Ultra Street Fighter IV

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Lads, lads I messaged joffo about this last night but I need to tell everyone.

I won a round of Quarrel with the word 'merkin'. I'd like to think that this is the greatest victory a man can possibly achieve.

[Camel]

Lads, lads I messaged joffo about this last night but I need to tell everyone.

I won a round of Quarrel with the word 'merkin'. I'd like to think that this is the greatest victory a man can possibly achieve.

I won a round on the iPhone version with 'spunking'. I even took a screenshot of them shouting it out.

[MacMantis]

Just started to play SSF4:AE on the 360 after throwing down a few games at the small Arcade on Tottenham Court Road next to CEX (which has quite a nice selection of fighting games as well as the brand new AC/DC Pinball machine).

Whilst I have a few of the SF4 Pads I decided to look for a cheap-ish stick to improve my game a little here and also to give me something more fun to play MAME with. I noticed the mention of the WWE AllStar FightSticks and saw Zavvi only has the PS3 version.

Took a look around and found that whilst still marked at full price on the GameShark store they're also on 'Buy One Get One Free'. As I wanted two £35 each isn't terrible, especially as (unlike any of the other places I found them listed for cheaper) they're in stock. Only appears to be 4 left, mind.

(Sods law now dictates that everywhere listing the 360 version as out of stock will get it back in stock for £25, but so it goes).

Link here if anyone is interested: http://store.gameshark.net/WWE_All_Stars/290

[Nate Dogg III]

Very community-minded of you there MacMantis, have a +1, a pat on the back, and what I hope is the good kind of warm fuzzy feeling you get for helping your fellow man as opposed to, say, the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you wet yourself and it's nice and warm for a moment and then it dawns on you that you have, in fact, just pissed yourself and everyone's looking at you.

Anyway, would anyone like to punch me in the nips tonight? I've got A N Other Game to play and then write about but I'll be doing fireball motions as soon as I can get that out of the way.

[joffocakes]

I will not be playing, but I want you to write a full JLM-style match by match write up of your night of fighting, analysing the mind games and so on, completely from memory, and then check your battle log to see how much you actually remembered properly.

You don't need to do the last part; I'll read it all up anyway.

[joeplus]

I might have to stay away from this game for a day or two, I got super-salty yesterday evening on ranked. Totally humped, even against some terrible players. Going backwards.

[joffocakes]

Concentrate on doing something fancy to show-off in each match instead of winning. That's the main reason I don't get too bothered about losing at all.

[joeplus]

Heh, good attitude. I don't usually mind but it was so relentless, got perfected a couple of times and didn't win a round in 7 or 8 matches. Straight after I turned the Xbox off I thought of at least two useful things I'd pledged to start experimenting with and completely forgot about.

I'm a beginner after all, must stop being so hard on myself.

[Plopboy]

When I'm getting a mauling, most of the time, I just start taunting as much as I can. Makes some people real mad

[joffocakes]

There aren't too many begginers left online; I don't envy your position getting into it now. At least a year/two years ago there were lots of minnows to gobble up and use as combo practice, but you have to have your wits about you in almost all matches now. I think maybe we should, as a collective*, put together our own, friendlier rough guide to each character, and maybe some matchup specific stuff and store it in the first post or something.

Or maybe not. I dunno. Just because trawling through SRK is like going for a poo at a festival.

*JLM.

[Nate Dogg III]

Yeah, I can't imagine what it must be like starting from scratch this late in the day. There are no bad players left, and even when you come up against someone with minimal PP and BP it's presumably only because they've only just got the internet after two and a half years of consistently travelling the world and winning tournaments or something. The standard is crazy now.

That said, being chucked in at the deep end can help, in a way. Rewind to 2009 and there were tons of people in here complaining about getting randomed out by flowchart Kens and plasma-spamming Ryus and all the rest of it, meaning you had to learn how to deal with that as well as the hard stuff. From what I saw of Mute, another beginner, last week he's pretty fucking advanced given how long he's been playing. Pockets levelled up pretty quickly too.

[Qazimod]

There aren't too many begginers left online; I don't envy your position getting into it now. At least a year/two years ago there were lots of minnows to gobble up and use as combo practice, but you have to have your wits about you in almost all matches now. I think maybe we should, as a collective*, put together our own, friendlier rough guide to each character, and maybe some matchup specific stuff and store it in the first post or something.

No beginners left? I'm still playing Kidding aside, I think the CC guys said something similar - everyone playing online now is good - the other players have just given up or moved on to something else. That's not to say that you can't still have fun though, whether it's in rllmuk lobbies or whatever.

[Wintermute]

Too kind, Nate. Even a mashed joystick gives the right combo twice a day. Or something.

