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[PS3] [360] [PC] Skullgirls

Unread postby Sparkster » 10 Nov 2012 12:38

[Post split off from here: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=18477#p18477 -icy]


Just about everything done in Skullgirls has been done in other games, only much better. It's no secret that the game's based off of Marvel vs Capcom 2, but even then it's hard to pick out a mechanic that's only unique to Skullgirls. You've got standard pushblocking and MvC3 airblock, dashes, magic series chains, DHCs, a ratio system, and restand combos (where you combo from the air to the ground and force the opponent to stand rather than falling down). So basically, one new feature.

Now on blocking: Allowing air blocking is fine, but if you couple that with higher air mobility and kinda shitty counters, it makes being in the air mindless. So, how have other games dealt with air blocking? The Street Fighter Zero series made grounded normals air unblockable, so while the old token Shoryukens used to be the unchallenged best solution anti-air, the Zero games added more emphasis on spacing your grounded attacks to cleanly beat out any air option. Capcom's Vampire series has that same rule, but grounded anti-airs are slower and riskier. This balanced out though since they added airthrows which beat empty blocking while also allowing air blocking to counter air-to-air setups. Being in the air in MvC2 was a terrible idea unless you were flying or using a quick trijump. Even MvC3 has great, instant airthrows which easily balance out the risk.

In Skullgirls, anything can be blocked in the air. Oh, there's airthrows but they're slow and they use two button inputs. Again, all of the above games used one button throw systems so not only are airthrows instant, but if you fucked up the range you at least stick out an attack. In Guilty Gear, you can press button combinations to get an airthrow attempt or a fast air-to-air attack. Blazblue uses the same two button throw scheme, but the throw tech game is fundamentally different and to block grounded attacks you have to drain your barrier gauge. I've dragged this point into the ground, but there's basically no excuse for the air game to be this uncreative and boring.

But wait, what about moving under the opponent as they're in the air? Well, joke's on you motherfucker because this game is so goddamn slow. The entire pacing feels horrible. Grounded walk speeds are terrible in conjunction with the large stages. Dashes aren't anything special aside from one or two and there's no sort of momentum system as you'd find in Guilty Gear. In fact, most of the backdashes and even some forward ones are situational. You'll either barely move backwards at all and in most cases you might as well airdash backwards since it's usually faster. Complicating this is that while basic options are slow, close range mixups are still fast. Good luck dealing with instant IAD cross-ups, tick throws, and assist mixups.

While moving through the molasses, Autumn games had the courtesy of giving us 6 attack buttons and making sure just about all of them are fucking awful. Instead of having standard pokes, pressing just about any button results in a painfully slow and ugly attack. I swear the only reason 80% of the moves in this game exist are either for combo chain filler, dodging the autistic infinite system, or only as a shitty occasional OTG or something trite. Even the specials generally feel shitty, with most having poor reach, skimp hitboxes, abnormal startup, or the slow movement speeds makes spacing them odd. Hey, at least they work in combos, right?

Turns out Mike Z designed the game not around having an interesting combo system, but rather at avoiding infinites. He did a shitty job at this since you can do absolutely annoying, Hokuto no Ken length combos (minus the hilarious basketballing and the actual damage) and end in a reset or whatever. However, once you reach a certain length the game awards the opponent more and more meter, so you shouldn't want to do long combos. You only avoid infinites by jumping through hoops so that you don't use the same moves too many times in a combo; instead you use some other equally identical attack so it's not a true infinite until you've looped it long enough!

Most combos boil down to hitconfirming into a launcher, doing an air combo, forcing a restand or OTG, and then going for a knockdown, super, or reset. There's some other deviations, but who cares? Damage scaling negates the amount of max damage you'll do, but more importantly the general combo flow is identical for everyone. This is the same shit you find in Street Fighter X Tekken, where you chain into a launcher, do some low strongs, then a special. In Skullgirls, you chain into launcher, air chain to the ground, then pick something. Do a long, slow combo then carry on with the rest of match.

