Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

Though it seems like Capcom Cup X was just a few weeks ago, we’re already in the latter portion of Season 2 of Street Fighter 6. As such, it’s time to start thinking about and discussing publicly the kinds of alterations the game might use to become even more fun and engaging in Season 3, and 2019 Capcom Cup champion XSet|iDom is helping us do just that.

iDom joins Kizzie Kay for a new Fighting Game Select video in which they discuss which characters need to be nerfed most, which should stay the same, and who needs to be buffed.

The pair spread the game’s 24 roster members across four tiers: Needs Nerfs, Kinda Needs Nerfs, Stay the Same, and Needs Help. Only six characters wind up in either of the nerf categories, (two in the top and four in the second) but you may be a little surprised at who did and didn’t make it.

Ed, for instance, is one of the best performing characters in recent weeks and months, but iDom feels the Psycho Power pugilist may need some changes, but ultimately can’t articulate any and places him in “Stay the Same”. The same is true for Ken, whom iDom feels is right on the cusp of potentially needing to be toned down.

Zangief, one of the game’s more polarizing characters this year, does make it firmly into the “Kinda Needs Nerfs” category. iDom explains that Gief’s health advantage over the rest of the roster is a bit too much, and that he needs to be “put in line” with the rest of the roster.

You can view their visual tier chart by simply clicking the thumbnail here, but it’s much more helpful to hear all the discussion behind each placement, which is available in the full video below.

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What do you think of iDom’s balance thoughts? Which characters need to be regulated and who needs buffs when Capcom updates Street Fighter 6? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

For more SF6 opinions from iDom, be sure to hear what he has to say regarding the current health of Street Fighter 6.

NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Games are keeping the spooky training chugging along with more special Halloween content in Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns. They recently kicked off a set of Halloween-themed towers in-game that allow those who complete them to earn new costumes/palettes, and today we’ve got the next costume in the line up to take a look at.

Mileena’s new Halloween skin in Mortal Kombat 1 is available right now and can be earned at no real world monetary cost. All you need to do is beat a single tower to earn yourself two slick new looks for the popular ninja warrior.

Mortal Kombat 1’s new Halloween campaign is adding new towers every so often that give players the opportunity to earn these new spooky skins. It started with Smoke, who saw a tower prop up and rewarded those who cleared it just once with two new palettes.

Smoke’s has been available since October 21 and will be going away on October 26, so you’ll want to jump in now to unlock the spoils if you haven’t already. A couple of days later we saw Reiko’s tower pop up, which will also likely run for five days similarly to Smoke’s.

Now Mileena’s is up, and you’ll have a limited time to get in there, clear the tower, and grab the new skins.

Similar to the towers before it, Mileena’s only requires you play through it one time in its entirety to get the two new costumes. There are seven stages in this tower, with five of them being actual fights and the two others coming in the form of special Test Your Might and Survive challenges.

The two new skins you’ll get for beating this tower are called “Insatiable Zombie” and “Undead Carnivore.” Both act as alternate colors/designs for the Order of Darkness skin, but on top of adding new colors for the outfit also give Mileena an undead zombie look to her body and face.

Be sure to jump in soon to get your Halloween skins in Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns as they won’t last long. The next spooky tower will be going live in just over 16 hours (from when this was posted), and it will likely be replacing the Smoke tower as that seems to coincide with its deadline.

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One of the fighting game community’s worst-received games is getting another shot at life as an avid team of talented fans, led and primarily funded by Maximilian, are transforming the ill-fated Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite into Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and Beyond.

We got a massive look at latest progress made on Infinite and Beyond in a recent live stream presentation, and among the many improved facets of the MvCI experience, we’d like to highlight the captivating new main menu images.

First, we have to remind you what things looked like in their original form. The main menu of Infinite would initially give you the models of Ryu and Captain Marvel as seen below, and would proceed to cycle various pairings of Marvel and Capcom characters in a similar format:

We could split hairs as to whether the undeniably horrible visuals were more or less impactful than the lack of legacy MvC characters, but these two factors were more than enough to give Marvel Infinite a one, two knockout before it had the chance to garner any momentum back in 2017.

Infinite and Beyond aims to rectify this by overhauling the game’s visuals in just about every way. In game action looks a lot more comic book-like, as do the revamped character models. This is still a work in progress, of course, but tons of artwork and updated models have already rolled out.

It was during the live presentation that Max showed off a handful of updated main menu images featuring character juxtapositions that are so much more inspired, and that effectively capture the lighthearted and high octane action that’s long characterized Marvel vs. Capcom.

