Ultra Street Fighter IV

[mayor_mike_haggar]

oh, yeah, I think that might be my fault. 2 rounds of bipson st.hk against gief was the last match we played. hype.

too tired to stay up late. sparring killed me tonight

[JLM]

Geegees Donut. Little series of Yun vs Yang in AE and then assorted Third Strike matches. I remain rubbish at 3S but always have lots of fun playing it.

Personal highlight from the short AE set was this outrageously unnecessary finish with Yang:

Highlight from the 3S set was winning a roughly even number of games even though Donut is much better than me at it. Fraudulent Strike!

[joffocakes]

Excellent words, Jellum and Haggs. Question (I've not looked at the SRK tiers): Wouldn't Blanka having a great mathup vs T Hawk be completely offset by his vs Abel match? I thought that was considered to be ridiculous due to Abel's Ultra 1 punishing pretty much everything he has on block or hit.

I can't wait until I move flat and lose my internet connection for a while so I stop playing Street Fighter for a bit. I wanna play NiGHTS.

[Yasawas]

The entire UK team has pulled out of Canada Cup this weekend for some reason. Boo.

[joffocakes]

That's a shame. I probably wouldn't have watched it, but I do like seeing UK teams in international tournaments.

Is Guilty Gear out today on XBLA? I don't feel like we've been given much information on the port really; has anything been added?

[JLM]

Yeah that's rubbish about the UK team; it was a really strong line up too. Poongko has dropped out as well. The teams that are still in look pretty good though:

Canada 1:

Air (Ryu)

Johzear (Vega)

Chi Rithy (Cammy)

Lap Chi (Blanka)

??????

Canada 2: TBA

USA 1:

Justin Wong (Rufus)

Mike Ross (Honda)

???

???

???

USA 2:

Ricky Ortiz (Rufus)

PR Balrog (Balrog)

???

???

???

Team Japan:

Tokido (Akuma)

Fuudo (Fei Long)

Mago (Not sure as there's both a Fei and a Sagat already there.)

Kazunoko (Yun/Seth)

Bonchan (Sagat)

Team Korea:

Laugh (Ryu)

Infiltration (Akuma)

Naraks (C. Viper)

KimLegend (Blanka) - This Blanka is ridiculous, looking forward to seeing it against non-Korean opponents.

Daniel Kim (???)

Team Netherlands:

MBR (Akuma)

DoomDomain (Ryu)

Momi (Fei Long)

Emersion (Vega)

ChaozTheory (M. Bison)

Team South East Asia:

Gamerbee (Adon)

HumanBomb (Sakura)

Xian (Gen)

Kaiser (Yun)

?????

That S.E. Asia team is excellent. Love it. Players confirmed to be attending who aren't on teams yet includ Latif, Kim1234, KBrad, Alex Valle, Floe and Vangief.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

well, according to their tier list blanka loses 7-3 or so to Seth, cammy, Honda, vega (balrog(claw)) and balrog(m bison(boxer)) and Abel is 6-4. so the hawk match doesn't quite offset that. but blanka eats dee jay and gouken for breakfast too. so he's got a lot of hard matches. probably again why you'll never see one win a tourney.

I don't know why Abel match isn't worse. its a monster of a thread. loads of good knowledge, but a pain to navigate.

[JLM]

I think it's because it revolves heavily around that ultra threat, but outside of that Blanka can fight him. He has much better footsies than Abel, and Abel needs to burn EX TT to get out of hop/electricity/throw shenanigans because the roll won't work. Back when I used to main Blanka, the best advice I got was to just try and get him to use the ultra early in the round and just take the hit, and after that it's not so bad. Also that problem was obviously much more significant before they changed it so Blanka balls knock down, so you can at least use reversal upball and horizontal upball to end combos when you couldn't before. On block it's still a huge punish to eat, but you'll rarely see top class Blanka players let it happen very often.

It's still a win for Abel because Blanka is in real trouble once the Abel vortex begins, particularly when the threat of ultra makes upball extremely risky, but it used to be that the neutral game and Blanka's offense and combo potential were hampered by it when they aren't so much any more.

6-4 seems fair.

[joffocakes]

Ha; I didn't even know they'd made that Blanka Ball change. I guess getting blanka balls to use properly completely changes the versus Abel match.