The few things Skullgirls does right is made moot by all its shortcomings. Who cares about a good button config screen when you what follows is a ugly botched memory of MvC2 but with a blindingly obscene super bar? Who would bother playing this shit on GGPO when you can play dozens of great games for free on your PC? Then you remember that there's only 8 characters in a potentially 3v3 game. lol

I can't think of any merit to the game. Air and ground footsies have been done leagues better and faster, with beefier damage and attacks. Everything is ugly, from the interface to the half-assed movie theater motif. At least the soundtrack has a few cool jazz songs. When everything stems from such a lackluster baseline, the few interesting mechanics - special move detection buffers, custom assist formation, and the upcoming tournament mode in the patch - only detract from the overall experience. Why, imagine if King of Fighters XIII had GGPO netcode instead of this mess!
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Unread postby Sparkster » 10 Nov 2012 13:07

http://www.play-mag.co.uk/general/skull ... ew-mike-z/

Play-Magazine wrote:We asked Mike Zaimont what makes Skullgirls the best fighting game ever:

…OK, here goes nothing.
Because I truly believe that Skullgirls is the first “fighting game for fans, by fans.”

Now, that “by fans/for fans” thing is a bit of a cliché, but the way games are developed and marketed now usually ends up diluting the creators’ intent and reducing it to nothing more than an empty tagline. Reverge Labs is small enough and Autumn Games is hands-off enough that I think our vision for Skullgirls is pretty much intact.


This is some comedy gold right here. Skullgirls is the best because it was made by a fan instead of a seasoned developer who's designed numerous fighting games? I guess I should go break out my copy of I Wanna Be the Guy instead of playing Contra Hard Corps. Not only that, but the second paragraph is non sequitur. As if a tagline, a videogame tagline at that, affects the creator's intent in any way.

http://shoryuken.com/2012/04/09/skullgi ... hilosophy/

Mike ‘Mike Z’ Zaimont, Project Lead for Skullgirls wrote: In general, what can we expect from Skullgirls?

You can expect a pretty full-featured 2D fighting game. We’ve got story mode, arcade mode, a training room, extensive tutorials which go well beyond the basic “throw a fireball, nice!”, and, of course, online play using GGPO. We’re a really small team, so some of these don’t have quite as many options as we wanted initially, but since it’s downloadable it’ll be cheap – $15, less than a quarter of the cost of a disc-based game!


I guess that by those standards, ClayFighter would almost be a full-featured 2D fighting game if only it had a training mode... except that Skullgirls might as well not have a training mode since it barely offers any options. It's obvious that the development team wasn't ever on point with Skullgirls and didn't really have a goal they were striving for other than making a $15 videogame.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Nov 2012 05:37

That should do it. I'll stitch together a review from these two posts, thanks.
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Unread postby qweasdzse » 12 Nov 2012 07:59

I only disagree with Sparkster on a few things.

First of all it might be worth noting that there is one character who has an air un-blockable move, but that's just a minor factoid and his point about air-blocking remains valid. It definitely makes the game less momentum based in regards to mix-ups on incoming characters after you kill their teammate.

What I really disagree with is his favoring of one button throws. I find that the way games like Marvel vs Capcom 3 handle throw gives too many defensive option selects to the person trying to break the throw. The way Skullgirls handles throws is pretty good; you have to stand up to perform a throw break and you can't option select it. It gives trying to break throws a good amount of risk.

Also, I have to disagree that every character has the same combos. Most characters have different combo routes beyond a chain combo into a launcher. It's just that each individual character's combos are basically all the same simply with the moves used in a different order. They also tend to be extremely long, repetitive and do piddling damage.

It's also worth noting how pitifully slow walk speed and even dash speed are in this game. The only way to move around quickly for most characters tend to be air-dashing. This is to the detriment of any kind of real footsies the game has.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2012 22:11

Can the two of you do me a favor and perform the exercise I told Carceri to do here:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=18251#p18251

For fighting games of course... You can do, say 3 or 4 games per rating instead of 5 if you simply haven't played or aren't sure about that many fighting games. And of course make sure to include Skullgirls somewhere.

I am asking this because from the analysis I got the game doesn't sound like a one-star game, and merely the fact that you played it long enough to figure all this stuff out would tend to reinforce this sentiment. For me, even if mechanically the game is worthy of two, or even three or four stars, the aesthetics are so execrable I simply can't play it, so it's dragged down to one star regardless. But obviously for you this isn't the case, so try not to be swayed too much by my opinion. And the way to do this is to perform the exercise I told you as conscientiously as possible.
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