This might sound crazy but I honestly hope they don't include traditional health bars in VF6...

(Would be cool to see the new X-Ray body damage mechanic replace traditional health bars)

I think the gameplay will be wayyy more interesting and it could actually be a brilliant and innovative decision. I'm getting tired of health bars in all games tbh lol. And with the new footage they've got an X-ray body damage mechanic where specific limbs or body parts will light up orange when they are in critical condition. One example was when Wolf specifically targets Cielo's legs. And there was another moment where a lethal blow to Cielo's head leads to the slow-mo shot into a KO.

EDIT: Just realized you can see there are health bars in the footage, so it would be nice if there was an option to disable the HUD and turn it off lmao...

I'm ngl, I think having no health bars would make fighting games 2x more interesting.

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u/cryptofutures100xlev — 20 hours ago

▲ 0 r/virtuafighter

My only critique about the footage - where's the parries?

I was under the impression that this game would have a universal parry system that allowed for martial arts movie type choreo back and forth where you could dynamically parry attacks. Previous clips and also the tech demo concept footage showcased glimpses of this, but it isn't very prevalent in the new leaked footage.

I'm hoping they have more footage to show at summer game fest 🙏

I'm really happy with literally everything else. Just add more parries and this would be the perfect game. Evasion looks nice, but even more evasion and defensive options in general would be epic.

The X-ray damage system is very exciting.

reddit.com

u/cryptofutures100xlev — 1 day ago

▲ 4 r/EDM

Anyone know the name of this song?

Sounds like house music. Shazam doesn't know what it is. I came across this banger on a Vietnam travel vlog I was watching on YT 😎

u/cryptofutures100xlev — 2 days ago

▲ 0 r/Fancast

I'd love to see Thomas Brodie-Sangster get a chance to audition for James Bond...

He's a criminally underrated actor who I haven't seen in AGES since The Maze Runner trilogy. I really think he deserves to be more mainstream! He could definitely pull off James Bond, he just needs to bulk up a little 👀

u/cryptofutures100xlev — 6 days ago

▲ 0 r/marvelstudios

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how much bigger and weirder the MCU’s street-level side could feel if Marvel actually leaned into the martial arts/crime/mystical side of the comics.

I like Kingpin. Vincent D’Onofrio is great and Fisk is easily one of the best villains Marvel has put on screen. But I don’t want the street-level MCU to keep circling back to him forever. The original Daredevil series, Hawkeye, Echo, Born Again, it always comes back to Fisk. It's gettin kind of annoying at this point. He’s great, but this corner of the MCU needs to evolve at some point.

I’d love to see Kingpin finally lose power or get killed off in a way that actually matters. Not just for shock value, but because it could create a real power vacuum in New York. Different gangs, factions, assassins, mystical groups, and street-level heroes all fighting over what he left behind would be way more interesting than “Kingpin is behind everything” again.

My pick for who should rise out of that chaos is Mister Negative. Martin Li is so underrated. He’s not just another mob boss. He has the public philanthropist side, the supernatural crime lord side, the Inner Demons, the Chinatown underworld angle, and the whole light/dark duality baked into him. He is meant to be the personification of yin and yang, and his corruption powerset is really interesting.

Aesthetically, he would go insanely hard in live action if Marvel actually committed to it. The inverted black-and-white look, the negative energy, the Inner Demons, the calm respectable public image hiding a supernatural gangster underneath. I would genuinely watch an entire series just about Martin Li’s backstory starting from China, how he built F.E.A.S.T., his ties to organized crime, and how his two sides coexist to create a zen-like balance. We literally have the perfect setup with Aunt May's death and the F.E.A.S.T. shelter being introduced in the MCU, so you could naturally weave Martin Li into Peter's world. And instead of giving him a cliche revenge motivation against Oscorp like the Insomniac games, they should dive deeper into his comic book backstory cause there's still so much to explore with Martin Li.

In the comics, stories like Shadowland, Gang War, and Devil’s Reign make New York feel packed with heroes, villains, factions, and overlapping histories. Daredevil, Spider-Man, Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, Moon Knight, Elektra, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Punisher, Bullseye, Mister Negative, Tombstone, the Hand, the Maggia, all of these characters can cross paths and it feels natural. The MCU version feels stripped down by comparison.

We’re apparently waiting until season 3 of Born Again to really get more Defenders energy, which is crazy to me. Even Bullseye, who is one of the best parts of Born Again, still doesn’t have his proper costume yet. It just feels way more pedestrian than it should.

