More art, more big blockquotes from DA. Her description/history is a bit shakey but I feel like I’d be okay if I roleplayed her. Not that I do any RP stuff lately. Anyways.

Some more space stuff. I figured Rory (Miss No Legs) needed a captain so she could have a ship to work out. So I made Varda(One Eye ). I will resist the urge to further populate the ship with scared females and just leave it at these too. Anyways this is sort of a “Proto Character”. I usually flesh out character personalities by using them for something, so the below exists mostly as a base idea that’ll probably be modified. I have a wiki page with stuff on this space nonsense if anyone cares. It’s right over here.

Sylvarda Liliandra (simply known as Varda to most) is an earth born elf who’s wanderlust lead her to the stars. Being magically inclined, she enrolled at a relatively long age to become an astral navagator — mages who pull starships into (and navigate) astral space to achieve FTL travel. Varda also took her time at the academy to become an exceptionally skilled duelist with magically infused rapiers, designed to be used as spell focuses. Despite being a highly talented and motivated student with a promising future as a top class navigator, she abruptly vanished for unknown reasons and generally refuses to talk about them.

Varda exists as a rogue and a smuggler, captaining a light transport. Her and her crew get by performing morally ambigious jobs in the galaxy’s shader locations to make ends meet. She fiercely avoids work that to heavily entangles or harms folks who are just trying to get by, but is not above stealing from cooperations, criminal organizations, or simply those she views as rich enough to afford it. Desptie her concern for the lives of the innocent, her reputation is that of a cold and dangerous woman.

Varda is an arrogant, sultry woman, often to her own (often comedic) down fall. She has a habit of throwing tantrums when frustrated and isn’t always very good with people. In fact, her cold reputation isn’t even entirely deserved, as it is somewhat of an “act” to make up for her lack of negotation skills (which would be handled by someone else whom I’ll probably draw at some point). Despite such flaws, she is an exceedingly clever player and schemer, and, assuming she’s working with people who actually listen to her, exceptionally well at getting things done. She is fiercely protective of her crew and, when able to relax, has a soft, caring core.

Under her eyepatch (another event she seldom will talk about) exists an artifact called the Karisarma, which, from elvish, loosely translates itno “The Demon Engine”. This engraved glass eye, when exposed, can see into and eve partially exist in astral space. This gives incredibly fast reflexes and a massive amount of energy for her body to metabolize, giving her an incredibly boost in speed and agility. As it is used, the demon engine pulls her in deeper, making her even faster and stronger, but slowly overloads her body with magical energy. When turned off quickly, the effects are small — muscle aches and such — but when used for an extended session, the pain endured upon deactivating can be crippling, as if ones body was on fire. Extended use requires long recoveries and a sufficantly long use could outright kill her. It is not uncommon for her to use it in combat in short bursts, but extended usage exists only for dire emergencies. The full image of whats imprinted on the eye can be seen here. The patch it’s self actually has a pinhole camera in it that can feed images to the enchanted eye without using it’s power. While not as good as a real eye, Varda enjoys uses her opponents expectation over her limited field of view to her advantage.

That’s all I got. If I ever get a chance to roleplay any of these new characters, I’ll probably have a chance to actually refine their personalities and histories, but as is these just serve as basic starting notes. Whatever I finally end up with could be quite different.

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Before I go on, lemme just say that I’m a cheap fuck who doesn’t buy anything, so it’s not like I’m saying this while rolling in the bank or something, buying every piece of DLC that comes out for a game. But anyways, I’m sick of this. While individual bits of DLC can be overpriced or poorly implemented or dumb or whatever, I think we can safely say the concept, in all it’s incarnations is ‘okay’. Theres three things people tend to whine about (Everything else is either flat out accepted or begrudgingly accepted. By cavemen.)… On Disc DLC and UNLOCK DLC. They also whine about map packs and I’ll explain why thats okay later.

