Ultra Street Fighter IV

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Thrust peak should be -32 on hit, also. There's nothing better than normals which are thoroughly punishable on hit.

Also. Lads. I have not played this game in forever, and I don't think I ever will in my current living arrangement. Also Dark souls 2 is much more important at the moment. But would anyone like to go and spend a sweaty weekday evening at HoG at some point? I think it would be nice.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Every now and then when I'm wildly bored at work, I forget myself and accidentally visit eventhubs. My god that site is so incredibly terrible! The worst thing about it, I've decided, is the horribly over-wrought writing style. Like, you can see how they guys who write over there want so sound (or how they imagine they sound at least), but they just seem to spectacularly miss the mark with their prose every time. It's so leaden and awful! Genuinely makes me unhappy to read it.

[ah]

I stopped checking it after they posted one too many horrific deviantart drawings of fighting game characters wearing bikinis or whatever. So I guess about two or three years ago.

Speaking of street fighter: Wow, those belfry gargoyles don't mess around.

Also, here is my one big bit of advice for all you guys struggling with this game this week: STOP PLAYING SO MANY RANKED MATCHES. Seriously, stop it. Even if dudes in 2-player endless lobbies quit/kick you after two wins, you'll be so much less salty than you feel after you lose a ranked match never to see that opponent again. Once you're warmed up and happy with your play, maybe consider trying some ranked matches just to stop yourself having too good a time, but don't make it your default game mode.

I should be around this early evening if anyone fancies a few games. If not I'll go slice some more beasties up with a Drangleic Sword.

[Yix]

Every now and then when I'm wildly bored at work, I forget myself and accidentally visit eventhubs. My god that site is so incredibly terrible! The worst thing about it, I've decided, is the horribly over-wrought writing style. Like, you can see how they guys who write over there want so sound (or how they imagine they sound at least), but they just seem to spectacularly miss the mark with their prose every time. It's so leaden and awful! Genuinely makes me unhappy to read it.

What sites would you guys recommend? Eventhubs is kinda my go-to site for FG news, if only because its news-focused layout makes it easier than most of the others/message boards*.

*I'm having horrible flashbacks to my old housemate telling me he only read Mail Online because it had the best layout, before moving on to complaining about black people in Oxford**.

**Which is a fucking weird complaint anyway, Oxford's one of the least multicultural cities I've ever lived in.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

I dunno, what do you mean by "news". Most eventhubs news seems to be reposts of twitter conversations or something. I check the sf4 subreddit and that's about it.

[Camel]

I have a black friend in Oxford. I wonder if he knows how much he is upsetting people.

[Yix]

Mostly tournament results/streams and game-related announcements (say, add-on trailers and the like), really. I'll wander into the Reddit SF subforum once in a blue moon but Eventhubs also covers other fighting games I try to play like Persona 4 Arena.

[ah]

SRK will post most of that tournament/game news stuff, they just go lighter on the random XBL replays, twitter interviews etc. They do seem to cover most fighting games but maybe not every bit of media in the same way EH does, though. I guess it depends how much "news" you want and how averse you are to funding EH with your ad-views.

[df0]

Hah, I made a meme. It is probably the wrong backdrop, but cute seal does not care.

[Nate Dogg III]

Does Goukifafa normally play Balrog? I just beat Goukifafa's Balrog. Best game ever.

[ThePixelbarks]

I'm not sure, but Matt was saying that he plans to change over to Poison in Ultra.

[ah]

Yeah he plays Balrog in tournament. I won the first game against him last time I went to Leeds but he turned it around and won 2-1 in the end. He is also good at Marvel, the scumbag.

Have I mentioned I hate Balrogs? I'm not sure if my always having to fight them in tournaments makes me hate them more, or if my hating them makes me always have to fight them in tournaments. It feels like I must have done something to deserve this karma.

[ThePixelbarks]

Recently played some AE again after not playing street fighter for well over a year (Waiting for a PS360+ to arrive to continue playing Blazblue).

After playing a year of really fast paced fighters (Mainly Arcsys and TTT2), I just can't seem to adjust to the slower pace of AE again. I'm just getting battered left right and centre at the moment. Will probably get back into it again with the release of Ultra just around the corner, but I wasn't expecting it to be such an uphill battle once again. Really liking the look of how Decapre plays.

But man, that really strict link timing, it's killing me.

[ah]

Maybe you should pick Balrog.

[Lyrical Donut]

Next time I play Alistarr I am picking Balrog.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I've been watching quite a lot of Hugo matches today and there is a disappointing lack of clap shenanigans on display so far. I'm hoping that it's due to it still being very early days rather than the clap being useless. That would be disappointing.

[JLM]

At Hypespotting Dawgtanian had meaty set ups that allowed for clap, clap, clap, stand short xx EX lariat for nasty damage. Once he'd established that, he did it slightly later so the clap looked extremely meaty but actually whiffed completely, then did 720 ultra 1. Every single person watching would have sat there and got grabbed just like his poor opponent did. There are clap tings, don't worry about that.

[sith]

I really can't be bothered to play AE anymore. I neeeeeed Ultra now damnit.

[joeplus]

KappaDogg is incredible. Nate, you are now obliged to write a column that posits stream monstering as the greatest form of 21st Century artistic expression.

I quite like Eventhubs. The twitter fluff and miscellaneous posts make decent filler between trailers, tourney results and the like, and it's easily scrolled for what might interest me. I can see haggar's point about the bad writing, but surely better to overreach than not try. The regular melon-tits banners don't exactly help them aspire. Still, I actually got a bit fonder of the site after the ridiculous negative overreaction to the adblock thing. It's obviously OK to dislike or even boycott the site, but seeing posts like "EVENTHUBS IS CANCER" (not here, of course) made me root for the underdog a bit. Wherever you get your news and content from, running a popular website isn't free.

r/sf4 is good for videos and the odd interesting discussion, but lacks all sense of fun. r/kappa is overall just *sigh* but has also provided me with more chuckles than any other FG site outside of this thread.

