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A quick 8-minute update on…

It’s too early to draw any conclusions about Rivals 2, save one: whether you came from Melee, Ultimate, NASB 2, Slap City, or are just picking up a platfighter for the first time, everyone’s giving it a try. At time of writing this intro (the 25th), it’s the second highest trending game on SteamDB:

https://steamdb.info/app/2217000/charts

As I said last week, people are going to leave the game. Likewise, we’re not all going to be playing on the same days. You might be one of the 11,000 players who showed up on opening night, but have had to work horrendous hours the rest of the week because the retail gods demand your sacrifice. A net loss in active users at the same time on different days does not mean the game is dead. Far from it.

One thing the Rivals series has always excelled at is its balancing simplicity with rich character expression. That is, combined with the game’s physics, every character’s complex enough that individual players can develop their own unique playstyles. In a similar vain, even if you’re not an expert, the game has its ways of making you feel like the combo you just pulled was sick nasty.

Look, you can be stuck in disadvantage for thirty years in this game, but it only takes one mistake from the opponent for you to do the same to them. They’re more afraid of dropping their combo and resetting to neutral than you are of losing a stock early. Besides which, if you’re a big body main like me, being combo food just means your real stock begins at 80%.

I’ve been posting a LOT of clips on Mastodon since last Wednesday, and to go with them, here’s a couple of things that I’ve reflected on in-between.

KRAGGS TOGETHER STRONG (permalink)

When BossHog opened the Rivals UKIE guild, he also invited everyone to ask him questions about Rivals 2. He wants this game to catch on, and I see his vision. What I didn’t see is just how many players slipped into his DMs. I took the invite to mean we could ask him anything; what he really meant was questions you couldn’t an answer for from anyone else.

“Should I ban Hodojo as Kragg?” Is a question I really could’ve asked to the… checks notes TWENTY-EIGHT other Kraggs:

What I’m exposing myself for is an epistemological mistake. Going to the best player I knew first contradicts what I believe about labbing in general, which is that anyone can get involved:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again/

If I’d asked this to the other Kraggs, regardless of their skills, and got us to pool our knowledge together, then we’d have built a cohesive hypothesis to test. It’s half the reason we have character-specific guilds in the first place (even if they’re host to smouldering takes).

Here’s what I’ve got so far: based on what I know about triplats and superheavies in Ultimate, Kragg’s going to be de-shelled like a pistachio at the top of the screen when juggled. On the other hand, his rock can be put under those platforms as an obstacle. Unless it’s the mirror match, they can either hit it, or leave it be. Consider, also, that Kragg is the only character who can mixup their platform tech chase with a grab from below.

Kragg can exploit, and be exploited by, Hodojo’s platforms; we support this hypothesis by posting clips in support of its arguments; someone in the lab tests this to show how it can be repeated, and what the counterplay might be. That’s how one labs.

Reviewing Replays (permalink)

There’s another thing I’d like to own up to: I did not review any Ultimate VODs with my friends. Not even my own replays. Toughing it out on my own, VOD review became an abstract kind of torture, where I found myself ramming my head against a brick wall. I believed I was doing everything you had to do to improve, and as it turns out, I wasn’t.

Neuroscientists have a name when we try to hammer round pegs into square holes and can’t see other possibilities – einstellung:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect

This being accustomed to a method of practice that didn’t work was one of the things that put me off playing any platfighters for so long (besides no-lifing my Honours project). When I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, I fuuuuuuuucking hated myself.

During the demo, my ass turned up on a silver platter by the hand of a player known only as, ‘Lose Yourself.’ The sort of player who gives you the ol’ “High five! Down low! Too slow!” routine, but turns your skin inside out before they finish; Dan Fornace rolled their ass back to my present, because their playstyle reeked of a lost life of success and notoriety.

An hour I spent scrubbing through those replays. Their Zetterburn and Fleet just slapped buttons in my face, and I tried to talk out what I could’ve done instead, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. This was a problem that needed two brains to solve, and there really was only one player who knew my mindset better than I did.

