Weekend Update #2: A Cat-girl is Fine Too!

Before we start, let me just say that officially, there was no update last weekend due to the reason that my internet went down. Oh, and I was too busy watching the live stream of EVO2k9 to actually care when there was internet. With that out of the way, on to this weeks update.

After having practiced a bit with BlazBlue's resident cloud cookoolander cat-girl Taokaka, I decided to give her a test run against real live people. Surprisingly, I find I'm taking to her quite well - her mixup/rushdown game seems to come naturally to me. There's a certain pleasure to being able to zoom around the screen almost at random before pouncing on an opponent. I still however revert to Ragna every now and then, usually when I need to use some very serious pressure against an opponent but that's a rare occurence now.

Offline, I find I'm doing quite well - although I'll admit my local opposition isn't really worth bragging home. However, it's still good practice for experimenting with setups and combos in a live match using Tao. Online however is a slightly different story.

My biggest hurdle with online right now is that BlazBlue, despite being generally considered second only to (the mouthful that is) Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix in terms of smoothness of online play, has variable input delay based on your connection - the time from when you press a button to when your character does a move varies depending on the connection. This means that there are times when even if I believe my timing is correct, the delay will throw it off a bit which results in more than a few whiffed combos. While this seems to be something that people should expect in online gaming, there already exist technologies to beat this, such as the much lauded GGPO (which has a fixed amount of delay, and deals with lag spikes via rollbacks - the use of which gives SSFIIT HD Remix it's edge online)

Due to the variable input delay, I'm having to relearn the timing of some things. More importantly however, I'm having to learn to deal with situations where my timing does get affected. This in turn means learning not to rely too much on standard set-ups and instead be able to deal good damage out of random hits and occurences (what I believe some Japanese players would call abare).

As for my online performance itself, while I'm still having to deal with high level Japanese players - and some non-Japanese as well - on ranked, I can actually do pretty well when matched against someone who's closer to my level. The switch to Tao really does seem to be doing me good. I beleive I'm actually doing better with her than with Ragna. Case in point, this one high level Rachel player who I kept getting matched with, my best matches against said player (where I almost did win) were with Tao - the time I did use Ragna (and also v-13, in an attempt to use zoning) didn't fare as well.

At this point, I'm pretty much ready to consider Tao as my "main" over Ragna. I seem to be doing better with her and I' actually having more fun. All I need to do now is to get some more matches, polish my mixup game and get myself used to dealing lag whenever it rears its ugly head online. Indeed, in this case, a cat-girl is fine too.

P.S. Taokaka cosplay pic found somewhere in the Dustloop forums, and run through despair.com's demotivator generator.