Ultra Street Fighter IV

[joffocakes]

Oh dear. I don't half spurt out a load of guff sometimes. Wad'll be come of me.

[Plopboy]

How dare you expose my awesome Elf tactics Mr Cakes and they are 'manly man tummy splashes' I'll have you know , but he is right the miserable one is a good starting point just to get the basics down and adding in things like the focus attacks.

Talking of Elf, I did some cooking with him last night and managed 2 delicious wins out of four matches before I headed of for the cheap thrills of SFXT. Not too many people on SF and my pressure game is soooo rusty after the slack inputs I can do with the Tekken characters but it was still fun.

I did get beaten by a Seth in training but did manage a win in the replay with a U2 on reaction in the last round which was a) lucky and b) awesome, I like my cooking wrestler

[Camel]

Dhalsim is the best.

[Plopboy]

Dhalsim is the best.

pfft

(Sorry Singho, tbf he was probably on the toilet at the time or doing something else)

[ah]

Apart from the obvious answer of practice practice, any other tips for a complete SF noob?.

[WARNING: LONGER-THAN-EXPECTED POST INCOMING BECAUSE I AM SITTING IN BED WITH A CAT ASLEEP ON MY LEGS AND UNABLE TO DO ANYTHING WITHOUT WAKING IT, APART FROM MAYBE DRINK THE ORANGE JUICE SOMEONE THOUGHTFULLY LEFT ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE AND WRITE ABOUT STREET FIGHTER (BECAUSE SOMEONE THOUGHTFUL HIDES THEIR LAPTOP UNDER THE BED SO BURGLARS CAN'T FIND IT (UH OH, PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE SAID THAT BIT))]

If you want to win games, don't jump towards your opponent unless they are lying on the ground. Jumping is basically another word for fun, but while you're in the air you can't block, so you need to be sure that whatever attack you're going to use will definitely beat whatever they can do in response.

If you're a real beginner, make sure you are consistent with the basic moves - go into training mode and throw fireballs until you can throw ten in a row without missing one, then do the same with dragon punches. If you pick a charge character (Bison, Balrog, Honda...) then do the same with their charge-based special moves to learn the timing.

Don't obsess over big combos just yet - learn a couple of basic things, like with Ryu you would need to know how to do a crouching medium kick (cr.MK) then do a fireball to cancel the recovery of the kick and combo into the fireball, because this is a good basic way to apply pressure when your opponent might be blocking. But there are a LOT of tricky combos in this game that require tight timing, and while you'll need to get into training mode at some point to learn some of them if you want to keep improving, they're not the most important part of the game.

Actually, JLM once wrote a brief guide for learning a new character which was something like:

- learn what button to press when they jump towards you (i.e. learn what your anti-air attacks are)

- practice a basic combo to do when you know you're going to hit (i.e. learn your basic punish combo, so when they fly off up into the screen having missed you completely and you are just waiting for them to come down so you can hit them, you know what you're going to do)

- practice a basic combo to do when you're not sure if it will hit or not (like the Ryu example above of cr.MK xx fireball, something where if they block it all you won't mind because you haven't left yourself open for punishment).

- learn what distance from your opponent you want to be so that you can catch them with your best attack but they aren't in the right place to catch you with their best attack. This differs by character, so for example if you're fighting against Zangief you want to be far enough away that he can't catch you with a spinning piledriver (SPD), and use your longest range normal attacks to poke him to death. With Dhalsim, his long range attacks are better than yours so you want to find a way to get up close so he's not as dangerous (this is a big part of the game and takes practice and learning and getting hit by a lot of attacks, but it's worth learning).

- learn to fight blanka because he's weird (we can skip this one for now).

I would add on there the unspoken "learn to block" - even if your combos suck, if you don't get hit by anything the other guy throws at you then you're going to have a lot of life left at the end of the round, regardless of how little damage you did to the other guy. You can only really practice this by playing against people and losing games, but watch what your opponent is doing, learn to block crouching but watch out for attacks that hit high (overheads), watch out for throws.

