Unprofessional Fridays: 04/27/2018

Good times!

Been loving the GBWest content lately!

Spyparty! I assume. I haven't watched it yet.

Woah, i'm messing around with a circuit bent Sk1 right now. Such a dirty crappy sound. Love it.

Is this thumbnail a The Witness puzzle? In one shot it looks like the joy-con is right in front of Jeff's face, but there's no joy-con at all in the other.

i wanted the theme to rugrats

So, I still think Labo is dumb and a waste of money, but even I have to admit that that punch card stuff is pretty cool. Well done Nintendo.

@boiter: I also come from humble beginnings, so I can relate on that level, and while I'm sure I'd have loved something like this then, that doesn't mean it would have been worth the money.

People have been making the Lego comparison with Labo a bunch, and while it isn't completely without merit, the comparison falls apart in what I consider a fundamental area. With a Lego set, once you've built the whatever it is, you're left with a bunch of Lego pieces which can be used for other projects - Labo doesn't have this flexibility. Once the kid has put together the kit, that's it - all you're left with is a cardboard toy and an app. I just don't see Labo lasting anywhere near as long as proper toys, and I don't see it being as good a creative toy as dedicated building sets. And, it is expensive. You can get a lot of Lego or K'Nex or what have you for the price of a Labo kit, especially if you did like my family did, and buy used. Nowadays, you can get a damn solid robotics starter kit for under a hundred bucks.

The other aspects are similar. I had a plastic piano we bought for five bucks at a garage sale, we'd put together puzzles bought dirt cheap from liquidation stores, I had an endless succession of RC toys that were bought cheap and used until they fell apart. None of this cost anywhere near what Labo does, and was not as fragile.

The best toy, building/creative or otherwise, I ever got was a solar panel and tiny electric motor for my K'nex set. I built every kind of mechanical thingamajig you can imagine: cars, boats, windmills, trains, even walking animals. I got literally thousands of hours out of the thing - I literally would not be the same person I am now if I hadn't been given this thing at a young age. The kit cost forty dollars.

I just don't seem Labo in anywhere near the same category - it just looks like a gimmick that is overpriced and underperforming compared to other options.

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I can't believe I wrote all that, in defense of a mildly negative opinion on a kids' toy. I should delete it, but it took a while to write and I'm drunk, so fuck it. Enjoy my Labo manifesto, Giant Bomb.

And I just checked, the solar panel my parents bought me for forty bucks twenty five years ago is now two hundred dollars. So fuck that too, I guess. This is just what toys cost, now, I suppose.

Pwnd is gonna one day be the only e sport left when guns are banned from video games

There is a Switch air-drumming game: Gal Metal

I hope chat tells them about the waveform stuff...

every time jeff started conducting jan's song i absolutely lost my shit

I’m real excited for that new Ranking of Fighters

These Star Trek jokes are choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NLOuw4dIo

Brad with a piano just makes me want to hear him sing....... gosh darn voice of his

@its_beeman: Don't know if you've seen this, it's probably the best example of his singing.

@monkeyman04: I have seen it; but definitely what I needed tonight! I will sleep soundly :D

yo fuck infinity war!!!

MELON!

is nintendo labo the spiritual sequel to wii music?

yes

To answer Ben's question about Fantasy Strike a little bit: I've always been interested in fighting games but have bounced off of basically every one (not counting a youth spent playing too much Smash Bros.). Some of it's just down to not having anyone to spar with, but also needing to, say, practice BnBs to even begin to crack into Street Fighter V, or struggle with the complexities of anime fighters (even despite tutorial quality going up) is rough.

I grabbed two copies of FS on a whim a month or so back and ended up noodling around with a friend. It's the first time I've ever been able to hit a point of intentionality in fighting game and it happened dang fast; a state where I'm less concerned with remembering all of my moves and instead actively thinking about spacing and strategy and meter management and actually outplaying my opponent. So in that sense, the simplified, slower pace of the game actually succeeds, IMO.

On the other hand, in my totally inexpert opinion, it stumbles by having a really lopsided sense of priorities. The core of the game feels mostly alright, but when you start reading the tooltips to get a feel for things (since there's no tutorial yet) it just throws actual fighting game terms around willy-nilly. Not a big deal for someone like me who at least knows the lingo, but not ideal for total newcomers. It also fails to describe some abilities clearly (though I would argue even Blizzard has this problem with the very similar cheat sheets in Overwatch).

The whole thing has a clunky sense that it's built by Fighting Game People that don't have the greatest grip on how to downscale things smoothly. The way throws work are the best example of this. Yomi Counters sound clever at first, but don't make any sense to me and don't seem like they fit the game at all. Why would a new player, in fact any player, drop their controls entirely in response to something as lightning quick and reflex-based as a throw? In my brain, normal ole counter-throws make way more sense, and as a further alternative there's nothing stopping them from getting crazier and fundamentally altering throw logic completely (blockable throws???). The game also proceeds to ignore all of that by making command grabs universally jumpable (as per the very noticeable float text) instead. Throws are classically the "bullshit cheap cheater move" so it's weird to see the game almost double-down on them instead of tackling them with a lighter touch.

At the moment character design also feels off, where some feel waaay more questionably powerful than others (as noted, the ninja lady's teleport dash strike thing feels like some real BS) and some feel far more coherent and fleshed out than others (compare watchmaker vs. ghost judge dude).

