Skullgirls Week Two Review

Skullgirls came out around two weeks ago on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN, I'm just going to talk about my thoughts on it and what I liked and what would need improvement, if you just want a summary, scroll to the bottom.

My favourite fighting game is Marvel vs Capcom 2. A small part of this is down to the sheer level of absolutely insane hype that is tied to the game, as well as the fact that pretty much every good character is from the Marvel universe, but most of it is down to two things:

- The lack of comeback mechanics
- The sheer variety of playstyles

With regard to comeback mechanics, I'm not a fan of them in general, even as someone who they will directly benefit. I don't like being actively rewarded for doing badly, whether it's through major damage boosts at low health or when I'm down to a limited number of options, or the more overt huge bar that fills up as my health bar goes down that lets me attempt some sort of Hail Mary play that may or may not win me the game. Ironically, I feel that the inclusion of comeback mechanics such as X-Factor and Ultra Combos actually diminishes from the excitement felt from a real comeback, such as one seen in something like Starcraft or Marvel vs Capcom 2, where any disadvantage can quickly snowball out of control and comeback mechanics are completely non-existent.

As for the variety of playstyles. Despite the vitriol poured on Marvel vs Capcom 2 by people who have not played the game widely, running up to someone and forcing them into an infinite combo for ten hours is not the be all end all strategy in the game. While rushdown is powerful and a dominating strategy, there is also zoning from characters such as Cable, Spiral, Blackheart and Dhalsim, who all play in vastly different ways, one hit kill team hyper combos such as Juggernaut/BBHood/Iron Man, chip damage trap teams such as Strider/Doom. Players could use whatever they liked (within reason) and more of it came down to player skill than anything else.

I suppose what I'm getting at here is that I haven't been happy with Capcom's recent offerings, part of this was down to the poor netcode and real life issues making it hard for me to go to tournaments, another part of this was down to the aforementioned comeback mechanics, and rushdown being king in Marvel vs Capcom 3. So when I heard that MikeZ, a pro fighting game player was planning to make a fighting game that was a 'spiritual successor' to Marvel vs Capcom 2, I was interested enough to consider buying it on release, but not enough to read up on any of the hype or pre-release details, though there was enough good will from somewhere to make me buy the game close to the release date. After trying out the game for a couple of days, I'm very, very happy indeed with it, and I'll just take the good points in the order that I encountered them.

The art style is the first thing that I laid my eyes on. I'm not an art expert so anything I say about it will make me sound like an absolute imbecile, but it looks clean, unique and extremely interesting. The characters look like they've been cribbed from other sources rather than created from whole cloth. It's quite simply one of the nicest 2D games I've seen in ages, and unlike some of the others, I don't feel like I've been put on some sort of police list by playing this, at least not yet anyway.

Next up was how the game designers were clearly catering to high level players, as well attempting to get low level players who wished to improve to a higher level. The most clear sign of the first was how this game uses what is known as "the good type" of button configuration. A player just has to press the button they want to bind a move to, and that's it, no more individually selecting buttons from a list, or cycling through configurations, or tedious button checks. Another example of this is an extremely small, but major gesture, in order to pause in a versus match, the player has to hold down the button for a longer than normal period of time. This prevents unnecessary pauses during tournament games, something which is sometimes punished with forfeits or even disqualification.

With regard to the latter, an extremely robust tutorial system has been put into place, teaching players the basics such as moving, how to execute moves, throws and how to block, before moving onto more advanced concepts such as airdashing, combos, stagger and wakeup attacks, and then, finally, and most importantly of all, teaching players those important concepts, such as hitconfirming and mixups. it does this in an intuitive and simple way, just telling them to watch the opponent and react to what they do. While I'm very, very happy with the system put in, there is one very major problem, it's quite simply unfinished, some of the important and high-level concepts are left out, which is a shame, since I'd love to see how they'd be taught and to actually learn something from it.

