Wednesday Night Fights and Yomi

Every Wednesday in Los Angeles, California, there's a large gathering of fighting game players who compete in various games. This gathering was started by Alex Valle. You guys might not realize the significance of this event, so I'll try to put it in perspective.

Alex Valle has won too many tournaments to count, but in my opinion, the tournament win that started his long reign of Street Fighter Legend was his victory at B3 in 1996 in the game Street Fighter Alpha 2. This tournament was put on by Tom Cannon (founder of shoryuken.com) and Tony Cannon (creator of ggpo networking). It was a landmark event in the entire history of US fighting games, as it was the first time players from all over the country (and from Canada) really came together to face each other. Valle dramatically revealed his then-secret technique, now known as the Valle-CC, when he defeated another Street Fighter Legend: John Choi.

The reason I'm telling you any of that is to put it in perspective that Wednesday Night Fight events draw about 130 people each week, I hear, which is larger than the attendance of the entire B3 tournament. Every week! This event has more impact than just in Los Angeles, too. It's streamed so anyone in the world can watch, and most of the best Marvel vs. Capcom 3 players in the world just happen to live there and go to it. So I think this event is actually pretty key in advancing the level of play in MvC3 everywhere.

For these reasons, I'm proud to support the event as a sponsor, and I think tonight Mr. Valle and crew will be giving away a few copies of Yomi.

You can watch the stream tonight at 8:30pm, Pacific Time here: http://www.twitchtv.com/leveluplive
You can also follow the contest on Twitter:
@levelupseries
@alexvallesf4
Hashtag #WNF 

Cheaper International Shipping

Here's some great news, I can now do shipping of small items outside the US much more efficiently. "Small items" include Yomi 2-packs and also Flash Duel. Here are the huge shipping cost reductions for those items for non-US players:

Canada: $20 -> $7
UK: $35 -> $9
Australia / New Zealand: $40 -> $10

Pretty big improvement! And I get to pass it all on to you guys, effective immediately.

Yomi Online Rankings

We're trying out making online Yomi matches best of 3 instead of best of 1 in the free online version at www.fantasystrike.com. You can leave feedback about that here.

In this system, think of taking the opponent's like down to 0 as winning a "round" in a fighting game. So when press Quickmatch and find an opponent, you play best of 3 "rounds." You can't switch your character between rounds. After someone wins a "game" (meaning they won best of 3 rounds), you can get a rematch. If you rematch, the loser can switch his character, but the winner cannot, as is customary in fighting games. Rematching can be good to do for your own personal improvement, as it will let you get deeper into the nuances of playing against a particular opponent. If they are exploiting some bad habit of yours, you might never really figure that out if you don't play a longer set. Up to you though!

The main reason our system was 1 round before instead of 2-out-of-3 was just time. If it takes 15 minutes to play Yomi, you'd have to set aside 45 minutes to play a best of 3, which is unreasonably long for the default way to play the game. Looking at the data, an average "round" lasts between 8 and 9 minutes though. This is shorter than we expected. If you figure that half the time a best of 3 will go to 3 rounds and half the time it will end in two rounds, the average for a best of 3 set is 22.5 minutes or less, which is acceptable for us to try. The benefit of more rounds is that you have more time to get a read on the opponent and exploit their weaknesses, so it's a better test of skill.

Leaderboards

We're resetting the leaderboards now, because of this change. From now on, leaderboards will be showing people's perforamnce in best-of-3 situations, rather than best-of-1. Congratulations to garcia1000 for taking the top spot on the first season's leaderboard. Garcia's hobby is making statements that sound plausible, but that are actually false. Also he plays Lum and is a poker master in real life. (Those two things are plausible and actually true.)