On Disc DLC
Now I’ll admit, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially when I’m playing say, Street Fighter 4 and an online opponent uses a costume I didn’t buy. It’s clearly there. It’s taking up harddrive space — but I can’t use it. THAT SAID, these features were never advertised as being ‘in game’ and whats the alternative? Take them off the disk and make it so I have to download a patch for other peoples DLC? On disk DLC, while it feels shady, is fine because it’s pragmatic. The common argument is ‘why not just include it in the game!”, but lets get real here, stuff has been held out from us for expansions since the early PC days.

Unlock DLC
This pisses me off the most. I can’t believe people will whine about this. This refers to content that is on disc and also UNLOCKABLE IN GAME. People see this as exploitation, getting people to spend money to REDUCE the value of their game. Clearly this is also the type of people who care about achievements, as they need a carrot infront of them to do anything.

The big misconception here is ‘Hours played = Value’. Fuck you. Fuck whoever said that. That person should die in a fire. I do not judge how good a movie is by HOW LONG IT IS. I do not judge the quality of a book by the AMOUNT OF PAGES and in all cases that length can be DETRIMENTAL TO THE EXPERIENCE. I don’t buy games to BURN TIME I DON’T WANT, I buy games for an experience. The optimal lenght for an experience can be too long or too short, but it’s never “MOAR IS BETTER”. I -LIKE- having time to do things and there was a number of times I would gladly pitch a dollar or two to keep a game from WASTING MY TIME.

Oh my god, character unlocks in SF4. I would have GLADLY played a few bucks to “lowered the value of my game” and never have had to touch single player. You know why? Single Player in fighters is GARBAGE. I want all the characters so me and my friends can have the BEST EXPERIENCE. Granted, unlocks in fighters SHOULDN’T EXIST (well, unless it’s EX style characters or something, and by all means, have dlc for that too ), but if they are, I would LOVE an out. The lack of unlocks in SSF4 INCREASED the value of the game in my mind. Another example is Bayonetta. I wanted to get some key items so I could start doing what I considered to be the ‘meat’ of the game (playing for score). I didn’t want to play through the whole game again in under 5 hours to get the bracelet of time, or do this or that for something else. Thats a waste of my time. Theres no VALUE THERE FOR ME. It is NEGA VALUE. I was able to get around this by farming halos through an exploit and using ‘cheat codes (more like a secret shop)’ to get stuff, but even THAT was time consuming. I’d have gladly spent a few bucks to get through that too.

So some guy in some racing game might want to just play with a certain car and isn’t interested in the requirements for it. LET HIM. Let him have is fun. You can make the argument that ‘They didn’t earn it!’ but really, whats that worth? If someone said that to me in TF2 if I bought all the unlocks (OH YEAH I’D SO DO THAT TOO D:<) I'd digitally punch them in the dick for implying I should waste my time on such drivel.

Map Packs
This is over done, so just for whoever is wondering why map pack bitching is okay.
TLDR Version of Argument: Map Pack bitching is okay since map packs segregate the community unlike unlikes like a character in a fighting game, whom you can still play AGAINST but not play. Segregating multiplayer communities is awful. It’s practically extortion.

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Alright, going to write about a bunch of stuff. Sad news first.

My friend’s Dad Died
Rest in Peace, Tim Traskos. He was the dad of my very good friend AJ. If you’re an IWBTG fan, he’s one of the people who is frequently quipping in my youtube videos, as well as the guy who cooked up Mecha Birdo. I wish him and his family the best. :(

I Went to this Weird Indy Arcade in the Basement of What Seemed to be a Squat House

I went to Babycastles, which was this super ghetto but cool little set up in some building in the middle of Brooklyn that hosts illegal concerts. So to put it short, it was an establishment far hipper than I. I got there late after 3 hours of train/subwaying which made NO FUCKING SENSE (the trip should of taken a little over an hour each way, but instead ended up taking 6 hours of total travel time for 2 hours of payoff. Ah well. Met some up and coming pro gamers which was cool. The guy who ran it seemed to have a lot of heart. He wanted me to come by to talk to some high school kids about game creation. Cool guy. The whole thing was because IWBTG was in one of their ‘arcade machines’ — amusingly junky looking setups made from salvaged windows 98 machines. So I kinda got to be E-Famous for a bit. Also got the charming chance to bitch about Jason Rohrer. Destin(Dustin?), if you read this, I think the words that fit my feelings are better put as “I hate everything he’s ever done and think it has no contribution to the true artistic nature of art, but if people eat his shit up I hope he at least makes a living for himself”.

