I think a lot about how the 25th ward is his best game, he didn’t even write like 2/3 of it, and his section is easily the most juvenile. I’m like, 99% sure Suda is the guy who came up with “rape as a JRPG attack” which nobody talks about because you have to actually play through the 25th ward. Have fun making your “the avengers of kill the past” bullshit buddy. they should have let Masahi Ooka cook instead. suda’s goodwill should absolutely be torpedoed too but he’s one of those kojima type guys where he can do no wrong for some reason. and I say this as someone who loves the silver case (where again, the best half of the game isn’t written by Suda either) and fsr.
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Just like with Kojima, Suda’s biggest strength has always been the ability to find the right inspirations and collaborators for the job, but I don’t think his strengths should be downplayed just because. If he was still mainly ripping off Takeshi Kitano, David Lynch and edgy Japanese arthouse, I think I’d still love him the way I used to love him until NMH2 dropped. I have little interest in the version of him who mainly watches Kamen Rider, Deadpool and Rick and Morty, I feel it turned his experiences into empty calories supported by some strong artwork, even the charitable readings one can offer Travis Strikes Again ring somewhat hollow when you see No More Heroes 3 and it’s a game about nothing whenever it’s not about Suda still being mad about EA. If this is what being an “artist at peace with himself’“ is (to quote a lot of TSA fans), I don’t think being an artist at peace with oneself is worth much.
Still. Even on the level of political consciousness, the guy seems way above any other Japanese auteur – in killer7, he had an entire allegory for Nobusuke Kishi’s violent occupation of Manchuria, and whenever asked about Kishi’s grandson Shinzo Abe in interviews, he was brimming with contempt. Flower, Sun and Rain’s interconnected central metaphors still knock me off my feet, I love the idea of an exotic trip guidebook serving as a holy text aiding you in an existential journey, I love how thematically it’s like a Japanese version of Lost in Translation. It still means a lot to me. I know he had a lot of talented writers like Ooka aiding him, but I don’t it’s right to discount how he elevated their voices, and how even in the first No More Heroes which has no cowriters credited, Suda still gets the core of what Kill The Past is, expressed as a total disenchantment with gaming and its culture. He may have strayed since then, he may have delivered some unreadable stuff (that new Fire Pro scenario), but it’s telling he hasn’t strayed half as far as Swery has. (Does Swery even have important returning collaborators? Feels like he lost his mojo the moment he left Access Games).
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I guess I was mostly just commenting on the fact that if you want to talk about swery being a piece of shit the other guy in this situation isn’t exactly innocent either. swery sucks more, but whatever.
Also like you pointed out there is a real difference between his older games and the travis strikes again slop era. That’s why I was making fun of his dumbass Avengers comment. I like No More Heroes but that game came out in 2007. Like his best work was almost 20 years ago to over 20 years ago at this point. He used to read books! The Silver Case is super rooted in some popular mole people under Tokyo book he read in the ‘90s.
Considering 25th ward has an extended epilogue that’s obviously not original to the 2005 phone game that you have to watch literally 100 times where the time cop guys ramble about Taken for 20 minutes it’s tough to give some of his newer writing the same latitude as killer7 or flower sun and rain. This is why I called him washed earlier when I was talking about hotel barcelona. Sure he was good once but he don’t have it anymore necessarily. Going from thinking girls were gross and nasty and obsessed with their stupid periods in the silver case to lusting for a killer cop with a gun in 25th ward is very funny development for him as a writer though.
I say all this negative shit with a modicum of love however. Like of the three japanese game “auteur” guys mentioned so far Suda will always be my favorite… I wouldn’t care if he wasn’t! I still have a whole folder on my computer dedicated to kill the past shitposts I’ve made after all.
placebo sumio (forma de ballsack)
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The control scheme for Revelations 3DS is growing on me. It’s still coarse, but it is actually easier to run and gun in this version of the game. Also, it strikes me that Veltro is actually the most well developed villain group in the game, and bad because it creeps up towards the lower bound of the uncanney valley. Resident Evil villain orgs mostly are just ciphers for conspiracy theories, and when in RE5 or whatever they decided to try to flesh their motives out they just became hollow comic book shit, which is setting appropriate. Veltro’s deal is revenge/spiritual education through suffering, which is still childish bullshit but more closely approximates real feelings that could motivate evil. So despite it being in some senses worse because of the extra little bit of complexity, I like the extra little bit of complexity.
