Tekken 8 has a problem which I’ve taken to calling “talks outta both sides of its mouth disease.” From where I’m standing, the history of the game has looked something like this:
Season 1 had some contentious new systems but reasonably clear design goals, and many strong players felt the game’s various issues could eventually be ironed out as it settled on a more concrete balance direction
Season 2 promised an expansion of system-wide defensive capacity to balance out the game’s powerful offensive tools. It technically delivered on that promise, but did so at the same time as it gave everyone plus on block homing mids and other offensive tools that effectively invalidated the new defensive options
Season 3 advertised itself as going “back to basics,” reassessing its approach to the game’s design principles in an effort to create a version of Tekken 8 that kept its systems for rewarding aggressive play while reigning in the more excessive elements of its system and character balance. It did this a little bit, but also directed most of its changes towards explicitly making offensive pressure easier to establish across the cast.
In short, the last couple years of Tekken 8 have, to me, looked something like this:
First is that I’ve removed the link to the Cohost archive from the sidebar. The posts are still up, and you can find them here, but I’ve elected to keep that section of the site less advertised partly because the posts are not quite as, for lack of a better term, historically important as the posts in the regular archive, and partly because the sidebar was gonna get a little bit crowded with the new addition.
Hi. What you’re about to read is a very personal, emotionally-driven diatribe about why I think the modern experience of playing fighting games online kind of sucks ass. This is entirely separate from any discourse surrounding the perceived popularity of fighting games in comparison to other competitive game genres, and it is not intended as a contribution to any form of public discourse about the genre more broadly. I invite you to read this piece and think about the ways it might or might not match up with your experience, and I sincerely hope it gets you to consider what it is that you find valuable about this wonderful genre and the community that has formed around it. I would only ask that you refrain from starting any flame wars over what is ultimately my subjective interpretation of my subjective experience.
You should play video games with your friends. That goes for this one, too. I still think that if you have friends who are interested and the patience to trudge through arcade game setup, then you’ll get a lot out of EXVS2. But if your friends are on Starward? You really can do a hell of a lot worse.
There is now a new link in the sidebar titled “Archive”. This is a section of the website dedicated to hosting a bunch of the blog posts I made on my old blogs - one of the WordPress variety, the other my old Github Pages site.. I’m not fully intending to take those old addresses down just yet, but time will tell if I feel like nuking everything later down the line. Note that the archive isn’t home to everything I posted on the old sites - things like yearly retrospectives and old major tournament post-mortems didn’t make it over - but the majority of my writing is now hosted here, so it’s all in one place. Each post in the archive also has a short blurb at the beginning; a lot of them were chances for me to reflect on my opinions or writing style, and frankly, I can’t help but want to riff on some of the shit I’ve said in the past.
My first exposure to Brain Jar Games’ Dead as Disco was through a video where someone had replaced the player character’s model with Deadpool and set the ensuing gameplay to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”.
I can’t exactly tell you why that managed to pique my interest1, but it did. So here we are.
At time of writing, I’m almost done with the first day of 2026. The year that preceded it was a really weird one for me, with a lot of highs and lows, so I figure that maybe if I give it a kind of send-off then it can stay in the past.
Then again, maybe not. What is there to say, even? I spent the first quarter of 2025 recovering from damage that was at least 50% self-inflicted, only to spend the rest of the year learning that the damage was not nearly as extensive as I thought it was, that most people don’t care about what caused that damage (if they even know anything happened at all), and that basically everyone I care about is still happy to have me around. I have a stable job that pays me well enough to pay all my bills, I live in a new house, my husband is lined up to get top surgery in a couple weeks and I am surrounded by people who love me in all the ways I could ask for. Despite everything, my life is kind of fucking awesome.
Riot Games was always going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to win me over. I have never liked a single one of their games, I have zero investment in the characters or shared universe they’ve built off the back of League of Legends1, and their long-awaited entry into the fighting game space has been marred by all the problems associated with a decade-long development cycle that included at least one full rewrite of the game concept, as well as the future problems associated with free to play monetisation that will undoubtedly cause the game to slide off my brain as if it were coated in teflon.
In 1986, a man named Yu Suzuki, along with a small handful of developers at SEGA AM2, would release an arcade racing game called OutRun. Suzuki had previously made some fairly successful motorcycle racing games for SEGA by way of Hang-On and Enduro Racer, and with OutRun, he sought to create a racing game predicated primarily on allowing players to enjoy the experience of driving and, in his words, “feel superior”1. With incredible graphics for the time, a stellar soundtrack and shockingly well-realised driving physics, OutRun was a huge hit in arcades throughout the late 80s and even early 90s, and is one of the most influential and important games in the genre.