Anyways, will probably go back at SOME POINT, but I’m definitely going to drive.

I Hate Trophies/Achievements

As far as I know, there is no way to turn this shit off on the PS3 (at all) or 360 (without turning off ALL notifications). Now, I could talk about how the concept is silly to me, but my bitching has nothing to do with that either. Let people have their fun. I JUST DON’T CARE. I don’t get why this is an all consuming, inescapable system. I love playing SF4 and having an achievement notification cover my opponent’s life bar. I don’t read what it is, I never look up what it is later or anything. It also makes my games take longer to load. They have been nothing but a net negative to my experience. Frankly I’d love to turn them off, period. I don’t want people to compare trophies with me. How far I’m in a game is none of their god damned business… but I could deal with that as long as I didn’t have to deal with it.

Actually wait, I can deal with it, and do, but that doesn’t make the lack of such a basic feature NOT RETARDED. Yet whenever someone questions this online, theres threads of mouth breathers going “Why would you want to turn off achievements?” “lol why don’t you just ignore them” “oh my god my console has a blue light when it’s on how do I turn that off, lol!”, like a bunch of worthless slapdicks that think gamer scores mean anything and need a little pop up notice to accomplish anything.

Also don’t get me started on achievements in TF2. To put it short, if this BS was never invented, my life would be marginally better. If Microsoft and Sony just implemented a basic feature, my life would be less marginally better, but still better.

This whole ’social networking’ thing in gaming is starting to piss me off. I’ve come to accept facebook, but I don’t want shit like that in my gaming.

Speaking of facebook, I can’t set anything up to publish blog posts to facebook. I thought facebook was supposed to be friendly! D:<

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Playing SSF4 online a bunch, I’m seeing a lot of this. I see a lot of players who are downright doomed never to improve. Whats worse, I sometimes lose to these players! Thats a bittersweet thing, but it’s something I have to accept. The difference comes to trying to win with stable strategy vs tryin g to win with shenanigans. The goal of stable strategy is to try and develop habits and techniques that will potentionally be able to win in any situation. Shenanigans on the other hand is doing what would normally be incredibly stupid stuff. In SSF4, Ken doing his fierce DP over and over again, T.Hawk spamming dive and spinning 360s every possible moment. In Starcraft it’s like 2 pooling as Zerg and rushing every game. None of these tactics are ‘good’, but they can win from time to time against bad players. In games like SSF4 which are populated by bad players, they can win a LOT……. up to a point.

Now, it’s hard to explain to someone who wins like this that it’s a totally awful idea. I mean, they’re winning! Thats the point, right? Well yes and no. I could win a 100% of the time against my cat by pressing jab all day. The idea is to be able to win against the best opponents possible, as consistently as possible. Shenanigans can win because they are unexpected, or the player doesn’t know the counter (usually easy) or can’t effectively punish it with their level of knowledge… but once one plays against a sufficiently skilled opponent, the Shenanigans are no longer not effective, THEY ARE DETRIMENTAL. You give up so much, for such an easily counterable strategy. You are merely led on by those who do not understand the tactic. You write off your losses, focusing on your wins…. But you will never catch up to the players who beat you with that mentality. They practically have you beaten forever until you change your game at a fundamental level.

Shenanigans have their uses (though rarely are they the same shenanigans the player is using currently, but thats another story). Sometimes it’s good to throw something wacky out there to catch someone off guard. The problem for these low level players is that not only is shenanigans their ‘plan A”………… There is no ‘plan B’. Thats it — beat their trick and they flail in panic. Sometimes its hard to tell — sometimes you can throw out tons of shenanigans and actually beat a player better than you occasionally…. but for what? You are throwing your win to the random number god. Sometimes you get lucky with your BS, other times (most of the time) he’ll just punish you. I get this with a lot of people I play with. I will lose to them occasionally, but they will mostly be in a spot where they will have little luck improving. It’s useful for me, because I can use this to clear how to properly deal with such nonsense and move on eventually…. The player will likely be stuck where he was though, making tiny improvements at best. Instead, they should be developing solid, safe and consistent play while not being deterred when they lose. Switching to that style may represent an actual increase in loses at first, but the rewards are CONSTANT wins and the ability to beat much stronger opponents. It also leads to near limitless improvement!

