Game:

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (2011)

Duration: 1:32:20

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1

Aren't you glad you're not part of the inner circle... of... ... ...test subjects?
twitter.com/yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW

(we don't offer dental coverage, either)

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FAIR WARNING! As of even several days after upload, I'm still stuck with a weird copyright robot snafu, so what I'm going to presume will end up being a massive concentration of ads, as per standard YouTube automation's de facto policy.

I'm sorry about that. I'm working on fixing it as proactively as possible, but it's out of my hands for the time being.

...some poor underpaid intern at Capcom has to receive my request to convince YouTube's robots that I didn't steal a chunk of a producer interview from way back when. *sigh*

(Does this mean the robots think we're professional fact-seekers-and-knowers?! ...like... real talky-talk personalities? ...oh, you dear, sweet, deluded machines. Please get a sense of taste and understanding.)

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So, back up some odd time to the grand old days of fighting games of yore. We were JUST starting to be able to take online play for granted in ever so many genres and the quaint little networks of separated-out platform-by-platform ecosystems almost felt like they were on their way up in the world.

But it still required you get other people to buy the game, agree to play, sometimes pay a (not-so-)little subscription fee, hopefully work out all the technical snarls along the way... it was all frankly a menace, and I wonder how on earth I ever got any takers at anything ever at all!

And the real icing on the cake was the actual network performance besides. Sure, you COULD play what passed for a facsimile of the underlying fighting experience... ... ... but you'd also be subject to some rather potentially monstrous latency depending on a dizzying array of potential culprits that even your savviest end user is frankly not even remotely prepared to fend off.

So, you "can" play with your friends... if all the stars properly align... and you're not especially picky about the quality of said experience... ... ... yeah, really cheerful snapshot of an entire era of gaming...

Fast forward several hardware generations, and (otherwise totally unrelated and despite the problems I've described) we've finally got a decent amount of userbase penetration on tools to let us communicate in real time, first in word... then in voice... now in VIDEO?

In a real leap of ingenuity of epic proportions that I honestly would've expected sooner and always fondly hoped might one day somehow magic its way into becoming reality... not only can we send the video to the eyes of a purely hypothetically adoring public, we can send... button presses!

So what this means is that we can be playing a game in one part of the world... and remotely add another player just through providing a video feed and interpreting some inputs and sending them back to the source... and it will WORK! ...even with an entire ocean between the endpoints!

If that isn't actual witchcraft, I don't know what is.

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In fairness, and as a control test group... we DID try the inbuilt netcode first.

And we discovered that someone was incredibly stupid about their implementation of practically compulsory in-game voice chat. (Whyyyyy?!)

Then we tried out Steam's own implementation of all but actual black magic... ... ... or tried to. We probably messed up on both sides before getting to give it a proper go of things, but it certainly didn't cooperate in letting us untangle the mess it made.

So we moved on... to the actual focus of our testing. To Parsec. And then we played. And played. And even roped in another unfortunate player. And continued to play.

So sorry for the excessive running time, but it clearly couldn't be helped. (We didn't want to help it.)

I guess that means it worked! (Now, all that's left is to tediously and methodically fine-tune the results for all the remainder of eternity!)

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