You can view all seven pieces of artwork plus a version of the main menu without characters and the updated Press Start screen vial the gallery below. Be sure to let us know which you were most impressed by in the comments after.

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For more of Infinite and Beyond’s updated graphics you can check out our article on Dante, one of the most egregiously-designed roster members of the original MvCI.

Half of the second batch of DLC characters for Street Fighter 6 have made it to the roster and we know that Mai Shiranui and Elena are en route next, but this game looks to have a reasonably long life ahead of it and, if its predecessors are any indication, will like likely garner around 20 more characters by the time all is said and done.

It’s with that future potential in mind that we turn to SF6 Director Takayuki Nakayama and Producer Shuhei Matsumoto as they sat down for a recent interview with Gamerbraves and, during which, highlighted two key factors that go into character selection.

The interview was conducted through a Capcom translator named Jessica, who graciously communicated both Nakayama and Matsumoto’s responses to Gamerbraves. When the latter asked about the compass the team at Capcom uses to select which new characters will be brought in as DLC, two main factors came up: popularity and game mechanics.

“Whether or not they’re popular they also consider that as a factor,” started Capcom’s response. “And game mechanics, because each character can be finely tuned in the newest iteration to match the balance that’s needed for the entire game, it’s probably, when comparing the two, the character is actually more prioritized than the game mechanics,” said Jessica.

“So when you’re comparing the two, the character or the game mechanics they do tend to prioritize the character. Whether it makes sense for the character to come back in this iteration timeline wise and also background wise,” she finished.

This struck us as interesting since the community (we included) have often supposed that certain Street Fighter legacy figures would or would not lend themselves all that nicely to the mechanic-defined atmosphere of a particular game.

Makoto and Dudley, two fan favorites we haven’t seen since Street Fighter 4, for instance, both tend to rely heavily on forward momentum as many of their maneuvers are advancing in nature and lend themselves to an “overwhelm your opponent with unrelenting offense” game plan.

When considering how these characters might have fared back during Street Fighter 5’s continued development, it was easy to come to the conclusion that SF5’s offense and dash-heavy nature might be a little too accommodating for such characters, and thus that might be the reason Capcom skipped both figures during that game.

Despite some conspicuous overlap, Street Fighter 6’s Drive System is quite different than SF5’s V-System, and one might imagine it’d make for a more versatile fit for the likes of characters such as Makoto and Dudley. In any case, Capcom has clarified this factor isn’t as important as we may have thought.

Capcom conducted a popularity poll earlier this year for the entire Street Fighter roster, and when the smoke cleared both Makoto and Dudley were in the top 15. Makoto placed 6th overall while Dudley clocked in at 14th; Season 2 DLC incomers M. Bison and Elena finished at 15th and 43rd, respectively.

If popularity is indeed king, we might expect the likes of Sakura (2nd), Evil Ryu (11th), and Karin Kanzuki (12th) to join the roster soon (though all three made recent appearances in SF5, and Sakura and Evil Ryu were both in SF4).

Whom do you hope to see join the roster for Season 3 and beyond? We’d love to hear your thoughts on that matter as well as on Capcom’s stated criteria for selection in the comments section below.

We’ve seen fan drum up characters usage stats for Tekken 8 plenty of times since its launch back in January, but never have we gotten official popularity rankings from Bandai Namco. That is, until Director Katshuhiro Harada shared this information on the latest episode of Harada’s Bar.

Before he offers the list, Harada tells us that this data is collected not only from online matches, but also from offline. This means we’re getting a more vivid picture than ever before when it comes to global Tekken 8 character usage.

As it turns out, the most popular character in all of Tekken 8 is the brand new Reina. Harada points out that it is especially atypical for a new character to garner this much public favor this quickly, though it seems Reina has tapped in to the same vein as the somewhat similarly-themed Juri from Street Fighter, who also saw massive overnight success.

In contrast, Lidia Sobieska, a relatively new character introduced in late stage Tekken 7 and brought back into Tekken 8 as DLC, ranks all the way down in the bottom five. Azucena, another femme fatale introduced in Tekken 8, comes in just above the middle of the pack at 14th.

We would be remiss if we didn’t point out that these findings do not include the very recently added Heihachi Mishima, Reina’s father. Heihachi is easily one of the franchise’s most popular characters and has been around and central to the main narrative since the very beginning, so he very well could dethrone his daughter once he’s had ample time in the wild.

You can see Harada present the list himself as he shares additional details, such as how things have generally changed and which characters have moved over time, in the full video below.

The character usage segment begins at the 19:25 mark, but Harada talks about plenty of other topics ranging from Tekken 8’s sales performance thus far to new merch and more.