At this point I actually began to play the game, and while I was initially taken aback by the low number of characters available, I quickly found one that fit my playstyle. For the record, my playstyle involves standing as far back as possible and making the opponent navigate some sort of obstacle course made up of fireballs, shields, powerful ranged normals and summoned abilities, if I get some sort of teleport so I can make them do it all over again when they get close to me, then that's a bonus. Needless to say, Peacock fit me perfectly. On the other hand, one of my friends enjoys playing characters that spend time and using their abilities getting close to you and nullifying your attacks, and then making you suffer with throws, mixups and extremely damaging moves, which meant that Cerebella suited him. Other players were fans of rushdown, harassing their opponents, or something more versatile, and there were characters for them as well.

Actually playing a game with him was easy enough, we just invited each other to play, set a frame delay based on our current ping, picked our characters, and started to play. After each round we could choose to begin another one instantly and just carry on without interruption. There were no noticeable problems with the netcode, which would be surprising since it was GGPO style netcode, something that a large number of players have been asking for in almost every fighting game with online since the inception of GGPO.

Once we actually got to play though and I was able to use the extremely versatile assist system (which allows you to use any move short of a Blockbuster/Super Combo as an assist) to find essentially another projectile that Peacock could throw out to cover an angle that she was susceptible to attack from, I was able to have a series of very fun, rather close matches, where we both used our different playstyles to try to win, and since there weren't any sort of major comeback mechanics, or anything especially janky, we never really felt cheated or annoyed outside of the opposing character/team playing to their strengths and having to find ways to deal with it. Needless to say, it was very fun indeed.

Peacock has six projectiles that fly across the screen at different trajectories and speeds and hit the opponent. All of the coloured areas on here represent a different projectile that will be thrown out as part of the 'obstacle course'. Being hit by any of them causes you to eat a super which throws you back into the corner to begin the obstacle course all over again.

While mentioning this is a formality, the controls were completely fine, I never unintentionally did a move and most of the times I failed to pull of a move or do a combo I knew this was down to my own shoddy execution than anything else.

While I am happy with almost everything in Skullgirls, there is one major problem, namely that the game is unfinished, posssibly due to it being rushed out. There are several examples of this, which I'll talk about in increasing order of severity: Firstly, an extremely minor gripe, you're unable to see the movelists for your characters without going online to the official website and downloading a .pdf file to look at, while this could be slightly more convenient if you're the type of person who has their computer and television right next to each other, or if you don't mind printing off the .pdf and just popping it next to you, it'd be slightly annoying if you want to know how to do certain moves, or how certain moves even work (Peacock's level 3 Blockbuster beginning from her throw and her Shadow of Impending Doom increasing in power if you hold it down). As I said though, it's not major, but the annoyance is still there.

Secondly is the problem that bugs me the most. Quite simply, the tutorial system is incomplete. I talked about this earlier, but it's still something I'm not happy with, largely because I'd love to see how they planned to handle teaching some of the more difficult concepts in place in fighting games.

Finally is the online play. While I've mentioned already that I'm happy with the netcode used and the ability to choose your own delay, there are slight problems. The most important of these is the lack of any sort of lobby system in place at all, and if you've read what I've talked about before, you'll know how much I care about this. You're limited to one on one fights which no one else is able to watch or interact with. It's rare that a game has a worse version of spectator mode than Marvel vs Capcom 3, but here it is. Additionally, joining a ranked game is slightly annoying due to having to constantly requeue if someone disconnects before the game begins. To solve this problem though, the player could quite simply opt into an automatic match finding system while in training mode or arcade mode, similar to Arcade Edition or Marvel 3.

While the problems do seem rather major, there are two things that have to be kept in mind, that also serve to diminish the severity of them. They don't affect general offline play (including tournaments), and they can all be fixed via patching or free DLC. Their website does claim that there will be free updates, and I don't think it'll be too much to ask for that a lobby system, ingame movelists and a completed tutorial system will be among them.