A post on a forum that I recently read said something akin to "Fantasy Strike's problem is that it's too simplified for existing FG fans and too FG-ified for total newbies" and it's hard to disagree with that appraisal. Hopefully they can keep iterating on it and come out of Early Access strong because I think underneath some of the clunkier stuff there is something that works in there, and the genre really desperately needs more entry-level options.

Here we see Jeff trying to replicate 'Trout Mask Replica'.

The best thing I can say about Fantasy Strike is that Gambling Panda and Ghostly Diplomat are some of the best character class names I've ever seen.

Edit: honeydew is some trash tier bullshit

Giant Bomb going in deep and hard on the progressive jazz genre.

Did Brad just do a TNG joke?

Temba his arms wide

Brad doing his best rendition of Erotic City starting at 17:08

Dungeon of the endless is amazing and I am the only person who know about it and loves it. The music in that game too. amazing

It's always weird to hear the gang, and I guess I mean Jeff specifically here, get weirdly upset or maybe annoyed at people liking a popular thing, when they themselves make fun of folk out there that get irrationally angry about videogame stuff. People really like Star Wars and comic books, and hey thats cool. I mean when someone from work came in the next day after seeing an advanced screening of Infinity War and told me it deserves at least 5 Oscars or whatever I was a little taken aback (and it was a female too, breaking the stereotype of the pasty, overweight nerds representing comic book fans everwyhere) but at the end of the day good on her for really enjoying something.

this fighting game seems shitty

I might be wrong about this but I think that fighting game is part of the "Strike boardgame franchise universe," including a boardgame version of puzzle fighter featuring these same characters. It's weird.

Did you watch it? Need to remind you as its great....I also really enjoyed him singing Holy Diver.

Coming from the Xbox stream straight into this just feels like one big long show. They pick up right where they left off with the Avengers talk. Nice.

The coverage of Labo by the video game media has been cringe worthy at best. You can tell that none have any grasp on what it is or what it's for. It's similar to that feeling you get when an outlet try's to review a sports or fighting game.

Yes it's made by Nintendo & yes you may already not like it for whatever reason but you should really seek out coverage outside of the usual games sites to get a better understanding of it. At least then you'd be hating it from a more informed perspective.

This is it exactly, I'm the same way. I love the idea of the back and forth of fighting games, but I can't stand most of them because they put so much emphasis on seemingly arbitrary button combination presses. I love Nidhogg and Smash Bros because they are fighting games where you don't have to memorize strange, weird button presses. I'm really curious, in fact, about how the GB folks got into fighting games - in what scenario do you have someone to play against, who's also patient enough to let you scroll through the menus and memorize how to do every attack? Or were all the attacks listed on the arcade cabinets back in the arcade days?

That said, Fantasy Strike seems interesting, but the execution seems lacking.

Honestly, that Nintendo Labo piano seems pretty neat.

Although the cardboard punch card thing seems like it doesn't work as well as it should. I feel like there should be a way to make a "virtual punch card". It would be fairly easy to do I think.

I like when they ignore the chat for the most part and just focus on what's going on in front of them.

@elite49: it feels more like a show instead of a constant QnA

@elite49: Agreed, I'd rather they never look at the chat like they did before. It's become to chat heavy.

Jibes well with the "Play Whipping Post!" from Jeff.

mrrnnnhh... MRRRNNHHHH... mrrrnnnnhh....

Fantasy Strike seems like its mechanics were made for mobile devices

30 seconds in and I see Ben doesn't feel the need to complete thoughts anymore.

@lofi: I dunno how consistent it was, but yeah, often moves would be listed on the cabinet.

There's also something to be said for the fact that while something like Street Fighter 2 is not necessarily simple, it's definitely a bit slower and more basic compared to the systems on top of systems on top of high speed action you get nowadays.

And on top of that matches were probably more likely to be equal because way early on it was kids and teens fumbling around, trading rumors, and just doing whatever. Instead of the handful of folks who bought the game because it just went on sale being fed to the wolves who've played nothing but that game for the last three months.

Aaaand going even further, the barrier of entry was vastly lower. Didn't have to pay $60+ for the game, plus potentially even more for a fight stick, just to get your ass beat by a pro. You lost a quarter and a couple of minutes and then you moved on. (And there was no buy-in to spectate, though I guess Twitch rebalances that part of the equation a bit.)

In terms of accessibility there's also probably some additional stuff with regards to how the arcade origins of the genre mean a lot of conventions were designed more for keeping quarters coming that then just so happened to add pressure to competitive side of things and so were kept around. Forever.

As for inputs, I used to loathe the concept of specials, but I've cooled on those at least a little bit; still don't think they're necessarily ideal, but some of the most excessive ones have been smartly culled (no more pretzels or deltas, good lord) and they're generally pretty universal now so wrapping your head around a QCF feels like less cognitive overload.

Surprisingly what gets my goat moreso now are normals. In a six button game every character by default has a whopping 18 normal attacks, plus probably some additional command normals. That's a huge number of abilities to keep track of as a newbie, which is why you end up with the expectation that you'll engrave a few basic combos into your neurons. Juggling learning special inputs AND all those normals is just overkill. (For a point of comparison, DBFZ seems to have 9 normals + command normals + ki blast stuff. And then Fantasy Strike cuts the number in half again with only 4 normals, period.)

Dunno if auto-combos are the perfect solution, but at least those get a new player into the game and actually playing instead of being told to go do homework in the lab.

Wait, what's your issue with video game outlets covering fighting games?