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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My New Year's Resolution

In my last piece, I may have said a few things about my feelings on Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R and BlazBlue Central Fiction. Those feelings may have been largely negative feelings where I admitted my frustrations and losses came from a lack of knowledge, but then I rationalised my lack of desire to play these games as simply not wanting to fill those gaps in my knowledge. I can’t help but feel like I was scrubquoting hard in doing so.
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Sleepmode's 2021 Gaming Recap

Series: Sleepmode Year In Review

So 2021 happened. I was originally going to introduce this piece with a brief overview of the political situation under COVID-19 as a way to contrast how awful the year was with some personal levity, but the idea of jumping from “the far right is growing out of an anti-vaccine movement while governments continue to glibly allow their citizens to die from a preventable disease and ordinary people try pick up the slack where their leaders and fascist/fascist-adjacent neighbours have failed” to talking about the video games I played this past year felt like a bit too strong of a tonal whiplash.
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Create.

I used to be very insecure about my creative ability. This insecurity has long since passed, now that I’m older and generally more confident, but it’s something that I do reflect on from time to time. After all, when you’re surrounded by so many people who can do incredible things – visual artists, graphic designers, musicians, voice over artists and just about everything else you can think of – it’s hard not to feel like you need to “measure up” to them in some way, and equally hard not to feel discouraged or even depressed when you can’t “create” works of art the way the people around you are seemingly able to.
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New Players Are Not Stupid Pt.2

I think, fundamentally, engaging with any video game (but especially a fighting game) is akin to a conversation between developer and player. As a developer, your goal should be to confidently communicate your game’s mechanics to your player, and trust that the player will be able to keep up. There’s a delicate balance here, though – say too little, and your player won’t feel comfortable contributing to the conversation on their own.
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Exodus

Welcome. This is my new blog, hosted on Github Pages and running on Hugo (after much fighting with inscrutable software dev nerd shit). It’s here because I got sick of Wordpress being clunky and locking useful quality of life features behind a paywall. Hopefully this way you won’t need uBlock Origin so much. For what it’s worth, the old blog is not being deleted, just deprecated – I’ll be keeping all of my old writings there for archival purposes.
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