Moral of the story: Don’t cheese your wins until your good enough to realize how cheesy your cheese is. Otherwise you’ll confuse ‘cheese’ with something more substantial. Besides, when you get better you’ll learn about some HIGH LEVEL CHEESE you can use occasionally and that cheese is just soooo much more taster. So go read up on your game and try and find the best way to improve!

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More hating on Valve! This is sort of like the the Blazblue post. I need something I can link too every time someone is shocked that I hate the L4D series. Let me preface this a bit… I think Blazblue is like, objectively pretty shitty in it’s design. L4D on the other had is just one big, clever illusion. It is well designed in a sense, but the game is extremely shallow. So all that said, you shouldn’t feel bad for liking L4D (or even Blazblue, though you should at least acknowledge it’s gaping flaws).

The game is artificial. I often say I hate the game, to which people reply “Well you must not like team work!” or something (sometimes they accuse me of not liking fun, which is more accurate in general, though L4D bores me to tears). I always found this funny because -there is no real team work in L4D-. This is color by numbers team work. Why do you pick your friend up? Because when you get pounced or hurt, you need your friends to keep you from dying. You pick him up because you are incomplete. It doesn’t just benefit you and your team to pick him up — it is critical to your survival. The game has a gun to your head and is saying ‘pick up your team mates because if you have no team you will abruptly die to some special infected.”

Now sure, this is ‘team work’. You are working and doing so as a team, but you are mostly just going through the motions. It is team work in the same way patty cake is team work. You follow a series of almost immutable rules. Move as a group, pick up friends, jump at the same time, focus fire the tank — whatever, pretty much. Variating from any of these is practically suicide. Now I can play TF2 which we jokingly call ‘personal glory fortress’, but team work, while optional, is highly rewarded and takes actual skill and coordination. The team work angle in L4D is pretty much a farce. Special Infected in verses takes team work, but thats it — incidently, thats the only time I ever actually enjoyed the game.

The other thing people state is ‘hey it’s co-op!’ — well, I hate co-op. Doesn’t make co-op bad, but I can dismiss this point personally. This is partially why I think the game succeeds (mixed with zombie romance) with most people.

So besides the lack of team work, what else is wrong? Well, the game is secretly DEVOID OF GAMEPLAY. People will lol and laugh when they beat a zombie to death with a bowling pin, but thats not really ‘gameplay’. Aesthetics and visercial feel matter, but lets be realistic. Thats not properly ‘gameplay’, those things need to be supported by gameplay… and the gameplay in L4D is a watered down Doom. You run around with hit scan weapons and shoot mostly harmless targets. Occasionally a SI drops down and hits someone then you kill him because he has no control over his character. Great. To make it worse, due to the above mentioned rules above, you can’t do anything but follow the predefined routine. No running off rambo style to slaughter zombies unless you wanna endanger your team. Single player is stuffy and dull. I never once feared death because it was so out of my hand. I was relying on 3 outher human beings for my mere survival and the SI can come down so hard and fast that death often came out of nowhere. I suppose some found this to be ‘tense’, but that just made me ‘zzzzz’. So little at stake, so little control, so little options, so little in the terms of interesting weapons.

You know whats a better co-op game where you fight hordes of the undead? Doom. Don’t wanna play Doom? Serious Sam. Interesting weapons and enemies and a sense of overwhelmingness! Sounds good to me!

