Over the weekend, I took 1st place at the Alamo City Gaming Championship in San Antonio which had about 70 registered players. This was certainly a bit of a windfall; I was expecting to do OK but definitely not thinking about winning the tournament! I think a lot of people were surprised by the result. Hey, it may have been a while, but don’t doubt the duck!

Some archives of the stream:

(My 5th round match with Mexiwont at 1:32:16)

http://www.justin.tv/monsters_arcade/b/267280728

(Winners Finals and Grand Finals are here)

http://justin.tv/monsters_arcade/b/267283274

Against Fuerte in the first vid,
- I didn’t know that Ultra 2 was a grab; I thought it was low for some reason. I got punished by it for doing a meaty kunai in the first match, so in the second match, I did a safe jump short as soon as he had ultra meter. I baited out the ultra and blocked low; little did I know it was a grab. I wonder if that jump short would be safe if I held up.
- I still don’t really know what I should be doing to get out of his oki mixups. I feel like I just have to get lucky to escape.

Against Honda, I kept a few key things in mind:
- HP Raida beats Honda’s neutral jump fierce, one of his favorite moves to spam, which leads to a safe jump setup.
- EX Kazekiri beats both normal and EX Headbutt, so I can option select safe jumps with this move or simply do it when I’m expecting an EX Headbutt close up.
- Jump short is a reliable jump in, sometimes beating headbutts.
- If I cross up Honda on wakeup, he has trouble keeping a charge. Sure enough, RH Teleport on wakeup threw off his rhythm.

Against Seth, I kept two main things in mind:
- I can regular neckbreaker under Seth sonic booms!
- b.MP beats Seth’s stretchy jump fierce.

Apart from that, I had the advantage of using Seth as a secondary, so I sort of know what that character is wanting to go for. Nonetheless, the Seth player adjusted a lot and took a lot of effort to break down. I was fortunate to have such a strong opponent in the finals; it felt like I earned the win.

I’ve still got a lot to learn with Ibuki but I’m really happy with her now. I do believe that she is the strongest of the 10 new characters in Super SF4. I did use her at Evo as well and went 4-2, losing to a Blanka and an Abel in my pool.

I’m organizing a new event soon for the arcade, so hopefully I can make another strong showing in the near future. I’ll stick to what worked though; no expectations–go in with a plan for each matchup and play by the book.

Today, Mago posted a really hilarious post about Ameriken on his SF4 blog, http://blog.livedoor.jp/magopizza/.  This one was especially hilarious, so here’s my translation:

“Arigatou” by MagoPizza

This happened on February 7th.

I decided for the first time in a while to go play some SF4 in Tokyo.
Guess I’ll check out Shinjuku . . .
which means I’ll be hitting up the Taito Station at the Shinjuku South Exit.
I hear this place is a lot more poppin’ than Baba* lately.

*fubarduck’s note: Baba is referring to Takadanobaba, where Big Box is located

I’m glad that I came and checked it out,
but I wasn’t in a Sagat mood
so anyway I figured I’d warm up with some Rufus.
basically, I’m playing Rufus on the left-most cabinet.
I showed off some pretty good play, and I was feelin’ myself.

But in the middle of playing, I felt a losing aura from the person on the right cabinet . . .

Huh?

What’s this? This . . . aura?

Timidly feeling that aura, I gently glanced at the person to my right.
Ameriken (he’s actually an American) was on a losing streak against Yuu★.
Is this person down on himself or what?

Ameriken: “AHHH . . . AKUMA . . . WHAT DO I DO?!”

Lately, Ameriken has gotten really good.
He’s always playing at Shinjuku where most players are “Men of Valor” rank,
But he’s got a consistent win record and keeping his Grandmaster rank (over 110,000BP)

Even at his level, Ameriken gets too frustrated in the Akuma matchup.
It appears as though he’s too sad to even enter “beast mode”.