In conclusion, this game is absolutely fantastic, but quite simply unfinished in the learning resources and online play department, if you don't mind doing just online 1v1s or play a ton offline and are looking for a nice change from Capcom/Namco/SNK/Arcsys/Netherealm fighters, this is a definite buy.

Summary

Pros:

+ Variety of characters and flexibility of assists allow several different playstyles, allowing almost any player to find their niche.
+ Interesting art style that manages to carry its own unique style, as well as looking very nice indeed.
+ Inclusion of GGPO netcode allows online games with a minimum of complaint.
+ Gameplay is extremely solid and tournament players were kept in mind from things to button configuration to comeback mechanics.

Cons:

- Clearly unfinished content, namely tutorials and offline movelists
- Lack of online lobby system.

Verdict: 

 The game is just shy of being a perfect fighting game with what is currently there, with the added changes, both casual and tournament players will be very, very happy indeed.

My nineteen month thoughts on Bayonetta...

Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3
Developer: Platinum Games
Release Date: October 2009 (JP) January 2010 (Rest of World)
Genre: Action



...Is still the frontrunner in gaming disappointment of the decade, as well as being overshadowed by a game 10 years its junior.

While I mentioned my opinion of the game a long, long time ago, I feel that it needs restating, in a proper way.

There are two things I like in life, one about gaming, one not about gaming, let's deal with the latter first. Nerdy girls are the absolute best thing ever. Rachael Weisz is my favorite woman in cinema purely because of the bookish klutz she played in The Mummy. Ema Skye puts every character in video games to shame, and this random girl in an episode of Columbo looks absolutely awesome (ignoring the fact she's probably 60 now and possibly dead). Attractive girls own and putting glasses on them and making them smart is even better.

This is the first time I've searched for girls by name on Google in like a year.

The second thing I like is Devil May Cry, and to a lesser extent, Devil May Cry 3. The game has a simple, easily learned control scheme, perfect enemy and boss design, once I'm done with this I'll probably write another essay on why DMC1 is pretty much the best game ever.

So, imagine my surprise, when in mid 2009, I get a link to a gameplay trailer for something called Bayonetta. It looked like Devil May Cry, but instead of a white-haired, teenage half-demon, I'm playing a hot, leggy, librarian. It was like my dreams were made manifest, my two favorite things on the planet crashing into each other and leaving a pure diamond of gaming behind. I pre-ordered it instantly and waited over six months for it.

Look at this, look how perfect it is, imagine a game of this.

Eventually January rolls around and I get the game through my letterbox. I finish it two days later and just feel underwhelmed and cheated. Most of my criticism of the game so far has been shallow and petty, so I thought I'd attempt to explain it properly, but first, the good stuff.

The game is gorgeous, the aesthetics of everything from enemies to weapons to characters look good, however, there's a problem with this that I'll get to later. The music selection is good, though I feel some songs were squandered while others were massively overplayed (An instrumental version of their Fly Me to Moon remix would've been a decent main combat song, for example, instead of hearing the same, semi-bland song over and over again). Finally, Witch Time is a genuinely interesting mechanic.

Now, the bad.

1 - A homage without context is just a hamfisted reference.

One of the first scenes in the game begins with Enzo, one of the characters best defined as 'comic relief', talking about the recently deceased Eggman the Destroyer. You see, they mentioned Eggman, who is a character in Sonic, so it is a reference, hence you can nod sagely and smirk to yourself and go "Yes Bayonetta understands me, the oldschool gamer."

While I find these types of references strange and forced, they're nothing compared to the type of stuff Bayonetta pulls later on. Halfway through the game, you're riding a motorbike for what feels like five minutes, occasionally punctuate by fight sequences when you go to ground. Then later on, before the final act of the game, you're riding on a missile, shooting monsters out of the air for at least ten minutes, occasionally punctuate by fight sequences where you beat up angels while running along the missile. Older games who played different things to me will go "No you see, this a clear homage to Outrun and Space Harrier, you ignorant Philistine."

