I'm very happy with the overall product.  I'm sure the networking stuff will be addressed.

SaBrE: I totally agree as far as non programmers picking up programming over time, and that is complety credible. My main problem is that he says that he pretty much single handedly programmed the game, that is in my opinion a little bit on the unrealistic side (and im not doubting he is a smart person, I dont know the guy after all) As you said your self normally the skills are for little things here and there.

Im also not doubting that he probably did fight for a better game, I just personally from working with teams alot, dislike the way he takes down all his team members in making himself sound like the saint. The guy might be a really nice person, but a nice guy rule is you dont leave your team to the dogs. Backbone does great work, so I couldnt imagine this being left to a single person.

Either way I just feel that everyone involved deserves to get great credit and I dont like seeing one person trying to rise up above all other involved (cough Cliff Bleszinski with Gears of War :P  cough)

skankin' garbage you said:

"Nevermind that Sirlin isn't trying to make it sound like he was the only one responsible for making the game, either; he's only talking about one particular aspect of the development."

Thats not true check out the article http:

//www.destructoid.com/how-sirlin-struggled-with-street-fighter-2-hd-113577.phtml

Its more than just one aspect of development , the article goes into his claims on programming, design and rebalancing. (granted he didnt try to say he played the music and drew the art ... yet :P)

Dec 12, 2008 -- 8:36AM, Thane wrote:

I wouldn't consider anyone who mouths off like him a nice guy. When someone says something like this, you know they're talking ****:

-------------------------------

"Who's going to pay for all this, it's hard enough to ship this game in the first place and, were they going to assign programmers to help me? They didn't want to do that. So they said, 'no, we're not going to do it'. Just flat out no.

"I pretty much ignored that. I started reading the source code myself, and I'm not a programmer, and I'm certainly not an assembly programmer, so it's complete gibberish to me."

-------------------------------

Also, degrees in math and business from MIT don't mean you're credibale to program jack. I'd be shocked if a designer with no programming knowledge would be allowed edit any source code. From my experience of working in games development, the idea of doing such a thing would be so stupid that it'd never be allowed.

What are you talking about? If it wasn't for Sirlin, the game wouldn't be half as good, or balanced. I don't know any other designer who would actually spend so much time and effort to learn some programming and try to balance the game for free. Sure in the end, he finally convinced capcom to help him with balancing, but he actually used his own time to secretly learn some hard computer skills, so that he can make the fans happy, and make sf2 the best it can be.

Sirlin deserves a lot of respect, cause there is no way the game would have turned out this good (aside from the bugs) if he wasn't on board. I have followed up a lot of his articles, so I know the contributions he made to the game, it would be very foolish to critisize him after all the things he's done for the fans.

Dec 12, 2008 -- 8:29AM, Dale wrote:

SaBrE: I totally agree as far as non programmers picking up programming over time, and that is complety credible. My main problem is that he says that he pretty much single handedly programmed the game,

No he didn't.  See here.  His description of how he first learned to do anything with hit boxes sounds completely credible, it's the kind of thing I always have to do when editing unfamiliar code or learning new tools.  If you haven't done so, read his gamasutra.com and videogamer.com interviews, and the 'rebalancing' blog entries.  'Singlehandedly programmed the game'?  He was changing hitboxes, priority and requesting additional frames, alongside the programmer he mentions in the above link, and those he asked for advice.  Those are the extent of his coding claims, they're perfectly realistic, and it's ridiculous to characterise that as 'singlehandedly programming the game'.  Of course there were few-to-no programmers working on the rebalancing project -- it wasn't even officially mandated!  If you've got something to contradict that, showing that Backbone's management actually pitched the rebalancing to Capcom on day dot and assigned programmers and time to it throughout the whole development process, and that Sirlin is thus toootally lyin', man, it's obvious, then please, let us in on it.

Im also not doubting that he probably did fight for a better game, I just personally from working with teams alot, dislike the way he takes down all his team members in making himself sound like the saint. The guy might be a really nice person, but a nice guy rule is you dont leave your team to the dogs. Backbone does great work, so I couldnt imagine this being left to a single person.