Razzle was audience to perhaps some of the shittiest, self-flagellating takes I have ever had about a video game. Ultimate, of course. We once had an ‘argument’ where I, the undefeated grandmaster of Socratic dialogue, dismissed Dedede’s inability to deal with Joker’s gun in neutral because really, we know nothing. Never mind the fact that Razzle had played Sho that weekend, the best Joker in the country at the time. In a word: “Sorry, mate, your eyes aren’t good enough.”

Regardless of my bad takes, he stuck by me. I often reflect on the fact that I’m now as old as he was when he first met me. Suffice it to say we’ve both come a ways since then. Razzle’s a pretty good Kragg, too. He al-RIGHT, I GUESS. Wanna know what my problem was? Not enough aerial Down B at ledge. I never tried to cash out on my opponent’s DI with a spike that could end the stock then and there. If your opponent is in disadvantage, there’s less risk in chasing them using your pillar.

“That’s your homework for me,” he said.

My smile muscles were aching a little. I’d never wanted to do so much homework before that moment in my life. For the next 30 minutes after that call, I did nothing but practice catching jumps with Kragg’s Bair and following it up with Down B. I still don’t land it every time, but I’m more aware of the situations where I could take stocks with Down B. That’s what matters.

Doing VOD review with a friend helps you break out of einstellung. While a lot of competitive gaming advice is presented in terms of bettering our brains when they’re on autopilot, VOD review reveals something else about our brains that neuroscientists understate: human thought is dialogic. Even on our own, we analyse our games in a sort of dialogue. But it’s more fun when there’s another human being to go back and forth with.

So, yeah, in a word: it felt nice to come to my friend with a problem, and have him show me what to do.

Rivals 2 Runs on Bazzite… (permalink)

…Or does it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN25ghkfgQA

My parents, despite having an all-singing, all-dancing 4K smart TV, still prefer to watch in standard definition. Graphical fidelity is not on their list of killer features in the slightest. They don’t need to count all the pores on Lucrezia Millarini’s nose, or all the beads of sweat shed on the football pitch. 4K is as much a gimmick in this house as as 3DTV ever was.

I find myself disagreeing with them 99% of the time, but when that brief period comes that we agree, it’s when I’m tweaking graphics settings just so I can get a game to run at 60fps. I had to do it with Persona 3 Reload, and am once again having to do it for Rivals 2.

Riddle me this – here’s a Beelink SER5 5800H, the same mini PC that I saw last week:

https://brologue.net/2024/10/18/players-make-the-game/

https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser5-max-5800h

I bought one, set it up, and tried to run Rivals… Only for it to barely squeak out 55 fps on the lowest graphics settings. Playing Forsburn? Those smoke clouds shave off ten frames ALONE. I wouldn’t be so tormented if I didn’t have a story from an owner of a weaker model, who managed to get the game to run on its defaults at a constant 60. You’d think the machine with the higher specs would do a better job, no?

I really hope this isn’t a Linux thing. I installed Bazzite to exorcise the Windows 11 from this machine. I’m not giving Microsoft a crumb more than they’re entitled to (The answer to ‘how much personal information my corporate vassals should keep about me’ is ideally, ‘zero,’1):

https://brologue.net/2023/11/06/windows-10-end-of-life-and-what-comes-next/

Then again, we didn’t really establish a testing methodology to verify if their claims were true. The game is new, and for how much gaming on Linux has caught up with Windows, waiting for compatibility fixes is still a major caveat. Until then, I suppose I’ll keep plugging away at any quick fixes I find:

https://rivals-of-aether-ii-launch.nolt.io/12

Clip Dump (permalink)

Finally, a lightning round of all the clips I’ve posted, in reverse chronological order, and an emoji for flair:

  1. h/t Cory Doctorow – https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/20/water-also-wet/#marking-their-own-homework
    > “Surely the right amount of toxic, nonconsensually harvested data on the public that should be retained by corporations is zero:
    > https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction
    ↩︎
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