Leonardo De Vinci quite clearly has his finger on the pulse of culture.

The problem here is I don't care what game it's referencing, or how the game is trying to make me enjoy something through forced nostalgia, the homage doesn't work in the game due to the length and vastly different style of gameplay it puts on. I played Bayonetta expecting something like an action game with esoteric weaponry, an interesting main character and fun gameplay, not a game where things are awkwardly bolted on.

For example, a good reference, or homage, would be something like Mr Game and Watch in Super Smash Bros Melee. He still fundamentally plays like most characters in the game, but his appearance and moveset are so baffling, especially in an aesthetic sense, that you'd feel compelled to know who he is and what the hell he's doing in the game. SSBM doesn't make you play inside a Game and Watch and limit you to one button of play and force you to play simplistic minigames whenever someone picks the character.

Also, since I know someone will bring up the Space Harrier homage in Devil Mary Cry, there's a few crucial differences, the healthbar of the boss gives you a clear indication of primary progress, while you constantly advancing on him is 'secondary progress'. He does different attacks that have to be avoided in certain ways, and on Normal, the fight is short enough to just be something strange and interesting, rather than you just begging for it to end.

Of course, this gets worse when the game starts laughing at the plots of other action-adventure games for being overblown and childish, with Bayonetta telling bosses to shut up as they provide exposition and so on. However, the game then proceeds to pull some sort of double-ironic fake-out on the player by having the plot combine the worst parts of a grandfather paradox, prophetic messiah plot, and an ending that makes absolutely zero sense.

You can't call every cake in the bakery shit and then invite us to eat out of your toilet.

2 - Funderstanding, or the art of encouraging players to learn your game.

Almost every game I like for gameplay alone has certain things in common. The games almost always are simple to learn but hard, and much more importantly, rewarding to master. However, this mastery shouldn't come from memorization, but a simple understanding you come to with the game and the limitations it presents to you, and then mastering the game by working out the way to get around it. Here are some games with examples of what I mean.

Devil May Cry : Learning the game is about meter management and smart usage of Devil Trigger
Starcraft: Learning the importance of resources, unit creation and macro, as opposed to watching battles and using fancy control.
Street Fighter: Learning that -not- jumping is quite often the best course of action, as well as the importance of normal moves.
Pokemon: Learning the perfect balance between variety and specialization.

Despite this, there is some level of memorization in each of these games, Devil May Cry requires you to learn enemy patterns so you know when best to exploit their weakness and burn meter. Starcraft requires map knowledge, build order knowledge and knowledge of the units. Street Fighter requires you to know the moves of you and your opponents, as well as efficient combos, Pokemon requires knowledge of what each individual Pokemon is able to do, as well as its typing.

The point is, the memorization and the understanding dovetail into you visibly improving in the game, letting you play better, win more, get faster times, complete harder modes, so on and so forth.

However, this only works if the game is fun enough and the mechanic you're required to learn is actually deep.

If Street Fighter wasn't initially fun, nobody would care the slightest bit about this data, let alone demand to see it.

Now how this works with Bayonetta is interesting and is down to two things, the fighting system, and the enemy design.

I'm going to explain Bayonetta's and Devil May Cry's fighting systems, then explain the problem with the former.

Bayonetta's moves can be jumped into two general categories: Special Moves, and Combos. Special moves generally require a trigger to be pressed or a button to be held down or so on. The combos function in much the same way as God of War or Sonic Unleashed, you press buttons in a certain order at in a certain frequency to pull off a pre-defined combo, there are at least 15 of these. The game, at least early on also hinges on Witch Time and Dodge Offset, which essentially means, you're able to stagger a combo, dodge an enemy attack, then finish your combo on a slowed enemy, giving you increased style rating and increased damage.

