Of all games, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game also has an actual magic pixel mechanic implement. If your health is above 10 and you receive an attack that would kill you, you survive with one hit point. You can also regenerate health using super meter, so it's sort of a neat system where you can cling onto life, swing momentum a bit into your favor and try to spend meter to go over 10 HP to give yourself another safety net. But it's such a fast-paced, volatile game that it doesn't come into play often.
Correction: The magic pixel wasn't removed in Ultimate MvC3, it was shrunk. One can boot up training mode, and either turn off regenerating HP or do a tod, and kill the dummy with a non-cinematic super that hits a large number of times (like Ryu's Shinku Hadoken or Dante's Million Dollars). If you do it correctly, you can observe that the dummy's HP appears empty for several hits before they die, showing that there is a magic pixel. I remember reading that the magic pixel in vanilla MvC3 was 4% of a character's full HP. In Ultimate, I haven't done any tests but I think it was halved to 2%.
Any time your HP is broken into more pieces than you have pixels for health bar, the magic pixel is likely to exist. It doesn't have to be intentionally implemented, and is in tons of games -- especially low res ones.
I love this breakdown of such a controversial mechanic. It's such a fine line between making it fun for spectators and making it fun for players. The core of it feels like not making Magic Pixel/Guts strong when there is a strong comeback mechanic as well. Doubling up on them feels bad (X Factor, V Trigger, Etc) but with Xrd, it feels almost rewarding to learn how to play around it
Interestingly, in arcana heart, not only does each character have an individual guts value, with some guts values being negative, but furthermore each of the 24 arcanas you can select for your character modifies your guts level in a unique way; turning guts into even more of a strategic consideration than in other games
And he completely missed the progenitor of "magic pixel" OG Melty Blood. There's Will It Kill clips of the absurdity of the "You have absolutely NO health left, and the combo is going to last for another 30 seconds, but you're just fine"
A very prevalent system in GG that you failed to mention is how chip damage in the game works, chip damage can ONLY kill when the opponent has 1HP left. Even if your opponent blocks an attack and the chip damage would be greater than their current health it will only leave them at 1HP which can produce a very similar effect whilst still being a very real mechanic at play.
Bruh I didn't expect one of my old CF clips to be used in that collage of examples. Magic pixel comebacks can be pretty hype to see, it takes a lot of mental fortitude to keep yourself from panicking during these situations as any stray hit will kill you. BUT, the feeling of finally breaking through that bullet hell of a defense and then performing your own game winning combos on your opponent is one of the most satisfying feelings one can ever feel in a fighting game.
Part of the reason Strive is high damage is because Guts was directly nerfed in it. A 0 Guts character from Xrd would still receive more damage resistance at low HP than a Guts 5 character in Strive.
The "magic pixel" as a mechanic, in MvC3 in my opinion, was absolutely perfect for Marvel and the culture surrounding it. It's just not something I'd like to see replicated really anywhere else.
I prefer the magic pixel to guts. Part of it is that it’s a more accurate representation of hp, and part of it is that I don’t think it’s that interesting as a player or spectator to switch from the combos done earlier in a round to repeatedly hitting jump punch (or whatever a specific character’s best attack is for that purpose).
A similar mechanic in devil may cry and similar games is the game will purposefully keep you at 1hp even if the attack would have killed you to create more tense situations. There is a character in bayonetta who takes enough damage from every attack to die, but because of that mechanic you have effectively 2 hp to work with.
Kingdom Hearts also does this, but only when you've got EXP Zero equipped, except the reason that's included is because you'd start dying in one hit to literally everything after a certain point otherwise
1 hit kill protection like Bayonetta does not exist in any DMC game. The only character action games I can think of off the top of my head that have it are God Hand, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising. Also, put some respect on the King of Little Devils name.
@@assassinonprozac DMC1 does have 1 hit kill protection though. In fact, you don't have to even be at full health, there's just a certain threshold of health where you can't be dropped to zero HP from a single hit
@@The_Meev Forgot about DMC1, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten low enough in health in that game to actually encounter it, and when I do I die immediately after (been a long time since I’ve played DMC1 too, need to go back to it). It definitely doesn’t exist in any other DMC game though (I actually tested it before posting that reply). Also, notice that all of the games that have it involved Hideki Kamiya in some way, either him directing the game or the game being developed by Platinum.
Fighting games as a genre pride themselves on having no hidden information? My guy we still don't have hitboxes and hurtboxes in training mode in most games. Allot of tech before the rise of internet culture was also never explained in game it had to be discovered.
DnF Duel magic pixel is similar to SFV except instead of having to super to kill you have to break the opponents guard. Being able to use your own remaining white life to cancel anything and put yourself at 1HP feels amazing as a player. You can use it to save yourself on a whiffed move, or even as an advantage for whiffing. All the while still being exciting for commentators. Wish the game was managed better. Great video as always
There's two non-fighting game examples of the magic pixel that come to mind for me. In Bioshock, if you're playing on easy or normal, a would-be fatal blow will leave you with an invisible sliver of life, giving you a chance to pop a medkit and save yourself. And in Pokemon, there's a move called False Swipe which is weak, but always leaves the enemy with 1hp or more, as it's actually designed to help you weaken and catch pokemon without KOing them, especially if you're overlevelled. There's also a passive ability called Sturdy that prevents you from dying in one hit, but who cares, False Swipe is way more interesting.