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my favorite thing about revelations will always be the cutscene where they show a copy of dante’s inferno on the villains desk and then five seconds later a character goes HE’S QUOTIN’ DANTE!!! just perfect stupid resident evil bullshit. god what a good game.
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I feel like Travis Strikes Again is catching a lot of strays. It’s a lot more interesting as a piece reevaluating players and creators relationships with games and how the hobby itself can be both genuinely romantic and also a source of a lot of suffering. Like the ‘hating EA’ angle of it is only one way in which the game engages with that idea and I think fair enough. It has more teeth than most. The game is also probably one of the more mechanically involved under Suda’s direction and is interesting enough to tweak and play around with abilities. It also feels genuinely sad a lot of the time and I guess it falls into a sort of ‘sad bastard’ genre fiction but it stuck with me a lot more than some of his other projects. I think of stuff like Shadows of the Damned or Killer is Dead being a much earlier nadir which are far less rewarding than TSA imho. Very few ideas of any worth at all. Definitely can’t discount killer7 and FSR.
I guess Swery really just hit a home run with Deadly Premonition and struggled ever since. I thought Spy Fiction was interesting enough as a very gadgety MGS clone.
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TSA has a lot of interesting parts as the closest thing in the last decade to releasing a developer diary you could buy at morrisons but one thing I couldn’t get over is how he teed himself up at the end of the dammed chapter to rip into everything wrong with SOTD and the most he could come up with was “maybe you should be able to carry weapons over to new game plus” and not Every Other Problem With That Videogame
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I think this is just because it’s something outlet reviewers latched on to at the time which I guess stuck with him. Not the boner jokes, turret sections, ultralinear levels, boss design issues, or lazy violence toward women. Those were all ‘just so’ 
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Enough time has passed and the game in question bombed hard enough that I’m comfortable claiming that swery definitely read a DDD zine and ripped me off but I’m fine with that cuz he was too much of a hack to do anything good with it, thank goodness
Actually it woulda been better if he did something cool but this is fine too
I like having delusions okay, I don’t have much nowadays, just let me try and rekindle grudges against fallen gaming stars, maybe that’ll spark some fire in me, maybe this is what I need to keep going . . .
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Played through Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. Mainly a playthrough to see the design throughline rather than getting particularly deep into any of the games but interesting to see what grabs my attention. Most of my feelings revolve around Juggernaut.
X-Men Children of the Atom
The game has no playable Juggernaut. The only other character that grabs my attention is Spiral. Feels very rough as a fighting game otherwise. Damage feels really weird and unpredictable.
Marvel Super Heroes
Juggernaut! It’s interesting working up to MVC2 since the character select, stage art and super art are all much more visually striking than that game in pretty much each one of these. Marvel generally seemed to have a stronger visual identity when projects primarily drew from the comics and shows for reference. Thanos sucks.
These guys are having a good time
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Team mechanics start up, but it feels very rough and ready. Like tagging feels more like a gimmick than a considered part of the flow of fighting at this stage. Had a lot of fun with Juggernaut/Chun-Li, simple/technical moveset.
Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
More advanced tag moves now as well as the inexplicable removal of Juggernaut >:( Going Spider-man/Chun-li here. Hyphen team. Otherwise found this one kinda unremarkable. Roster doesn’t do it for me generally.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes
Really enjoyed this one. The tag mechanics felt a bit more fluid though I am not a fan of the randomly selected assist character. Like why not just let us select it? I looked it up and there’s a code but the default design seems like an odd choice given the fantasy of these games. Yes it annoys me because Juggernaut is not directly selectable! The tease! He’s right there!