—————————————
*Beast Mode
This is the mode that Ameriken invokes when he is on a losing streak and totally flips out.
If this is invoked, it doesn’t matter who is lined up behind him–
His appearance morphs into Bob Sapp from his heyday and plays his opponent repeatedly like a demon.
When he beats his opponent, he goes to the other side of the machine
And does a win pose. Until he does this, beast mode is not rescinded.

By the way, perhaps recently he got used to rotating turns
So this mode is almost never invoked anymore.
—————————————

I remember a story Tokido told me once.

When Tokido and Ameriken are at the same arcade,
Tokido can speak English better than most people, so apparently Ameriken usually asks Tokido a lot of questions.

Ameriken: “MAGO, SAGAT VS AKUMA, VERY GOOD”
Tokido: “For sure.”
Ameriken: “MAGO KNOWS EVERYTHING. BUT I KNOW NOTHING . . .”

Tokido: “It is what it is. It’s because he has played against a lot of Akumas, and studied the matchup.”
Ameriken: “I CANT DO JAPANESE. SO I CAN’T ASK MAGO . . . THAT’S SO SAD . . .”
*By the way, that conversation happens entirely in English!

Apparently, that’s kinda how their conversation went.

The stuff from that interaction floated across my head.

(It’s no use . . . should I try to bewitch him?)

Thinking that, I lightly tap Ameriken’s shoulder.
It was a “I’m touching you with my hand, so please get up so I can play” gesture.

Perhaps I was late and beast mode had just been invoked,
Even touching him with my hand, I couldn’t believe he was going to keep playing. That’s what I thought, but . . .

Ameriken, however!
Is it really happening? A smile across his face as he stands up from the cabinet!

Ameriken: “OHH! MAGO! SAGAT! PLAY!”

The response was so different than I expected, that I just looked at him blankly for a moment.

And then, the final blow.

Ameriken: “MAGO . . .”

Ameriken: “AH . . .”

・・・

Mago: “Ah . . . ? ?”

Ameriken: “AH . . ARIGATO!!!”

! ! ? ! ? ? ? ! ! ? ? ?

Thi,

This bastard!~ . . .

To go as far as to use shoddy Japanese . . .

This motherfucker!! . . .
I won’t let you cryyy~ . . .

Yuu.

You can be my sacrifice.

So you can beat Akuma with Sagaaaat~!
You have to fight like thiiis~to beat hiiim~!
I have to teach Amerikeeeen!

And so begins the public execution by the hands of Mago . . .

(Ameriken . . .)
(Keep your eyes glued on the screen . . .)
(THIS is how you fight Akuma with Sagat!)

. . . 30 Minutes Later

Mago.

6 Losses in a row.

・・・

Looking at the tragedy in front of me, I’m unable to focus my eyes.

Trembling, I look behind me . . .
Ameriken was looking at me with sorrowful eyes . . .

(I KNEW IT, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN FOR MAGO . . .)
(SAGAT VS AKUMA . . . NO FUTURE . . .)
*This is just a guess

No!

This is . . .

Not what usually happens!

Yuu definitely got better!

But in reality, this kind of thing doesn’t happen!!
So . . .
So don’t look at me with those eyes . . .

At this rate, the matchup will be impossible in Ameriken’s heart . . .

This is bad . . .
I have to shake this off . . .
To be a 2D god, every single person must see me in their dreams!

I decided to release my limiter.

I have to do this seriously . . .

Deciding this, I removed my jacket,
Loosened my fingers with scrupulous care, extracted the energy from my shoulders and faced battle.

(Starting now, I’m a “textbook” . . .)
(Don’t take your eyes off what I’m doing, even for a moment . . .)

With my limiter released, I was certainly a fierce god.

What happened to Yuu a while ago? Who’s playing now?

I wasn’t on that side of the machine so I can’t confirm who it was,
But it was some flowchart player that I was destroying.
It became apparent that the person playing now was a mere coin-inserting zombie.

Winstreak after winstreak.

Sagat vs Akuma isn’t such a throwaway match.

Mago: “Ameriken! Hey! Were you watching me!?”