From what I understand, similar mechanics have been around for a long time in many games, even in those that weren't focused on the multiplayer experience. If I'm not mistaken, I think the original Doom had the player be more resilient the lower their health was, to force more tense situations when death is seemingly one hit away. It's closer to how guts works than to the magic pixel, but if you ask me they're all variations of the same core idea
I think having a magic pixel is actually just fine, to me guts is a more confusing and specific system. It does create more hype and a bit more magic to casual players, and that's fine, even if it is artificial. Anyone playing competitively will already know the magic pixel exists anyway. I do agree that SFV has a good system though.
I never liked Guts personally. I think it's way more obscuring and unintuitive than the MvC magic pixel. Since it's a continually changing stat that's different for every character, it ruins the ability to estimate what combo could kill. Meanwhile I never knew about the MvC magic pixel, but if you know about it, I would think that you can just easily estimate the damage by imagining the health bar is just a tad longer.
If you play the game enough, you'll absolutely know. The information is all out in the open and completely visible after all, it's just not as intuitive as it could be
Its not that its unintuitive, its that its just illogical. Like, the lifebar is straight up lying about how much health the character actually has left.
Defense values and guts are just another thing to keep in mind when it comes to matchups, and knowing the specific details of matchups was a huge part of mid-to-high-level Guilty Gear
Agreed. I always felt guts was a pretty awkward mechanic. Feels like it would create really weird situations of "I want to avoid doing the strongest combo here so I can prevent them getting more guts" almost like you are getting punished for doing optimal combos by having your next combo forcibly scaled.
minor thing i also love about sfv’s implementation of chip kills is the way it changes how you look at meter where you could use an EX now for a better KD or plus frames or wait until they’re at chip health to bop them with a super. its very cool and would pave the way for the burnout mechanics in sf6 which i also enjoy a lot also, magic pixel in non-chip games is at its funniest on carmine from under night, where the risk of all his health-draining attacks is mitigated because Anything will kill him anyways
One of my favorite ways fighting games sort of guide the tension via the HUD is the two lifebar system found in games like Killer Instinct and Injustice. In reality, you're just playing a normal first-to-two rounds system except the winner of the previous round doesn't get their lifebar refilled. The trick is that since Injustice and Killer Instinct use distinct healthbars instead of a round/lives counter it makes the round look heavily skewed the losing player even if they technically need to do less damage to win Round 2. Vampire Savior is much honest about this, using a lives indicator and single healthbars that are refilled upon losing a life. You can easily see that your green bar in Round 2 is bigger than the green bar of the guy who beat you first.
The lack of chip kills are something that many games have. And one argument I have heard several times is that this mechanic nerfs zoners, not allowing them to win by simply enacting their gameplan.
I love the guts system in Xrd. The first GG game I put time into was Strive but after they added rollback to Xrd I've been playing that game more and more and slowly reaching the conclusion that it's just way more fun to play. The guts system means the situation never feels hopeless.
Guilty Gear's guts is something I've always been mixed about. On one hand, it's obviously designed to be misleading. To make new players feel like they were close to winning a round, when in reality the opponent had like half their health left. It seems like a good way to make matches feel more tense, but falls apart when you go to training mode, do a combo or super that deals 40%, then do it in a real match against someone at 30% health and they live, ruining the illusion forever. On the other hand, guts is more than a misleading display, but actually affects how damage numbers are calculated. It takes a lot of practice and studying, but you can work around guts and play it in your favor. Not just in optimizing combos like the Chipp one shown in the video, but stuff like how Faust's poison and healing items are NOT affected by guts, and are thus MORE effective on low health players. It can be overwhelming, but it's one of many things that contribute to making GGXrd such a nutty and expressive game that I love, no matter how much I suck at it.
When I first heard about SFV's no chip kill I immediately thought of jojo's But i think in jojo's supers can't kill either. a hit or a throw needs to finish them off
So... IIRC, the SFIV/UMC3 engine in particular, but also a number of them around the same time (think Tekken 6) has something I call the "parabolic lifebar." A super-extreme example of this is the Heihachi/Kazuya showdown in Tekken 7 where the lifebar *appears* to be a consistent 2D object in the GUI, but is actually curved into the background/foreground so opening damage is exaggerated and the same attacks delivered towards the end of the lifebar, while they do the same amount of *points* per hit, are graphically represented less as the match goes on. There's also some differentiation in games where "0 HP" is a knockout, and "-1 HP" is a knockout.
This isn't actually true for either SFIV or Tekken 6. Both those games have "flat" life-bars for lack of a better wording, (with the exception of the small angled part of SFIV's life-bar where it can look a little bit off). Street Fighter IV does have a scaling system directly correlated to health loss though, where being under certain health pool thresholds while impart base scaling (95%, 90% and 75%) on attacks that hit you. A 90% scaled 100 damage move (doing 90 damage) on the end of the life-bar and a 100% scaled 90 damage move (doing 90 damage) on the beginning of the life-bar will visually deplete the identical amount of damage from the bar.
A genre that prides itself on not having hidden information?! This is the most obtuse, hidden mechanic genre of them all! Frame data is something players have had to mine and memorize, hitboxes are often very much not represented by their animations, and important status effects like invincibility or projectile invulnerability have 0 visual indication whether on wakeup or during a DP. At least smash makes your character flash during invulnerability (sometimes) tfg usually have nothing. How do I know Honda's headbutt has anti air properties while butt slam doesn't? I had to look it up on a wiki. Its so bad that for years players thought that DP was simply the "highest priority" move, and had no clue how it worked. Having some health level hidden on an already not super precisely detailed healthbar is the least problematic hidden mechanic I've seen in a fighting game.
