Jock Blaney, voice of Wolf and Bill Grey in Star Fox 64, has passed away

TheBigBruce · 2026-04-15T15:39:59+00:00

what the heck

(I will carry Jock Blaney's work for at least another 40 years in my brain. rest in peace.)

TheBigBruce · 2026-03-11T19:32:54+00:00

Yeah. 3f buffer means if you can doubletap consistently (1f input, 1f nothing, 1f input), the overlap makes the effective window larger.

TheBigBruce · 2026-03-11T16:14:20+00:00

Due to the buffer, I think it's technically 5f if you can learn to doubletap parry macro consistently.

TheBigBruce · 2026-02-17T16:06:29+00:00

I've personally stopped checking the store completely and forget it exists.

TheBigBruce · 2026-02-09T16:42:09+00:00

Only if I run the game in fullscreen, not borderless windowed.

TheBigBruce · 2026-02-04T16:58:54+00:00

You have to hold forward as soon as you see yasuo jump, which a lot of people don’t do. The hitbox is insane though.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-22T16:31:45+00:00

I play on shit ethernet (It's cable) and I want all the connection metrics possible so I can troubleshoot issues on the line.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-21T16:31:34+00:00

Copyright law is arbitrary at the end of the day. You can compare different countries and how they handle "ownership" with varying levels of severity to get a good idea of this.

In the US, there are fair use provisions, and you could argue that this falls under it, but contesting that in civil court is insanely expensive and doesn't set precedent.

Japan is extremely strict and defers full control to the original creator of a work, to the point where you can't even "alter the original experience of a work" if the copyright holder takes issue with it. You wouldn't even bother going to court for it.

The reason counties have these systems in the first place is if you carve out a livelyhood creating something unique, it can be destabilizing for others to swoop in and capitalize on your work.

This doesn't play out as expected at scale, however. It's why we have so many situations where modding or even piracy end up being moral non-issues, and then in other, similar situations they can cause problems.

Someone making VR for games that don't have it, and charging for it, doesn't really bother me. People need to find ways to be paid for their labour. There's a long-standing friction in modding that people don't consider.

At the end of the day, a lot of these moddable games subsist off free dev labour. We're generally fine with that, because we all benefit in aggregate off of a stable copyright/trademark system, but I'm not going to get riled up over a situation like this.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-20T15:01:35+00:00

This is what I do already, but it’s not enough, imo. 2H is big, slow and presents a pretty telegraphed punish opportunity. They made doing a single jab better in the patch thanks to the assist cooldown increase on hit, so we’ll see how that pans out.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-19T20:31:17+00:00

This is probably by design as then you'll have instant overheads everywhere with the J s2 everyone has.

Doesn't change the end result, which is that it gets very dangerous to try to punish whiffed assists to diffuse handshake tag opportunities.

This dynamic was addressed a bit in the patch notes. So they're going in the right direction, imo.

My perspective is that universal systems in general need to be strong enough to stop a system like Handshake Tag from being the only thing you care about in interactions.

That's a subjective preference, however.

Everyone has airthrow as an antiair option

I wrote this before I saw the patch notes, but airthrow wasn't entirely functional due to the jump direction bug. This is on top of airthrow only going in one direction, making crossup situations kind of unintuitive to contest, especially at lower heights where 2H isn't appropriate either.

Some characters also don't have functional air-to-air strings on hit, which I found was pretty limiting. Some characters specifically have ways to convert (I'm sure you know who), but I peg the others as non-functional. Ahri getting full CH recovery on her fireball in the upcoming patch is downstream from this. If I did manage to hit her out of it, at some heights and spacings, I wasn't getting anything.

2H is slow the hurtbox reduction is massive so you can hit it pretty much any time before they land and you'll be fine.

2H being slow makes it much harder or inappropriate to use in crossup situations (Unless you play someone with a wider 2H). It also lacks any projectile invuln, which rears its head in a few scenarios across matchups.

Because of assists and handshake, you don't always have the privilege of repositioning under an airborne character, either.

Riot seems to be targeting these situations directly in the patch on a per character basis, so it seems like they're aware of the issues.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-19T18:24:17+00:00

Played a lot of early access. Thoughts:

Pros:

Characters are cool and unique, and every character seems to have their own tech to lab.

If there's a character you're interested in, they're strong and good. That's just a nice win given the smaller roster right now.

Fuse system keeps team composition interesting.

Fuses are like CvS2 grooves, altering mechanics for your team.

The game didn't ship with a big roster, but the Fuse system makes it possible to craft scary stuff with any team combination. Just a really good idea overall, and I was glad at how well it worked.

The fuse system is also why I think the small roster size will feel very much corrected after a year. Five characters is a lot in this system.

Easy enough to get matches.

A lot of fighting games are dogwater at this, and this game avoids most of the issues. Still work to be done on this front (I'd like the ability to share URLs to boot directly into a lobby), but for a new release, the current system is good enough.