I was convinced that those sad eyes from earlier became sparkly, twinkly eyes and looked behind me in high spirits!

・・・

・・・

・・・

Uhh, nobody is here . . .

On that day, unlike usual, I heard a firefly’s glow . . .

I got bored of playing Akuma and Chun-Li in casuals, so one night at UFO, I picked the only other character I had an idea of how to play: Rufus.

The unexpected thing was that I started winning a lot more. It was suddenly way easier to win than it ever had been with Akuma or Chun-Li, so I decided to stick with him for the next week or so and use him in the two SF4 tournaments at UFO this past weekend.

I didn’t do too great in the regional, but in our Ranbat, I managed to take 3rd Place. I lost to Sinister-X (Dhalsim) and Viet (Ryu). My play was really sloppy, I missed a lot of Ultras and generally didn’t know what to do in a lot of situations. Nonetheless, when I actually got in, I managed to get enough damage to win a round. I could pretty consistently do the dive kick B&B of 5lk, 5hp, HP Galactic Tornado which a lot of people have trouble with. This combo just came naturally to me after coming from Akuma, because I learned to plink all of my combos with him as well as doing the plink to make Raging Demon come out faster.

I’m going to study Rufus more and stick with him for the remainder of vanilla SF4.

Last night was “Fight Club” in NYC which was peddled as the first publicly playable version of Super Street Fighter IV.

It wasn’t.

Hundreds of people lined up to a room full of kiosks with . . . hold your breath . . . the regular version of Street Fighter 4 and the US version of Tatsunoko vs Capcom. Wait, what’s so “super” about that? If they were honest, they would’ve said “see Frank West in action” or similar. If they intended to show SSF4 in non-playable form like they did, they should’ve done it as a surprise.

Of course, it would’ve been a much smaller event if they hadn’t advertised this as an SSF4 event.

So let’s get this straight. First, you announce no arcade version. Then, in what seems to almost make sense, an announcement is made that Fight Club will be “super”. It’s automatically assumed that this is going to serve as the first location test for the game. Unfortunately, three people finding combos for the characters isn’t really a location test, now is it?

Besides the fact that Capcom just wasted hundreds of people’s time last night, it seems like they’re also now intending to shit out an untested and unbalanced product. If things don’t turn around soon, this is really going to be the end of competitive Street Fighter.

I had the pleasure of attending Season’s Beatings 4 this past weekend in Columbus, OH. My performance was as follows:

SF4 Teams: Top 5 (with Frodo and vVv_Scrub, lost to Sanford’s and Daigo’s teams)
SF4 Singles: 1-2 in pools (Lost to Eric V. and a Gouken)

Blazblue: Top 5

3rd Strike: 2-2 (lost to Alucard and Daigo)

This was my first time to attend Season’s Beatings, and I’m glad I did. The tournament ran very smoothly, and the venue was large and accommodating. In fact, this event heavily refueled my interest in fighting games; especially SF4.

Playing against Daigo

One thing people have asked since I got back is what it was like to face Daigo in a tournament. This is actually the second time we’ve faced off, the first being at Evolution 2006 where he handily beat me on stage by baiting throw techs; he did huge chunks of damage on my Chun-Li by down-parrying the low jabs that came out when I attempted to throw tech.

This time, I felt more confident. Our first duel was in 3rd Strike on Friday, where I faced him in the loser’s bracket after Frodo beat him with Denjin Ryu. I decided to play only Q for this tournament (I’ve been having the most fun with this character lately) and I frustratingly lost my first match by a hair thanks to missing a series of parries on Rocket Uppercut from Alucard’s Dudley.

Daigo picked Ken as expected, and the first round was going well. I believe I had him down to 30% life or so without losing any health. I finished off the round, but things turned a bit sour from there. Daigo started spamming the hell out of some air EX hurricane kicks, which I didn’t know how to properly punish. I tried reacting to them when he jumped, but the move is just too quick. I tried punishing with back+MP but ended up taking too much damage from that risk. I was recently informed that you can punish whiffed air EX hurricane kick with SA1, and I confirmed this playing casuals last night. If only I’d known that a few days earlier.

