Fighting Game Catch-All

Fine, I guess getting all your rune slots and mastery points is kinda important.

Who can actually make it tonight, and play Mortal Kombat?

Great games last night, I had forgotten how much fun Mortal Kombat is. I'm out of town this weekend, so you all have fun on Saturday, and I'll see you all next week for Street Fighter X Tekken.

Sorry to do this, but can everyone fill out this form again? I added a field for your GWJ handle, turns out I do actually need to know who has filled it out for when new people join. In return, here's the link to the form results doc, so if you just want to update your game list, you can do that there, or so what games other people have.

NorCal Top 8 videos for Soul Calibur 5. Get 'em while they're hot.

HUGE WORD OF WARNING: These games are casted by Aris Bakhtanians, so if you aren't a fan of outspoken bigots you may want to give these videos a pass. I know I will.

SF X Tekken STA Season 3 Grand Finals, now with 100% less bigotry:

First, some terminology in case you haven't seen these before:
quick recovery - press Down just as you hit the ground
meaty - An attack where the active frames of the attack are still going when the opponent recovers from a knockdown. The most common example is a meaty c.FK, where the sweep is still happening when the opponent rises from being knocked down.

There are a few options. First, you can force them to do a L1 focus attack by doing a quick recovery, and L1 FAs can be blocked or absorbed by your own FA. Second, you could try throwing them out of it, particularly if you did a quick recovery and they are still charging it up to L2. Lastly, if you really don't think you can avoid it, you can jump and take the hit in the air. You'll still take it, but instead of them being able to combo off it you just get spun around and knocked back down, giving you another chance to get out of it.

One thing to keep in mind about FAs is that they only have 2 active frames (it only has a hitbox for 2/60ths of a second), and this makes them extremely difficult to do meaty. This is to your advantage if you've been knocked down, it means that unless if your opponent is Daigo Umehara or Justing Wong, they're not likely to hit you with an FA just as you recover, so you'll have a few frames to take your own action.

I recommend trying throws first. Don't ever, ever forget about throws, they are an absolutely amazing tool in any fighting game. They beat out more moves than you'd think, they reset the situation so you can renew your offense or take a breather, and they allow for mixups from blockstrings.

DP has 3 startup frames, the same as a Jab(!!), so they are likely to beat any straight jumping attack. Additionally, the hitbox on a DP is above the actual character, so you'll never get your attack in behind the hitbox... unless you make it meaty!

Basically, you can safely jump in on a shoto character if you can land a meaty attack or a meaty crossup. At this point they either have to pull off a reversal or just block. Another thing you can try is doing an empty jump - empty jumps recover faster than jumping attacks, so you can make someone think you're coming in with an attack, do an empty jump, block their attempted DP and then go to town on them.

No, very much not the case at all. The combo system in MK allows you to take sub-sections of an attack string and combine them in your own order. The combo system in SF is always constructing the combo from single attacks that are either linked or cancelled. This is the "very quick manner" you're picking up on, in MK a full or partial string is punched in all in advance, but in SF you need to wait for the previous move to finish first (if it's a link), or know that it's a move that can be special cancelled.

For example, watch the hands while this dude does Juri's trials (skip to 2:38):

See how it's not about the speed, it's about the timing. The exception to this is Juri in her FSE ultra, but that's because her FSE allows her to cancel any normal into any other normal. You won't see that with any other character.

Another great example is Ryu's trials:

EDIT: It's too bad Super SF4 lacks the online enabled training mode that SF X Tekken has, but if you'd like to do another practice/tutorial session I'm down for that. If anybody would ever like to do something like this, I think it's a great thing to do, it makes us all better players and I think we'll have more fun as a result. I can help out with Super SF4, SF X Tekken, Blazblue, and Mortal Kombat. 7inchsplit is our resident Marvel expert, I'm sure he could teach us all a thing or two about that game.