Team XBox has published some still shots from the upcoming live-action translation of Dead or Alive to the big screen. I’m not sure how I feel about this one: most of the actors look convincing, but the backgrounds, costumes and overall visual style is just too simplistic. I think they would have done much better to have taken their cues from something like Mission Impossible instead of trying to directly mimic the images from the game. It doesn’t look as bad as Street Fighter (1994), of course, but it’s getting there. Maybe it will surpise me. Coming sometime to a theater near you (hopefully).

Infendo posted this nice image of Link in all his various forms, which echos my blog on the evolution of fighting game graphics. Too bad the evolution of Ryu is not nearly as dramatic.

David Sirlin has written a great piece on Gamasutra about the lessons that games teach us, specifically contrasting Street Fighter and World of Warcraft (guess which comes out ahead). This is required reading. There will be a pop quiz tomorrow. Blah Blah.

So I just downloaded and tried out the Fight Night Round 3 demo on Xbox Live. Can someone explain the appeal of this game to me? I mean, the game looks crazy good graphically. It’s close to photorealistic. But it plays like molasses. Jabs are slow, my guy shuffles around like a zombie, and there’s no on screen display telling me if I’m winning or losing or anything. Can I get a power meter at least? Aren’t demos supposed to make you want to go out and buy the game?

I’m sure you all remember David’s glowing review of the Hori Dead or Alive 4 joystick for the XBox 360. One of the great things he mentioned about the stick was that it used a standard USB plug so it should be usable on the PC, too. I went out and picked one up on his recommendation in preparation for some emu quality time. Unfortunately, I ran into a particularly nasty problem. The Hori stick forward and roundhouse buttons (those 2 grey ones in the bottom right) map to positive and negativeanalog rotation about the Z-axis on the PC. This makes it impossible to programatically disingush between both buttons and both buttons depressed!

Not being able to detect simultaneous forward+roundhouse means all 3-kick moves just don’t come out. So no Zangief lariat, no Gen stance switching, etc. Needless to say, I’m completely bummed about this. Maybe the good people at Hori will come out with a software remedy for XP. Until then it looks like I have to find another joystick.

Pop quiz. The silhouettes above are characters from four popular fighting games. The trick is, this drawing is to scale according to the height of the character in pixels. As I’m sure you all know, the tiny guy on the left is Ken from Third Strike. Next is Chipp from GGXX and Kazuya from Tekken 4. That monster on the right is Elliot from Dead or Alive 4, and he’s the smallest character in the game!

What’s going on here? As technology has improved, so has the resolution of fighting games. Capcom’s CPS-2 system, state of the art for it’s time, runs at a resolution of 384×224. DOA4, by contrast runs at resolutions up to 1920 x 1080! More resolution means more pixels devoted to each character, and (with talented artists) more expressive characters.

This element is lost in the typical “2D vs 3D” debate. For the vast majority of non-hardcore gamers, 3D fighters are not popular because they’re 3D, but because they have outstanding graphics and highly detailed, expressive characters. Any 2D game resurgence must consider this fact and include new technology to generate beautiful, high resolution, fluidly animated graphics. There are lots of ways to do this, but one of them for sure is not hand drawing enormous sprites. Sprites are a dead technique, and should be relegated to the 2nd tier gaming platforms like hand-helds and cell phone games.

What amazes me is how resistant to change the 2D fighting game companies have been. Capcom basically has two teams of artists, one to generate high quality illustrations for posters, manuals, and boxes, and another to generate the sprites for the game. Instead Capcom should invest in technology to use those high quality illustrations in the game directly. The pen is a more expressive tool than the polygon; just compare some of Bengus’ or Akiman’s illustrations to the high-res 3D models in VF, Tekken, or DOA. 2D games have the potential to look much better and more exciting than even the best 3D games on the market now, but the 2D game companies must invest in that potential.

Dead or Alive 4 has moved up to #3 on Major Nelson’s ten most popular XBox Live games. Actaually, his list just tracks how many people are logged into Live and playing the game, not necessarily those who are playing online. Given the shall we say “unsatisfactory” nature of Call of Duty’s online play, it’s quite possible that DOA4 is the second most played game online for Live.

I ask this not under the guise of Shoryuken.com authority, but because it’s in all of our best interests. This post was sparked by my horror of seeing Numpad notation all over the Dead or Alive section of our wiki. Before we get to that, though, let’s define terms.
Numpad notation is when someone says 6P rather than f+P to mean “forward+punch.” Or 2K rather than d+k means “down+kick.” Or 214K rather than qcb+K to mean “quarter circle back+Kick.” The numbers correspond to directions based on the layout of a keyboard’s numpad.

