Whelp...I'm out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)

The Tournaments

These are going to be skewed through the lens of what I was personally interested in watching, but there was a lot worth watching.

Mortal Kombat 1

SonicFox took their 7th Evo championship this past weekend using at least three different characters, by my count. Strangely, they took the title in a mirror match against Nicolas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEYVZzJnQEs

Nicolas and his twin brother ScorpionProcs have been on a tear through the Mortal Kombat scene since the world emerged from the pandemic, and they're both so young that they still need a parental escort to these events. The two of them have both been taking wins at different majors, typically only challenged by the likes of SonicFox and Rewind. ScorpionProcs didn't make it into top 6 this time around, but Nicolas got very close this time.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

3rd Strike is a game I tend to like more in theory than in practice. The parry system is awesome, but it's also so pervasive that it basically invalidates zoning, a major component of most fighting games that introduces some variety to play styles. Being 25 years old with no patches, in an era where characters like Sean were designed to be bad on purpose, it also settled into a rigid meta. That meta is Yun and, if you're lucky, Chun-Li, which is what the top 6 looked like in Evo Japan this year. The top 6 this weekend somehow had 6 different characters, if I'm not mistaken, including when players picked a pocket character, like Elena as a counter pick.

Ordinarily, the most exciting match will be grand finals, not just because the most is at stake but also because it tends to be where you'll find the two best players in the closest competition. 3rd Strike this year is the exception. The star of the show is a player I'd heard about months ago from Justin Wong videos, Hayao. I had been following this person in particular through the entire bracket, hoping for him to bring a Hugo to top 6, and he delivered. He unfortunately was masterfully counter picked by his opponent in winners with a knowledge check that he just didn't have the answer to, but Hayao's match in losers quarterfinals was one of the all time greatest fighting game matches I've ever seen, on the 20th anniversary of Evo Moment 37.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8DpmASk_ho

Skullgirls (community tournament)

Personally, this is my main game, so it means more to me than any of the 8 games that Evo ran in an official capacity this year. It may have only been a 47 person bracket (it's harder to convince great players to sign up for a community tournament when there's no promise that Evo will avoid scheduling conflicts with other games), but the developer threw up a pretty substantial prize pool--from what I can tell, it was over $16k--and there were at least three great players who had a shot at winning the whole thing, Dekillsage, Reis, and SonicFox. Dekillsage finally took a bracket over SonicFox, winning decisively from the winners side of the bracket after sending SonicFox to losers. Unfortunately, there will be a bit of lag on the VOD, so I don't have it ready this morning to link to.

Guilty Gear Strive

One by one, my friends and I watched all sorts of top players get eliminated as they narrowed it down to top 6. The Strive scene is packed full of people who could have taken it all, and neither of the previous two Evo Vegas champions, Umisho and Leffen, made it into top 6. I like watching him play, but I never would have predicted Nitro would take it all, playing Jack-O', no less; the previous two years were both won by Happy Chaos players. Congrats to Nitro!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwUYASA9hc4

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot! I love the things that the crowd gets into at big majors. There will be "See ya later!"s during Marvel 3 and "TO MEMPHIS!" in Street Fighter 6, but I heard a new one when Zando came on stage and played his Asuka. Asuka is a zoner who's playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of a fighting game match, and he can cast a bunch of spells that send out cubes, giving the opponent no choice except to block for 10, 15, or 20 seconds in some cases. It's strong, but it sucks for the viewing experience and for the defender. So, facetiously, the crowd will yell "CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBES!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ik06KNRJIo

Street Fighter 6

I didn't follow the Street Fighter V scene very closely, largely because I didn't really like Street Fighter V, but Punk got his win that sounds like it was a long time coming. There was some phenomenal adaptation from both players. Punk with his masterful shimmies, that his opponents would catch on to a bit too late, and then Punk getting stingy with his meter on three different rounds that cost him three different games as his opponent Big Bird capitalized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-C435HjNhg

The Reveals

SVC Chaos shadow dropped after the KOF XV finals, which caught everyone off guard. I would have thought that this would be part of a Capcom Vs. SNK collection, but the fact that this game is re-released at all bodes well for a CVS collection later. The reputation this game has is that it's the worst of those three games that SNK and Capcom collaborated on, but it's good to have it re-released with rollback anyway.

Somehow, Heihachi returned. Death is already meaningless in fighting game stories, but Bandai Namco has been beating the "Heihachi is dead" drum for a while now and even leaned into it in the reveal. It seems the only thing they're capable of killing is Soul Calibur. RIP.

Guilty Gear Strive showed off the next four characters coming to the game. Dizzy is a fan favorite, and I'm excited for her XX era song, "Awe of She", to be added to the Strive soundtrack. Venom is another fan favorite, but I wasn't sure if he'd be added due to his similarities to the current version of Jack-O' in the game. I never would have predicted Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

Street Fighter 6 showed off Terry Bogard, and his face looks weird.

The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history's largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike bracket. Plus, other nerdy data is here, including which players of game X also signed up for game Y, and what the most popular games by country are. Competition ought to be pretty damn good this year.

Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.

Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.

They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.

A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.

I got Star Wars Episode I Racer from GOG on a sale for dirt cheap back around May 4th. I've been trying to get it working via Heroic ever since, particularly the multiplayer, which is fixed via mods. The Lutris script definitely does all of this super easy, but not only would I like to have it working via Heroic for the gamepad controls navigation, I'd also like to pay it forward and document these steps on the PC Gaming Wiki. Unfortunately, while I thought I could tell what this script was doing after scouring the Lutris script documentation, I haven't managed to crack it, and the Heroic install of the game complains about not having IPX installed when I boot it.

https://lutris.net/games/install/13260/view

With the Lutris install of the game and the Heroic install of the game side by side in WineCFG, I can see that that there are library overrides set for:

• dplaysvr.exe
• dplayx
• dpmodemx
• dpnet
• dpnhpast
• dpnhupnp
• dpnsvr.exe
• dpwsockx

All "(native)". For some reason they're sorted to the top of the library overrides and marked with an asterisk, and what's more, I don't see any hint of these ones in the Lutris install script, but they got set somehow, and I don't see the libraries here that are listed in the script.