The fighting game community prides itself on collecting the information and sharing it, but like... fighting games usually either don't explain or do so poorly. Some games include the frame data in training mode which is hella nice, but... Uh. Then there's tekken 7, where the devs had it ready to go and charge money for access to it
huh, I thought Magic Pixel was more of (you need to be at one health to die) in fighting games, which RPGs have used alot. Learning that it includes just having hidden health and life based scaling is interesting.
I honestly like how both sf5-6 do it. Having chip damage be something thatyou need to use super on or need to get a player in burnout, make it feel less bad to be at low hp because blocking is at least option. In 5 it does lead to trying to bait out the super or trying to vreversal checkmates too. SF6 it makes burn out fill so much scarier as you are force to play a different game and checkmates can come about but its a punishment for burn out.
Lol just having a portion of health that is not visible in the life bar is a really ingenious and easy way to implement "magic pixel" as a specific game mechanic without having to worry about how you would code which situations should leave the player at 1hp and which should just kill them.
weird how in MVC3, capcom just said "eh, hide the last bit of health cause why not." I feel like that had to be a mistake cause there's not way that was on purpose.
Personally I feel almost the exact opposite. The SFV change sucked all the excitement out of last chance situations because they became way more common and were often resolved in an anti climatic light hit. So when the occasional real comeback occurred I didn’t care because it wasn’t even special that they were sitting on no hp. And yeah on top of it the “never get touched” part of coming back from other games was unique and why it was hype. There’s always these moments where you’re sure they’re dead but instead there’s some edge case use of a move or supper they throw out and it’s wild. Trading that for 1/5 matches ending in something fishing for a c.lk was a huge mistake
I love that you dive so deep on this stuff. I would say on this one that I feel like the current crop of games designed around hype have really not been my thing. Im a game like 3rd Strike, parry was your way around chip at low health and I think that is a good method to counteract those cheap situations where you can just guarantee a win at the end of a round. I don’t feel like giving them inflated life or invincible blocking is necessary. Even SF6 has parries, but you only take chip when burnt out… What’s the point of the parry?
I think the oldest capcom game where you can't die from chip is jojo's from '99, that game also has a semi-universal chip-negation mechanic in the form of stands
I'm pretty sure it had, I remember seeing a thread that calculated the effective health each character had when you factored in the guts scaling I remember SFIV having it as well, it even activated during training mode lol
I do like sf6 version of chip where you only take chip in burnout. It still allows you to get the kill if your opponent decides to be risky with their energy usage.
The whole chip kill thing was the reason I wasn't a fan of SFV. I prefer the old tradition where any special move does chip and will kill if your health is low enough. I still play usf4 to this day but I understand why some people prefer what sf6 has done instead
@@mrosskne It hit multiple times before a big final hit, but those lead up hits did basically no damage. As a result the damage was backloaded onto the final hit which caused it to skip all forms of guts. Functionally this meant it did "more" damage in round ending situations. Watch any SF4 footage with abel and you'll hear the commutators be shocked every time it finishes someone off because for any other character they'd survive in similar situations.
Man, complete opposite view on SF5's magic pixel for me. It made it the most boring thing to watch, because the match should have been decided 30 seconds earlier while both players turtle up and try not to get opened up that one last time. It didn't happen every match, but it sucked. I much prefer the way Guilty Gear, the last two MKs, and SF6 handle it, where you're either spending Tension, defense meter, or Drive (respectively) to withstand chip damage at the end of the round, and if you continue to just block there instead of finding some other opening, you're done. It makes it exciting as you watch the resource tick down, while still keeping the match moving.
It's fascinating cause when I think magic pixel I actually think of Souls a lot. There are many, many situations in Souls and Elden Ring and whatever where players, enemies, and even bosses seem to brush off a hit that should have killed them, only to survive on the magic pixel. It's a weirdly effective system for increasing the player's stress in what is already a stressful and difficult genre.
I've never been a fan of death-by-chip-damage. The fact that you're about to lose the round because of your low HP and simply getting KOed out of blocking is nothing but frustrating to me. I'm happy that many FGs nowadays don't use, even though most of those aren't mainstream.
Bruh I'm so disappointed that there was no mention of GBVS's magic pixel, because IT IS THE BEST IMPLEMENTATION of such a mechanic ever and literally every FG should just copy it.
Is there any citation for the magic pixel being implemented intentionally? I have reasons to believe it's just the consequence of health value numbers not translating to pixels evenly when rounded, and the fact that you can't make a 0 pixel wide UI element. So the bar will always hide behind the top layer in rare circumstances.
Disagree a comeback from chip damage is more impressive while sfv magic pixel encourages the person who has to no life to depend on the opponent messing up rather than fighting to make no mistakes.
Digimon Rumble Arena actually has an *anti* magic pixel mechanic, where if 100% health is 65536 (0x10000), and the health bar is 120 pixels long, you can't have any less than 2 pixels visible, specifically to avoid this situation. Why it was 2, and not just 1, is because I imagine the developers made the reasonable assumption that many players would have played on blurry composite video where the orange life and the player 2 red health bar outline could blur together, especially if you and your sibling had to play on a small 12 inch CRT where it was hard to see shit to begin with. (For similar reasons, you can't have 119 pixels of health either, only 120 for a perfect 100% health, or 118.)
