Vecderg

Netcode Warriors is an upcoming fighting game aiming to be the first true competitive arena fighter! i haven't been able to talk about it since it's been under NDA, but the team behind this game is incredibly talented and i've been very honored to be able to work on it. we have characters designed by Digimon designer legends, and we'll be working to make something very special.

if you wishlist it on Steam or spread the word in any way, it'd be very much appreciated!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2823570/Netcode_Warriors/
Twitter: https://x.com/NetcodeWarriors/status/1755705711764357607

**Netcode Warriors has been in the works for much more than 1.5 years, that's just when i was hired lol

lemme get this out upfront: i LOVE leo and they're one of my favorite tekken characters, both design-wise and playstyle-wise. but i was also shocked to see them revealed so early for tekken 8.

leo is roughly the 31st most played character in tekken 7 (https://www.reddit.com/r/Tekken/comments/xlyvki/tekken_7_season_4_pc_ranked_leaderboard/), which puts them in the bottom 50%, only a few spots above gigas!! they were also consistently going down in popularity, and only jumped up after the last patch gave them buffs.

while i love leo's design and especially their new outfit, i can't help but think about how it's objectively bad character design. as the sole german representative, does leo represent their country well? does their background of being a spelunker reflect in the way they dress? does their personality and fighting style weigh in how they carry themselves?

there are certain moments in games that when invoked, take the reader back to the moment they first experienced it. the baby Metroid; Snake's ladder climb; and perhaps most memorable of all, the Spelunker elevator.

what do you mean "shut up dork"? YOU know what i'm talking about:

this moment comes literally 2 seconds after pressing start to begin the game. years of precedent tell you that your character can clear a 1 millimeter gap by simply walking over it, but Spelunker is here to remove the comforting lies you were told: welcome to the real world motherfucker. EVERYONE dies here their first time playing, there are no exceptions.

spelunker is a legendary kusoge (crap game) for a lot of reasons: the repetitive and silly BGM, the brutal difficulty and the Spelunker himself, one of the most fragile and inept video game protagonists i've ever seen in my life. there's an often-repeated bit of trivia that Spelunker was such a cultural touchstone in Japan that it spawned the expression "Spelunker's constitution", typically referring to athletes who are easily injured by trivial things.

SO, you fall off the fucking elevator. you're probably going to do it again in about one second because upon death, Spelunker will respawn quickly and without fanfare at the very edge of the platform he fell off of, making it hilariously easy to repeat fatal mistakes once or even twice more.

when Spelunker jumps, he's locked into the height and trajectory so if you made a positioning mistake there is no mid-air correction a la Super Mario. if he falls roughly 4/5ths his height, he dies instantly, and you don't even get the catharsis of seeing him hit the ground! he just freezes in midair like an idiot. if a bat shits on him, he dies. if he sets off fireworks (to scare bats) and they fall back onto him, he dies. if he uses his gun to defeat a ghost his air supply plummets (guess what happens when it runs out). he dies a lot

for these reasons and more Spelunker is known as a kusoge and the patron saint of the bargain bin in Japan. calling it such is funny but i just don't agree with it. Spelunker is not a bad game, it's a deliberate game. it runs on harsh but internally consistent rules that are reinforced clearly and early; as early as the first couple of seconds. is Ghouls and Ghosts a bad game for its bottomless pits and locked-in jump trajectory? how about Castlevania?

Spelunker is fun okay! it's just difficult, unorthodox and a little absurd. you can certainly not like it, but it's learnable and rewarding and honestly thrilling once you're just good enough to start blazing through the obstacles while still dealing with the randomly appearing ghosts and constantly depleting air supply. i urge you to give it a fair shake and you might fall in love with it; or, try another game commonly considered to be bad! there's something redeeming in almost any game.

also, if there's an unpopular or infamous game you love please tell me what you love about it!

i have to give them credit for the impressive cruelty of bouncing you 10 feet just for tapping your toe against a rock though...but at least it happens *consistently* 😎

(image source: The Prisoner Apple II manual)

i think it's worth reiterating that there's a difference between kusoge (derogatory) and kusoge (subculture). the latter is actually closer to how people are seeking for unorthodox gameplay and being extremely amused/charmed by it.

titles like Atlantis no Nazo fascinate people within the kusoge subculture because they're doing something entirely different. they're not doing Good Game Design. one of the reasons i'm pretty sure the old avgn was popular on nico is because they inspired people to look into the kusoge subculture: NES games like Silver Surfer are unique for how difficult and "unfair" they can be, so they provide experiences that can't be really found anywhere else.