So anyways I said the SI are fun, but only SOMEWHAT. See, they’re horridly designed, especially the first batch. With the first batch, everything but the Boomer was pretty much dead after they hit a target. After that, wait 30 seconds. You’re basically a bomb. L4D2 does this a little better with the SPitter and Jockey (The charger has L4D1 syndrome and is just a hunter that doesn’t jump in practice)… and why is it like this? Well, so yopu just can’t totally out skill the humans and flat out kill them. AWESOME. I’m just a MOOK. I’m actually kinda okay with being a mook, but I am NOT okay with waiting 30 seconds between each uneventful death.

So yeah. Not much gameplay. For the most part you can’t even be good at the game. The skill is in being the least bad. Between co-op, zombies and good presentation, people get into it. People also get into it because honestly, they enjoy being tricked. When you look at the teamwork objectify, it’s laughable, but for the average player it makes them feel like hot shit. One thing I noticed is every group of players who play L4D seem to think that their little group is the best. Why wouldn’t they? They get to stomp random teams and feel like they’re helping each other the whole time. Theres also a general lack of accountability. Lose as the SI? Oh well, SI always lose (unless you’re doing comp L4D which I can’t even begin to speak about), no harm there. If you, win, you’re awesome. If you lose as humans, you have 3 other humans to blame. Even if you don’t blame them, you can laugh it off and not be bothered — its just how the game works. Sometimes you’ll randomly die. The only thing to be afraid of is just flat out fucking up.

So yeah, I fucking hate the game. You’re not a bad person for liking it, but your experience is mostly artifical. But hey, no harm in liking dumb, shallow games, I play horrific fighting games all the time my self…. just don’t tell me theres any real gameplay in the game. Just say you like co-op and zombies and be done with it.

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Subject: I hurd u like Diablo so I put bad drops in your fps so you could… something while you something. TLDR: Your updates suck.

Mr. Walker, why are the community weapons so retarded? Diablo-esque stat-line, uninteresting items? No thanks. Man, remember that game? With the well defined, unique, immutable classes, the crisp, consistent and sophisticated art style and the wonderful adherence to minimalism? Jesus christ, what happened? Do you guys even know what you originally made? Did you not realize how BRILLIANT that was, so you just kept smearing monkey feces all over it because ‘moar are better’?

To be fair, the official updates have been sophisticated and while they detract from the trim, lean design of the original release, they do add real, new gameplay at the cost of less elegance. But now we got these shitty, worthless items mucking things up. They complicate the game WITHOUT MAKING IT A BETTER GAME. Were you guys always secretly hack game designers, strung along by some other forces working at valve, or did you slowly drift into hat-induced madness?

And still, the drop system. Oh wow, lets make a system of inconsistent reward! People like that, right? They play WoW! But lets design it with such little feedback that the only people who get that slot machine rush are the PEOPLE WHO ARE IDLING. We will then fix this system with an awful crafting system that is useless for anything but hat generation and then vaguely fix the crafting system by making obvious changes that could have been made at any time!

You guys are ridiculous. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish you’d STOP updating the game after the engineer update. Clearly you no longer have the game design sense to make smart, intelligent games and if you’re just going to shit on what used to be this games wonderfully elegant game, I’d rather you just stop doing anything but bug fixes.

In short, stop being awful. You guys are awful. Please stop.

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From my awesome friend Katie. It was supposed to be for my birthday but uh, this is what happens all the time with birthday pictures. Not with her — with EVERYONE. Though she was also hella busy I kept telling her she could wait! In the end, the results are all that matter. Thanks, Katie!

So yeah. Dat Ass.

Paladin Naomi Vos Cruz by *Katie-W on deviantART

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Despite my best efforts, I can only draw women! Anyways if anyone is waiting for Brave Earth’s release (Sometime before the universe suffers from heat death), the below has some spoilers — but really who cares? So as usual, DA post biography.

So here we got Naomi Vos Cruz, walking toward a undescript, old fortress. Naomi is a young Astorian Paladin, belonging to the Sacred Order of Saint Alistair — an order of mostly females. Naomi is friendly and outgoing, through tends to have a temper when pressed. Over time, the typical naivity associated with Paladins faded away, leaving a somewhat jaded young woman who could better percieve the shades of gray between good in Evil. When confronted by actual evil, Naomi acts with brutal decisiveness and is not against fighting dirty if necessary for the greater good.