Anyway, same thing happened in the second match–I was doing fine until Daigo built enough EX meter, after which he air EX hurricane kicked me into oblivion. It looked very similar to one of Mopreme’s wins at SBO qualifiers in 2007 at TGA. Very amusing.

In SF4, I faced Daigo during the team tournament. I handily defeated his first two teammates (who were apparently his translators) and myself and vVv_Scrub were left on the team. I went up with Akuma. The first round wasn’t going to swell, I believe I ate a focus which of courses costs Akuma 40% or so when you’re dealing with Ryu. I saw a chance to catch up after a knockdown, so I jumped and did a low-to-ground air EX hurricane kick to set up demon. I landed with demon buffered, and Daigo went for low forward fireball, taking the bait. Unfortunately, I ended up crossing up Ryu and finished my input with the wrong direction, so nothing came out. On the stream, it probably just looked like I did an air EX hurricane kick for no reason.

After that, I had no chance to come back in Round 1 and lost. By the middle of Round 2, he had full Super meter which basically means Akuma can’t do jack. I got hit by one of his 1000 setups for it, and lost R2 pretty quickly.

As for the cross-up I wasn’t expecting after air EX hurricane kick, I tested it at home and you do indeed cross-up Ryu every single time in that situation. I won’t make that mistake again!

Overall, I didn’t quite get the feeling that Daigo overwhelmed me. I did however feel that there was a huge gap in match-up knowledge that he was able to abuse against me. His Shinkuu usage is way too good in SF4, and I don’t really know what risks Akuma can take that are worth the possible 35%+ I’ll lose if I eat Shinkuu. I did learn a lot from playing against Daigo and especially watching him play so many matches, so I’m thankful that I did have the opportunity.

Blazblue

In Blazblue, I lost to an Arakune and a Jin (StunEdge, who won the event). The Arakune I didn’t feel great about losing to, mostly because he didn’t know how to break the loop at all. When I noticed this, I got a little trigger-happy thinking “one hit is all I need” and as a result got hit by way too many curses. If I had played the match patiently like a normal vs. Arakune, I think I could’ve changed the outcome here. This would’ve had me up against LordKnight in the Winner’s Finals using Litchi, a match I’m extremely comfortable with.

Instead, I had to fight StunEdge in the first round of Loser’s Top 8. Jin is definitely my least favorite character to fight (even more so than Rachel) just because his pressure is so difficult for Carl to escape or interrupt. He also has a thinner body than most characters, making it easy for Jin to escape the loop if you mis-space it by just a little bit.

I played a pretty good fight against StunEdge, but it wasn’t quite good enough. I did have a very impressive looking 2nd match, including a perfect in the 2nd round from one loop. In the 3rd match, my execution was a bit off and I dropped a couple of opportunities that would’ve gotten me the round. I was a little nervous, but I also just don’t have the same level of execution when playing on a console joystick. I do think I owe it to myself to do a little more training mode to warm up next time I attend an event like this.

Japan: “US level of SF4 is caught up”

The most surprising thing about this event is reading what the Japanese thought of the American scene on 2ch (Japanese BBS) after watching the SB4 stream. The comments weren’t all the same old “America sucks and will never catch up to Japan” (and those were still there) but there were many posters commenting that America had basically caught up to Japan. The most praised players were Justin and Sanford; the consensus was that these players would be Grand Master level (the highest level on SF4 cards in Japanese arcades) if they had access to Fei Long and Cammy in Japan. vVv_Scrub was also praised, with people calling him equal to Maeda Taison after seeing his money match with Daigo that went down post-tournament.

In a nutshell, SB4 has been a revolutionary event because Japan is finally beginning to see us as equals. They’ve noticed that with the current skill level, a random player couldn’t come here and win one of our tournaments. It’d have to be Daigo, Mago, or some other elite-level player.