Shang-Chi is another huge missed opportunity. We should have had a sequel by now. The first movie had some of the best fight choreography in the MCU, and then Marvel just let him sit there. I’ve been reading the 2020 Shang-Chi run, and that’s exactly the kind of scale I want: martial arts mythology, secret societies, family drama, mystical weapons, crime politics, and Shang-Chi actually crossing paths with the wider Marvel universe.

In Shadowland: Spider-Man, Spider-Man and Shang-Chi team up to stop Mister Negative while everyone else is dealing with Daredevil and the Hand. Mister Negative even corrupts Shang-Chi with his touch during the fight, and Spider-Man has to talk him back from the edge. That kind of interaction would be great in live action.

In Gang War, Shang-Chi is also involved because the Five Weapons Society runs Chinatown and Mister Negative’s territory borders his. That alone feels like a perfect setup for the MCU. You could have Chinatown, the Hand, the Inner Demons, the Five Weapons Society, and Kingpin’s collapsing empire all crashing into each other.

Iron Fist deserves another shot too. Give him a proper comic-accurate series with K’un-Lun, the Immortal Weapons, mystical tournaments, the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, all of that lore. I’d also love to see Lin Lie eventually. If the Hand is coming back, Elektra should obviously be involved too. Moon Knight could work as the brutal wildcard doing Midnight Mission stuff and investigating the supernatural side of the gang war.

That’s why Spider-Man: Brand New Day bringing in the Hand feels like such a big opening. If Marvel actually uses it to connect Spider-Man’s world with Daredevil, Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, Elektra, Moon Knight, and Mister Negative, you could build a whole street-level martial arts saga out of it.

You don’t need to directly adapt Shadowland or Gang War. Just take inspiration from them. Daredevil gets corrupted by the Hand. The street heroes fracture over what to do with him. Kingpin’s empire starts collapsing. Shang-Chi gets pulled in because of Chinatown and the Five Weapons Society. Iron Fist gets pulled in because of the Hand and mystical martial arts lore. Moon Knight investigates the supernatural rot underneath everything. And Mister Negative is quietly playing every faction against each other while they all tear themselves apart. Then, at the right moment, Martin Li steps out of the shadows, kills Kingpin, and takes everything. That one move would instantly tell the audience the old era is over.

I don’t hate Kingpin. He had a great run. But the MCU street-level side needs to get bigger, weirder, darker, and more connected. Marvel has all this insane martial arts and street-level lore just sitting there. Mister Negative, Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, the Hand, Elektra, Moon Knight, the Inner Demons, the Five Weapons Society, the Immortal Weapons, all of it could make this corner of the MCU feel way more alive.

If I was in charge, I’d be building an entire street-level martial arts/crime saga around Mister Negative, Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, and the Hand.

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u/cryptofutures100xlev — 19 days ago

▲ 6 r/moviecasting+1 crossposts

Character Bio

To the officers under his command at the Łódź Voivodeship Headquarters, he is Andrzej Kowalski, the new Komendant transferred in from the Warsaw Metropolitan Grid. They have heard the rumors. A grim posting in the Mazowieckie containment zones. A messy divorce. A reputation for closing cases other men preferred to bury under sealed-court NDAs. He keeps to himself, drinks alone at the bar across from the precinct, and runs the building with the quiet authority of a man who has nothing left to prove.

None of it is real.

Kowalski died fourteen months ago in a smart-glass dacha outside Skierniewice, his body fed piece by piece into the plasma furnace of a defunct biorecycling plant in Pabianice. His biometric profile was harvested first. Cornea, gait, vocal print, dermal microbiome, the works. The man wearing his uniform now is Marek Wójcik, called Wilk on the streets where he grew up, second son of a Bałuty foundry worker and the most prolific monster the Polish underworld has ever produced.

He stands six foot two, broad in the shoulder, with a beard he has worn since his conscription days and hair he combs back the way his father did. His face has been remade three times. Once in a Wrocław blackmarket clinic above a dumpling shop, once in a Vienna gene-tailor's atelier, the last time in a sealed surgical suite in the basement of his own safehouse to settle precisely into the bones beneath Kowalski's harvested skin. Subdermal mesh masks the old scars from facial recognition sweeps. A custom neural shunt at the base of his skull intercepts the precinct's mandatory cortical telemetry feed and pipes Kowalski's authentic patterns back upstream in real time. As far as the Ministry's databases are concerned, the dead man is alive and filing his reports on schedule.