And I would also add on, for new starters, the thing I want to tell every person I play on Xbox Live who quits out after I've beaten them once: if you give up the first time you lose to someone, you're never going to learn how to deal with whatever it was that they used to beat you. Treat each game you're losing as a learning experience, and actively think to yourself "what did he do that led to me getting hit?". Don't agonise over how their combos were 27 hits long or whatever, just try and work out where that first hit came from, and work on blocking it right the next time you fight that character, or standing at a better range so you don't have to block it, or just not jumping forward so much (I would happily bet that if you watched 1000 games of street fighter on the Xbox Live replay channel at random, most of the losers were jumping forward against a standing opponent way too much. It's how I lose most of my games, anyway). When you lose and you don't know why you lost, you can go and watch the replay and identify the little things that went wrong. "Oh, he worked out I don't know how to do throw escapes so he just threw me all the time", etc... And if the guy sticks around for a rematch then take it and practise blocking his nonsense. Don't worry about losing, because that's not actually the point - the point is to have fun learning and trying to do fancy stuff - and the wins will start coming more and more almost by surprise (even if, like me, you never do attain that fabled 50%+ win rate which would signify you were winning more than you were losing).

There are a few other things you might want to read up on once you get through your first bit of practice, but I'll just note them here for reference because someone else would do a better job of explaining them (probably already have, if you search the thread!):

- throw tech (and crouch tech)

- footsies

- difference between chains and links when doing combos (discussed recently at length in the SFxT thread)

- frame trap

- taunts*

- mixups

- resets

- FADC ("focus attack dash cancel", useful for combos)

*added at request of thread. See also: focus taunts.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Look at alistarr's theory fighter there. What a good man. He should write a novel about a man who writes lots of theory fighter, and the novel should mostly be theory figher.

The best characters for someone new are probably some of these men:

ryu/ken/evil ryu and maybe oni. For reasons joffo said above, these men are good because you probably already know their moves and they're pretty decent all round.

M. Bison: This man is good if you like charge characters. His medium kick and hard kick are good buttons to press, because you can really easily kick your opponent to death with them. He also has lots of ways to escape people pressuring you after they knock you down.

Balrog: None of this mans combos are that difficult, it's really easy to land his ultra after a headbutt, he's got quite high health and lots of his normal attacks are quite good too.

Rose might be worth a try too, though she can be tough to use sometimes.

As a word of warning, lots of people online have been playing this a lot for quite a few years now. Ranked can be a bit fearsome, but don't fret and just have fun!

[Plopboy]

I can't believe that whole lovely post by alistarr and it is a lovely and wonderful post you neglected to mention the ultimate Saikyo art of taunting, tssk.

HP+HK and it does absolutely nothing other than enrage your opponent, apart from playing Dan where it is an essential part of his game.

Though you might find people taunt at the beginning of the match, which is more of a welcome/hello sort of thing and is common in Rllmuk lobbies.

If your looking for matches there are loads of people who play on here in this spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AvVZj9Jzp8YXdGhXZF8tWkVyQzd1ZTE5eE1oOWo5VlE&rm=full#gid=0 and feel free to add your name.

I think one of the things I found is to try out a few characters first and see who you feel comfortable with, as there is a huge different between each character in terms of execution, movement speed, frame data etc and it is just a case of sucking and seeing. I went through a few characters before I found the two I'm most comfortable with.

[Camel]

It was nice of Singho to let you win there, Plopboy.

*massivewinky*

[ah]

My favourite use of taunting is to have Rufus sit down and wipe his brow after I mess up a potentially match-winning combo. See also: saying "Disappointing..." with Gouken after missing a back throw into ultra 1.

[Lyrical Donut]

Got this delivered yesterday. Apart from the obvious answer of practice practice, any other tips for a complete SF noob?. Are there any fighters you are better off starting with or should avoid until you become a bit better?

David Sirlin's Super Turbo guide is worth a watch. It covers a lot of stuff that's still relevant in SFIV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm1eawSzaE8

[Plopboy]

It was nice of Singho to let you win there, Plopboy.

*massivewinky*

I thought so too.

[ah]

I kind of really want to get this t-shirt:

[carlito]

Yeah! It was real good fun although I can no longer do QCFx2 or remember which buttons to press in combos. Who knew I was such a cheap and horrible player!

I was ashamed, and by ashamed I mean proud, of killing you when you taunted in response to my taunt one round.

How can you still do those Seth combos?!

I need more of this - Strekken doesn't appeal to me at all.

