Sleepmode Year In Review: 2023 Edition

Series: Sleepmode Year In Review

For most normal people, two weeks into the new year would be a pretty sensible time to put out a yearly retrospective piece. Unfortunately, I am not normal, and so the only reason why I didn’t get this piece out earlier is because my SSD died, and in replacing it, I temporarily lost access to this website’s local markdown files1, and thus was unable to do much of anything with the website until I got that sorted.
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Playing OutRun 2SP in $CURRENT_YEAR

In 1986, a man named Yu Suzuki, along with a small handful of developers at SEGA AM2, would release an arcade racing game called OutRun. Suzuki had previously made some fairly successful motorcycle racing games for SEGA by way of Hang-On and Enduro Racer, and with OutRun, he sought to create a racing game predicated primarily on allowing players to enjoy the experience of driving and, in his words, “feel superior”1.
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Combo Expression

You guys don’t fucking know how to talk about anything. I mean, I know that Twitter as a format is basically anathema to actual discussion but you could at least try. The Twitter account FightstickArt, ostensibly an account centered on showing off people’s cool fight sticks and artwork and stuff, took part in the time-honoured tradition of engagement farming by posing a question to FGC twitter: what’s most important to you in a fighting game?
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Sleepmode Year In Review: 2022 Edition

Series: Sleepmode Year In Review

So, uh. I guess 2022 wasn’t exactly 2021 Hard Mode, but we can’t exactly say there were many… systemic improvements to the stuff that was fucked about last year, either. I’m at least doing okay on a personal level, which means I’m in a better position to be working with others to fight for those systemic improvements at least! Anyway, this is gonna go on mostly the same beat as the last one of these, though it’s not gonna be focused exclusively on games.
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Melee Is Sick, and I Don't Want to Play It

As I’ve gotten older, more mature and more experienced with the fighting game genre, I’ve managed to become pretty good at honestly assessing my feelings about particular games. This honesty really reached a strong point of development when I finally realised that I didn’t like BlazBlue Central Fiction all that much (you can read about that in my article “Learning to Love, to Learn and to Let Go”), and it’s come to carry forward into another game which I’ve had a fraught relationship with – Super Smash Bros.
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Optimising a Vroid Model for VRChat

A pretty popular and accessible way of creating custom avatars for VRChat is by using Vroid Studio, a program mostly used to create character models for vtubers. Unfortunately, VRChat has pretty strict limitations on how avatar models can actually be constructed and displayed in a session without setting people’s computers on fire1, and Vroid models by default will flagrantly ignore all those limitations in the pursuit of making your brand new anime femboy self-actualisation vehicle as cute as programmatically possible.
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Evo 2022 Announcement Thoughts

I’ve missed every discourse cycle for the past few months and god damn it I will not miss this one when there is #content to be created. Anyway, here are my scattered thoughts on some of the bigger announcements that were made at the 2022 edition of Evo, everyone’s favourite fighting game trade show masquerading as a tournament.1 Capcom Capcom revealed two new characters for the upcoming Street Fighter 6 – Juri Han and Kimberly.
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The Spectator's Guide to Bloody Roar Extreme

It’s that time of year again: Combo Breaker is almost upon us. Of the many FGC majors sprinkled throughout the US, the Chicago, IL event is most notable for its emphasis on spotlighting novel, commuinty-driven brackets – most notorious are its Mystery Game and Auction tournaments, including the cultural touchstone that was the Sarvets All-Stars tournament from 2018. And while these kinds of events are almost certainly appearing at Combo Breaker 2022, the main stage will also be seeing a new challenger among the likes of Guilty Gear Strive and The King of Fighters XV – a Nintendo Gamecube game called Bloody Roar Extreme.
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KOF XV Balance Change Proposals

I’ve been playing The King of Fighters XV a lot lately. I think the game is very good, and overall the balance is pretty spot-on, but there are a few things that I think warrant some changes – nothing drastic, just a few quality of life changes here and there. I’m putting them all here so you don’t have to see them all over your timeline. I’ll try to justify every proposal I’m making here.
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Learning to Love, to Learn and to Let Go

Prior to Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, Arc System Works’ three most prolific and popular fighting games were Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2 and BlazBlue Centralfiction. These are all games I’ve spent varying – but generally large – amounts of time with, and my opinions of them have varied accordingly. My rocky relationship with all three of these games is well-documented, here and elsewhere, but I feel like I’ve come to a pretty clear idea of how I feel about all these games.
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