Brosnan posted:

For the record, anyone new to fighting games is required to watch every goddamn video on this page.

AnonSpore posted:

I’ll now tell the story of one of my own Street Fighter tournament victories. The tournament was called the East Coast Championships 4, or ECC4. I won the Street Fighter Alpha 2 portion of the ECC3 tournament, so I felt a lot of pressure to win again. I made it to the finals where I faced veteran player Thao Duong. Thao plays only one character (Chun Li), and he’s incredibly robotic, meaning he executes moves perfectly and rarely makes mistakes.

I was undefeated in the tournament so far, and Thao had one loss (it was double elimination format). This means Thao had to beat me 4 out of 7 games to be even with me, and another set of 4 out of 7 to win. I only had to win one set of 4 out of 7 to win.

I started by playing Zangief, my secret counter to Chun Li. Because it’s widely believed Chun Li totally destroys Zangief (but not mine!), it would be a flashy way to win. Whether it was my year of no practice or Thao’s playing skills or Chun Li’s dominance of the game I can’t be sure, but Zangief was not up to the task that day. No problem, since I would switch to my standard Chun Li killer: Ryu. I scraped together a win or two, but again my lack of practice was showing and Thao won by greater and greater margins. I then realized the horror of what I would have to do, and what I would become somewhat famous for in the Street Fighter community. I realized that the only remaining character I could reasonably play in a tournament was Rose, and furthermore that Rose, though very good against most characters, really only has one effective move against Chun Li: low strong.

This is where Sun Tzu comes in. My use of Rose’s low strong move is both a method of winning before fighting and of waiting. The low strong is an uninspiring little punch that doesn’t have all that much range, but it has amazing priority to beat other attacks. It’s also incredibly fast, allowing Rose to do multiple low strongs in a row with only the tiniest of gaps in between.

The low strong was my brick wall—my first test. The only problem is that there was no second test. And worse yet, there really wasn’t much “actual fighting” in store for Thao should he get past my “trick.” I could only hope that he’d fumble in trying to get around it, and even become frustrated enough to make mistakes. In retrospect, this is not the best approach to take against the robotic master of move execution himself, but it’s still preferable to no strategy at all, which was my alternative.

I low stronged my little heart out. Probably over 90% of my moves were low strong, done at a very particular range, and with a particular pattern of timing that I dare not reveal (let me keep some secrets). I had infinite patience to low strong forever, forcing Thao to defeat this trick. If he could beat it, we would then have to actually play, and at that point surely he would win. But fortunately, he never did beat it: he fought it head on. At times, he would decide not to attack, not to beat against a brick wall. I used that opportunity to get at the optimal range (which is one pixel farther from him than the range of my low strong). From this range, I continued to low strong forever. I wasn’t winning by doing that, but I wasn’t losing either. Even the robotic Thao would eventually tire and attack, sometimes at the wrong times out of annoyance or desperation. Spectators reported that I did an amazing 18 consecutive low strongs without either myself or Thao doing any other moves.

A side effect of my low strongs is that they create a “baseline expectation” of what I’m going to do. The sneaky roundhouse I do after the 17th low strong is pretty tricky, actually. I mean, wouldn’t you expect an 18th low strong after the 17th one? (Note: I was actually even more sneaky by doing the 18th low strong, then the low roundhouse.)

My story is dragging on as much as that match did. Each game is best 2 out of 3 rounds, and games tended to go the full 3 rounds. They went the full count of 4-3 when Thao won the first set, and all the way to the 14th and final game, where I won 4-3 in the second set to win the tournament. I collapsed in dehydration and drank a quart of red Fierce Berry Gatorade without pause. Even today, Fierce Berry Gatorade tastes like victory to me, but I digress.

Had I ever actually fought Thao “normally” with Rose, he would have killed me easily. Instead, in an amazingly boring and non-crowd-pleasing show, I attempted to prevent actual fighting through my “brick wall trick” of low strong. Furthermore, I bored my opponent into attacking hastily at times, and generally frustrated him, or at least think I did.

It’s interesting to note that early rounds of Street Fighter tournaments are often dominated by “tricks” like the ones I’ve described. Few players have the will to keep those brick walls up forever, though, and eventually resort to “actually playing.” Also interesting is that the last rounds of Street Fighter tournaments—especially the finals round to determine the top two players—very rarely operate anything like I’ve described. Far more often, the players good enough to get the final two are also good enough to easily avoid the kind of roadblocks I’ve been talking about, even if they have to devise countermeasures on the spot. The usual case at such high levels of play is “actual fighting” right off the bat, the very thing I try to put off as long as possible in a tournament match. So it seems that (my own exploits excepted!) tricks will only get you so far. Above a certain level of play, you must actively try to win the game, not just wait for the opponent to hand it to you. To the benefit of the spectators, when the best face the best, there are more often two bloody, clashing swords than a sheathed one.

A.o.D. posted:

I think that the buttons would be more depressed after everyone sees your preference of porn.

Real hurthling! posted:

i'm not a huge fan of how the default ggxrd buttons lay out the 3 extra buttons on an 8 button stick
I usually move RC to R2 to get it closer to where my hand usually hangs out and take taunt off a binding so i don't accidently hit it but what should i put on my L1/L2? a burst macro? what do you guys do with the extra buttons?

inthesto posted:

Does the default layout still put P under K

I will never get over that poo poo

Real hurthling! posted:

4 hours of barely animated slow panning anime conversations are my jam

Broken Loose posted:

In addition to what has been said about the Revelator demo, it also includes a phenomenal tutorial. They massively improved the tutorial over the Xrd tutorial, which was already pretty good. Just preorder Revelator on PS4 and go ham.

Dias posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFx8uY6GwY

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

It's also beautifully animated, has a ton of personality, and a very welcoming community. (All eight of us.)

NecroMonster posted:

oh poo poo nevermind i thought ralf and carl were from metal slug

fadam posted:

Combo Breaker hit cap for SFV. I hope we get another death pool so people too lazy/stupid to pre register can get mad on Twitter again.

anime was right posted:

i watched some random kof14 footage and hey this game looks fun and like an actual fg cool maybe ill play it hahaha just kidding i dont play fgs anymore


seriously tho it feels like everything was outsourced to china

bebaloorpabopalo posted:

Zand posted:

xvsf, cota, reload

mvc2 is somewhere in there

Zand posted:

yea but i love it regardless... i would have listed vanilla AC instead but id rather play against #R slayer than AC pote

Gutcruncher posted:

Sucks how they just kinda forgot to put the full intro in the game.

Also sucks how both SF4 and SFxT took their cool CG trailers than smashed em together into a terrible music video.

anothergod posted:

Any tips/tricks/etc to have fun and/or just be **cool** would be appreciated.

interrodactyl posted:

If you beat anonspore in a ft10 in the chipp mirror it's rumored that he will buy 800 copies of your game

interrodactyl posted:

What happens when woshige fights you and then you have to buy 800 copies of sf5

Bisse posted:

Dear god. I am not prepared for melty

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