[JLM]

I still play this and it's still my favourite of the three big Capcom games by a huge margin. If Alistarr isn't online for Strekkcellent Adventures then I'm all about the AE. Last set I had on it was a long session of Ryu mirrors against a guy who mains Ryu and is very handy with him. He had better spacing with his fireballs and was winning at footsies, but I was able to compete because I'm quite good at downloading player tendencies. One of the few mirror matches that's 5-5 rather than 0-0, and it all just felt so fair and pure after playing a lot of the other games lately. All the successful baits and mix ups in that match up are entirely legitimate because you're both well aware of all of Ryu's options, so it comes down to solid fundamentals, good reads and making good decisions. Street Fighter!

Also had two matches in ranked the other day. One of them was me as Dee Jay vs a Ryu player that was the longest ranked match I've ever had. Three rounds, two ending in a time out and one ending with me losing with two seconds left on the clock. that lame stuff. I couldn't generate any offense against him at all, and he didn't seem interested in doing so against me. I wondered if this extremely inactive play style was just what he did against Dee Jay/lesser used characters or if it was his standard approach. I picked Gief and it turned out it was the latter as I absolutely murdered him. Can't get away with doing nothing against Gief. That's one match up where I think seeing itplayed correctly on tonnes of streams and seeing it analysed and broken down by Ultradavid and the like has really helped. There's still a very common misconception that you need to run away from Gief, whereas for most characters the best option is to stand your ground and make him fight for every inch of space.

On that notre, I also had quite a long set of Zangief vs a very skilled Rufus player who I could not beat. The match up is still in Zangief's favour in AE2012, but this guy was well aware of how Rufus can make it winnable and frustrate Gief and was mixing up his defense so well that I struggled to get a good read on him. It's funny that with Gief I can lose to the same guy ten times in a row and still enjoy it more than I would with any other character though. There's something very satisfying and rewarding about exercising patience and slowly trying to pick through their defenses with Gief and then starting to maul when you get in. Any time I correctly anticipated a crouching fierce and focused through it for a free SPD felt like a small victory. I also find that playing as almost any character against Dhalsim is a personal favourite match up for similar reasons. Maybe I'm just a masochist.

Also I really want one of those Ricky Ortees.

[Qazimod]

Look at alistarr's theory fighter there. What a good man. He should write a novel about a man who writes lots of theory fighter, and the novel should mostly be theory figher.

The best characters for someone new are probably some of these men:

ryu/ken/evil ryu and maybe oni. For reasons joffo said above, these men are good because you probably already know their moves and they're pretty decent all round.

M. Bison: This man is good if you like charge characters. His medium kick and hard kick are good buttons to press, because you can really easily kick your opponent to death with them. He also has lots of ways to escape people pressuring you after they knock you down.

Balrog: None of this mans combos are that difficult, it's really easy to land his ultra after a headbutt, he's got quite high health and lots of his normal attacks are quite good too.

Rose might be worth a try too, though she can be tough to use sometimes.

As a word of warning, lots of people online have been playing this a lot for quite a few years now. Ranked can be a bit fearsome, but don't fret and just have fun!

What I tend to do with most new fighting games I pick up - SFxT, SFIV, Marvel, even 3rd Strike when I played it on the Xbox collection - is spend a short while offline trying out every character, whether it's in arcade mode, trials, practice mode or whatever. I don't play for hours with one character before swapping over, just enough for me to decide whether their moves and commands suit my play style. The trials help hugely in this respect as they often show you how a character's moves can be used together in ways that you may not have considered. Of course, in trying out different characters you're also more prepared when you face them in matches, since you know their strengths and flaws.

[sinky72]

[WARNING: LONGER-THAN-EXPECTED POST INCOMING BECAUSE I AM SITTING IN BED WITH A CAT ASLEEP ON MY LEGS AND UNABLE TO DO ANYTHING WITHOUT WAKING IT, APART FROM MAYBE DRINK THE ORANGE JUICE SOMEONE THOUGHTFULLY LEFT ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE AND WRITE ABOUT STREET FIGHTER (BECAUSE SOMEONE THOUGHTFUL HIDES THEIR LAPTOP UNDER THE BED SO BURGLARS CAN'T FIND IT (UH OH, PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE SAID THAT BIT))]

If you want to win games, don't jump towards your opponent unless they are lying on the ground. Jumping is basically another word for fun, but while you're in the air you can't block, so you need to be sure that whatever attack you're going to use will definitely beat whatever they can do in response.