Congratulations to the players that stepped it up enough to bring about that recognition. I think things can only get better for the U.S. scene from here.

Streaming Footage

This event also made me realize that I don’t really capture enough footage at Arcade UFO. I’ve been planning on implementing some sort of video capturing system for a while now, but my inspiration to do that more quickly became much greater. The simple fact is, your scene doesn’t really get acknowledged until everyone else sees videos. We’ve become a pretty spoiled community, so I completely understand. We’ll catch up with the times and rectify that as soon as possible.

I had a lot of fun at Season’s Beatings 4. Any SF4 fan who missed this tournament truly missed a revolutionary event. Oh yeah, my other goal once I figure out how to do it is to separate this blog into English and Japanese sections. There’s a severe lack of good coverage on the American scene in Japanese, so hopefully I can help bridge that gap a bit.

Most of my time at the arcade lately has been spent playing either SF4 or Daemon Bride.  I still play Blazblue occasionally, but after SBO, I’ve mostly been awaiting the revision.  I think Blazblue is really fun, but I learned just how broken the game is in Japan.  It took them several tries with Guilty Gear though; this will be no different.

In Japan, I noticed how easily everyone was doing the Akuma f.RH loop.  I knew there was an easy input method for this combo, but I never actually put the hours in to practice it because it didn’t seem practical.  Well, I should’ve known better because every Akuma at Big Box was doing this combo easily.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve been practicing this combo in every game of casuals at the arcade that I can.  I’ve got it about 80% of the time now, and I think by the time SB4 rolls around I’ll be above 90%.  Since this was also the #1 question I was asked after Japan, here’s how it’s inputted:

HK –> 5LP –> 6HK, MK –> 5 LP –> 6HK, MK –> 5 LP –> LK Hurricane Kick –> Sweep (or HP Dragon Punch depending on character).

Inputting 6 with HK gives you the tiny bit of distance you need to stay close, and MK is supposed to be inputted one frame later so that the game registers the input as “HK, HK+MK”.  That’s what we decided to name “p-link” I think . . .

Oh yeah, it’s character specific too.  Sagat, Abel, Guile and Seth are the characters easiest to get full reps on.  It can also work on Rufus, Zangief and other big characters but you have to be careful with distance against the fat characters since it’s really easy to get close stand jab instead (you need far stand jab for the combo).

How good am I at Street Fighter 4?

This is another thing I want to be perfectly clear on:  I know I’m not very good at this game right now.  There is always buzz about who’s hot and who’s not.  I’m not a scrub, but I definitely have a lot to improve on.

People tend to learn the name “fubarduck” and mistake me for a naturally talented player.  If I were to put myself into a category, I’d say I fit somewhere around “40% talent/60% hard work”.  Comparatively, I’d put players like Justin and Hsien at 70% talent/30% hard work or so.

Yeah, I have some talent, but I acknowledge that a lot of players are naturally better at fighting games than me.  They’re just a little better at seeing a step ahead, and don’t really have to think about it as much as your average joes like me.

I haven’t put nearly the number of hours into SF4 that I had into GGXX and 3S, so it’s no wonder that I haven’t really done anything in this game yet.  I’m pretty sure that I played Blazblue more than SF4 this year . . . like a lot more.  And hey, I’m pretty good at it now!

That having been said, I also know that none of that prevents me from being capable of winning.  I am not the type of player that gets winstreaks (I think my best arcade winstreak was in the 40′s or so . . . compare that to Hsien, who regularly got over 100 wins in 3rd Strike in the early days).  In the entire past year, I think I’ve only broken 30 once.

But, tournament play is different.  I can focus all of my mental energy on that once match, and really think about everything I do instead of just let my mind wander like if often does when I’m just in the “flow” of casually enjoying fighters.  Sometimes, I try to focus really hard on casuals like I do in tournaments, but I usually get exhausted and need a break after 10 games or so.

Anyway, I hope this will be a good place to vent my feelings on player skill, the state of the scene and whatever else crosses my mind.  Let’s see where this goes . . .