Hot Podcast Action

I've been thinking about doing a podcast for a long time, but have held myself back for multiple reasons. The main one is that I recorded three episodes of a podcast in college with some of my friends, which wasn't exactly what I would call brilliant. It is no longer on Itunes, but I keep it on my computer as a constant reminder of how not to make a podcast.

The second reason is that I didn't know how I wanted to do it. You can go to any video game website and hear them rehash the weekly news. So I came up with the idea to talk about a different video game related topic, or specific video games each episode. That kind of specific and in-depth conversation would be interesting to me, so I hope it'll be interesting to other people as well.

Today I actually went ahead and recorded the first episode of the Game Time With Manny podcast. This past weekend my friends and I went to a fighting game tournament in Philadelphia, PA. Fighting game tournaments aren't something a whole lot of people have context for, so I thought it would be cool to talk about the experience for a bit.

I have embedded the podcast below for your listening pleasure. This is the first episode, so any criticism, comments, or suggestions would be extremely welcome. Also yes, I realize the audio quality is kind of bunk. My mic sounded fine, but Willy and Noukeo's weren't exactly the hottest. Next time I'll try to find new mics and mess around with the settings a bit more. 

Party Game Sundays: Watching EVO

I haven't written one of these in the two weeks since I've been back and for very good reason. The first week I skipped we played Birthday Party Bash as a belated celebration for my Birthday, after which we played Scattegories. The week after we were feeling rather lazy, so after eating ourselves to the brink of destruction we decided to watch videos of competitive Beyblade players, and some super hot advanced techniques. For those that don't know Beyblades is an anime where characters fight with spinning tops. There are toys of the tops, which people apparently get super into. It's super funny.

That brings us up to this past Sunday, where we would have played some games, but EVO was happening. I love watching competitive fighting game play, and EVO is the tournament to end all tournaments. I don't like using the analogy, but it's basically the Superbowl of fighting games. So inevitably Noukeo and I forced Landers, who doesn't know anything about fighting games, to watch the EVO finals. It was actually quite an educational experience. Landers asked a whole lot of questions and we tried to tell him as much about what was going on as possible. We specifically watched Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Ultra Street Fighter 4. If you've never played Marvel before it is basically incomprehensible flashing, so we had to explain a whole lot about that. Street Fighter on the other hand is two people beating down on each other much slowly, so he had a pretty firm grasp on it.

When my brother started getting way into fighting games about five years ago he started watching streams of tournaments all the time. This made it so that I also ended up watching a lot of tournaments, and quickly got to know all the prominent players of both Street Fighter and Marvel. It's one thing to watch a tournament online, but it's completely different to go to an actual tournament. Philadelphia, PA is a few hours away from where we live, so we go to quite a few tournaments there. It's surreal to see all the players who you respect playing in person. What's really nuts is how loud everything is. When people cheer it's earth shattering. When something amazing happens the whole room erupts and it's deafening. That's one of the reasons I love watching EVO, because it's on a whole different scale. When you can hear the crowd super loud on the stream, it's probably out of control in the actual venue.

Thousands of people show up to EVO every year.

I'm personally super terrible at fighting games, but I understand what I should be doing in order to do well. So when I watch competitive play I can tell what's super lame and what's going to bring the hype. Since I know the players it's easy for me to latch on to who I want to win a match and it gets me way more invested in it. Even when we go to tournaments I just watch, but it's incredibly fun for me. I scream fairly loud when things get crazy and watching EVO is absolutely no different.

When we were with Landers watching the finals nothing particularly bananas happened, but I still got a little amped up. In Marvel the only thing I want to happen is for Chris G to lose. I've got nothing against the guy, but he always wins with what I find to be a boring strategy. He uses the succubus Morrigan to fill the screen with colorful projectiles in order to lame out the opponent. Much to my pleasure he did end up losing to Justin Wong, who is arguably the best fighting game player in America. Watching Justin win is always entertaining, because he's just so damn good at everything. You can't dislike him. I always want my boy IFC Yipes to win, but he never gets far enough for me to cheer him on anymore. I had to settle for Justin winning, which is always a fine alternative.

I was so happy Justin won. He jumped onto the ground and rolled around for a bit.

Street Fighter was much more hype for me, because I didn't really know what was going to happen. Unlike Marvel, Japanese players actually do well in Street Fighter, so there were a bunch of them in the top 8. There were however two American players and a French player in the mix as well. One of the American players SnakeEyez is incredible. He's been doing super well for the last year or so and his play is only getting better. He didn't win, but he did have some amazing matches. The day before Party Game Sundays he had a ridiculous match where he won at the last second against a previous EVO champ. Take a look at the video below. As you watch the end imagine me losing my shit in unison with my brother, who was on a different floor of the house.

I bet that most people who watch this video with no context will think I'm crazy, which is how I feel when I watch most sports. For some reason fighting games are just exciting to me. When watching I yell, scream, and occasionally want to cry. Sometimes I feel like I'm alone in this excitement, but after going to tournaments in person, I know that I'll never be alone in my hype.

If you don't know anything about EVO or fighting games you should just search for some EVO videos on YouTube to see some people lose their minds over a video game fight. Next week I promise we'll play something new. I just had to watch EVO, or I would have missed the hype!