Naomi’s combat skills are highly regarded. While not as high as many other in the order by status, she is one of the most respected by merit. She is agile and atheletic, while possesing the strength to wield a bastard sword one handed with a shield. Her magical skills are highly focused on combat — healing and other clerical skills are highly lacking. Instead, Naomi can wield holy energy as an offensive, explosive force. She can also use that energy to further increase her speed and strength. She is also particularly skilled in magically destroying the undead. Despite all this, Naomi started out as an unremarkable warrior, who entered the order through birth and, in dangerous situations, was often seen as a burden to her brother who did all her could to protect her. This likely acted as the motivation for her rapid improvement.

Naomi is socialable and charasmatic. She tends to be a community figure where she is positioned (like many of the female Alistarian Paladins), though due to her combat skills she is not often positioned in places where this is necessary. She enjoys make-up and prefers to look well made and groomed in public, doing so even it is not necessary or even appropriate. Naomi will socially drink (through with very strict moderation) and socialize with townfolks at the local taverns. She also has an intense love of fruit, which she seems to eat constantly in public. Despite her outgoing characteristics, she is quite private. She keeps most of her feelings to her self and usually vents through writing and reading poetry. She doesn’t show it to anyone though — it’s probably pretty bad.

She is noted for her intense and bitter rivalry with Cassara, who killed her older brother and fellow Paladin. Naomi remains in constant inner conflict over her brother, whom Cassara casts casts aspersons of guilty upon for various crimes. The mixture of Naomi’s loyalty to her brother and Cassara’s antagonistic personality has led to Naomi’s absolute hatred for her, despite them often working toward the same goals. Cassara on the other hand, despite Naomi’s growing skill, merely precieves her as a naive brat anda nuisance.

Despite being a Paladin, Naomi’s faith is also not quite in tact. While the existance of higher powers are obvious in a world of spirts and magic, the teachings and scriptures of her church do not seem to line up with reality in her mind. Combined with the panthiestic nature of the priest, Father Maynard (Slash), has led to her merely possessing a deistic view. Despite this she still is able to weild her holy powers, which furthers her shakey faith. Naomi remains in the church more due to it’s ability to allow her to help the most people, rather than for it’s exact tenets. She also is highly distrusting of the upper clergy. She her self is also suspected by the church, and she suspects that her usefulness as a warrior is the only reason she is kept around.

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It’s actually kinda cozy!

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Nerd, from the Brontoforumus, asked me to write about why Darkstalkers is or is not the best game ever. Well, all I’ll say to that directly is that Vampire Savior is a perfectly playable, good game with a high execution requirement. It’s also the game where Daigo Umehara made a name for himself, after he switched from Pyron to Bishamon. The top tier is a bit too strong and the bottom tier is a bit too weak, but thats indicitive of all games of that era. If you wanna play a Darkstalkers game, Vampire Savior is as good as it gets.

But thats not a very interesting post. Theres not much to say about how fun Darkstalkers is to play — it succeeds at what it tries to do for the most part and is playable. But what IS interesting is how massively influential the series was. While Street Fighter laid the foundation for fighters to follow, Darkstalkers went TOTALLY BATSHIT CRAZY and tried to buck every trope they established. They introduced crazy new systems and piled them on top of each other. The series was highly experiemental and most modern games take more then a handful of systems from the series.

Obviously lets begin with the original Darkstalkers. Darkstalkers was released just before Street Fighter Super Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha. What systems did this game have?

Chain Combos: Making normals cancel into other normals — the feature seen in the majority fighters these days. MVC2, Guilty Gear, Blaz Blue, TvC, Melty Blood… All these games and more owe this system to Darkstalkers. Called Hunter Chains (or maybe they weren’t called that until the next game?) they allowed you to, in a precise way, chain a number of normal moves together, going from lightest to strongest attack. This is actually more liberal then a lot of systems that exist today. The system was also put into the first Street fighter alpha, but was dropped. Guy and a few other characters retained their chains, but generally speaking, their role was vastly reduced. These chains only grew more liberal as the series progressed.