Ranked is stupid difficult though, aye. I stopped playing it completely after a sustained series of beatings and decided to go back to basics. Try and learn the game properly from the fundamentals rather than getting excited and attempting mega combos into Ultras that never work in a match anyway. Maybe it's paying off, hard to tell, I'm still losing just not by quite as much as before!

[Wintermute]

That's a good point actually, Pockets. Sounds familiar! Like when I first started playing pool I was focused on hitting the white so much I'd rarely get the pot, but as your skill grows you can focus on the important things because you know you've got the basics right.

I'm still at the first bit in SF, concentrating on myself instead of reading and second-guessing the opponent. Who'd have thought a game about punching mans could be so difficult, eh?

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Online is really fucking tough now, I think. I've only really been playing a year or so and even in that timeframe it's got harder. And it's obviously very disheartening when you get bodied (which I do a LOT still). I mean I'm still pretty dreadful, but I think I've improved a fair bit over the last year. But most of the people left have probably been playing since vanilla, and a lot of people you see online now are at it a lot. I always see the same faces. It's even worse when you lose to someone who's just on a different level, because it's not fun and you don't learn anything. On the plus side, it forces you to level up your game really fucking fast. And lobbies are still fun and the best way to learn I think. Much less stressful than ranked.

I think I ended up in a lobby the other night with a relative noob ken player who was just jumping in and stuff, and I totally destroyed him with 1 button and some spacing control. I felt kind of bad, because that was basically me not long ago. Annoyingly I can't beat srk happy shotos for some stupid reason, probably because I play them quite rarely. Also invincible, mashable 3 frame reversals are hugely useful when playing with lag I guess.

Still, on the plus side, how long until sfxt is out? Because that's going to sell like hotcakes, right? And is similar enough to sf4 that we should be relatively decent straight off the bat. Which might make ranked infinitely more enjoyable?

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Also, my execution is terrible and I genuinely have never pulled off even 1 FADC combo online. I think that getting a rough handle on consistent punishes (maybe not the most damaging, but consistent), being able to anti-air at least reasonably well, knowing how to block (playing vega has taught me this); knowing which are you characters best normals and how to use them (this is more footsies/poking I guess); and having a clue what is and isn't safe are all really important.

For example, something I catch myself doing way to much is just pressing buttons without thinking. Good players I'm certain press many, many fewer buttons than I do. An example is when I hit with vega's cr.mp, and it's blocked, vega is a -1f disadvantage, so I SHOULD NOT press mp any more because any more with 4f startup or less will beat me. But I still press it, and sometimes I get lucky, but more often I get counterhit and eat some damage.

Also I think I do a focus attack on average once every 45 minutes, which probably doesn't help me since it's the mechanic the game is built around.

[Lyrical Donut]

How are people searching for games? I always have my region set to 'all', that way you can pick from a wider pool of European players. I've even had some lag-free (ish) games against east coast American / Canadian players too.

I'd say playing ranked late at night is probably the worst time to go on, as you're more likely to bump into very good players.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

I host, because I'm nice like that. However I refuse to allow any forrens from outside our fair shores to play, because I'm awful like that. Also I can barely get a good connection to Hegg half the time, so Europe is right out.

I have to admit one of the nicest things about late night lobbies is escaping from the shark tank of ranked, past about 11 you suddenly seem to get absolute killers everywhere. I assume it's all students.

[ah]

Ranked is ridiculous because I so rarely feel like I had a good close game against someone who's about at the same skill level as me - 90% of the time I'm either beasting on some fool, getting beasted on because I am that fool, or feeling like I'm undeservedly scrubbing out wins/losses against similarly mismatched opponents.

Ranked should be set to best-of-three to allow you to get a better handle on whether or not you actually deserved to win/lose. Having pretty much every tournament ever be best-of-three and then ranked online be best-of-one just feels kind of like having premiership football be 90 minute games and then the first division teams playing ten minute halves - how are they ever going to feel like they played a real match?

Sorry. Moral of story = 2-player endless battle is better than ranked and they never should've removed the "player match" option that was there in the first game.

Also this thread is getting pretty far off topic. Has nobody been making coleslaw recently? I bought some beetroot for the first time in ages yesterday and considered making some kind of cabbagey salad with it. In the end I just made awesome sandwiches.

[joffocakes]

No coleslaw, but the lass is making a tiramasu right now. I'm pretty excited about it. I also continued my spree of documentaries featuring depressingly obsessive folk with Strictly Background, which was about extras in LA. Decent enough. Confessions of a Superhero was about those Hollywood costume mascots who trap tourist with photo/tip begging nonsense. Some brilliant lies from the George Clooney look-unlike. George Cloney. Also, I Think We're Alone Now was a wildly wild doc about two stalkers of 80s pop-senstruation Tiffany. Really uncomfortable to watch at times for both cringe and creeps. When the old guy is reading an article from the time he was arrested for stalking her and proudly points out his name like it's an old cutting of his league-winning goal it really sets the tone. Not an amazingly well put together doc, and leaves loads of stuff unexplored (and Tiffany uninterviewed) but it's probably worth watching if only to put my Street Fighter habit into perspective.