I wonder if there will be any further updates to AE in future? Ono made his wee remark about the community being divided on whether or not they'd want changes. I'm sure I'd happily roll with whatever balance changes they do make; at this stage it'd all be relatively subtle tune ups and unlikely to greatly affect me, I hope they add a ready/not ready toggle to lobbies to make going for a cup of tea easier, as well as hosting lobbies for streams. And the online training mode stuff, or some 3rd Strike style system direction options for wild lobbies.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Bar a few little glitches here and there I don't think there's much they should be fixing or changing, really. Hawk could maybe benefit from some of his moves working correctly, and I'm sure there are some wierd hitbox issues and stuff, but tournament results have been so unpredictable that it hardly seems worth rebalancing. Top tier aren't massively top, bottom tier aren't massively bottom.

Also the third lot of strekken balance change notes are out. there's so much stuff being changed it's hard to keep track of it all. Hwoarang and heihachi look to have been buffed, which is nice. I've really no idea how the game is going to play after all these changes. There's a lot of quite significant tweaks.

[JLM]

Yeah, Blanka balls finally work how they always should have; they get increasingly easier to punish on block depending on strength used, but none of them are punishable on hit if you do them at the right ranges. Also the upball and EX upball has a bit more recovery after it lands, so you don't just eat another one for trying to punish it like you used to. None of this is much consolation to Tomas Hawk though.

The only change I would dearly love to see in SF4 is the addition of a 1 vs 1 player match with a quick rematch button. If you sit and play offline for an hour, you can get so many more matches done than you would playing online. It's also why myself and Alistarr are able to grind Marvel so hard despite not playing it all that frequently; you can squeeze a ton of matches into just about any length of play time, and being able to run it back instantly makes the set flow so much more naturally. It's odd how in the short trip back to the lobby and through the character select screen you can forget why you lost the previous match.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Yes. It's an infuriating mystery as to why that isn't there. Also a rematch option in ranked.

[JLM]

In Alpha 2 on the Saturn, they had a weird middle ground where you could opt for a completely text based character select screen for versus mode to cut down on loading between matches if you wanted to change character. Quite a novel idea, though entirely necessary at the time because those loading times were loooong.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

It amazes me that the character select screen takes as long to load as it does.

[joffocakes]

Button checks/config in lobbies would be great too, for people who forgot they were using a pad last time and don't realise until after a 5 match wait to play. I also would have liked it when I used some characters on pad and some on stick.

[imp]

So, they've nerfed a lot of Lili's stuff in Strekken. Because she was really overpowered? I hope 2013 is a free update, as I'd really like to try it before committing to that game again...

[mayor_mike_haggar]

2013 is. indeed, freer than I am when playing jellum.

[JLM]

Yeah it does seem to take far longer than it should. In Soul Calibur 5 the transition from character select to stage select to the match is staggeringly quick.

On topic: Meat Liquor was lovely. We waited two hours from arrival to food on the table, but I was prepared for that and had six friends I hadn't seen in aaaages for company so it was fine. I went with a Philly cheese steak because that is a slice of Americana I have been wanting to try for years and it was good. Also some delicious chili cheese fries and some of their enormous fluffy battered onion rings of excellent. I like onion rings, but I wasn't going to order them because they tend to be the same everywhere, but then I saw some on their way to another table and decided that I needed to consume at least several of them. Also I stole one of those fake tea light things they have on the tables. I haven't kicked my childhood habit of stealing small trophies from restaurants.

Also also, the friend whose house I stayed at only had one fighting game and it was Mortal Kombat. Hard times indeed. As silly and massively flawed as I think that game is though, it's still great knock about fun like almost every other MK game and we had some laughs on a hung over Sunday morning. Back when I was trying to get into it and give it a fair crack, the one thing I always enjoyed about it is the combos. I don't like how they work or how you perform them, but a lot of them look very swish indeed, and I spent ten minutes in the lab trying to figure out a simple but a little bit fancy combo with Mileena to use on people.

Ended up with a little string into roll into standing kick into teleport kick special thing, which is similar to combo she has in MK2 but looks fancier in this game.

I'd honestly consider buying it for around a tenner just to try and do nice combos in training. Might wait for Injustice instead so I can play as Solomon Grundy though. What a beast.

Also also, my friend lives in Mortlake, and we were debating how to get back at the end of our night out, and someone asked if it was within walking distance and my friend scoffed at it. So, in unison, three of us went "one does not simply WALK into Mortlake" like the bunch of personified internet meme losers we are.

Oh, and one of my friends paid £9 for a single vodka and coke because Londonlol.

Good weekend all told.

[imp]

Did you bring your lagless monitor for MK?