I hate hate hate the removal of chip kills. I find the immediate need for a low health character to begin relentless offensive pressure or risk death to be really exiciting. Making a comeback based on the fact that you are suddenly invincible in the face of a core mechanic feels extremely lame and undeserved to me. If you get down to that low life, you absolutely deserve to die to chip, even in a checkmate scenario. Of all the old school mechanics left by the wayside in newer fighters, this is the one I miss most.
4:04 I just play GGXXAC with the Life bars as warnings. I won, and can see the whole background behind my life bar? It took *40 hits* to take the last inch from that guy so I DON'T CARE XD
I think it's a little bit lying to say it's a "mechanic". Magic pixel is a term made purely by the fgc, and in reality it's really just an off chance of it happening, not something intended to happen by game devs of Capcom cause it'd be a little unfair. Magic pixel situations, as you demonstrated, tend to just happen per situation- the health bars obviously can't show ALL the HP, let alone 0.01% of it. Magic pixel is made by the community. Fighting games afterwards of umvc3 typically don't let characters die to chip damage anymore, really just depends on the game (usually team based fighters have chip damage ko's). And even with you saying "Capcom improved it in umvc3", it still exists. It's not something they can just *change* because that's just how numbers work. (For example we can look at Pokemon, a non fighting that also has the magic pixel and where being hit is a min-max damage roll, usually it's pure happenstance that a pokemon survives with 1 hp depending on the damage roll. There are items and abilities that can force a 1hp scenario, but using those items/abilities *is* intentional by the game devs, but the damage roll is RNG.) The only mechanic I can think of for umvc3 is advancing guards prevent chip damage, especially from multi hit supers, but saying Capcom purposefully made this magic pixel "mechanic" is sorta baity
Isn't it also fairly common especially nowadays for the health bars in fighting games to not really be proportional to health? Like if your character has 1000 HP then the first half of their health bar might actually graphically represent 300 HP with the second half being 700, which makes it seem like fights are more close to death than they actually are because even if there's not a guts system in place, it still takes fewer hits to get to what looks like low HP.
honestly I dont like guts, especially since the game already hide informations about the damage you're doing to begin with. In general I hate not seeing what damage I do except in training mode. It also makes combos look very silly where you're encouraged to spam lights or multi hitting supers to kill.
I usually really like your videos. But did you seriously just say that the term magic pixel comes from Marvel versus Capcom 3? The term dates back to Street Fighter 2 possibly even earlier. Maybe your age is showing a little.
Nah, they fixed it in SF6. Chip damage is only in burnout, and it's one of like three very good reasons to manage risk/reward of how you spend your Drive so that you don't get burned out.
I hate the current state of magic pixels existing in every game nowadays. You mentioned Street Fighter 5's implementation of it and that, to me, is one of the biggest offenders. I don't care about hype or what the game looks like to viewers, I just want my opponent finished when they've already lost. Absolutely maddening in all these trash modern games that you have to constantly show respect to the player on the back foot. Moment 37 really did irreparable damage to the genre.
Magic pixels aren't new at all, they only just got named in Marvel 3 It's a side effect of showing life as a percentage meter and nothing else, you can even see magic pixels happening in an explosive game like Street Fighter II if you happen to get very unlucky with the damage randomizer. TBH I'm not sure why it's bein called a mechanic in the case of Marvel 3
Of all games, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game also has an actual magic pixel mechanic implement. If your health is above 10 and you receive an attack that would kill you, you survive with one hit point. You can also regenerate health using super meter, so it's sort of a neat system where you can cling onto life, swing momentum a bit into your favor and try to spend meter to go over 10 HP to give yourself another safety net.
But it's such a fast-paced, volatile game that it doesn't come into play often.
Is this mechanic in GGST?
@@thisistherun4015 Nope. It feels like it sometimes, with the Guts system (taking less dmg at lower health)
The 😮😮😮
The magic pixel- Aka "Why 'Will It Kill' Exists".
Correction: The magic pixel wasn't removed in Ultimate MvC3, it was shrunk. One can boot up training mode, and either turn off regenerating HP or do a tod, and kill the dummy with a non-cinematic super that hits a large number of times (like Ryu's Shinku Hadoken or Dante's Million Dollars). If you do it correctly, you can observe that the dummy's HP appears empty for several hits before they die, showing that there is a magic pixel. I remember reading that the magic pixel in vanilla MvC3 was 4% of a character's full HP. In Ultimate, I haven't done any tests but I think it was halved to 2%.
Any time your HP is broken into more pieces than you have pixels for health bar, the magic pixel is likely to exist. It doesn't have to be intentionally implemented, and is in tons of games -- especially low res ones.
@@toby2581This video isn't just about the fact that it exists, but games where it is intentionally implemented.
I love this breakdown of such a controversial mechanic. It's such a fine line between making it fun for spectators and making it fun for players. The core of it feels like not making Magic Pixel/Guts strong when there is a strong comeback mechanic as well. Doubling up on them feels bad (X Factor, V Trigger, Etc) but with Xrd, it feels almost rewarding to learn how to play around it
Interestingly, in arcana heart, not only does each character have an individual guts value, with some guts values being negative, but furthermore each of the 24 arcanas you can select for your character modifies your guts level in a unique way; turning guts into even more of a strategic consideration than in other games
And in ARCANA HEART of all games.
And he completely missed the progenitor of "magic pixel"
OG Melty Blood.
There's Will It Kill clips of the absurdity of the "You have absolutely NO health left, and the combo is going to last for another 30 seconds, but you're just fine"
OG Melty Blood also don't have chip kills unless it's a super. Something Sf5 implemented later.