Those guys are lightweights.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Ggs to donut and mute tonight. Apart from when bloody donut broke my heart when I got his balrog down to chip health twice, only to somehow fail to punish a whiffed ultra once, and to also be completely unable to ex psycho in about 3 attempts the other. And you should have heard me mashing and mashing with ryu against seth.

Mute your juri is coming along nicely. And good man for using Rose. I think when you use Rose you should dash a bit more. She's got really good dashes, especially her backdash, which is really good for moving her about more quickly than walking, and also for getting her out of trouble. Also, when I played you with hawk I was grabbing you on wakeup a load, and backdashes are invincible at the start for a short while (i don't know if you know this or not, btw, it was news to me when I started out). So one way to get out of the Hawk grabs is for rose to backdash on wakeup.

Also you can use dashes to cancel out of your focus attacks when they hit/are blocked. I'm terrible for this, too mind. But basically focus attacks have HUGE recovery after the hit animation, like around a second or so. They're basically designed so that you have to back or forward dash out of them, or you're at a huge disadvantage and will probably get your face twatted in.

[Nate Dogg III]

I played precisely none of this game last night. Stupid work.

I watched last week's WNF, though, and found myself rooting for Hugo101 for the first time ever. Online Tony's Seth is the worst, quite how he's managed to suck the fun out of arguably the funnest character in the game is beyond me. Reduces all those tools to a simple 50-50, SPD-or-DP mixup. Bleh.

[carlito]

The whole spiky blue shell picture thing has only just clicked for me!

You are a good person.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

[Plopboy]

He looks so comfortable with himself in that lovely picture. I didn't know he was of a Welsh persuasion?

Note before anyone gets upset I myself am of a Welsh persuasion.

[Yasawas]

Worked my way through a bit more of last week's Winner Stays On last night, did anyone catch this? Pretty much the same turnout every week but a few really good matches in this one, particularly Problem X versus that Chun and what must've been the stream and possibly tourney debut of King Quaka.

Also I like how he puts these on YouTube so I can watch them from my XBox. I wish there were a Twitch.tv app so I could watch stream on the telly, is there a reason this can't happen that I'm missing? You'd think they'd be try to make it easier to watch it on a TV screen.

[joffocakes]

Oh my lord. That is absolutely amazing. I want that on a tshirt. Can you put animated gifs on a tshirt?

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Why not wear several shirts with each frame on, and rapidly change them

[Plopboy]

Oh my lord. That is absolutely amazing. I want that on a tshirt. Can you put animated gifs on a tshirt?

Yes, yes you can

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/e60f/

sort of.

[Wintermute]

Ggs to donut and mute tonight. Apart from when bloody donut broke my heart when I got his balrog down to chip health twice, only to somehow fail to punish a whiffed ultra once, and to also be completely unable to ex psycho in about 3 attempts the other. And you should have heard me mashing and mashing with ryu against seth.

Mute your juri is coming along nicely. And good man for using Rose. I think when you use Rose you should dash a bit more. She's got really good dashes, especially her backdash, which is really good for moving her about more quickly than walking, and also for getting her out of trouble. Also, when I played you with hawk I was grabbing you on wakeup a load, and backdashes are invincible at the start for a short while (i don't know if you know this or not, btw, it was news to me when I started out). So one way to get out of the Hawk grabs is for rose to backdash on wakeup.

Also you can use dashes to cancel out of your focus attacks when they hit/are blocked. I'm terrible for this, too mind. But basically focus attacks have HUGE recovery after the hit animation, like around a second or so. They're basically designed so that you have to back or forward dash out of them, or you're at a huge disadvantage and will probably get your face twatted in.

Thanks Mr Haggar! ggs for sure, I especially enjoyed the double whiffed Ultra to double taunt combo you both pulled off with whiffy aplomb. I even won a few and didn't get super Dan taunted which is a bonus.

Yeah, I'm terrible at dashing. Can't backdash to save my life (on 1p side) and frequently plain forget to dash out of focus. I can FADC on occasion, in training, but the effort involved means I'm too pooped to pull off any meaningful combo afterwards and/or get massively confused and kick myself in the head. Hawk is a match up I'm not familiar with really (like most of the cast) so tips noted, ta! My wakeup game in general is pretty shoddy, I was EX pinwheeling all over the place against Donut and getting punished but I couldn't help it.

Back on topic, i don't really like coleslaw. Or onions.