Were you surprised by any of these results? Do you think Heihachi will shoot to the top of the stack? Share your thoughts in the comments section with us below.

He was supposed to be a conspicuously bad character, initially, but wound up being ridiculously strong, surprisingly, and now has been regulated back down to being bad, hopefully. That’s the story of Yajirobe thus far in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, a game that’s been out for a few weeks now and just received its first patch update.

Despite rolling the patch out early Thursday morning, developers at Bandai Namco haven’t shared any official list of patch notes. The community, however, has already figured out how the sword wielding warrior has been hindered.

Though he did help out a crucial juncture or two, Yajirobe has traditionally been an onlooker from the sidelines whose pride ushers him toward being overly confident and thus a bit of a joke fighter next to the likes of Goku and Vegeta. As such, he wasn’t meant to be all that powerful in Sparking Zero, but wound up with way more juice than intended.

It wasn’t that Yajirobe had abilities that were lopping off more damage than a fully powered up Spirit Bomb or an Ultra Instinct Kamehameha, but instead was insanely efficient. As a very inexpensive, 2-Destruction Point character, Yajirobe enjoyed perk of starting fights with 2 skill points already stocked, which made gaining access to his 5 Skill Sensu Bean maneuver quite feasible.

Sensu Beans instantly and famously heal characters in the Dragon Ball universe, and allow Yajirobe to fully restore his health bars. This proved to be way more effective than developers though as online players quickly started abusing this ability and scoring more wins that you’d expect with such a low tier hero.

Thanks to the information from LotusAsukara on X, we can see that the character has been nerfed from a few angles. Sensu Bean now costs an additional skill point to use, he begins the match with 0 skill points, and his health has been reduced by half of a bar:

Yajirobe’s Senzu Beans skill now costs 6 Skill Count instead of 5. Also, he now starts a match with 0 skill count instead of 2. His health has also been reduced from 3 Health Bars to 2 and 1/2. #DragonBallSparkingZero pic.twitter.com/dNQv1qpBrm

— ~Lotus (@LotusAsakura) October 24, 2024

The patch also aimed to rectify issues regarding buggy online controls, difficulty levels in Episode Battles, and operational stability. Without notes we have to simply wait and see if these issues have been fully fixed, but it seems Bandai isn’t quite done tidying Sparking Zero up on this initial pass:

The patch is now live!

Also, we are aware of some remaining issues and are investigating:
-Character rank reset to 0
-Connection errors & online matching issues
-Corrupted save data
We apologize to all affected players and thank you for your patience.

— Dragon Ball Games (@dragonballgames) October 24, 2024

This update is live on all platforms including PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam, but be aware that replay data will be deleted, so you’ll want to back any saved battles up if you want to hang onto them.

The Mighty Keef is back at it with a Pitch Meeting-style format that imagines some of the more peculiar conversations that must have been had as Bandai Namco developed Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero.

The game is currently making a humongous splash among fans, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without its blemishes. Keef, with his razor-sharp comical precision, takes a few hilarious stabs at Bandai.

We won’t give too much away here in the preamble, but will note that Keef comes out swinging with a reference to 2018’s Dragon Ball FighterZ. The more traditional fighting game community took an extremely strong liking to FighterZ and has been avidly playing it for the last six years, which makes it a fairly ancient game by today’s standards.

Bandai Namco has famously been behind in their efforts to keep FighterZ feeling fresh, most notably when it came to the implementation of rollback netcode. Audiences cried out for this feature for four years before Bandai actually made the promise to convert from a delay-based model, and already the game was feeling old and the player base waning at this point.

It took another 18 months after the announcement for rollback to actually be implemented, and even then the update was plagued with bugs and visual issues that made the experience unplayable.

Now fans have more or less moved on to hope for a Dragon Ball FighterZ sequel more than anything else, but of course, that isn’t what Bandai has coming down the pike next. Keef kicks off his sketch with a joke about FighterZ 2 that lands with particular impact for many readers of this site, and goes on to hit a series of on-point Sparking Zero observations that have us wondering “what were they thinking?”

Check out the full video below and let us know which part you laughed hardest at in the comments after.

Although he was looking like he had the potential to be busted before release, Terry Bogard isn’t shaping up to be a top-tier meta contender as much as the previous Street Fighter 6 DLC characters — but that also isn’t stopping a ton of players from using him and finding success.

That also includes the current number-one ranked online Terry player, Kintyo-ru, who put together a full match up chart for the Fatal Fury guest star.

After reaching an impressive 2,300 MR points with the latest fighter that came out not even a month ago, Kintyo-ru places Terry right around the middle of the cast though there’s some interesting picks on both sides of the fence when paired off for a match with him.