Either way I just feel that everyone involved deserves to get great credit and I dont like seeing one person trying to rise up above all other involved (cough Cliff Bleszinski with Gears of War :P  cough)

skankin' garbage you said:

"Nevermind that Sirlin isn't trying to make it sound like he was the only one responsible for making the game, either; he's only talking about one particular aspect of the development."

Thats not true check out the article http://www.destructoid.com/how-sirlin-struggled-with-street-fighter-2-hd-113577.phtml

Its more than just one aspect of development , the article goes into his claims on programming, design and rebalancing. (granted he didnt try to say he played the music and drew the art ... yet :P)

Look at the quote from that post (and the whole article it's sourced from): "who's going to ASSIGN PROGRAMMERS". He doesn't say that the programmers were lazy.  He criticises the management.  And considering Backbone's history of making either (a.) solid ports, or (b.) rushed crap, plus the default corporate inclination not to go the extra mile (shareholders do NOT want to hear "The game is late because we need to make it a little more awesome" -- in the short-sighted view of the majority of companies, especially ones like Backbone, a mediocre game that's out there being sold is far, far better than an awesome one that's still on the blocks), the odds of him telling the truth are far more likely than the opposite.

Look at how he characterises the situation when asked 'Any regrets?' in the post-mortem.  Sirlin obviously isn't a very good communicator or people wouldn't be laying into him for things he didn't say, but he maps the situation out clear as a bell in part of that response:

"I talked to the programmers and they said, 'well we've already addressed it in the tournament mode'. So actually we would just copy and paste the code and it would take maybe five minutes plus another five to verify that it did what we thought and that would be that. And I said, 'great! Let's do it', but then because of political arguing that has nothing to do with really anything, that particular change took months and months. It took fighting, it took me going to the head of our company, even then I couldn't get it through. All of this effort to get that one thing fixed that would have taken five minutes. So that is a regret, that there was a lot of wasted energy."

He's describing very, very normal office politics.
It's not the programmers you have to 'nag', it's the money-men.  It's not the programmers you have to 'fight' (if they were 'fighting' to avoid work, they'd have long since been fired and replaced with programmers who don't), it's the money-men.  If you can find any interviews or blog posts where he's criticising his fellow programmers, I'd be very interested to read it.  You could argue that the links in his blog post to Backbone's past failures is a slight against his fellow workers, but that would be very ignorant of the realities of game development and publishing.  Talented people get saddled with crap assignments that become crap games -- ESPECIALLY when they're working under suits who say "okay, the game basically functions, therefore it's gone gold -- OUT THE DOOR!"  A bad game usually says a lot more about the management than the coders, and any programmer, especially one working at a place like Backbone, would be incredibly naive (and pretty obviously inexperienced) to think otherwise.  It's pretty clear where Sirlin's enmities lie, and it's not with the coders.

Sirlin,  I've read his blog and agree he sounds very ****ure of himself.  He doesn't seem to take critiscm very well, and I imagine he was a nightmare to work with on the game.  He takes credit for everything and everyone, and if you remember his company's work on 1942, you remember how boring that turned out!  What about Grim Jr.?  Snooze...

Its good to point out that he's an academic - all the degrees and learning don't make a spit of difference if the game turns out meh - and if you look at his roster of released games, most are just that...meh.  That's the problem with academics like him - they think academia is a substitute for experience and that alone will make their efforts 'superior' to everyone else.  Thanks, but no thanks, I'll take something else.

Even he doubts his achievements with SSF2HDR, as he wishes he could make a fighting game to "show them how its done".  I liked the game myself, but found it very flawed and full of bugs and unbalanced gameplay.  Its still fun, but nowhere as fun or as fine-tuned as the original!!

I posted this elsewhere, but this review says what I think mostly, as it likes the game but feels its a bit off as well.  please take a look and see if y'all agree:

http://popzara.com/pages/853