If you're a real beginner, make sure you are consistent with the basic moves - go into training mode and throw fireballs until you can throw ten in a row without missing one, then do the same with dragon punches. If you pick a charge character (Bison, Balrog, Honda...) then do the same with their charge-based special moves to learn the timing.

Don't obsess over big combos just yet - learn a couple of basic things, like with Ryu you would need to know how to do a crouching medium kick (cr.MK) then do a fireball to cancel the recovery of the kick and combo into the fireball, because this is a good basic way to apply pressure when your opponent might be blocking. But there are a LOT of tricky combos in this game that require tight timing, and while you'll need to get into training mode at some point to learn some of them if you want to keep improving, they're not the most important part of the game.

Actually, JLM once wrote a brief guide for learning a new character which was something like:

- learn what button to press when they jump towards you (i.e. learn what your anti-air attacks are)

- practice a basic combo to do when you know you're going to hit (i.e. learn your basic punish combo, so when they fly off up into the screen having missed you completely and you are just waiting for them to come down so you can hit them, you know what you're going to do)

- practice a basic combo to do when you're not sure if it will hit or not (like the Ryu example above of cr.MK xx fireball, something where if they block it all you won't mind because you haven't left yourself open for punishment).

- learn what distance from your opponent you want to be so that you can catch them with your best attack but they aren't in the right place to catch you with their best attack. This differs by character, so for example if you're fighting against Zangief you want to be far enough away that he can't catch you with a spinning piledriver (SPD), and use your longest range normal attacks to poke him to death. With Dhalsim, his long range attacks are better than yours so you want to find a way to get up close so he's not as dangerous (this is a big part of the game and takes practice and learning and getting hit by a lot of attacks, but it's worth learning).

- learn to fight blanka because he's weird (we can skip this one for now).

I would add on there the unspoken "learn to block" - even if your combos suck, if you don't get hit by anything the other guy throws at you then you're going to have a lot of life left at the end of the round, regardless of how little damage you did to the other guy. You can only really practice this by playing against people and losing games, but watch what your opponent is doing, learn to block crouching but watch out for attacks that hit high (overheads), watch out for throws.

And I would also add on, for new starters, the thing I want to tell every person I play on Xbox Live who quits out after I've beaten them once: if you give up the first time you lose to someone, you're never going to learn how to deal with whatever it was that they used to beat you. Treat each game you're losing as a learning experience, and actively think to yourself "what did he do that led to me getting hit?". Don't agonise over how their combos were 27 hits long or whatever, just try and work out where that first hit came from, and work on blocking it right the next time you fight that character, or standing at a better range so you don't have to block it, or just not jumping forward so much (I would happily bet that if you watched 1000 games of street fighter on the Xbox Live replay channel at random, most of the losers were jumping forward against a standing opponent way too much. It's how I lose most of my games, anyway). When you lose and you don't know why you lost, you can go and watch the replay and identify the little things that went wrong. "Oh, he worked out I don't know how to do throw escapes so he just threw me all the time", etc... And if the guy sticks around for a rematch then take it and practise blocking his nonsense. Don't worry about losing, because that's not actually the point - the point is to have fun learning and trying to do fancy stuff - and the wins will start coming more and more almost by surprise (even if, like me, you never do attain that fabled 50%+ win rate which would signify you were winning more than you were losing).

There are a few other things you might want to read up on once you get through your first bit of practice, but I'll just note them here for reference because someone else would do a better job of explaining them (probably already have, if you search the thread!):

- throw tech (and crouch tech)

- footsies

- difference between chains and links when doing combos (discussed recently at length in the SFxT thread)

- frame trap

- taunts*

- mixups

- resets

- FADC ("focus attack dash cancel", useful for combos)

*added at request of thread. See also: focus taunts.

Wow, seriously, many thanks for them tips, much appreciated and thanks to everyone else for replying also.

[JLM]

Good science Alistarr. Good science indeed. +1

I am still AE-ing because I can't play against Joffo at Strekken.

