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Concerning Sirlin:
His article "Play to Win" was a really obnoxious piece of writing that seemed to suggest if you're not squeezing every competitive advantage out of your game, you ain't worth sh!t. Every tactic is fair game, every trick is encouraged. This only works if the game is well balanced, which he claims SSF2T is.
The fact that he had to rebalance it in the first place blows that out of the water. He also skirts uncomfortably around the issue of Akuma. "Well, hang on, Akuma... well... that there would be what we in the biz call 'an exception'. Everybody's still balanced perfectly and if you're having difficulties, it's your fault. Honest!"
His thoughts might well be more applicable if you're talking about playing in the arcades, where time costs money and people are waiting to take their turn at the game. But a whole generation of us also started on Genesis, SNES, and home consoles, and we play to enjoy - and winning is irrelevant.
He also ballsed up the rebalancing of SSF2THDR, wherein a basic bug led to the autoblock bug vs. crossups (now corrected in the latest patch). The characters still aren't balanced - Honda will still eat any non-ballers for breakfast, and Boxer's super is still fricking ridiculous, just to name a few. He shuffled stuff around and that's not the same as mission accomplished. It would have been easier to bear if he hadn't been so self righteous about it.
The only unilaterally good things about the rebalancing were: removal of the random input frame windows for Dragon Punch moves (which actually has been the case for all games after Super Turbo anyway) and the simplification of the command inputs.
He's been fired from Backbone for promising shedloads of stuff to Capcom and then not delivering. He also went beyond the specs for his position and started arsing around with code - which, regardless of his good intentions (which he failed to deliver, see above), is still unprofessional and which makes him pretty much the only person to be surprised when Capcom refused to let him make his own game with their intellectual property.
So in short, a few years back he wrote a controversial cod philosophy article badmouthing people who aren't like him - but since then he's really done not much else worthy of attention. He loves games and claims to being a defender of gamers' interests. But he's got attitude problems with everybody he personally doesn't like, he talked a good line and then failed to deliver, and basically poisoned the wells for gamer involvement in the dev process with Capcom games from here on in.
He may be a good gamer. He may have the interests of gamers genuinely at heart. He may have tilted at Capcom's windmills in futzing about with game code for our benefit. But I have yet to see anything to suggest that he's not a self-aggrandizing ass.
And now I'm going to play SF4 in the privacy of my own house and not care if I win or not.
His article "Play to Win" was a really obnoxious piece of writing that seemed to suggest if you're not squeezing every competitive advantage out of your game, you ain't worth sh!t. Every tactic is fair game, every trick is encouraged. This only works if the game is well balanced, which he claims SSF2T is.
The fact that he had to rebalance it in the first place blows that out of the water. He also skirts uncomfortably around the issue of Akuma. "Well, hang on, Akuma... well... that there would be what we in the biz call 'an exception'. Everybody's still balanced perfectly and if you're having difficulties, it's your fault. Honest!"
His thoughts might well be more applicable if you're talking about playing in the arcades, where time costs money and people are waiting to take their turn at the game. But a whole generation of us also started on Genesis, SNES, and home consoles, and we play to enjoy - and winning is irrelevant.
He also ballsed up the rebalancing of SSF2THDR, wherein a basic bug led to the autoblock bug vs. crossups (now corrected in the latest patch). The characters still aren't balanced - Honda will still eat any non-ballers for breakfast, and Boxer's super is still fricking ridiculous, just to name a few. He shuffled stuff around and that's not the same as mission accomplished. It would have been easier to bear if he hadn't been so self righteous about it.
The only unilaterally good things about the rebalancing were: removal of the random input frame windows for Dragon Punch moves (which actually has been the case for all games after Super Turbo anyway) and the simplification of the command inputs.
He's been fired from Backbone for promising shedloads of stuff to Capcom and then not delivering. He also went beyond the specs for his position and started arsing around with code - which, regardless of his good intentions (which he failed to deliver, see above), is still unprofessional and which makes him pretty much the only person to be surprised when Capcom refused to let him make his own game with their intellectual property.
So in short, a few years back he wrote a controversial cod philosophy article badmouthing people who aren't like him - but since then he's really done not much else worthy of attention. He loves games and claims to being a defender of gamers' interests. But he's got attitude problems with everybody he personally doesn't like, he talked a good line and then failed to deliver, and basically poisoned the wells for gamer involvement in the dev process with Capcom games from here on in.
He may be a good gamer. He may have the interests of gamers genuinely at heart. He may have tilted at Capcom's windmills in futzing about with game code for our benefit. But I have yet to see anything to suggest that he's not a self-aggrandizing ass.
And now I'm going to play SF4 in the privacy of my own house and not care if I win or not.
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