Stats from Season 1

Here are the stats for ranked games (with mirror matches exclude) by character:

Midori	2238 / 4238  52.81%
Geiger	2358 / 4492  52.49%
DeGrey	2731 / 5257  51.95%
Lum	2202 / 4310  51.09%
Rook	2367 / 4689  50.48%
Grave	2516 / 4987  50.45%
Argagarg2592 / 5172  50.12%
Jaina	2503 / 5107  49.01%
Valerie 2486 / 5231  47.52%
Setsuki 2924 / 6436  45.43%

Yomi's balance has held up remarkably well, so we're very happy about it. It remains closer balanced than any known fighting game. What's interesting about these stats is that Midori is often ranked last in tier lists while Grave is often ranked first. Grave doesn't even crack the top half of the chart here though, and Midori is #1. That said, all these percentages are very close anyway.

Now let's look at those stats ranked by popularity instead of by win-rate:

Click to read more ...

The Wii U

Some people seem to hate on Nintendo's concept for Wii U, while others are excited. I think the skepticism is understandable because it's hard for people to imagine a new thing that's different from current things. I still am reeling from people on my forums who "couldn't imagine how the Apple iPad could be of any use," and now it's created a new category of device that may eclipse PCs. The gaming world in general couldn't really imagine the Wii catching on (what's with the weird remote and lack of power??), but it dominated for years. Even the *balance board* accessory outsold the entire PS3 platform, last time I checked. So perhaps its best to look at some history, first.

Nintendo's History

Nintendo has always made good games, but they've also always used a hardware strategy that sets them up for success. (How the hell they make such consistently good games, regardless of hardware, is beyond the scope of my post, but an interesting question, too). Their strategy has been to make new "verbs" and then design games for those verbs. This is actually their term, though I forget if it was Miyamoto or another Nintendo representative who used that term. What they mean is their hardware gives players a new way to interact with games, and so Nintendo can offer new experiences.

If you think back to E3 several years ago, Nintendo boldly announced "We won't be announcing the controller for the Wii at E3." Yes, they actually announced that they would not announce something, and that made news. Why would they not announce the controller? Miyamoto explained that Nintendo was the first system to have a d-pad, and now that's standard. They were the first to have rumble. They were the first to have an analog stick. I think there were other firsts in there somewhere too, but the rest of the industry copies them and they wanted even more of a headstart on the Wii, which is fair enough. We now know that the secret at the time was that they were the first to bring motion control to consoles and the mainstream.

Iwata's Promise

In 2006 at the Game Developer's Conference, Nintendo's President Iwata addressed a packed auditorium about the future of Nintendo. At events like this, you can kind of feel the tenor of the room, if people are angry or bored or whatever else. In that room, the feeling was excitement and skepticism. Iwata's story of the future was exciting but, I think many (including me) thought it was kind of a fairy tale.

Iwata told a story about a company who was doing well and top of their industry, but then another company came along and took their crown. It was about Nintendo losing to Sony, remember that's what happened during the days of PS2. The punch line is that his story was really about Pepsi losing to Coke. Pepsi found itself on the #2 end of the cola wars, and Pepsi's strategy then, he said, is exactly what Nintendo's will be now (in 2006). Rather than sink more money into fighting Coke on the same battlefield, they diversified. Pepsico then created the #1 selling bottled water, the #1 selling sports drink, the #1 selling energy drink, and several other categories. They were fighting on a battlefield that Coke didn't even know they were supposed to care about.

The DS, he told us, is this kind of disruptive

Click to read more ...

Yomi and Puzzle Strike, back in stock

That was a pretty painfully long wait to get more Yomi and Puzzle Stike, but the wait is finally over. The games are here and ready. Also, all pre-ordres / backorders have now shipped, to everyone who ordered anywhere in the world! Phew!

As always, you can get my card games from www.sirlingames.com if you want to buy online (also at Amazon in the US). They'll ship right away now that they're actually in stock. Or, you can try your local game stores anywhere in the world. If your game store doesn't have my games, you either tell them to contact Dan at Salute@GameSalute.com or you can tell him about your favorite store yourself.

Thanks to everyone, and your orders are on the way right now, if you haven't gotten them already.