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.