Up close, the eyes give him away. They sit too still. They watch the way an animal watches a wounded thing it has decided not to kill yet.

Wilk came up under the remnants of the old Pruszków hierarchy in the early 2030s. Extortion first, then chip trafficking, then the work that gets handed only to men who do not ask questions and do not talk after. He was twenty-six when he killed his first informant with a claw hammer in a Praga basement, twenty-eight when he took over the crew that had ordered it, thirty when he stopped counting the bodies. Investigators who tried to map his organization in 2044 quietly closed the file after the lead detective's twelve-year-old daughter received an unsolicited AR drop on her school-issued lenses. She has not spoken since.

By thirty-three he had moved into the digital trade. The patostream economy was metastasizing then, the platforms half-deregulated under the new Cyfryzacja Acts, drunks and addicts and runaway girls paid in vodka and crypto to scream and bleed and degrade themselves on livestream for an audience of paying cowards in seven countries. Wilk industrialized it. He bought the housing blocks. He bought the streamers. He bought the moderators on the platforms that pretended not to see. He fitted the apartments with always-on neural-feed rigs that scraped the streamers' cortical responses raw and sold the data to mood-engineering startups in Kraków under three layers of shell companies. The ones who broke contract or tried to leave were moved to a different production pipeline, the one that operated out of a converted meatpacking arcology in Sosnowiec and uploaded its work to onion-routed servers running on stolen quantum allocations out of Minsk. Eight terabytes a week, at the peak. He watched the dailies himself on a private holo-rig. He took notes.

His distribution network ran through Rotterdam, Pristina, and a forwarding address in the Limassol free-data zone. A Russian buyer in 2047 reportedly paid mid-seven figures in laundered Monero for a single custom commission and called it the finest he had ever received. Interpol's Cyber Division has known the product by a steganographic watermark for nine years.

They have never known the man.

Four times prosecutors built cases against him. Four times witnesses recanted under coerced memory edits, evidence vanished from chain-of-custody servers that were supposed to be quantum-sealed, judges retired early and bought beachfront in the Tricity reclamation zones. The fifth prosecutor was found in his garage in Mokotów with his hands spike-nailed to a powered workbench and his confession to corruption charges generated by his own neural lace and timestamped to the hour of his death. The case died with him.

What changed in Wilk's thirty-eighth year, no one in his old life can say. He liquidated his visible interests. He paid off debts that had not come due. He disappeared for sixteen months into the unmapped sectors of the Silesian sprawl, and when he surfaced again, Wilk was gone. In his place stood a uniformed senior officer with a forged service record so deep the ABW had vetted it themselves, his credentials cross-signed by three dead men and a compromised AI auditor that still flags his file as exemplary every quarter.

Now he sits at the head of the table. He signs the requisitions, attends the funerals, pins medals on widows. Some investigations he steers toward dead ends. Some he buries outright in classified-evidence vaults that no one has clearance to open. Others he pursues with a bewildering, surgical ferocity, dismantling rival operations with the precision of a man who knows exactly which server rack the cold wallet is hidden behind. The pattern, if there is one, has eluded his subordinates, the prosecutors, and the men who used to fear his name.

The patostreams still run. The Sosnowiec arcology still ships. He receives the encrypted reports on a quantum-paired burner he keeps in a Faraday lockbox welded under the chassis of his official car, and he reads them in the precinct parking lot before morning briefing, the data streaming directly to his retinal overlay, and his face does not change.

He is patient. He is methodical. By every external measure, he is an exemplary officer of the law.

Whatever he is actually building behind that uniform, he has not told a soul...

u/cryptofutures100xlev — 21 days ago

▲ 26 r/JohnWick

I'd be really interested to see a lot more world building in a Hong Kong setting. In JW4 we got the Osaka Continental for Japan which was cool asf. Now I think it would be really cool to see the Hong Kong Continental!🙏

And especially since Donnie Yen is directing this, I would love to see him spice things up with that Hong Kong action cinema style. He's done many films in Hong Kong before and I think that setting would translate really well when it comes to the lore of John Wick 😎

These Hong Kong assassins would go CRAZYYY lol

Btw, what are everyone's predictions for the plot?

u/cryptofutures100xlev — 24 days ago