MARATHON : NOT FOR CUCKS

 So what to play while waiting a full year for Virtua Fighter Crossroads?  (Its rumored to release October 2027).  Marathon, damn it!!  A lot of people hate Marathon.  Right off the bat they committed the nerd sin of stealing art.  Plagiarism is never cool, even in this Chat GPT era.  Others hate it because it took resources away from Destiny 2.  A game that has been dead for two years.  I look as Marathon as the middle step between Destiny 2 and 3.  It uses a whole new engine.  That's something the Destiny franchise sorely needs.   I can't stand to look at the stumpy, runty characters of D2/D1 anymore.  

   There are two camps of Destiny players that hate Marathon:  One,  the singleplayer cucks.  marathon barely has any singleplayer content besides the Nightmarsh mission on Complex, and even that can be compromised by enemy players if they earn the access keys and credentials.  

Two, the Control, Team DeathMatch, and Gambit players.  These guys are used to running headlong into the middle of the map and dying repeatedly.  If they don't have infinite respawns, they don't know what to do with themselves.  I used to play Rainbow Six and Socom religiously.  I'm used to playing single life strategic first person shooters.  In Destiny only Trials Of OSIRIS and Trials Of The Nine were single life survival.  If you're a scrub, you will stay the hell away from Trials and be perfectly happy playing the rest of the game.  Imagine if you're a Destiny 2 player and wet yourself anytime a friend invited you to play Trials, then 9 years later Bungie releases a game where the whole game is basically Trials Of Osiris.  

Triage the Medic, is surprisingly fun tom play.

I was never the best Trials player, I've only gone flawless a couple times.   However, I never shrank away from the challenge.   We would go three wins or four wins, then get murdered by the laggy red-bar Eurotrash Hunters.  Still, my best PVP  gameplay experiences in Destiny were in Trials Od Osiris.

As for Marathon.........................

This is a hard game, but a fun one.  What's great about the game are the classes are diverse, but Bungie managed to make *every* class fun to play.  Even the medic.  Why a lot of people hate is it is more of a successor to APEX LEGENDS than it is a successor to Destiny.  The only thing I agree needs to be changed is the complete system wipe that occurs every season.  Nobody has time for that besides little kids and the unemployed.  If I level up to increase the size of my inventory and my backpack, and I earn the right to buy certain items from  the store, I should keep it.  I don't have time to re-earn the *basics* I should spend my time in subsequent seasons mastering the game and the meta instead.  My favorite characters to play are Rook, Vandal, and Destroyer.  In that order.  

The spiritual successor to Destiny's TITAN

                    People underestimate how fun it is to play as Rook.  You have to go 1 vs 3 against whatever surviving players are still on the map when you spawn in.  You may spawn in with 10 minutes to go or 15 minutes to go (out of a 25 minute game).  

It was better back in season one when Rook used to spawn in with 3 land mines in his equipment.  OHHhh the havoc you could wreak with those.  If you are halfway decent playing PVP, you will have a blast playing Rook.  He is high risk, high reward.   sometimes you will take out an entire team, or sometimes you'll get worked.  Either way its hilarious.  

Rook is the Man!

Vandal is the most agile and has a built in repulsor beam built into her wrist as a special move.   Destroyer is the toughest, and has a riot shield for a special and an air dash as an innate move he can use aggressively.  the beauty is when you use the riot shield and air dash in Combination.  The game is really fun and has a lot of potential.  I hear they are adding alien enemies from the original franchise entries either this December or next March.  They are also adding more story elements.    Hey, I like the game as is, but if they add more content, even better.  I'm all for single player content, but I'm not some weak willed scrub whose ego is so fragile he can't handle a few deaths in PVP. 

Scared to play Marathon? You need to be made of *sterner stuff*!!!

   

  

SO. VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS: WILL IT BE A HIT OR MISS?

 There’s been a lot of talk about “Tekken Refugees”  migrating to VF .  That won’t happen.  Tekken players have short attention spans, and VFC is still a full year off.  Don’t get me wrong,  Tekken has some admirable qualities,  a robust Okizeme system that is balanced across the cast.   Every character has a low parry, unlike in VF , where only some select characters have low parries or reversals.  What I like most about Tekken is its diverse cast.  

This pic gives me goosebumps.  It reminds me of the early released VF3 images of Pai, where they featured her pupils actually move to focus on targets.  You guys take that for granted now, but in 1996 it was surreal and ground breaking. 

It has a lot of options if you want to pick a male African American character.  Raven, Eddie Gordo, Leroy , etc.  In VF you’re stuck with Jeffrey McWild.  Of course the negatives of Tekken are the simplified gameplay.  I paid $7 to download Fakurahm in Tekken 7, and he didn’t have one single command move in his entire command list.  Not one move that requires a direction press with a button.   WTF.  How scrubby can you get.   I would never want to play ranked mode with a character that boring and simple.  If you’re a Tekken player, your mind is just wired differently to enjoy that kind of gameplay.  

Cielo, the modern goofball, and new protagonist of the series.  

Which brings me to Master Po’s VFDC post warning off Tekken Refugees.  

Po isn’t elitist,  he isn’t even elite.   He’s pretty much the biggest scrub in VF Larping as a Shaolin Monk.  Many people hit the nail on the head, the nerfs to VF were to appeal to the FGC.  The nerfs to Tekken 8 evades were for the same reason , only for the spectator:  they don’t want elitist Korean box stepping as a reliable option in EVO, hence they keep nerfing evade.  Aoki is no better, he nerfed Evade crouch dash guard in world stage for the same reason.  He said it’s “OP”. Facepalm .  It may be powerful but it’s earned by player effort.   

  Anyway ,  VF Crossroads is a full calendar year away at least,  that’s *plenty* of time for Tekken 8 to get patched to rectify its problems or for Namco to announce Tekken 9.  Don’t be so sure the “Tekken Refugees” will even come to VF Crossroads besides to play the single player mode.

     I doubt that “Tekken Exodus “. Will ever happen,  once the Tekken players realize they actually have to make an effort at memorize command moves weight properties and open/closed stance combos.  They’ve had it to easy for too long.  

    

      There is this idiotic rumor that Cielo is replacing Vanessa just because he has a ground and pound.   Seriously are you people this dense?  First dumbasses like Rooflemonger were saying it.  Then even relatively intelligent content creators like Virtua Analytics started saying it.   Look, assholes,  what Cielo and Vanessa have in common is a basic ground and pound *every* damn MMA fighter in the UFC has.  It is not a unique attack at *all*.    If someone leaked to you that Vanessa was being cut from the roster,  sharing one single move with Cielo is not the reason.   Even if Vanessa is being cut from the roster, I’m not going to trip.  A common tactic Fighting games devs do is cut a few legacy character from the roster,  so they can sell them back to you in seasonal DLC.   It puts less pressure on the Dev team to create a winning DLC character from scratch.  It’s much easier to sell people a fan-favorite with a few tweaks.  I remember Virtua Fighter Ultimate Showdown was the worst kept secret ever:  VFDCers kept hinting that an HD upgrade was coming for VF and it would hit PC.  That eventually came true with Revo.   Leaks and rumors are nothing new.  Ed Boon publicly said a few years ago that”Somebody needs to reboot Virtua Fighter”. Years before VFC was announced.  No doubt he knew something.

     

Vanessa is going *nowhere* you morons.  At least not for long.