On the other hand, Devil May Cry has special moves and combos. But the former are generally executed by pressing a direction on the analogue stick and/or either pressing or holding an attack button. Combos rely on the speed and frequency of your solo attack button, but unlike in Bayonetta, there are five of these combos at most, and only 2 or 3 of them see use at any one time.

What makes Devil May Cry's style interesting, is that due to the extremely small pool of moves, anything can chain into anything, and also, due to this extremely small pool of moves, you won't have to worry about putting effort into memorizing all of them, since it'll be done in the first hour or so at most, which then allows you to create free form combos and focus on dealing damage to enemies in the most stylish and efficient way.

Here's a short anecdote to explain it. Watching the demo, you see Dante knocking an enemy in the air, shooting them with his handguns, and then knocking them to the ground, it looks stylish and you'll want to give it a try. So you start the game and after a couple of minutes you fight an enemy, you can either check the manual or the ingame tips to see the move to knock an enemy in the air, as well as following them up there, once you do that, you just start hammering on the shoot button, and surprise, you're floating in the air by rapid firing your pistols, and keeping the enemy there as well! Then, to knock them down, you suppose you have to use your sword, so you press the attack button, and down they go. A stylish, easy combo that any newbie could learn instantly.

With Bayonetta, the problem comes with learning the combos, you have a vast volume of them to learn, they're split into Wicked Weaves and normal combos, the former of which do more damage, which means you should use those more than the former. What ends up happening is that you quite simply get overwhelmed with the sheer volume of data you have to process, leading to you not caring about improving, you know some of those combos will be better than other combos, and you sure as hell aren't going to work out the situational usage for each and every combo.

This would be like if Starcraft had 100 types of unit, or Street Fighter had each character start with 20 basic moves, or if Sonic had to run using the QWOP method, you'll get so bogged down in the minor details you don't find yourself caring about the gameplay because there's so much to learn at a low level. Which means you don't care about the gameplay at a high level, which means you're not going to bother playing it for any extended period of time.

3 - Twenty different types of problems, one way to solve them all. AKA Less is More

Bayonetta has bad enemy design, partially. The enemies are different and very nice to look at, however the way to beat almost every enemy boils down to dodging their attacks and then unloading a combo on them, and then possibly a QTE attack. The only variation is generally in the attacks you have to dodge and how the enemies look, even in the case of the Kinships, you're still dodging them and then hitting them, even though they're a giant floating ark.

In the first Devil May Cry, the enemies looked different and with the exception of the most basic enemies (which largely served as training dummies), they had to be dispatched in different ways, for example:

- Force a parry and then destroy in one hit.
- Dodge for an extended period of time while using guns to take down outer shell, then switch to melee weapons to destroy the core, then dodge them as they freak out.
- Ride tornadoes and bounce around and try to hit the enemy.
- Use a specific gun to force them onto their bellies, destroy them in one hit.
- Exploit their elemental weaknesses

The general point is, every enemy functioned as a specific encounter, the only enemies that -looked- similar were Marionettes/Fetishes and Sin Scythes/Sin Scissors, and even then they had to be dealt with very differently, to add to this, each enemy had a detailed file that got updated as you fought them and saw their moves and found out their weaknesses and so on. I can't overemphasize how different everything was to fight and how much more interesting it made the game.

In comparison, in Bayonetta, the only enemies I can remember in terms of having to fight them differently were the giant lions who were immune to Witch Time (the main draw of the combat system), and a giant ball that could kill you in one hit. These weren't fun or engaging, they were just really, really, really annoying.

The bigger brothers of these guys weren't very fun (not pictured: The Car, The Giant Ball and The Giant Ark)

To make matters worse, the difference in bosses are even more pronounced. In Bayonetta, every boss is an enormous set piece, loaded with QTEs, environmental gimmicks, cinematics and epic music. However, at their root, it's still the same basic encounter of dodge, combo, kill. Once again, in comparison, Devil May Cry had 5 bosses, in which you encountered them 3 times, with generally what seem to be minor differences between them. However, these differences generally include a different stage, which serves to help or hinder you, as well as increased movesets and weaknesses, and much more importantly, new phases.

