Weekend Update #3: Taking it Back to the Streets!

Didn't really get to spend time with online with BlazBlue this weekend (although I racked up a few good matches during the week). Instead, I found myself back with Street Fighter IV . This is partly due to my younger brother who had installed Street Fighter IV on his MacBook (running Windows 7 via BootCamp). Thanks to this, him and his friends have started running informal "tournaments" amongst themselves. Inspired by this, I decided to join in when a he brought a friend over and they had decided to play on my PS3.

At first, I did notice that I was trying to things that would only work in BlazBlue's engine (air dashing and wake up rolls). It took awhile for me to transition back to SFIV. I also noticed that, while my Cammy was nothing to really talk about before, I was terrible with her now. I ended up using my S-tier crutch Sagat to get a few wins against my brother's friend. Against my brother however, winning wasn't really an option seeing as he really is that much better than me (he runs a terrifying pressure game with Gouken). Still, I had fun, I even got inspired to give Balrog (Boxer) a run and did quite well with him.

Now after that, I was initially ready to go back to BlazBlue the following night, however a couple of other friends dropped by (one who plays a mean Zangief) and, after a few rounds of NBA 2k9, decided to challenge them to SFIV. Now, by this time, I had actually practiced a bit with both Sagat and Balrog meaning that my Sagat was unbeaten the whole night and my Balrog at least gave my friends Zangief a hard time. Also, I was able to get some good wins with my Cammy again (against Akuma no less). The key was not playing it like HD Remix (which I tend to do) and instead build my game around pressuring with her high priority Cannon Spikes. We also messed around with the other characters, including some low tier hijinks with Dan and Rey Mys..I mean El Fuerte.

All in all, it was good to get some decent time with SFIV. While I still will be maining BlazBlue, SFIV is still a solid and fun 2D fighting. Also, the game's more defensive, less combo reliant pace means that I had to really think about strategy and mind games in contrast to BlazBlue where the pace of the game tends to focus on offense and quick reflexes.

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.

Quick update: BlazBlue training

After a few days of training, I am now able to execute the same air combos that the Japanese Taokaka player I fought used to beat me. It took awhile and a bit of patience but I finally have the timing down and can (at least in training mode) get it to chain as high as 12 hits - granted it isn't a guaranteed "red" combo, meaning that the other guy can cancel out of it any time (something I didn't notice when it was used on me). With that done I can move on to practicing setups and actually using it (and other air combos I discovered) in a live match.

More SFIV custom shenanigans

Found these thanks to a post by TongariDan over at Capcom Unity (who in turn got this from Eventhubs). While at first people were just simply swapping character models around, it seems now there are actual customized character skins going around the net.

Bikini Cammy, Ninja Vega(Claw), Goatee Balrog (Boxer) and Flaming Ken


Evil Ryu and Violent Ken


More videos as well as instructions on how to do these can be found at the original Eventhubs post. Meanwhile you can check this post over at SRK for where to download the skins.

Weekend update v#1: Damn those Japanese!

Finally got to spend a weekend fighting online in BlazBlue. However, thanks mostly to the timezone I'm in, I'm facing alot of Japanese players. Now before we continue let me point out one very important fact (a fact so important, I believe it is equal to 42), that fact is, Japanese players are good.

Now let me first quantify what "good" means in the context of 2d fighting games. Remember that guy from highschool, the one who did well in the basketball team, who used to make fun of your dorky glasses and who made it with all the chicks. Well if "basketball" were "2d fighting games" then that guy would be the ones that the Japanese pick on for being a fat loser before going out in search of some real competition. The japanese are so good that for most top tier non-Japanese players, simply not getting beat up badly by the japanese at a competition is an achievement in itself.

Off course, I'm not saying that I did badly, in fact, I was able to chalk up more than a few wins myself. In my first match on Saturday, my Ragna (typical white-haired [i]bishounen[/i] boy with a big ass sword) proved to be a very good match against some other guys Jin (pretty younger brother who wants to stick his longsword into his older brother). A good start if I do say so myself, I even saved the replay (a memento of my first). The next few matches also went quite well, getting myself a couple of wins against higher leveled players and bumping my ranked battle level up to 6. Then the really good players started pouring in, guys level 30 and above (I was in quick match on ranked, meaning no level restrictions). In match against one such player, my Ragna was immediately turned into a human scratching post by a very adept Taokaka (faceless catgirl/lethal joke character) player. It really hit me that I was out of my league when my opponents launched me into the air and kept me there until we hit the end of the screen and fell. More losses followed after that, all to japanese players ranked way higher than me.

On Sunday, I fared a bit better since I got to fight some non-japanese players who were closer to my level in ranked. That off course, was little consolation when the eventual Japanese player would come along and totally destroy me - one annoying v-13 (cyborg girl/SNK Boss) player who zoned me the entire match, keeping from doing even the most basic of combos comes to mind.