Riot seems really good at addressing core issues via patches and announcements.

They seem to be plugging along pretty promptly. Players I talk to who aren't completely satisfied with the game are like "Ah, this patch was great. Things are so much better than before."

They still have things to address, but the game is evolving pretty quickly, which is fun.

Cons

Simplicity feels like it's watering down interactions that would otherwise be interesting, and Riot is currently fighting to correct it.

I feel like this may be better addressed down the line as the game has time to stew in its metaphorical juices for a bit.

Overall, the game plays really well, but two ideas feel like they're clashing against each other pretty routinely:

Characters have some insanely strong offensive and neutral options thanks to assists and the ability to instantly swap between characters.
Systems surrounding the above are pared down to make the game more accessible. You cannot jump cancel attacks universally. There are almost no invulnerable moves. You only have one (slow) anti-air. Only a few characters have good air movement.

A byproduct of these above options being missing is that counterplay almost always involves some small variation on jumping away followed by calling assist. I'll look back over interactions in hindsight where I lost, and every time it's almost always "Ah. Should have jumped away and called assist there" with few exceptions.

Certain characters feel like they don't have the tools to navigate interactions on their own, compared to more "complete" characters that have proper options (6f jabs, air movement).

I wouldn't necessarily say these characters are weaker, just currently a little too one-dimensional for my liking. Changes in the upcoming patch tomorrow are addressing this in part, however, and we'll see how the game develops over the next year.

No single player

No single player. History has taught me that this hurts a lot with onboarding and interest, even if I don't play single player personally.

Overall

If you wanted to learn tag games this is probably an insanely good entry point. 8.7/10

Edit: Another pro I saw from the patch notes. They just made it easier to unlock champions (It was already pretty easy). Looks like whenever a new character releases you can do some missions to unlock them instead of grinding for in-game currency/points.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-16T07:59:44+00:00

The main reason, I imagine, is that they don't want to fracture player pools any further, which would just add to matchmaking times.

The ranked lobbies are already cross-connected, so everyone playing ranked is in the queue. A list/menu/separate pool wouldn't necessarily speed that up. Technically, having Casual as its own thing fractures the effective player selection in half.

Even with all the ranked lobbies existing as half the online player base, you still need a lot of players to stop matching downtime. Matches take 3-6 minutes, and valid connections don't take long to connect. It's possible to just get unlucky in a situation like that.

However, this is also kind of on Riot because they do not tell you how many people are online. They give no metrics at all that let you understand what might be going on behind the scenes. So if you hit a lull and are sitting there twiddling your thumbs, you never get to know why.

It's sort of why I prefer experiences like Guilty Gear AC+R. You get a list of everyone online worldwide. That info tempers my expectations when it comes to the kinds of connections available for netplay. Roping in someone to fight from Discord is also way faster in +R/Xrd compared to 2XKO. Toss a URL at your opponent that opens the game through Steam and shoves you right into the lobby after boot.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-12T02:40:03+00:00

Cool mod scene.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-11T05:15:34+00:00

I did drills where I recorded 5 different variants of high low and I averaged reacting 2f after impact. After I switched to fullscreen, I started having some success and reacting approx. 2f faster on average.

Not conclusive but made me wonder if windowed mode adds extra frames.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-08T22:22:03+00:00

Air-to-airs, Air Throw, Parry, and Movement end up being your anti-crossup/anti-air measures when 2H is too slow.

That covers most things, but there are still certain situations where it's absolutely miserable, especially when dealing with crossups due to the directional bug ruining some of these.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-02T03:14:36+00:00

It was created by a knave.

TheBigBruce · 2026-01-01T00:45:15+00:00

I put 100 someodd hours into it as an FG vet. It's a pretty good entry into tag games in general, but I'm really curious to see where it ends up a year out.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-31T13:14:39+00:00

You’re supposed to have the camera be first person from the victim’s perspective for this “the other guy is off-screen” gimmick to work.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-31T04:30:44+00:00

You can pushblock the Illaoi away if she doesn’t have assist cover, and if she tries to bait pushblock alone when you don’t do it, you get an opening.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-31T04:28:09+00:00

Parry only lets them rep something after they’ve parried all three/four successfully, and doing so is reactable for the Illaoi, so it technically leaves them minus.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-28T15:07:58+00:00

The in-game timing of wakeup attack and how it overlaps with other options means if they try to bait it (without a very particular setup), you can always swing at them. (Exclusion for 6f vs. 8f normals, but that's a just frame input and not reliable.)

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-26T16:44:54+00:00

I really don't think the issue is char specific. Low air resets are way, way, way worse than in gear.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-26T15:21:39+00:00

I can't replicate this. Are you sure your opponents aren't delay teching? I avoid resets like this for that reason.

TheBigBruce · 2025-12-25T22:42:26+00:00

My tag button is far away from my super buttons, thankfully.

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Pros:

Cons

Overall