A very prevalent system in GG that you failed to mention is how chip damage in the game works, chip damage can ONLY kill when the opponent has 1HP left. Even if your opponent blocks an attack and the chip damage would be greater than their current health it will only leave them at 1HP which can produce a very similar effect whilst still being a very real mechanic at play.
doesn't matter that much, the point of the vid is the same.
GGXXAC has given several Bayonetta "Next Fart Kills You" moments.
Especially with a really long combo... "Can you Please BE DEAD ALREADY?!"
XD
@@Ramsey276oneHappens all the time in Xrd too.
"FAILED to mention" is fucking HILARIOUS
@@santitheperson9416 "failed to mention"☝️🤓
Bruh I didn't expect one of my old CF clips to be used in that collage of examples. Magic pixel comebacks can be pretty hype to see, it takes a lot of mental fortitude to keep yourself from panicking during these situations as any stray hit will kill you. BUT, the feeling of finally breaking through that bullet hell of a defense and then performing your own game winning combos on your opponent is one of the most satisfying feelings one can ever feel in a fighting game.
Part of the reason Strive is high damage is because Guts was directly nerfed in it. A 0 Guts character from Xrd would still receive more damage resistance at low HP than a Guts 5 character in Strive.
The "magic pixel" as a mechanic, in MvC3 in my opinion, was absolutely perfect for Marvel and the culture surrounding it. It's just not something I'd like to see replicated really anywhere else.
I would say "Cinematic Story Modes" or "Epic Boss Encounters" in single-player modes is fair as well; just don't throw that shit in tournaments.
Man makes the most informative vids on things that cross a lot of peoples minds, W
man The UI in vanilla MvC3 was so clean.
Yeah I've always preferred it to UMVC3
I prefer the magic pixel to guts. Part of it is that it’s a more accurate representation of hp, and part of it is that I don’t think it’s that interesting as a player or spectator to switch from the combos done earlier in a round to repeatedly hitting jump punch (or whatever a specific character’s best attack is for that purpose).
A similar mechanic in devil may cry and similar games is the game will purposefully keep you at 1hp even if the attack would have killed you to create more tense situations.
There is a character in bayonetta who takes enough damage from every attack to die, but because of that mechanic you have effectively 2 hp to work with.
Kingdom Hearts also does this, but only when you've got EXP Zero equipped, except the reason that's included is because you'd start dying in one hit to literally everything after a certain point otherwise
@@The_MeevHuh? The whole point of level 1 runs are that you DON’T have the 1 HP abilities.
1 hit kill protection like Bayonetta does not exist in any DMC game. The only character action games I can think of off the top of my head that have it are God Hand, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising. Also, put some respect on the King of Little Devils name.
@@assassinonprozac DMC1 does have 1 hit kill protection though. In fact, you don't have to even be at full health, there's just a certain threshold of health where you can't be dropped to zero HP from a single hit
@@The_Meev Forgot about DMC1, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten low enough in health in that game to actually encounter it, and when I do I die immediately after (been a long time since I’ve played DMC1 too, need to go back to it). It definitely doesn’t exist in any other DMC game though (I actually tested it before posting that reply). Also, notice that all of the games that have it involved Hideki Kamiya in some way, either him directing the game or the game being developed by Platinum.
Fighting games as a genre pride themselves on having no hidden information? My guy we still don't have hitboxes and hurtboxes in training mode in most games. Allot of tech before the rise of internet culture was also never explained in game it had to be discovered.
1:53 aw, it's Floe
DnF Duel magic pixel is similar to SFV except instead of having to super to kill you have to break the opponents guard. Being able to use your own remaining white life to cancel anything and put yourself at 1HP feels amazing as a player. You can use it to save yourself on a whiffed move, or even as an advantage for whiffing. All the while still being exciting for commentators. Wish the game was managed better. Great video as always
There's two non-fighting game examples of the magic pixel that come to mind for me.
In Bioshock, if you're playing on easy or normal, a would-be fatal blow will leave you with an invisible sliver of life, giving you a chance to pop a medkit and save yourself.
And in Pokemon, there's a move called False Swipe which is weak, but always leaves the enemy with 1hp or more, as it's actually designed to help you weaken and catch pokemon without KOing them, especially if you're overlevelled. There's also a passive ability called Sturdy that prevents you from dying in one hit, but who cares, False Swipe is way more interesting.
This is kinda unrelated to the specific topic of the video, but I think I like the look of old Marvel 3's meters more than Ultimate Marvel 3's.
From what I understand, similar mechanics have been around for a long time in many games, even in those that weren't focused on the multiplayer experience. If I'm not mistaken, I think the original Doom had the player be more resilient the lower their health was, to force more tense situations when death is seemingly one hit away. It's closer to how guts works than to the magic pixel, but if you ask me they're all variations of the same core idea
I think having a magic pixel is actually just fine, to me guts is a more confusing and specific system. It does create more hype and a bit more magic to casual players, and that's fine, even if it is artificial. Anyone playing competitively will already know the magic pixel exists anyway. I do agree that SFV has a good system though.
I never liked Guts personally. I think it's way more obscuring and unintuitive than the MvC magic pixel. Since it's a continually changing stat that's different for every character, it ruins the ability to estimate what combo could kill.
Meanwhile I never knew about the MvC magic pixel, but if you know about it, I would think that you can just easily estimate the damage by imagining the health bar is just a tad longer.