Starting at the top, there’s four characters who the Japanese player feels Terry struggles against the most including Akuma, Guile and M. Bison.

It seems he feels Mr. Bogard finds the most difficulty against the strong fighters that can keep him at a distance and then those who have a better rush down / pressure game — so we also see the likes of Dhalsim, Dee Jay, A.K.I. and even Ryu on the negative side.

Kintyo-ru went so far as to even order the individual match ups with the harder ones appearing towards the left side while the easier side of the spectrum is further to the right.

Because of Terry’s tools and ability to convert damage, the top-ranked user believes the guest does best against characters that try and mostly fight in the close to mid range.

That also includes some other top tier contenders like Zangief, Cammy and Ken interestingly though they are on the harder side of the slight advantage category.

From the recent SF6 tier lists we’ve seen out of VARREL|Mago, SAishunkan|Nemo and C9|Lexx, Terry has either been in the bottom rank or not far from it, but these match up ratings may paint a slightly more optimistic picture for him.

You can check out Kintyo-ru’s full, ordered match up chart for Terry below.

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Drive Reversal is one of the several defensive options Street Fighter 6 provides to players as a means of stopping their opponent’s offensive momentum. With the maneuver being safer on block now and there being a universal wake up option for it, this “get off me” mechanic is something we’re seeing being used more frequently than it first was.

However, Drive Reversal does not come without its own weaknesses, the main one being it can be baited and punished. Broski recently put out a new video that showcases a lesser known technique that can help players beat wake up Drive Reversal and that we recently witnessed being used on the big stage in top 24 at East Coast Throwdown.

Drive Reversal is a maneuver that has invincibility on its start up and is used to counter oncoming attacks, tag the opponent, and send them flying backwards to create space. As it stands right now it is -6 on block, and faster normal attacks can be performed meaty to bait the opponent into attempting the Drive Reversal, bait it, then punish.

During the ECT top 24, we saw Nephew’s Juri utilize an interesting “secret technique” that not only baited his opponent’s Drive Reversal, but instantly punished it with a level 1 super. While that might have looked like a very hard read on Nephew’s part, in actuality, this was an option select that worked out perfectly in his favor.

Broski explains what this option select does, how it works, and how different characters can do the same. The core of this option select lies within crouching light kicks almost universally not being special or super cancellable in Street Fighter 6 and light attack chaining.

Basically put, this option select allows the user to perform a crouching light kick on the opponent’s wake up, then input a super as if they were attempting to cancel the normal into said super attack. Since there is no cancel capability here, if the crouching light is blocked or hits outright, the fighter will chain into another light attack (such as standing light punch) and remain safe or get a combo for their troubles.

However, if wake up Drive Reversal is used, this will make the crouching light kick whiff and cause the super to come out instead.

When done correctly, this option select covers you completely when your opponent attempts Drive Reversal. If they go for something else, however, like an Overdrive reversal, you’d lose out.

Be sure to check out Broski’s full video below to add this secret technique to your Street Fighter 6 arsenal.

The latest update for Tekken 8 brought with it a ton of goodies including a brand new character, a new stage, some balance changes, and additional story mode episodes, but thanks to the excitement surrounding Heihachi and the controversy surrounding his stage, some of this new content may have flown under the radar.

Tekken 8 players now have access to fresh threads in the game’s shop as the update also included a new Seductive Pack of costumes for 10 of the game’s female fighters. We’ve rounded up images of the ladies in their lingerie along with some fun new accessories.

You’ll find the Seductive Pack in the in-game shop where you can purchase a base costume, long hair, succubus wings, and a devil horns headband for each of 10 female characters.

This list includes the likes of Reina, Azucena, Asuka, Xiaoyu, Lili, Nina, Zafina, Lidia, Alisa, and Jun. The purple and pink bedroom attire is consistent for all characters, and we can’t help but bring Soul Calibur’s Ivy Valentine (another Bandia Namco character) to mind as these threads may have been inspired by her similarly sexual (and purple) attire.

The full pack will run you 400 Tekken Coins, which can be purchased in packs starting at $4.99 for 500 and maxing out at 5,500 for $49.99. Those who nab the Seductive Pack will be able to mix and match the four aforementioned pieces of attire as part of any outfit for any of the 10 aforementioned characters.

You may only want to pair one or two of the accessories with other parts of other custom costumes you’ve purchased or unlocked, and Tekken 8 gives you the freedom to do so.

You can see all 10 ladies in their Seductive costumes via the gallery; the final two images below show off the hair, wing, and headband accessories. Let us know in the comments what you think of the Seductive Pack as well as the general state of Tekken 8 following this latest update.

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