Vee! (Black Lives Matter!)

Shmups on the Saturn! Which ones? How about TechnoSoft's Blast Wind and Konami's TwinBee Yahho! Maybe more...

People are back from Frosty Faustings, so what better time to post?

What is Vortex Gallery?

Vortex Gallery (fka AnimEVO) is back with its second online event next weekend. Running from Feb 10-Mar 5, the event brings games old and new to the forefront. I've spent a lot of time in the FGC (nearly 4 years), most of it online, playing what I could find on Fightcade. I'm going to talk about those games, some of which you might not have heard of!

I've decided to split up these posts by the week, since registration closes in waves - on Feb 8th for the weekend of Feb 10-12th, etc.

Vortex Gallery enters its second week, so here's another post detailing the games you can join on Fightcade. If you're not familiar, Fightcade is a platform that lets people play arcade games online - 90% of the time, that's fighting games. This is why we're here.

Week 2 registration closes Feb 15th, with tournaments Feb 17-19th.

It's the third week of Vortex Gallery, the annual fighting game tournament that brings the most unlikely games together. This week is going to be a little short on Fightcade games. There's only 3 of them, and 2 of them are pretty personal to me, so let's get started.

Week 3 registration closes Feb 22nd, with tournaments Feb 24-26th.

I've been noticing a trend of people talking around things in their content warnings. "A certain rich asshole" "That wizard game" etc.

Please don't do this. This isn't TikTok you can say fuck shit die kill cunt on here without consequence and nobody is namesearching Elon Musk to argue with you about him.

The purpose of the content warning is so people can filter out the post! But using euphemisms you are evading those filters and preventing the tag muffling feature from working for people who have filters set up.

It's also just confusing. Sometimes I actually don't know what your euphemism refers to and so I actually don't know what I'm going to get when I open your post. I'd rather you write it in as explicit language as possible. "A photo of my cunt" is a better content warning than "A certain pink thing ;)"

Thank you.

As you might already be aware, the mode we're playing in the beta is a public arcade lobby similar to Arc's last few fighting games. Players make avatars and walk around in a virtual arcade. To start a match you either sit down at a virtual cabinet and wait for someone to join you, or you walk up to another player at a cabinet and challenge them.

(Players will be able to play completely alone in the full game, but the online beta is specifically to test the online multiplayer component, so that's what we get.)

It's just like the arcades of the old days, except these days this kind of arcade only really exists in Japan or in a retro collector's apartment. So it's fair to say the vast majority of players playing SF6 right now have never actually experienced this environment in real life.

As such, players have different ideas about how people should use the cabinets than, probably, the people who designed and implemented this mode. I find this very interesting.

In particular, players are divided on the informal etiquette of challenging another player. I saw one player loudly proclaim on the chat "TIP: cabinets are for players who want to practice! if you want to fight other players go into the matchmaking menu! don't interrupt players who are practicing!". By "players" the person here means "me"; there is no rule or etiquette like this, the person just wanted to practice alone in a beta that does not yet allow that. Another player asked if it was polite to challenge without asking first.

By the laws of the old arcade days, if you were in the building, you were there to fight. Players would often politely ask "hey, mind if I play?" but the understood answer in the early 2000s was "yes, sure, I'm so happy to have someone else to play this game against, I welcome this challenge gladly". You could say "no thanks", and maybe the other player would respect your wishes, but people kind of hated you for it. After all, you were probably hogging one of the only competition setups for many miles around. People made the trip, and they wanted to play.

(Big exception was Soul Calibur 2's single-player Conquest mode, which was extremely popular with players who grinded it out for hours on end like an MMORPG, placing umbrellas and coats on the second player joystick so nobody would interrupt them. Everyone hated these guys.)

Japanese arcade setups are doubles cabinets where you don't get to see the other player unless you peek across: in this and many other aspects, the design actually invites direct challenges. Japanese arcades will sometimes have designated single-player cabinets for certain fighting games, but it's uncommon.

It's fair to say that the designers of SF6's Battle Hub didn't even consider the idea that a player would want to just play alone. It's not a part of the environment that they were trying to simulate. But they're creating a simulacrum of that environment for home users who've never experienced that space, and for whom it probably isn't even relevant. They have totally different expectations.

This is a lot of words to say that SF6 probably should, along the way, add a Do Not Disturb option to Battle Hub. It is a feature I would personally never use, but it's clearly called for. There are going to be players who want to hang out, chat, and not actually fight other players. That's really weird, in arcade culture, but in a digital space there's really no reason not to accommodate.

Back in the day we had two Third Strike cabinets. Now we have infinity.