missingno

A game can be fun in spite of balance. MvC2 is a beloved game even with its six character meta. But when there's room for improvement, and the internet now makes improvement possible, devs should take the opportunity to improve as much as they can.

Also, speaking of Tekken 5 - are you talking about the initial arcade release, the rebalanced console port, the "5.1" arcade rerelease, or Dark Resurrection? Because those totally count as patches.

Normally games shouldn't allow players on different versions to connect to each other. Version checks may be something devs need to explicitly implement, but surely most games should already have them or else I have questions for the developers.

Also, in the context of fighting games specifically, this is largely a nonissue. Fighting game netcode works by sending button inputs only, and the other client will play back those inputs to independently verify the outcome. There's very little cheaters can try to do that won't just result in a desync. To my knowledge there's only ever been one cheating scandal in the FGC, and the accused turned out to be innocent in the end.

It's not like I'm saying I hate classic fighters, or that there aren't any I still enjoy today. I've got plenty of hours on FightCade just dicking around in various random kusoge. I'm traveling to Combo Breaker in two weeks, and I signed up for six different brackets, two of which are retro titles (Waku Waku 7 and Twinkle Star Sprites) (you could also count Mystery Bracket, but the point of Mystery is to play trash that doesn't hold up).

But the games that have stood the test of time are few and far between. They're the exception, not the rule. If you think your game is too good for patches because it worked for Vampire Savior, you're a lot more likely to end up like SVC Chaos.

From a developer's perspective, they have to adapt to a changing market. All your competitors are iterating and improving their games, you need to keep up.

And hell, some of the most popular classics are patches in a sense. People play Super Turbo and Third Strike, but no one's playing World Warrior or New Generation. At least now players don't have to buy those kinds of 'patches' for full price.

Don't know about other platforms, but it's worth noting that Steam already does keep old versions and there's some command line method that can force download an older depot. Valve could offer UI to officially support this.

Edition Select like in USF4 would be rad. But I think I'd just like to see a universal way for platforms to let you roll back to any version of any game. Wouldn't even require any extra work on developers' part, platform holders would just maintain an archive of patches.

I get the nostalgia for simpler times, but fighting games have benefited so much from the fact that they can now be patched and updated over the internet.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had 56 characters, but ~6 of them were so strong that they rendered the rest of the roster nearly unplayable in comparison. And this is one of the games that was most fondly remembered! For every hit like that there were a dozen more that were so much worse they were quickly abandoned and forgotten.

For all the backlash to season 2, Tekken 8 is arguably still in a better place than the vast majority of pre-online fighting games. People are mad because standards have gotten so much higher, now that games do get patched we expect those patches to be better.

Sounds like you're specifically describing battle shounen. Keep in mind that anime isn't a genre, it's a medium, and there's such a wide variety of all kinds of shows and movies that happen to be animated.

Remember that the far right has been desperately trying to label any LGBTQ-related content as 'porn'. Educational resources? 'Porn'. Biographies about gay people? 'Porn'. Drag queens? 'Porn'. A book about a boy with two mommies? 'Porn'. Anything that acknowledges the existence of trans people? 'Porn'.

The purpose of this bill isn't to ban porn, it's to ban 'porn'. Anything they don't like will be deemed 'porn', and then this gives them the legal justification to ban whatever they want.

What do people expect out of a desktop SteamOS that they can't already get from any other distro?

Fighting games. I've been grinding Skullgirls for over 10 years now, without a single skinner box in sight.

I agree, it's important to preserve things today because it may be too late tomorrow. Some Switch titles have already been delisted, so it's good that we backed them up early.

But I'm just explaining it from Nintendo's perspective. If the tools we use to restore Super Mario Bros. 35 can also be used to crack Tears of the Kingdom, they don't want those tools in our hands.

The more important point though is that it is all cat-and-mouse, and the mouse is winning. We have those tools, and they can't fully stop it.