Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Easy Inputs

Hello and welcome back to another (hopefully) rousing discussion regarding 'Marvel vs. Capcom 3'. This time we're going to be looking at one of the more technical issues afflicting the game itself. In this case the actual game engine. This is something that is going to involve mostly guesswork drawn from examples as my own experience in dealing with this is mostly along the lines of the 'Goddammit, that wasn't the move I wanted!!!' area of the discussion. Additionally I am aware that in order for some things to work (buffering, canceling, etc.) there needs to be a certain degree of input leniency within the game engine. That said, I really doubt it's as much leniency as MvC3 currently employs.

Pictured: Your guess is as good as mine as to what happened here.

Ok, so ummmm, you know what? I have no idea what happened here. As an aside for those that don't follow/play MvC3 the character glowing purple in the above image (Wolverine) is doing so because of a move that supposedly requires . If you can find two consecutive downward inputs in that sequence then you may want to check into an asylum because you're probably hallucinating. No, what we've got there are a lot of down-ish button presses (down-forward or down-back) and apparently enough of those strung together will make the game think that you know what you're doing and activate the purple glowing aura. A more frustrating sequence for which I unfortunately don't have a screen capture would be the following:

Press down twice, forward, quarter circle forward and then another quarter circle forward. Well that seems simple enough. The issue is that the first character in that sequence (She-Hulk) has a move bound to such that if you do the first quarter circle forward a hair too quickly the game thinks that it should include the previously entered forward input and thus your consecutive direction inputs get read as forward, down then down-forward, i.e. wrong. That's OK though because we can always use another super meter to cancel into one of our teammates specials. In that example the teammate was again Wolverine who also has a special bound to so we'll use that. Except in this case I got his .  Why? I have no idea. So to recap I input:

And I got:

Now before you say that this wouldn't happen if I wasn't mashing out the moves you'd only be right if it was just the first move that screwed up. However that isn't the case as both moves came out wrong and thus the majority of the blame should be placed on the game engine. You may also notice that as far as the game is concerned that one of our directional inputs has vanished into the aether. This is a problem. As I said at the beginning I am aware that some degree of leniency is needed but the game can't need this much to truly function. When two moves consecutively come out wrong and an input is eaten we've going from 'easy inputs' to something else. That something else usually being a string of expletives. I wish there was an easy solution to this issue. But there really isn't. Do you create a game engine where if an input is 'used' such it can't effect future move inputs? Well then you've just created a game engine that (probably) doesn't allow for buffering moves. What about some sort of smart engine where the game sort of tries to read what the player intended? Even if that previous sentence made sense the idea it's describing just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Some day some clever clog with come up with something that makes us all go “Oh, so that's how you do that.” That will be a day to remember. See you next week with hopefully a less frustrating topic.

P.S.  Sorry that the formatting this week is kind of a mess.