Unless you get the Taunt to connect like with Ken/Urien/Necro/Yun maybe. I dunno, i'm not a huge fan of competitive 3S playing to begin with, and seeing people taunt after KO like it hasn't already gone out of style definitely doesn't help one bit.

Weird, I was sorta thinking about this too.

Actually, introduction sequences and win poses annoy me more. It's the worst sin to have really long ones and not be able to skip them. For winposes I would say that "to the victor goes the spoils" and only the winner should be allowed to skip them, but this function is in SS5sp and Jojo's and I personally fucking hate it with a passion.

But regarding knockouts, MeltyBlood allows you to perform only one action post-KO and only within certain cancel rules and time limitation, and there is no taunting. So actually my post preferred transitions would be like Vampire/Jojo's where first round KOs have no winposes and just immediately go into the next round as soon as the opponent gets up, but then also allow 1 action post-KO like Melty.

In 3S though, I'm not bothered by taunting after KO. I just think it's what people do when they can't/don't think of what else to do. I don't do it myself though, either. Actually I normally habitually just mash HP post-KO because Ibuki will do her far fierce into her back-fist followup. Meanwhile I'm mashing start. It's just become a habit of mine to always mash start and an attack input post-KO. Unless it's MeltyBlood where I either forward dash or IAD, then start mashing.