If you play the game enough, you'll absolutely know. The information is all out in the open and completely visible after all, it's just not as intuitive as it could be
You learn to work with Guts the more you play. It's really not that unintuitive.
Its not that its unintuitive, its that its just illogical. Like, the lifebar is straight up lying about how much health the character actually has left.
Defense values and guts are just another thing to keep in mind when it comes to matchups, and knowing the specific details of matchups was a huge part of mid-to-high-level Guilty Gear
Agreed. I always felt guts was a pretty awkward mechanic. Feels like it would create really weird situations of "I want to avoid doing the strongest combo here so I can prevent them getting more guts" almost like you are getting punished for doing optimal combos by having your next combo forcibly scaled.
minor thing i also love about sfv’s implementation of chip kills is the way it changes how you look at meter where you could use an EX now for a better KD or plus frames or wait until they’re at chip health to bop them with a super. its very cool and would pave the way for the burnout mechanics in sf6 which i also enjoy a lot
also, magic pixel in non-chip games is at its funniest on carmine from under night, where the risk of all his health-draining attacks is mitigated because Anything will kill him anyways
1:43 I can still hear the hype. You can't mute it.
Thor's magic pixel in MVC3 is so huge that he can take a full heavy tatsu from Ryu with it
CHIP KILLS ARE KING SHIT 👑
One of my favorite ways fighting games sort of guide the tension via the HUD is the two lifebar system found in games like Killer Instinct and Injustice. In reality, you're just playing a normal first-to-two rounds system except the winner of the previous round doesn't get their lifebar refilled.
The trick is that since Injustice and Killer Instinct use distinct healthbars instead of a round/lives counter it makes the round look heavily skewed the losing player even if they technically need to do less damage to win Round 2. Vampire Savior is much honest about this, using a lives indicator and single healthbars that are refilled upon losing a life. You can easily see that your green bar in Round 2 is bigger than the green bar of the guy who beat you first.
The lack of chip kills are something that many games have. And one argument I have heard several times is that this mechanic nerfs zoners, not allowing them to win by simply enacting their gameplan.
I love the guts system in Xrd. The first GG game I put time into was Strive but after they added rollback to Xrd I've been playing that game more and more and slowly reaching the conclusion that it's just way more fun to play. The guts system means the situation never feels hopeless.
Have you played Plus R? Super fun, do recommend ^^
Guilty Gear's guts is something I've always been mixed about.
On one hand, it's obviously designed to be misleading. To make new players feel like they were close to winning a round, when in reality the opponent had like half their health left. It seems like a good way to make matches feel more tense, but falls apart when you go to training mode, do a combo or super that deals 40%, then do it in a real match against someone at 30% health and they live, ruining the illusion forever.
On the other hand, guts is more than a misleading display, but actually affects how damage numbers are calculated. It takes a lot of practice and studying, but you can work around guts and play it in your favor. Not just in optimizing combos like the Chipp one shown in the video, but stuff like how Faust's poison and healing items are NOT affected by guts, and are thus MORE effective on low health players. It can be overwhelming, but it's one of many things that contribute to making GGXrd such a nutty and expressive game that I love, no matter how much I suck at it.
When I first heard about SFV's no chip kill I immediately thought of jojo's But i think in jojo's supers can't kill either. a hit or a throw needs to finish them off
Justin Wong Cable comeback at Texas Showdown is the pinnacle of magic pixel.
So... IIRC, the SFIV/UMC3 engine in particular, but also a number of them around the same time (think Tekken 6) has something I call the "parabolic lifebar." A super-extreme example of this is the Heihachi/Kazuya showdown in Tekken 7 where the lifebar *appears* to be a consistent 2D object in the GUI, but is actually curved into the background/foreground so opening damage is exaggerated and the same attacks delivered towards the end of the lifebar, while they do the same amount of *points* per hit, are graphically represented less as the match goes on.
There's also some differentiation in games where "0 HP" is a knockout, and "-1 HP" is a knockout.
This isn't actually true for either SFIV or Tekken 6. Both those games have "flat" life-bars for lack of a better wording, (with the exception of the small angled part of SFIV's life-bar where it can look a little bit off). Street Fighter IV does have a scaling system directly correlated to health loss though, where being under certain health pool thresholds while impart base scaling (95%, 90% and 75%) on attacks that hit you.
A 90% scaled 100 damage move (doing 90 damage) on the end of the life-bar and a 100% scaled 90 damage move (doing 90 damage) on the beginning of the life-bar will visually deplete the identical amount of damage from the bar.
Love the sludgey background guitar!
A genre that prides itself on not having hidden information?! This is the most obtuse, hidden mechanic genre of them all! Frame data is something players have had to mine and memorize, hitboxes are often very much not represented by their animations, and important status effects like invincibility or projectile invulnerability have 0 visual indication whether on wakeup or during a DP. At least smash makes your character flash during invulnerability (sometimes) tfg usually have nothing. How do I know Honda's headbutt has anti air properties while butt slam doesn't? I had to look it up on a wiki. Its so bad that for years players thought that DP was simply the "highest priority" move, and had no clue how it worked.
Having some health level hidden on an already not super precisely detailed healthbar is the least problematic hidden mechanic I've seen in a fighting game.
I'd replace health bars with numbers
The fighting game community prides itself on collecting the information and sharing it, but like... fighting games usually either don't explain or do so poorly. Some games include the frame data in training mode which is hella nice, but... Uh. Then there's tekken 7, where the devs had it ready to go and charge money for access to it
The SFV example by no means started there, Capcom has been doing that since at least Heritage for the Future
huh, I thought Magic Pixel was more of (you need to be at one health to die) in fighting games, which RPGs have used alot.