Review of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

This review is based on my experience with the PS3 version of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

Score: 3/5

Last February Capcom answered the prayers of their fans and released Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Now it’s nine months later and Capcom has released Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. It’s easy to see why they would push out a new version of the game so fast, but it’s just as easy to think of reasons why they shouldn’t have. The Marvel vs. Capcom series is well known for its over the top action and Ultimate MvC 3 follows in grand fashion.

Ultimate MvC3 plays almost exactly the same as original MvC3. You choose three characters and then you proceed to beat the living crap out of your opponent. There are three attack buttons, which correspond to light, medium, and heavy attacks. In place of the fourth attack button that’s standard for most fighting games MvC3 adds a launch button. If you tap the shoulder buttons the characters you’re not using will come in for an assist attack, but if you hold them you can switch which character you’re playing. In an attempt to make the game even more accessible Capcom added a super mode called X-Factor. If you push all four buttons your characters will glow red, gain speed, and receive a large damage boost. Well timed X-Factor usage can completely turn around a match.

Full screen attacks like this are common in Marvel Vs. Capcom.

The simplified gameplay has deterred some hardcore fighting game fans from picking up on Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The skepticism is warranted, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth.  While it’s easier to pick up on than most other fighting games there is no shortage of high level gameplay. It’s easy enough to pick up on the basics, but if you want to get good you need to learn all the advanced techniques. Just like every other fighting game it takes a great deal of time and effort to get “good”. MvC3 is an excellent fighting game that’s easy to pick up. If you haven’t picked it up, then Ultimate MvC 3 is easy to recommend.

If you already own original MvC3 you’re most likely concerned with the things Ultimate adds and changes. Like most fighting game iterations Ultimate MvC3 adds new characters, stages, balance changes, and small changes to the basic mechanics. The balance changes of the old characters work well, and some characters seem completely new because of it. New characters are the reason most people will be interested in Ultimate. The game adds twelve new characters to the already robust roster of the original game. Capcom did a good job with making each character feel unique. It’s easy to see that there was a great deal of time and effort that went into the new characters, but it’s a shame that the same sense of care didn’t go into the rest of the game.

Phoenix Wright is one of the fan favorites added to the game.

The changes to the game mechanics are basic and people who aren’t deep into MvC3 probably won’t care very much. X-Factor can now be used in the air, which makes air combos even crazier than they were before. X-Factor was thought to be overpowered, so Capcom changed it for this game. It lasts for a shorter amount of time, but the attack boost it grants still seems like a bit much to me. The HUD has been overhauled and stands out a bit more on the screen.

Other than new characters and stages there is very little new content to Ultimate MvC3. The arcade mode is still pretty much useless. You fight through six stages until you fight Galactus, the oversized final boss. The payoff is a terrible ending for the character who hit Galactus last. They consist of two or three pictures with text boxes. They are almost all terrible, so it’s not even worth playing through arcade mode unless you want to practice your skills on halfway decent AI. The twelve new characters all get their own endings. I was upset to find out that all of the characters from the previous game do not get new endings. The effort that went into creating the endings seems like it was minimal, so it seems crazy that they wouldn’t make new ones for the old characters.

If you spend enough time to beat arcade mode
you can see terrible pictures like this one!

The only mode that received worthwhile changes is the online mode. In the original version of the game it was almost impossible to find a match. To make matters worse you would get booted to the main menu whenever the game couldn’t find a match. The net code in Ultimate MvC3 is vastly improved from its predecessor. Finding matches is extremely easy, and the game is good about matching you up with people near your skill level with good connections. Online play still hitches up a bit, but that’s the way online games go these days. The ability to watch matches online is a much welcomed addition as well, but it should have been in MvC3 in the first place.

There are a few things about MvC3 that shouldn’t happen, but they do. I played the PS3 version of this game, so that may be the source of the problem. Upon starting the game a dialogue box pops up asking if you want to search for new DLC. When you say no the game says that it’s updating your player data. There should be absolutely no player data to update before the game has even been played. This problem happens all the time. Every time you go back to the main menu the game will update your player data, which takes an excruciating amount of time. On its own that wouldn’t be a big deal, but the game saves immediately following the player data update. When the game is saving you can’t move around the menu and the game is more or less frozen. Ultimate MvC3 has a mandatory install on the PS3, so load times like this are inexcusable, especially for the second iteration of a game.

The huge character roster in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3
is one of its drawing points.

Ultimate MvC3 is a great game. It’s a slightly improved version of MvC3 with more characters. I feel as if Capcom could have waited a bit longer to release the game to fix some of the problems and add more content. Before the games release they announced a free post release DLC mode called Heroes and Heralds. It’s an excellent mode, but it was released a month after the games initial release, so I can’t factor its inclusion into a review of the game. Since Ultimate comes not even a full year after its predecessor I can’t comprehend why they wouldn’t hold it back a month in order to tighten everything up a bit and include Heroes and Heralds.

If you didn’t like Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, then you won’t like Ultimate either. Ultimate is made specifically for people who are avid fans of the first game who are hungering for any new content whatsoever and people who play fighting games extremely seriously. If you have MvC3, but don’t really care about the changes then Ultimate is a hard sell. However, if you don’t have MvC3 then Ultimate is a great value at forty dollars.

Note: This review is also posted on Giantbomb.com

     -Manny