Worth Reading 07/26/2013

I love Worth Reading.

That's not what Patrick is saying. He's saying the kind of discussion that's going on is ridiculous and pointless. People are saying that because one system has better hardware, it's a better system. That has never been a deciding factor in any console generation.

@patrickklepek It's cool that you're taking an interest in the fighting game community! Good on you. I agree with those tweets about fighting game execution. Many of my fighting game friends are stuck on that weird low-intermediate level, where they can pull off combos but can't actually play the rest of the game (the parts people tend to overlook: footsies, mindgames, looking for the opponent's habits and patterns, pressuring the opponent to react in a certain way, etc). When they play or watch others play, all they focus on is the combos and ignore all the other aspects; with a lot of these people equating the neutral game to rock paper scissors instead of actually paying attention to what's going on during that time.

From this point (in my experience, at least) a lot of people end up quitting, give up on improving altogether, or end up sitting in training mode all the time and not playing the core game. It's sad to see people put in such effort and not get to the most rewarding part of fighting games!

It'd be great to see fighting games make a real effort to teach players how to play, and understand what's going on. In their current state, it feels like FGs hide these mechanics / concepts behind a veil, and I honestly don't know why they do it. They may have gotten away with it before, but now that the competitive side of FGs has blown up from 2009 and continues to do so, hopefully they'll feel pressured enough to make an attempt.

I thought I knew where I was going with this, but I guess I don't. My point's in there somewhere lol. Sorry for the ramble!

On Adam Atomic's comments, I'd generally agree, but it reminds me of when people say that slow, emotional music compositions are harder to play than fast, technical ones ultimately because you have to feel them. I think that's something you're ultimately born with and that can't be wholly trained. Those who are really, really good at Street Fighter or Dota or Starcraft have a lot of practice and technical skill, but also the "mindgames" just come naturally to them. Professional tennis players are very technically competent but also keep their cool in high-stress situations. It's a gift and comes naturally. The technical part is the hard part, honestly, unless you don't have the talent. And then it might not come at all, ever.

As an avid PC gamer - I agree 100% on the specs thing.

Any PC gamer will tell you, big multiplatform games will develop to the lowest common denominator, as long as that denominator holds more than 30% of the home console market. The Xbox 360 is this benchmark for the current generation. Multiplatform games were developed to the Xbox 360's capability, and ported to other platforms, to varying degrees of success, largely due to the differences between CPU designs. PCs may come in a million flavours, but 99% of them have the same thing at their core - something you can't always count on in proprietary hardware.

And, PC gamers contend with companies like Intel, AMD and nVidia - hawking specs at us every time we consider an upgrade - and frankly 80% of them are completely irrelevant. When broken down through real world testing, this year's new nVidia card is maybe 20% faster than last year's. And after the $300 barrier is crossed, cards generally run a game at 1920x1080 (1080p) at well over the usual 60fps. If you're running three screens, or pushing for insane framerates...well...you probably have enough money to not care about this sort of thing.

On an unreleased console, specs are purely marketing fluff, because until we can see these machines running the same game side by side, we have no idea what these specs mean in terms of what we really care about, game performance. Also, those guys who keep comparing PC specs to console specs really need to stop. Like, now.

Somehow, I think we can count on most developers to provide PS4 games that will run on a PS4, regardless of how much RAM it is using.

Patrick, I have been making a pretty good amount of money with those trading cards and I really want to read what you think about them and what you are or are not doing with them. Please?

@elwoodan said:

I believe the writer's position is that because statistically few home invasions occur where anyone gets murdered, it's a bit of an overreaction to go "Stranger in my house? Better murder him." The writer is saying that it's not really self defense, because it's more likely that the guy in your house is just a burglar who wanted to make off with your jewellery and Xbox and mistakenly thought you weren't at home. Again, supposedly the statistics bear out that few burglars ever end up harming the occupant of the home, so in the vast majority of cases, if you just catch the dude in your house and go "Who the fuck are you? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!" and look real mad, most guys would just run. Now suddenly you're safe, your family is safe, and nobody had to die. Few burglars are actually stone cold killers that will just shoot house occupants in the face.

Overall, the guy's point seems to be "Sure, he is breaking the law by breaking into your house, but what gives you the right to end his life?" He's trying to take your stuff, but there is no guarantee that he is actually a threat to your personal safety.

On the one hand, I see his point, but on the other hand, all the castle doctrine/stand your ground laws exist in the first place because some very small percentage of break-ins end violently, and that scares the bejeezus out of everybody, so in some places you're allowed to murder a home invader on the 5% chance that he is capable of murder and not just a cowardly burglar.