The Masked Carnie

Way to show us how much time we've wasted, Microsoft. Even better, way to put it in terms of other massive wastes of time.

My ego has finally healed up enough that I can talk about what happened Saturday. I attended a Super Street Fighter 4 tournament that day, hoping to use it as a first step into professional play. Now that I don't have a job, I need to find some way of making income, and I've improved tremendously in my gameplay since the last tournament. If I could win this thing, I would take that as a sign that I absolutely should pursue it seriously. Obviously, that didn't happen. I still can't completely discount it, but something happened to me that hit so hard it'll be a while before I even feel like I can pick up that controller again. I've been avoiding my Xbox for everything but DVDs since.

I am thoroughly bad at playing politics. I am too honest of a person to do that and people see right through me. Unfortunately, I am not playing with people who have an identical mindset to my own, and people will take dick moves personally. I have finally settled on that reality and have started to see how political maneuvering can work for me. Some games seem to rely on it, so despite how unreliable it is, it's still a tool to be used under the Playing to Win philosophy.

Apparently, there's an article in Game Informer talking about not only Capcom Vs. Namco, but also a separate title of Namco Vs. Capcom. One would use the SF4 engine, the other would use the Tekken 6 engine. I already made a comment earlier about how I generally hate the Vs. series, but I want to be more unbiased on this specific issue. Fortunately, anything I'm saying here is purely speculation, because this hasn't even been officially announced yet, let alone any real gameplay aspects.

Many people who know me already know that I have a thing against Capcom's Vs. series. Personally, the reason I see for them selling well is simply that people love crossovers, then the high-execution pros love the skill it takes to get the best combos involved. This is actually a good strategy in terms of sales, satisfying the core and the casual audience simultaneously. However, these games universally go too far and thus make what I consider to be flaws in their game design. Although my primary issue is the infinite combos they all have, my issue today has more to do with the level of customization they all have.

One of the tenets of Playing to Win is that not only do you do whatever is necessary to win, it can actually be advantageous to sometimes take bad strategies because your enemies won't see them coming. I had an opportunity to exercise this yesterday in Chaos in the Old World. Khorne generally wins by letting his advancement dial get run up, killing anything standing near him. He doesn't usually care about the score track except to consider who's ready to explode there. Well, I had that ridiculous opportunity to actually win by points, and I did so in a rather awesome way.

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As promised, I have a review for this Dominion game written for those who are not already familiar with the game. The popular opinion here is that this game is ideally played with 3 or 4 players, but I've only ever had a chance for a 2-player game once. I cannot honestly say it's bad to go 2-players with this level of experience, particularly because I do enjoy personal games. The essential idea is that you have a deck of cards that is set a certain way, and you have to purchase more cards for the deck (game money, not real money) using the coins in your existing deck to improve it. More powerful cards are worth more money. The end goal is to purchase victory point cards which, for the most part, offer little to no value in assisting your gameplay.

I'll get to reviewing this game in a later post. For right now, I think I've played enough Dominion games to understand a few principles. I've mostly figured things out as I was writing them, but I've stumbled upon 3 primary deck focuses: money, actions (draw), and production (actions generating things for you).

I'm in need of income. I have some money after selling some Magic cards, and I've decided that I'm gonna use it to invest in something I know I can do well: my gaming. I heard of Virgin Games through HLN's Clark Howard, and it's essentially where people can bet on games they play. Currently, it's all sports games + Halo and ModNation. In their list of games, they show a silhouette of Ryu in place of where Super Street Fighter 4 obviously will be. Once that takes place, I will sign up and see if I can make some money. I need to put my skills to use. There's certainly no guarantee of anything, but it's about time I took a risk like this with something to back it up.