MvC3 at last.

Ha! Well, my last post was a length explanation of why I haven't been posting, and a promise to do more, but then it was what? 2 weeks? 2 weeks?!?! Maybe I'm done blogging? Maybe twitter is a blog-destroying cancer (I've seen a lot of people blame twitter for their failure to blog, so maybe I will too).

But wait! I haven't been posting much to twitter, anyway. So maybe it's something else. I guess I can name those something else's. I already did in my last post.

Anyway, here's some things I've been playing:

Marvel VS Capcom 3. MvC3 is phenomenal. The first night I sat down with it, I pulled out my Fight Stick and got to work. At first, I was clueless. The buttons are a bit strange, but very similar to Tatsunoko VS Capcom (which I own but fully admit I only played a handful of times, mainly due to having to use the classic pad and not a real arcade stick or at least a fightpad.

Basically MvC3 ditches the expected kick/punch set up and just has three attacks, Light Medium and Hard. There's a "special" button, as well. So that's 4 attack buttons. There's 2 partner buttons, as well.

The 3 attacks make building combos pretty easy. I'm sure there's some crazy advanced combos, but basically you can string together some hits by stepping up from Light to Hard. So light, light, medium, medium, heavy. Or something, it's pretty open.

The action is super fast and furious, and it's hard not to laugh at the over-the-top nature of it all. By the end of the first night, I was pretty pleased with the game.

But even after spending some time with it, the 'special' is the button that threw me off. Really it's just kind of mislabeled. It sounds like you should be able to do special moves with it, maybe an instant Hadouken, which would be kind of lame. But actually it's a "launch" button. For most characters, the only thing it really does is launch the opponent 30 feet into the air, setting them up for an air juggle.

The game doesn't explain much of anything, so I had to look online for an explanation of how to complete air juggles. They're easy, really, but not intuitive. Once I got that down pat, I felt great. I had figured out all the pieces of the game and I'm comfortable playing with a lot of the characters. I've raced through the arcade mode with 10 or so characters, and played a bit online. So far I think all my matches have ended in time-outs. Strange.

Adam picked it up too, so I've been playing with him every now and then. He's pretty bad compared to me, if I do say so myself, but the since the game has a ton of weird characters, and it's 3 on 3, I can do an ok job of handicapping myself by throwing a bizarre character into the mix.

I can't wait until Ryan gets his copy and spends some time with it, because he can easily compete on a similar level and it's going to be epic.

Overall I think it's an amazing game, and a total blast, although occasionally the wacky spectacle of MvC3 makes me yearn for the slower, more masterful Super Street Fighter VI, which I'm convinced is about as perfect as games get.

Yeah...