And y'know props to Eventhubs for trying out stuff like the matchup rater, although I think that one is ultimately counter-productive for the masses; unless you're at a certain level, 6-4 is kind of meaningless, no? A while ago I entertained the idea of trying to write/collate (i.e. plagiarise) a "matchups for dummies" resource for people like me who don't play too often. Like a PDF with one page per character, top half "Rose vs..." and bottom half "...vs Rose". Top half, "Reflect is generally decent against shotos, your buttons are good but not as good as X Y and Z's buttons, blah blah,". Bottom half, "Yo grapplers cl.mk is unthrowable, anti-fireball Ultras work a treat, she has trouble with vortex...". I'd buy that, I'm just too lazy to make it.

I'm also a bit bored with AE and impatient for Ultra, especially a release date. Work gets insane in May and my proper holiday's not until August, so I just want to book the Ultra week off work and look forward to what I hope will be a lobbyfest and a meetup or two. All top tier Rose and pocket Rolento. All weed in his hat.

[ah]

I too am in serious danger of not being able to get a long weekend booked unless a release date emerges quite soon.

FGC history note (disclaimer: I don't know how much of this is true, but it's what the SRK old-timers would have you believe. Personally I avoid the site just because the titillating fan art and general level of discussion in the comments sections really remind me a little too uncomfortably that I'm playing a children's game): Anti-EH sentiment among the longer-standing community mostly grew from how the guy who runs it basically popped up from nowhere to capitalise off SF4's popularity, and he did that by posting other people's work without crediting it properly, and making money from ad views - which meant people who had actually made the videos and posted them to their own sites started seeing fewer visitors because people just watched the embedded video on EH. Maj the combo video maker wrote a long thing in about 2010 about how he basically couldn't afford to run his website any more because people just embedded his videos in their own sites and so the audience would see those other guys' ads and not his, and it kind of blew up from there. The ad-block stuff came a lot later and was, you're right, a bit silly - though the jaded old timer would probably note the irony of a dude who basically made his living from "stealing" other people's content/views was now getting upset at other people "stealing" his.

That's all slightly less true now because they're better at crediting and they do actually make their own content sometimes too (e.g. the matchups thing), but that's still the price of convenience for the audience - a lot of the time only one guy is getting the ad money and it's not always the guy who did the most work.

[Nate Dogg III]

Yeah I remember the Maj thing. Seemed like a community struggling to adjust to change, really. Aggregation's just the way the internet works, for better or worse. EH are definitely better at crediting these days from what little I see of them.

I can't stand them or SRK to be honest, they're just abysmally written and very little of what gets posted is anything more than a headline and a video or link, all the text on the page is just noise. You can apply that to most of the internet, admittedly. Print for life.

Still pleased with my Goukifafa win. He played the game exactly how I expected him to - ie, properly - and I won with an EX DP to beat a fullscreen EX rush which would have chipped me, which pleased me greatly as I did something to beat a thing I knew was coming. I was going for Ultra 1 but let's not get hung up on the details. But yes, I was chuffed to note that I can still play when my opponent plays a bit like all those people I watch on my television. Whereas I struggled terribly against a Ryu whose default setting was level 2 focus - released if I pressed a button, backdash cancelled if I didn't - a match I only won because he started throwing predictable fireballs in the final round and I caught him with Ultra 2.

All this suggests I'd be better off in Endless but I dunno. I do like the single-match pressure of ranked, and there being points on the line. I got a decent chunk of PP for that Goukifafa win, but all I'd have in Endless would be a fleeting sense of achievement.

[DC]

Argh. I got handed tonight and actually feel like I'm getting WORSE at this game and I didn't think I had far to fall. Some good games with Willei though, thanks man. Sorry about the lag too - my 360 is wireless but next to the router. Seems like I'll have to get an Ethernet cable after all.

I should stop playing. Should...

[ah]

Here's the youtube channel it should eventually be on: https://www.youtube.com/user/CapcomFightersTV/videos

If you didn't seek it out elsewhere then NCR top 32 is up on this channel now, but be warned it's mostly individual matches in reverse order, so don yer spoiler goggles and look for the 90 minute "32 to 16" video halfway down the page to start you off and then work your way back up from there.

[cale]

Dark Souls question (sorry)

I'm in the Painted World of Ariamis. If I choose not to kill Priscilla now and head back to the rest of the world can I come back at a later time and kill her then (should I want to)?

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Yes.

[cale]

Danke.

[df0]

Do you - whilst not having any sort of gain or loss in a match - root for the player or the character? During watching NCR 2014 I found myself rooting against characters such as C.Viper and El Fuerte. I have nothing against the players, Jayce the Ace and iPeru, but I find it hard to cheers for the characters. Sakura is also one of those who I like to see lose. Also, Adon and Yun.

Am I a horrible bigot?

[Camel]

I always root for the stretchyman if he's being played. Hate to see a Dhalsim in distress.

[df0]

Characters I default root for are Dhalsim, Zangief and Dudley. I am happy whenever I see Filipino Champ, Snake Eyez and Smug in the tourny line up.

[Nate Dogg III]

I always hope an Akuma player is going to lose. Sakura too. Sort of adon too.

I actually like watching Yun players these days because he's just a regular character like all the others. That and crouch strong crouch strong is my favourite combo in the game, whoever does it.