it's only rather recently that this idea of "masochistic" and jank gameplay is legible to mainstream gamers (thanks Dark Souls but also you're not that jank). people are too subscribed to game design concepts like FLOW that folks only see the "bad" and "outdated" in kusoge (subculture).

much of why i'm inside this subculture is because i reject what's considered "textbook standard". the most interesting games are the ones that go for the more negative emotions that mainstream games today avoid. the kusoge i enjoy are the ones that violate norms because it doesn't care or even recognize; it puts me into a spot and makes me rethink what makes for fun game experiences. i call any game "kusoge (subculture)" if it's able to surprise me.

you could say i read kuso as surprise or shock, so how does it look like? in games like The Prisoner for the apple ii, it could mean having entirely different controls when you're inside the room versus the world map. in 9:05 by adam cadre, the text parser is hiccuping with most inputs you put in because it's simulating the protagonist's state of mind. in Viscera Cleanup Detail, the bugs and physics trouble your cleaning up of bloody space stations and make for interesting stories. in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., shooting accurately is a privilege. in Pathologic, you are terrorized by how hungry and tired your character can be from simply walking around town.

and it doesn't have to be exactly mechanical too. in the Caligula series, that could mean having storylines that go into taboos like fatshaming and gender dysphoria. in Romancing SaGa 2, it is accepting your characters will die in order to pass down the skills and stats to the next people; by contrast, Venus and Braves is about you as an immortal who must keep fighting for 1,00 years, attending the graves of your soldiers who lived and died by you, and wondering when you'll be out of the game because it's such a miserable experience.

all of these games have been labeled kusoge in one way or another for not meeting "appropriate" standards for game design. their volatility is what's so exciting about games. if you don't feel uncomfortable playing a game, you aren't going to remember this experience -- a purely comfortable game is simply Entertainment: fun and forgettable.

even the more interesting cozy games have discomforting vibes at random times. animal crossing n64/gc lol.

anyway, kusoge is cool and i'm always looking for them. bye.

spelunker (nes) is excellent, very inspiring game. i 1cced it because i'm cool, it's easier than you might expect once you get accustomed to rope jumping

while kastel is right about there being a subculture that uses "kusoge" positively, i kind of wish people would just say they think these games are good and interesting without also calling them "shit games" or whatever. people who genuinely like my games often struggle to describe them without basically saying something like "it's bad game design but done on purpose"

i'm joining the group that sees "kusoge" as a positive term because i've only ever seen it used positively, but that could be because i've mainly heard it from the side of the fighting game community. the most recent fighting kusoge i played is the legendary Ultra Fight Da! Kyanta 2, and it was an incredible experience

the opening starts off with badly scaled PNGs flying across the screen as the most bizarre synths blast your ears for an entire minute straight. random sprites are thrown on screen, the character designs look like they were made 20 years ago in exactly 5 minutes, and incomprehensible text flies across the screen. this is the game you're playing!

starting up the game isn't much better, since every single time you press a menu button it sounds like someone's screaming. in-game, characters will fly across the screen, have full-screen projectiles, and every single sound effect was probably made in a torture chamber. the animations look awful, the attacks are incomprehensible, and there are absolutely 0 good color choices in the game. by basically every definition, this is undoubtably a kusoge.

but it's aaalso really really funny!! the game was probably designed through irony, but it's also just ACTUALLY FUN TO PLAY! the movesets are surprisingly simple so it's easy to get into, and pressing literally any button causes something funny to happen. there are entire tournaments for this game!!

i played it with a friend for like 2 hours straight and we had the time of our lives, then we both immediately uninstalled it because it was really overwhelming. but really, i think when most fighting game players hear "kusoge" they understand it as "broken and silly, but still silly fun" which is something that i think a lot of fighting games need every now and then.

I really like seeing longposts on random hobbies on Cohost, so I'm throwing in one of my big specialties!

I've made fighting game guides for years (though mainly for Smash), watched guides for longer, and played fighting games for even longer than that. Tekken, Smash Bros, Street Fighter, a bit of TFH, KoF, etc. It's one of my biggest passions, so it's important to me that I get as many people into fighting games as possible... but everyone's scared of them!! They say that fighting games are really complicated and confusing and difficult.

