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.

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.