Learning that it includes just having hidden health and life based scaling is interesting.
I honestly like how both sf5-6 do it. Having chip damage be something thatyou need to use super on or need to get a player in burnout, make it feel less bad to be at low hp because blocking is at least option. In 5 it does lead to trying to bait out the super or trying to vreversal checkmates too. SF6 it makes burn out fill so much scarier as you are force to play a different game and checkmates can come about but its a punishment for burn out.
Lol just having a portion of health that is not visible in the life bar is a really ingenious and easy way to implement "magic pixel" as a specific game mechanic without having to worry about how you would code which situations should leave the player at 1hp and which should just kill them.
weird how in MVC3, capcom just said "eh, hide the last bit of health cause why not." I feel like that had to be a mistake cause there's not way that was on purpose.
Magic Pixel? Oh, the situation Daigo was before the legendary Evo Moment 37
Personally I feel almost the exact opposite.
The SFV change sucked all the excitement out of last chance situations because they became way more common and were often resolved in an anti climatic light hit.
So when the occasional real comeback occurred I didn’t care because it wasn’t even special that they were sitting on no hp.
And yeah on top of it the “never get touched” part of coming back from other games was unique and why it was hype. There’s always these moments where you’re sure they’re dead but instead there’s some edge case use of a move or supper they throw out and it’s wild.
Trading that for 1/5 matches ending in something fishing for a c.lk was a huge mistake
AKA Hype Incarnate
its why driving around on empty is so exciting.
I love that you dive so deep on this stuff. I would say on this one that I feel like the current crop of games designed around hype have really not been my thing. Im a game like 3rd Strike, parry was your way around chip at low health and I think that is a good method to counteract those cheap situations where you can just guarantee a win at the end of a round. I don’t feel like giving them inflated life or invincible blocking is necessary. Even SF6 has parries, but you only take chip when burnt out… What’s the point of the parry?
yet another excellent fg vid
Ah, the magic pixel
The bane of many WIK rock throwers
Babe wake up theory fighter uploaded a new video
New TF video, it's like christmas morning
Magic pixel actually goes all the way back in the street fighter 2 days.
Also known as the destroyer of many friendships.
I can actually think of one instance of hidden information in a fighting game: which negative edge fireball Juri will throw in SF4
I have nothing to say other than Amazing video
I think the oldest capcom game where you can't die from chip is jojo's from '99, that game also has a semi-universal chip-negation mechanic in the form of stands
I miss SFV. That game had guts scaling, too, right? Did any other Street Fighter have guts scaling? I know 6 doesn't.
I'm pretty sure it had, I remember seeing a thread that calculated the effective health each character had when you factored in the guts scaling
I remember SFIV having it as well, it even activated during training mode lol
The talk about Guts makes me wonder what you think of Awakening in Persona 4 Arena, where it gives you a defence boost once triggered
Great Video👍
Theory fighter video? I immediately click!
I do like sf6 version of chip where you only take chip in burnout. It still allows you to get the kill if your opponent decides to be risky with their energy usage.
5:20 on SFV you can chip kill with a Critical Art
The whole chip kill thing was the reason I wasn't a fan of SFV. I prefer the old tradition where any special move does chip and will kill if your health is low enough. I still play usf4 to this day but I understand why some people prefer what sf6 has done instead
That guts shit some bs why wouldn’t the put a gauge for it on the screen?
MvC's hidden health is such a cool idea
And that's why Abel's ultra 1 always killed.
why did it always kill?
@@mrosskne It hit multiple times before a big final hit, but those lead up hits did basically no damage. As a result the damage was backloaded onto the final hit which caused it to skip all forms of guts. Functionally this meant it did "more" damage in round ending situations. Watch any SF4 footage with abel and you'll hear the commutators be shocked every time it finishes someone off because for any other character they'd survive in similar situations.
Misleading health bars is a wonderful idea. How about a logarithmic health bar?
Man, complete opposite view on SF5's magic pixel for me. It made it the most boring thing to watch, because the match should have been decided 30 seconds earlier while both players turtle up and try not to get opened up that one last time. It didn't happen every match, but it sucked. I much prefer the way Guilty Gear, the last two MKs, and SF6 handle it, where you're either spending Tension, defense meter, or Drive (respectively) to withstand chip damage at the end of the round, and if you continue to just block there instead of finding some other opening, you're done. It makes it exciting as you watch the resource tick down, while still keeping the match moving.
It's fascinating cause when I think magic pixel I actually think of Souls a lot. There are many, many situations in Souls and Elden Ring and whatever where players, enemies, and even bosses seem to brush off a hit that should have killed them, only to survive on the magic pixel. It's a weirdly effective system for increasing the player's stress in what is already a stressful and difficult genre.
I've never been a fan of death-by-chip-damage. The fact that you're about to lose the round because of your low HP and simply getting KOed out of blocking is nothing but frustrating to me. I'm happy that many FGs nowadays don't use, even though most of those aren't mainstream.
Bruh I'm so disappointed that there was no mention of GBVS's magic pixel, because IT IS THE BEST IMPLEMENTATION of such a mechanic ever and literally every FG should just copy it.
I thought it was called the invincible pixel?
what is the name of the background music?
Is there any citation for the magic pixel being implemented intentionally? I have reasons to believe it's just the consequence of health value numbers not translating to pixels evenly when rounded, and the fact that you can't make a 0 pixel wide UI element. So the bar will always hide behind the top layer in rare circumstances.