There are also several ways to use the mod fix, including the DLL override and the EXE patcher. The EXE patcher just crashes and dies right away when I run it in the Wine prefix via Heroic, and I once again don't see any hint in the Lutris script that the patcher executable is being run. And if it wasn't clear up until this point, I did download the 3 files at the top of the Lutris script and extract them to the Heroic game directory.

Are there any Lutris experts here who can help me figure out what I'm missing?

UPDATE: The fix was, of course, very simple. Thanks to @[email protected]! The thing that prevented it from working was the wsock32 override. Just because it's not in the list of library overrides, that doesn't mean you can't just type it in yourself. I've updated the PC Gaming Wiki with instructions for any time travelers from the future.

Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way better than the game just dying.

I don't think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I'm letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won't save you from Microsoft laying you off.

For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn't do many interviews.

Personally, as the acquisitions were happening, I was rooting for Embracer, because they were clearly trying to rebuild the type of publisher that the big ones today used to be, offering a large variety of options so that you can have hits and misses and keep experimenting to find what your customers want, where today's big publishers make a couple of games per year, leaving most types of games they used to make on the table, even if they were profitable, because they're not the most profitable. It's hard to keep track of what these three companies even own anymore, after splitting with Gearbox and Saber recently as well, but just prior to this shuffle, Embracer absolutely had so many irons in the fire that plenty of them were catching my interest, like the old days.

Unfortunately, Embracer did this with a lot of debt, and comes to this wisdom all to late:

> I'm a firm believer in equity. I think debt in general is quite dangerous as a tool. You should be careful to carry too much in gaming.

And then he basically immediately disregards this wisdom with the next sentence. There's an old saying from Warrent Buffet, "A rising tide floats all boats…only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." And Wingefors was naked.

Full disclosure: I'm friends with the guys who run this podcast and have appeared on other episodes, but I thought this story was particularly interesting and worth sharing.

Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! www.stopkillinggames.com

Hi, folks. A bit of an unusual problem here. In some Proton games, in semi-predictable places, I'll get this audio crunch noise. It's not deafeningly loud or anything, but it is distracting sometimes. I first heard it when playing Starfield, and it was most common when loading into a city environment. This crunchy audio sounds kind of like when Hollywood simulates corrupt or glitchy video recordings, and it's in addition to, not really in place of, the other audio in the scene, as far as I can tell. Because Starfield is a sci-fi game, I initially thought it was either supposed to be there or that it was there for everyone on Windows as some kind of Bethesda technical shenanigans. Then I noticed it in Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I had played through 7 years ago on PS4, so I was familiar with the sounds in that game. It was much more rare there, and I had a hard time pinning down a pattern. As I'm now playing through Pillars of Eternity II, it's much more noticeable, as it tends to happen whenever you continue the dialogue to the next step by hitting "1. Continue" or whatever other dialogue options the game gives you, but how frequently it shows it can vary wildly by location. Sometimes I won't hear it for hours, and sometimes it's every time I click to continue the conversation.

I wish I could show you what this audio sounds like. I encountered an area in Neketaka where this glitch happens frequently, so I set up OBS and recorded it, only to find that the audio glitch didn't make it into the recording. "Maybe it's my speakers?" I thought, but I also get this glitch through headphone jack with a shielded audio cable. I tried the game on Steam Deck, which also defaults to running the game through Proton instead of native, and the same scene via cloud save was glitchless. I found some search results saying that some "audio niceness" value may have been exceeded, but when I turned on logging, I didn't see any evidence that that's what's happening to me as the thread explained that I should, and trying the advice they offered anyway, I saw no difference. I've tried Proton 7, 8, and experimental, and they all behave the same; Steam Deck says Valve selected Proton 8, for what that's worth, and my kernel is newer than the one Steam Deck uses, though that is Valve's custom kernel. I'm on Kubuntu 23.10 and kernel 6.5.0-26-generic.

There are a couple of reasons why I chose to run Pillars of Eternity II, in particular, via Proton that I won't bore you with, and I may be able to get around this more-pervasive-than-average problem for this game specifically by running it natively, but I'd still like to solve this problem for all of my future Proton games if possible, and I can fairly reliably reproduce the issue here to be sure that it's gone after making changes. Does anyone know where I can start looking? Has anyone run into this problem personally?

This is a really good interview. tl;dw is...

• their next game was going to be D&D, but they changed course and are doing something else now
• Vincke has a vision for "the one RPG to rule them all", and each of their past three RPGs is a step closer to it
• the next game is not going to be that master vision but one step closer toward it, with their previous 3 RPGs proving out emergent design/multiplayer, story and consequence, and personal stories/performance capture, respectively
• Vincke would like to have this next game done in 3 years compared to BG3's 6 year development cycle, but realistically expects 4 years, as long as there isn't something like COVID-19 or a war in Ukraine to impede their progress

She looks to have retained most of what made her cool in +R, except there's no Instant Kill for her to route into. Looks like a cool addition to the roster.

I'm considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they're DRM-free, especially now that there's a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there's no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing?

Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it's less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I'd be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.

A bit of a media push for this game is coming out now. It looks great in motion, and this is a good breakdown of the game's main systems. I can't help but feel like they copied Street Fighter 6's homework, but I love Street Fighter 6, so I'm not complaining.