In addition to this, the bosses in Devil May Cry were deep, I could write an entire essay on how fun it is to fight Nightmare, as well as how involved and strange the fight is, and once you learn what makes him tick and how to counter each and every attack, you're able to enjoy it as a legitimate challenge. You begin learning how to use meter and the vulnerabilities in a bosses phases and how best to deal the maximum amount of damage at the optimal time, and unlike in Bayonetta, it isn't punctuated by a dramatic zoom-in on the boss as he pants and gasps like a geriatric.

http://i.imgur.com/RCpiB.jpg
See that indistinct blob next to the giant spider? He has more depth and unique stuff going on than every enemy in Bayonetta combined.

This may seem like a minor gripe, but half of the fun in an action game is down to the enemies you fight, and the other half is down to what you can pull off, and if the former is samey and boring and the latter is boring and confusing, then there's a problem with your game.

4 - I had something about level design written here but then a QTE happened so I have to do it all over again

My last two criticisms of the game are relatively minor compared to the previous three, but still, they serve to further cripple an already damaged game.

Level design is important, the places you go have to look nice, flow relatively naturally and not outstay their welcome. Bayonetta succeeds in 1/3rd of these.

While in some games you can get away with each level being radically different (Sonic and Mario come to mind), and other games levels don't even matter (Street Fighter/Starcraft). In an action game there should be some sort of attempt to maintain some semblance of consistency. Devil May Cry managed this by having most of the game take place in the castle and its related grounds, each level finished where the last one left off (with one, obvious, understandable exception).

In comparison, Bayonetta has you going from place to place with no rhyme or reason unless you watch the cutscenes, which the game seems to almost mock you for doing. There's no sense of progression, one minute you're in a city then the next minute you're in Paradise then you're back in the city then you're on a cargo plane then you're riding a missile then I think you're in a time machine then you're in some guy's office block then I think you go into space then the game ends.

To make matters worse, it's not like these levels are short, Sonic had levels you finished in 2-5 minutes, Devil May Cry had levels you could finish in SEVENTEEN SECONDS. On the other hand, Bayonetta's levels take around 10 minutes or so at least, everything feels like this slog, there's a ton of content you'll miss that you're not even aware of until the game kicks you in the balls at the end of level results screen, and that's assuming you didn't die in the war of attrition it puts you in, in which case you'll definitely be getting a Stone Award, repeatedly.

Of course, dying just because of enemies slowly grinding you down during a level wouldn't be annoying enough, there's also the quick time events, during a cinematic or part of the game, you'll be asked to press buttons to dodge an obstacle or do an action. If you fail the former, you die, instantly, from full health. Have fun. I don't even have to explain the level of stupidity to have a way to die instantly to a purely reaction based puzzle, on the easiest difficulties of an action game, in the first couple of levels, with something that's nothing to do with an enemy. It's just a terrible decision.

You gotta mash that square button so Bayonetta pushes down harder on the angel who has a piece of serrated wood riding up her vagina. If you get enough 'megatons' the angel suffers an orgasm and explodes into a bloody mess of gore and halos.

5 - Epilogue

I was hyped for this game, I legitimately wanted to like it with every fiber of my being, which is probably why I hate it so much now. It's not an unplayable game, it's just a shallow action game that doesn't know what it's doing or how to do it. There's no urge to master it, there's no urge to improve at it or play it after the first time. Despite this, like I said at the start, it looks nice and I really, really like some of the items as well as some of the music and weapons, however, the lack of depth in the game doesn't entice me to try out these weapons or items, or play enough to grind enough to unlock them.

Final Opinion

Pros:

- Music
- Aesthetics
- Cinematics

Cons:

- Level design
- Enemy Design
- Battle System
- QTEs
- Plot

Just rent it, it's fun for two days but after that it's not worth it.