...and they're right! But they don't have to be.

The repeating pattern I found in fighting game guides is that on paper, 90% of the concepts are extremely simple. Like, way too simple. Spacing is just "move your character so you're in a good position." Poking is just "use quick attacks to pressure the opponent safely." Conditioning is "do this one thing, but when they don't expect it, do this other thing."

These are the actual important things you're supposed to learn, but most people never even get to the good part because fighting games make everything complicated upfront! Spacing is hard not because the concept is hard, but because in modern fighting games you have to space using dashes and airdashes and korean backdashes or else everyone will run circles around you.

Fighting games have this weird thing that I haven't seen in any other genre where the games STARTED complicated and CONTINUE to keep getting more complicated. ¹ Usually a genre will start with a really simple first game, and then people will build on the mechanics or make spin-offs. It's like if instead of Super Mario Bros. kicking off the platformer genre, it was the original Mega Man, and every platformer afterwards just gave him increasingly complicated and more difficult movesets, and nobody ever made a platformer that was "just run and jump." ²

Recently, fighting games have made efforts to simplify things for newcomers, but in my opinion, they're still too difficult for beginners. Them's Fightin' Herds is an AMAZING fighting game with a great tutorial and great mechanics, which are relatively simplified, but to a fighting game outsider it'd still be very intimidating. All characters require motion/charge inputs, combos are very input-heavy, and there's many systems that have to be figured out before you'll be even remotely competent. Many other fighting games have included some options like special move shortcuts, but they mostly feel like band-aid solutions.

Fighting games are cool when you have to make quick, difficult decisions. Fighting games are cool when you get into the opponent's head and read them like a book. Fighting games are cool when you land the Falcon Punch when you DEFINITELY shouldn't have. But a lot of fighting games nowadays feel like they want to put all their eggs into the Combo basket, which IMO is not what defines fighting games.

Which to be clear, I LOVE a lot of modern fighting games, and I love doing big combos and pulling off complicated inputs, and this isn't meant to be me bashing on them. I just want more people to realize that fighting games are MORE than just combos and pressing lots of buttons, because fighting games can exist without those, and if developers realized that too, then maybe we'd have more people playing fighting games.

...OK, I've gotten this far without doing a self plug, I'm obliged to mention DracoFighter now.

DracoFighter was a big experiment, because I wanted to PROVE that everything I just said was true. The game had simplified movesets, simplified inputs, clear decision-making, shorter combos.... all I had to do was pass it onto beginners to see if it'd work. And it did!

I've given the game to people afraid of the genre, I've given it to literal children, and they GET the game in a very short amount of time. Concepts like spacing, timing mixups, weighing risk/reward -- it comes naturally to people when they're not forced to watch a combo cutscene 2 seconds into their first match.

And that's because fighting games are simple! Really! There are very few other PvP genres that get as simple as "beat up the other guy, but don't let them beat you up." I just wish more developers would realize that. I consider DracoFighter to be far from the perfect solution, but I'll keep working until we get something close.

reading back I'm not 100% sure what a good takeaway from this ramble is but i hope it resonates with someone lol, these are big thoughts i've had about the genre for a while and it might be an unpopular opinion, but it's something i've wanted to put into longform for a while now regardless

¹ Street Fighter II is what I would consider the "Mario" of fighting games because, while technically not the first fighting game, it's what most modern fighting games are based on. Whether it's Complicated is a bit debatable, but considering nobody wants to play it with me, I think it's pretty beginner unfriendly. Six attack buttons, multiple motion inputs for every character, special cancelling combos, punishing disadvantage states, etc. mostly became the NORM for future games rather than something to be left behind as "outdated arcade design."

I find that pretty uncommon, but there might be some contenders for genres that had something similar. Metroidvanias are the only ones that comes to mind, because by its nature it kind of has to be complicated, but there's definitely been simple metroidvanias + afaik the genre hasn't gotten markedly more complicated.

² There are a good number of contenders for this! Divekick and Footsies are the main ones that come to mind, but I personally consider the first to be a spin-off and the second to not be comparable to a full fighting game. Fantasy Strike is the closest thing to what I was looking for, but, uh, apparently it's a controversial game now?

As a side note, spin-offs of fighting games are the best things to happen to the genre IMO. It's a relatively stagnant genre, but games like Smash, Lethal League, and Yomi Hustle really stretch it to its limits and are VERY worth trying even for non-FG peeps.