I guess they were thinking where they could go with tag assist options and this was sort of an intermediary step towards a 3 person team.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes
I played this a lot at a friend’s house when I was young and we had no idea how to do any of the mechanics properly but we still loved it. It’s bursting with promise and engaging with the roster was just endlessly fun to my young mind, thinking up all sorts of teams with no idea about actual synergy. My Vs. game literacy is not much better today and my impression is that MVC2 is a lot of fun but also insanely punishing and unfriendly. They traded more fully-rounded system mechanics for the visuals since this feels the most like a mod of the collection. Sprite mismatches and lacklustre stage art though they put maximum points into music. I don’t think I’ll ever properly learn how to MvC2 but I still like it. Running Juggernaut/Spiral/Spider-Man.
Condensing attacks into 4 buttons to have two dedicated tag buttons seems necessary to be able to reliably control assisting teammates. The way they shove medium attacks into light chains works pretty well, I guess you’re sacrificing Street Fighter special variety for more assist and team dynamics.
The Punisher
I have no strong feelings either way except that the special attack vocal bark is an unhinged Tarzan yell.
Looking forward to Insomniac’s Marvel’s Juggernaut.
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okay
hear me out
instead of doing that, just queue as her and play bird build
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If playing Juggernaut in MvC2 it is essential to learn the very easy to perform Cyttorak Power-Up glitch:
Cyttorak Power-Up
Increases damage for Juggernaut’s next attack.
The effect is normally canceled whether the attack connects or not, but this effect is permanent when using the Power-up glitch
this makes Juggernaut one of the strongest characters in the game. for example, Headcrush deals 150% damage it normally does, making>
> Headcrush instantly kill a lot of characters
how the glitch works is explained below
it isn’t frowned upon when used at all, unlike what forums 12 years ago would lead you to believe
This glitch was later fixed in the PS3 / Xbox 360 versions, and was similarly fixed in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection version. However, the glitch was eventually patched into the Fighting Collection version. On the other hand, the other versions were not updated so it remains usable.
The Power-Up glitch increases the damage for Juggernaut on every attack, not just the very next one. The glitch only needs to be performed once per match unless you accidentally deactivate it later. To activate the glitch Juggernaut needs to Power-Up, then change to a different character without finishing an attack or otherwise canceling the effect. If Juggernaut isn’t flashing when he leaves the screen then the glitch probably wasn’t executed correctly.
When Juggernaut is brought back into play and uses Power-Up again the glitch is deactivated.
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Yet more reason to love Juggernaut
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he didn’t come up with D4 until he met me, the person who’s initials are DDDD
that’s my little comfort delusion
but that was before I met you and obviously he read your zine
deadly premonition is actualy impossible to play now that I know he’s not just ‘playing on horror tropes’ and actually is a transphobe that makes the whole games plot hinge on his hangups. so I can confidently say that swery never made a good game and this is what we all get for listening to stephanie sterling
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I feel like because that Polish dentist or whatever the fuck he does for a living did it, there’s like at least a 60% chance this mother fucker did steal your shit too
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Science is still trying to find the one person who played The Good Life
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@jsnlv didn’t you play that at a meetup
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For the record, the “hating EA” thing was about NMH3, not Travis Strikes Again. I really did appreciate the fact that he was speaking about more personal stuff in TSA but I thought it’s a kind of psychomagic, the guy pumping himself up to make meaningful stuff again, and then in NMH3 it felt like the most personal stuff he could think of was to tell people they should watch Andromedia and Char’s Counterattack. The “Avengers multiverse of gamedev” stuff felt very embarrassing to me, and then Suda went on a media tour begging Marvel to let him make Deadpool and my hopes for a new direction for GHM felt completely dashed.
(Re: Suda not being able to spot any flaw in SotD except for a lack of NG+, I remembered I once talked to someone who worked on that game and that they wanted to murder Yoshiro Kimura for successfully suggesting it should be a game where every enemy consists out of giant glowing weakspots. The Love-de-Lic touch…)
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Fair, my bad if I was reading words into people’s mouths. I felt similarly about NMH3, felt like it was building up to something big and it was just the same ideas reheated and leading nowhere and then Gungho bought Grasshopper.
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