Pandering to spectators always seems to be detrimental for the actual players.
song?
Im not really sure that mvc3 magic pixel is a system/mechanic. Seems like saying it is a variation on the mechanic of health would be more accurate.
It's not exactly the same thing, but a bunch of singleplayer games have the last bit of the health bar represent more health than the rest of it.
Disagree a comeback from chip damage is more impressive while sfv magic pixel encourages the person who has to no life to depend on the opponent messing up rather than fighting to make no mistakes.
Everyone knows that when you have 1hp, you start playing better
Digimon Rumble Arena actually has an *anti* magic pixel mechanic, where if 100% health is 65536 (0x10000), and the health bar is 120 pixels long, you can't have any less than 2 pixels visible, specifically to avoid this situation. Why it was 2, and not just 1, is because I imagine the developers made the reasonable assumption that many players would have played on blurry composite video where the orange life and the player 2 red health bar outline could blur together, especially if you and your sibling had to play on a small 12 inch CRT where it was hard to see shit to begin with. (For similar reasons, you can't have 119 pixels of health either, only 120 for a perfect 100% health, or 118.)
I hate hate hate the removal of chip kills. I find the immediate need for a low health character to begin relentless offensive pressure or risk death to be really exiciting. Making a comeback based on the fact that you are suddenly invincible in the face of a core mechanic feels extremely lame and undeserved to me. If you get down to that low life, you absolutely deserve to die to chip, even in a checkmate scenario. Of all the old school mechanics left by the wayside in newer fighters, this is the one I miss most.
4:04 I just play GGXXAC with the Life bars as warnings.
I won, and can see the whole background behind my life bar? It took *40 hits* to take the last inch from that guy so I DON'T CARE
XD
Venom Tactical Arch, D Stinger Aim and Red Hail, FYI
I think it's a little bit lying to say it's a "mechanic". Magic pixel is a term made purely by the fgc, and in reality it's really just an off chance of it happening, not something intended to happen by game devs of Capcom cause it'd be a little unfair. Magic pixel situations, as you demonstrated, tend to just happen per situation- the health bars obviously can't show ALL the HP, let alone 0.01% of it. Magic pixel is made by the community. Fighting games afterwards of umvc3 typically don't let characters die to chip damage anymore, really just depends on the game (usually team based fighters have chip damage ko's).
And even with you saying "Capcom improved it in umvc3", it still exists. It's not something they can just *change* because that's just how numbers work. (For example we can look at Pokemon, a non fighting that also has the magic pixel and where being hit is a min-max damage roll, usually it's pure happenstance that a pokemon survives with 1 hp depending on the damage roll. There are items and abilities that can force a 1hp scenario, but using those items/abilities *is* intentional by the game devs, but the damage roll is RNG.) The only mechanic I can think of for umvc3 is advancing guards prevent chip damage, especially from multi hit supers, but saying Capcom purposefully made this magic pixel "mechanic" is sorta baity
Isn't it also fairly common especially nowadays for the health bars in fighting games to not really be proportional to health? Like if your character has 1000 HP then the first half of their health bar might actually graphically represent 300 HP with the second half being 700, which makes it seem like fights are more close to death than they actually are because even if there's not a guts system in place, it still takes fewer hits to get to what looks like low HP.
What fighting game works like that?
@@hadoking3636injustice works like that and I'm pretty sure the newer MKs do too
which is why health bars are shit and should be replaced by direct numerical displays
Coulda picked a better clip to start with…
personally, i dont like when a game is like "super-armor damage can chipkill" cuz it makes comebacks harder for grapplers!
honestly I dont like guts, especially since the game already hide informations about the damage you're doing to begin with. In general I hate not seeing what damage I do except in training mode. It also makes combos look very silly where you're encouraged to spam lights or multi hitting supers to kill.
kinda invalided, just play as you would low hp shouldn't make you rush in, do exactly what you did to put them there
I stand in solidarity with Guts defenders.
I usually really like your videos. But did you seriously just say that the term magic pixel comes from Marvel versus Capcom 3?
The term dates back to Street Fighter 2 possibly even earlier. Maybe your age is showing a little.
And then SF6 just straight up removed chip damage altogether, which for me was a dumb move.
In sf6, being in burnout state causes you to take chip from everything except normals, and it can kill. It still exists, but its 2 step now.
Nah, they fixed it in SF6. Chip damage is only in burnout, and it's one of like three very good reasons to manage risk/reward of how you spend your Drive so that you don't get burned out.
I hate the current state of magic pixels existing in every game nowadays. You mentioned Street Fighter 5's implementation of it and that, to me, is one of the biggest offenders.
I don't care about hype or what the game looks like to viewers, I just want my opponent finished when they've already lost. Absolutely maddening in all these trash modern games that you have to constantly show respect to the player on the back foot. Moment 37 really did irreparable damage to the genre.
Magic pixels aren't new at all, they only just got named in Marvel 3
It's a side effect of showing life as a percentage meter and nothing else, you can even see magic pixels happening in an explosive game like Street Fighter II if you happen to get very unlucky with the damage randomizer.
TBH I'm not sure why it's bein called a mechanic in the case of Marvel 3
Sfv is trash and the opposite of hype no chip outs is a terrible idea
magic pixel is dumb. it's a slap in the face to actual skill based comebacks like moment 37.
No mention of Melty Blood? Characters straight up livin on magic pixel for 10 combo hits + super.