In the end, I topped out at level 9. Probably would have gotten more levels had I fought more matches (BlazBlue doesn't count losses against your level or rankings, only wins), however I had other things to do and my connection was getting a bit slow. I did get to fight a few friendly matches against another Filipino on PSN (KenProvido, who also kicked my ass) however my connection to PSN got cut at one point (still not sure if it was an issue with PSN or with my internet) so I took this as a hint to stop.

All in all, it seems that my initial efforts at BlazBlue online weren't exactly ideal thanks to getting myself beat by the Japanese. Despite this however, I'm not really that discouraged. In fact, I figure some good competition from the Japanese will actually do me some good as I'm going to be forced to up my game and get to their level of skill. Still doesn't mean I'm not annoyed though.

BlazBlue Video Review from GameTrailers

Quick post since I'm at work. Since I'm currently playing BlazBlue, I've decided to share something on the game so that people who aren't familiar with it can get an idea of what it is.

So here's the GameTrailer video review (which also serves as a test of embedding videos from GT).

Video Games | BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger | Review

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

This review has been out for a week or so already (ever since the Limited Edition came out) but I'm posting it anyway since I find GT's reviews to be very informative. They always go out of their way to break down the important components of a game instead of just having someone going about why they like or don't like a game. I especially like this one since they detail the game's unique "Drive" system which helps make the game pretty accessible.

Attract Mode

Let me begin by saying that I'm starting this blog a bit late. You see, I had orignally wanted to start this back in February, when Street Fighter IV had just come out for the PS3 (and the X360 as well). But for reasons that shall remain undisclosed, I ended up not starting this back then. Now that Arc System Work's BlazBlue is out however, I've decided to give this another shot.

It's a fitting start really, Arc System's previous game (and BlazBlue's spiritual predecessor) Guilty Gear was one of my favorites. Not only because it was a heavy metal fans wet dream turned 2d fighter, but more of the fact that I was pretty decent at it, enough that I could clean up at the local arcade (not that it really means much since there are very few GG players here in my country - the Philippines by the way, where just about everybody and their dog plays Tekken, and only Tekken).

Since I've dropped that bit of information, let me go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Franz, however I will be posting in this blog under the handle "d3v" which is the handle I use in Capcom Unity (where I'm pretty active in the SFIV and TvC boards), Shoryuken (lurker), Dustloop (active only in the BlazBlue threads) and AstralHeat (where I'm the guy trying and failing to set up matches between players in the Philippines, probably because I'm the only one there). I also use that handle in a few other sites, but they're irrelevant to this blog. I've been playing fighting games with regular consistency since about 1993 when I, along with most of my generation got introduced to a little know gem called Street Fighter II (in case you're wondering "little known" in this context is sarcasm). Ever since then, to use a cliche, I've been hooked -addicted so to speak.

Addicted is probably a good word to describe me in terms of my relationship to fighting games, I mean why else would someone with as rocky a record as mine keep coming back if I weren't addicted. Hence we have the second part of the title of this blog (the first part being "combo," a staple of fighting games which should need no explanation to anyone familiar with fighting in general). But anyway, back to being "addicted," I was such a big fan of Street Fighter that I actually took up Shotokan Karate-do (see, addicted - although delusional would also be a good fit).

Over the years that "addiction" has led me from plain SF, to other games and franchises. From established ones like Mortal Kombat and King of Fighters to obscure indie fighters like Vanguard Princess, from 3D stalwarts like Tekken and Virtua Fighter to hardcore 2D gems like Guilty Gear XX #Reload. Heck, I've even dabbled in M.U.G.E.N. - the Mary Sue factory of fighting games. Currently, a good portion of my PS3's library consists of fighting games and my PC also has it's fair share of old school fighters running on various emulators.

Now, just because I've played alot doesn't mean that I'm some sort of fighting game god. No, in fact (as I have previously pointed out), I've had a rather tumultuous relationship with fighting games. You see, just because I love them doesn't necessarily mean that they love me. There are times where I will find something and show some semblance of brilliance (such as in Guilty Gear XX and possibly during the early days of Marvel VS Capcom in the arcade), but most of the time, I find myself getting my virtual behind kicked by the dude in the machine next to me (or beside me on the couch). Which brings me to the reason why I'm starting this blog in the first place. I've decided to create a journal of my current progress as a fighting game player, a place to share my thoughts on my wins and losses in the virtual ring. Aside from that, it's also a place for me to write about fighting games in general whenever I feel the need.

So that's about it for this introduction, to end this properly, I'd like to explain why this post is titled "Attract Mode." You see, the "attract mode" or "introduction" is what an arcade game runs when no one is playing so that it catches the eye of the arcade's patrons as well as give some basic information about the game. As such, I'm hoping that this post serves as an "attract mode" for this blog and I hope to see you here in the future.

P.S.

I'd like to send thanks to the ff. friends:

Dave - who I have never won against (dude, you should go pro).

Manny - who's ongoing WoW blog inspired me to start this (although I don't think he plays fighters).

Anjo - who kicks my ass in SFIV, but it's OK since I kick his in SFIII: 3rd Strike.

Dan - your Dan is an inspiration to us all.

I'd also like to give a shout out to the fine folks at Capcom-Unity, SRK, Dustloop and Astral Heat.