Claws, demons, and robot arms: A week without MK9
By StarvingGamer 2 Comments
So I just got back from Mexico. Left there at 11:00 PM and got here at 5:00 AM... then came to work 5 hours later.
I wanted to get some smaller videos up last week but between LA Noire, prenatal visits and getting my shit in order for my trip I simply did not have time. However, with amazing presence of mind, I decided I would do some quick ranked matches of MK9 and throw them up here for giggles. Little did I know how dire the netcode situation is. After losing an unplayable match to Noob then winning another unplayable match against Sub-Zero I decided it wasn't in the cards and went back to MvC3.
It was weird coming back, trying to reteach my hands to cancel instead of buffer. It probably didn't help that I decided to suddenly teach myself how to use Akuma. I was fortunate to fall into a player match with a really strong player right away and he gave me a crash-course refresher on how hard it is not to get utterly killed. I've uploaded our first couple of matches which I am labeling a first-to-seven even if the other guy wasn't aware of it. Not uploaded are the next 30ish matches which I won ~5 of using my alternate teams.
Man, I love this game. Even when I'm getting bodied by a really well crafted Tron Bonne touch-of-death combo I'm still having fun. Even when I'm screwing up my setups and dropping shit left and right I'm still having fun. MK9 is a shocking well put together game and SSFIV:AE is going to be great, but neither of those games hit the pleasure center of my brain like Wolverine constantly shouting "UNACCEPTABLE."
So now that I'm back, what next? I just finished homicide in LA Noire so there's still a ways to go in that. I did notice before I left, however, that the damage % of some combos seemed to have changed. I have no problem with patching but I think NRS is going a little too crazy with their balancing. Just because you can push out minor tweaks every day doesn't mean you should. You need to give players enough time to break their characters, then other players enough time to figure out how to unbreak them before you can even begin to form an idea of how to achieve better balance.
I'm not looking forward to a world in which I have to redo a combo video every day because some attack got its damage reduced by 2% or something like that. Unfortunately I refuse to let my videos become irrelevant. I'll probably also start playing MvC3 regularly again since PSN is back up and I missed getting salty because, "I TOTALLY FUCKING BLOCKED THAT," and enjoying it.
Stay free.