[JLM]

I took the Streetfighter vinyl to all the clubs and asked them to play it and they said that there wasss no way.

[joffocakes]

Also on topic, Papa Johns Pizza expanded their delivery radius by about ten metres and I was suddenly able to order on their own two for tuesday offer last night. I got some italian sausage fest of sorts and added those "roquito" chilli peppers to it, but we also got a spinach alfredo pizza (with bacon to ward off peckish Allistars) and it was absolutely wild.

Their garlic butter is still the most disgusting thing ever though. What were they thinking?

Also! My lady made some pumpkin spice "whoopie pies" with a maple buttercream filling and they are exactly as utterly good as that sounds.I'd give y'all some, but I've already put them in my mouth and eaten them before they've even touched my hands.

[JLM]

As soon as you mentioned Papa John's I was about to post about that abomination.

First time I got it I did not take the time to check what it was and assumed it would be something akin to the wonderful, wonderful garlic and herb dip that is the sole reason I ever order from Domino's. But no, it's a little pot of garlic butter. I was nearly sick in my mouth.

Maple buttercream filling is surely what secretes from the teats of the gods.

[joeplus]

Oh man that garlic... thing. Someone at work ordered Papa John's for lunch a while ago and I experienced it. Hugely poor.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

I have never ordered takeaway pizza to my flat, nor will I ever. You awful heathens.

My slow roast lamb neck at the weekend was probably the best piece of meat I've ever cooked, mind. I might try brisket next. Or maybe pork belly. Hmm. It's so nice to have finally found a decent butcher within a reasonable distance. The quality of the meat, the variety of cuts, the knowledge of the mans and ladies who give me the meat and the fact that it's wildly cheaper than the supermarket are all wonderful wonderful things. the sausages are all brilliant, and cost something like £1.20 for 6. How do they do that!

[Qazimod]

Button checks/config in lobbies would be great too, for people who forgot they were using a pad last time and don't realise until after a 5 match wait to play. I also would have liked it when I used some characters on pad and some on stick.

I would have really liked character-specific button setups when my Fightpad broke and I was using a vanilla 360 controller. Having kicks on three of the face buttons is good for Juri, less so for other characters...

j.hk into sweep is broken

That's my general opening gambit in any fighter.

EDIT: or it was until I discovered jumping backwards.

[imp]

I had a Papa John's at the airport in Oman once. I was stuck there for 6 hours waiting for a connecting flight. There were no power sockets to plug my laptop into and watch stuff. There was just six hours of listening to Brits travelling to Australia get smashed while I wandered the food court, assessing where best to apply my courtesy meal voucher from Eva Air.

I eventually settled on Papa John's because even bad pizza is better than most mediocre fast foods, right? Well. It was almost as bad as the time I went to an "Italian" restaurant in kings cross and ordered a student meal pizza (£4), then realised that they had chucked left over kebab meat from the takeaway next door (same owner) over this pudgy little 8" monstrosity.

So is Papa John's usually better than that? Of course, nowadays I only go to Franco Manca, natch, darl, etc.

[Yasawas]

I would like our fantasy patch to include the motion for the selected ultra to appear on the pre-fight screen please.

[Camel]

I totally spent today in Kamakura and on Enoshima Island which is absolutely beautiful. The great buddha at kotokuin temple in kamakura was awesome as are the Iwaya caves on Eno Island. The rail ride along the coast was also a highlight.

We went to Freshness Burger when we got back which was delicious, so thanks for the recommendation. We then wasted about an hour looking for 8-Bit Cafe near shinjuku sanchome but failed. Gutted, am desperate to play 8-bit games over some sake, but it seems to either not exist or is in some kind of invisible building.

Finished the day off with some SFIV in the Sega arcade. I even won a couple of games (woohoo) but my god my game has turned to shit

Has anybody been to 8-bit cafe?

Tomorrow we hit Akihabara.

[Lyrical Donut]

GGs Jellum. Karakusa into nothings are the worst. Third Strike, yo.

As for the patch. I'd like to be able to input Down, R, Up, L, Y, B as the Capcom logo appears to unlock a GGPO enabled Super Turbo. But all of the characters look and sound like David Sirlin.

Bipsons fucking st.HK needs to go too.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

I read somewhere that tag cancelled reversals in strekken are now universally unsafe. Is that true? If so, isn't it a bit wild. Going back to the crazy days of unsafe invincible reversals, eh, lads.

Playing curtis will never be the same again.