Had some fun ranked outings with Big Pink Santa Gief, including a very close match against a T. Hawk which is my uploaded replay of the moment. Real men in real denim doing real damage. Classic match up/specialist porn film. Exchanged very cordial messages with the gentleman afterwards as well. It's quite a close match up and not as ridiculous as you'd expect because they both have deceptively good footsie tools and can keep each other out. You also have to be wary of going for your typical post-knockdown vortex set ups with Gief against Hawk because he his options are as good as yours if not better.

Also had a set against RegencyBlankeye, who is ridiculously good with a number of characters. Mostly did gief against Cammy, which is horrendous for Gief. Standing roundhouse, standing MK, well spaced spiral arrows and uppercut is a very robust anti-Gief set of tools. I managed to beat him once, which was a pretty big achievment considering at the beginning I was getting perfected or near-perfected every round. Eliminating jumping entirely made things a tiny bit more bearable for me.

Also had a ranked match against a Ryu player who hurled a tiorrent of abuse down the mic and quit the game when I landed my first SPD. Alright then.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

That ryu player has the right idea.

[joeplus]

Real men in real denim doing real damage. Classic match up/specialist porn film.

[Plopboy]

Also had a ranked match against a Ryu player who hurled a tiorrent of abuse down the mic and quit the game when I landed my first SPD. Alright then.

Must have been the gems

[sinky72]

Only had chance to play a little of it but what i've played i've really enjoyed. Just been in the practice mode so far trying out certain fighters and will get on later for a few rounds against CPU. I'm I best keeping it on medium difficulty or should I get some practice on easy then move up?

[ah]

The computer doesn't really play the game by the same rules as humans, so if you intend to eventually spend most of your game time playing against humans then it's best to treat the computer just as a moving training dummy rather than a good tool for working out strategies. It can help in teaching you which of your moves are unsafe, but sometimes it's not an accurate reflection because it can react faster than humans and also doesn't react to mixups (where you force your opponent to guess how to defend) the same way a human would - it basically just decides not to block every so often and there's no indication as to how effective that line of attack would have been against a person.

In short: for now just leave it wherever you feel comfortable so you can practice your stuff without taking too much of a beating. Most people can't beat arcade mode on Medium for a while because the final boss is annoying, so don't let that get you down :-)

If you want some online practice matches once you've settled on a character and done some exploring then just shout - don't worry about not being good enough, at the very least if you play against someone from here then they'll give you advice, and probably happily step away from playing "real" matches for a moment to help explain stuff by trying it out.

[Qazimod]

The CPU is good for testing your reactions and move executions, and it's also good for learning what your favourite characters can do in certain matchups, but the CPU doesn't know mindgames Real players will know the strengths and weaknesses of both characters in a matchup and will play much more carefully. The best experience can be gained in online play, and specifically rllmuk lobbies although we tend to play on Xbox Live most of the time (and I don't own a PS3 anyway...)

[JLM]

I dun been playin this today.

Some wins in ranked for Gief, and a couple for Dee Jay.

Went into endless and had some games against gamachan. He was a good PP score but was using Sakura who is obviously a new character for him. I mauled him with Gief and then decided to change out of courtesy because it's a shitty match up for Sak. So we did Sak vs Dee Jay for a bit and I narrowly four or five games. Then he switched to Cody (his main, with 12,000BP) and we went to a very close third round with about 20% life left each. He caught me with a nice counter hit combo towards the end to ake the life lead, then backed off to full screen and started taunting.

I thought we were having a sporting and friendly set but apparently he was maaad salty. Odd. I don't think it was imp-style Dee Jay hatred either as he was correctly safe jumping EX up kicks and "keeping me honest" as they say, so it's not like I was gimmick-ing or Dee Jay-ing him to death.

He sent me a message saying "Free Jay" just now. He has certainly shown me.

[Qazimod]

He sent me a message saying "Free Jay" just now. He has certainly shown me.

Shown you how to pun?

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Excellent. Did you send him some kisses?

[NEG]

Anything new coming out?

The game needs more words in the title.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

"Sapoorer"

"Zangrief"

[Lyrical Donut]

Who wants to play this tonight? I do. Anyone else?

[Qazimod]

"Sapoorer"

"Zangrief"

Which Street Fighter has trouble with buddhist meditation techniques?

Zen grief! (Zangief!)

Again, from the original SF pun thread. joeplus is OG for sure.