Enhanced Air Mobilty: … Air dashing and double jumping? Yeeeeah. All the way back in 94. Darkstalkers was the first game to bring fighting into the air. These systems aren’t universal like in Guilty Gear, but there were characters who possessed these abilities even back then.

Air Blocking: Another staple these days. Also featured in the Alpha series. Air blocking was necessary to allow the crazy air mobility to work. At this point you have every air system that modern, high mobility games use… back in 94.

Dashing… at all!: Oh wait you couldn’t even dash at all in any game before Darkstalkers. Where you can dash on the ground… AND the air.

Guard Cancels: Oh you know., Alpha Counters. Attacking out of blockstun, another hallmark of the Alpha Series existed first in Darkstalkers. Pretty much every god damned game ever uses Guard Cancels these days.

Flight Modes: Like Sentinel in MVC2 and other games. In fact, the other crazy thing with this is it uses the super meter. This game also had the first utility supers, wow!

It also featured even more ideas that were used in other games. I-no’s airdash in Guilty Gear is based off of Morrigan’s airdash. Faust can walk while crouching like Felicia. The game also featured a unique superbar immediately after super Bars were concieved. The bar would drain while filled and while active would cause special moves to have more effects, like additional damage or better properties. You could also use a super before it totally drained. This wasn’t a popular system, but it was indicitive of the creativity that went into Darkstarker’s design. There were other quirky decisions too. Fireballs would clash in different ways based on distance traveled and the strength used, based on the amount of ‘momentum’ they had left. So you could overpower a projectile by countering it with another one at close range. You also had weird ideas like Bishamon, who had a dragon punch that could ONLY be done as a 1 frame reversal.

Vampirer Hunter/Nightwarriors was Darkstalkers sequal that spawned even MORE new systems.

Stockable Meter: Now you can hold maaany levels of super. 99 levels I beleive, more then you could ever possibly use.

EX Attacks: These were actually called ES attacks (while EX attacks were basically Supers), but they were bigger, badder special moves that used the same meter as your super. Tons of games use this. SF3 and SF4, Guilty Gear with it’s Force Breaks and, in ways, FRCs, Melty Blood., etc etc.

Pursuit: Not to popular, but saw a lot of use in the Samsho games. Involves diving after grounded opponents for a free hit. You lose a chance to mix them up, but you get extra damage.

Tech Roll: Very common in a lot of games (SFA, SF3, SF4, and BB at the least), it allows the defender a safer way to get up by rolling after a knockdwn.

The game also featured a number of other weird systems, like auto-block mode, that lets you block for free when not attacking up to 10 times in exchange for not having the ability to control your chain combos.

Vampire Savior, the ‘best’ of the DarkStalkers games brought even more systems into the fold. None of these are quite as overt, but they are influential. You know Eddie from Guilty Gear? That whole concept comes from the Helper Dark Forces in Darkstalkers. The game also features variations on Alpha style custom combos (having your shadow be on the opposite side of the opponent to negate pushback for example). Super and Hyper armor moves are created — moves that can absorb one or many hits before being interrupted. It also added push-block, a feature that would appear in MVC2, GG, BB and TVC. The game even made some goofy changes. Life bars drain the opponent direction. A match is really one big round. Not necessarily good changes, but it shows how ‘out of the box’ DS was trying to be when compared to Street Fighter.

After Vampire Savior, Vampire Savior 2 and Vampire Hunter 2 came out. Both these games were like Savior, but with slightly different casts due to memory limitations. These gimmick releases were sort of ignored to my understanding. Still, Darkstalkers had a profound influence on later fighting games. I’m probably missing even more examples of new moves and character archetypes. Darkstalkers is easily the second most influential fighting game ever made, regardless of the playability of any individual title. These systems are EVERYWHERE and DS spit them out in mass. There was definitely a crazed genius involved in the creation of these games and while I don’t play them, I appreciate them fro their massive contribution to the genre.

Hope that’s good enough, Nerd.

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