The entire point of the wiki is to document fighting games in such a way that new players will be able to join our ranks. Fighting games are currently in a precarious situation in the business of games, and anything we can do to increase our numbers, rather than let them continue to fade, is a good idea for everyone. The wiki should be as easy to understand as possible to new players.

Now, I take it as self-evident that “Standard” notation is easier to understand than Numpad notation. Numpad notation adds another level of abstraction which the reader must translate. “6P…hmm…ok that means forward+punch.” There is less to translate when you present the reader with “f+P.” While it might be easy for YOU, the reader of this post, to understand Numpad notation, the wiki will be consumed by a much wider audience than you…and audience who doesn’t need another layer of abstraction thrown in. The last thing fighting games need is more jargon. I think many fighting game players are so caught up in our scene, that they have lost perspective about how much unnecessary jargon we have and how offputting it is to new players.
I tested this theory with 5 random co-workers today. Note that they all work for an actual video game company. A couple are casual fighting game fans, the others play mostly other genres. All five were confused by NumPad notation and didn’t see why we wouldn’t just say f+P…and I had to agree with them.

While we’re at it, I don’t think Dead or Alive gets to make up new jargon. We’ve had terms for things for years, and DOA doesn’t get to come along and call everything something else for no good reason. That only serves to further splinter the fighting game community. DOA is attempting to call the G button F. It’s attempting to call reversals “defensive holds” or something, I don’t even know. I play DOA and I can’t even keep all their silly terms straight. Here’s a list of what DOA should call things:

1) G is the Guard button.
2) P+G gives you a throw. A throw works against a blocking opponent, but not against the startup of an enemy attack.
3) A “catch throw” is special kind of throw that DOES work when the oppoennt is starting up an attack, but has more startup time itself to offset the advantage.
4) A “reversal” is when you grab an incoming attack. It’s usually perfermed with ub+G (high), b+G (mid punch), f+G (mid kick), or db+G (low).
5) The word “counter” is sometimes meant as “reversal” above. In 3D games, there is so much talk about whether something is “throw counterable” or “punch counterable” that we should probably stick to using the word in that sense. A move is “throw counterable” if you can block it and then throw the opponent guaranteed becuase the move had enough recovery. A move is “punch-counterable” if you can block it punch the opponent (meaning hit the P button) and hit them guaranteed, because their move had enough recovery.

We’ve had these terms for 10 years or so, and adding more jargon is not good for anyone. No one ever used to use the silly Numpad notation, including Virtua Fighter players (who predate Soul Calibur and DOA, btw). At the time, I called Joji Suzuki’s VF2 Akira faq “the best fighting game faq written in English, period.” Thank so much for writing that, Joji, it was a real eye-opener, and incidently it’s written in Standard notation.

Look at this faq for VF1. The guy actually wrote out “Back+Kick” and “For+Punch.” Or this VF3 faq where the author used ascii pictures of the joystick for move commands. I’m not advocating either of those notations, but at least they are clear! What I am advocating is the Standard notation that wonderful faq writers such as GLC have used for years. GLC has written VF faqs from VF1 to VF4:Evo, all of which use Standard notation.
There are only two reasons to use Numpad notation: 1) because it takes fewer characters to type 6P than f+p and 2) becuase it’s easier to read internationally, especially for the Japanese. The first reason is easy to dismiss. The goal is not to write commands in the shortest number of characters possible, but instead to write move commands in a clear way. The second reason has some merit, but I think it’s a lot more important to write commands win a way that English speakers can immediately understand than to sacrifice that in order to help out Japanese readers who honestly have far better resources than our wiki.

I really dread reading the comments to this post, but oh well. Please make our community a little more accessible by reducing jargon and layers of abstraction such as 214K.

Thanks,
–Sirlin

Major Nelson just posted the top ten games played on XBox Live, and what do I see, but Dead or Alive 4 coming in a #4, ahead of triple A titles like PGR3 and Madden 06! There are two important messages here.

• The fighting genre is alive and kicking. Fighting game companies, if you make a high quality product people will buy it, play it, and love it.
• The future of these games is online.

Before you get too excited, there are some mitigating factors here. Racing fans are split between no less than four popular racing games on Live. Nevertheless, this is an encouraging sign for the genre.