Fighting Game Catch-All

BAH double booking. I want to play MK pretty bad (since I'm not tragic at it, mostly) but I'm LoLing it tonight. I'll try and show up a bit later.

Lies! LoL nights are Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday! What are you really up to, you aquatic winged animal?!?

I'm out for tonight because my copy of MK won't arrive until tomorrow

ahrezmendi wrote:

Lies! LoL nights are Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday! What are you really up to, you aquatic winged animal?!?

Semi-aquatic and I'm LoLing with a few goodjers and close friends.

I just really want to hit 30 =)

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

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

I'll probably be on.

Thin_J wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

Cool, obviously the point of this is not to get people to spend money they don't want to spend. I count 4 people who say they have EXTEND, which means I may change that week into a split week, do one day of EXTEND then the 2nd day of Third Strike Online, but I'm going to wait and see if more people fill out the response form.

I'll have BlazBlue (the EXTEND version even...) before that week. And SFxT.

And I'll have Mortal Kombat for Saturday.

:oops:

I bought Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur V (I love SC, so it didn't take much) on Monday. I suspect that I will buy SFxT next week. And despite hardly playing CS at all, there's a fair chance I'll pick up EXTEND as well. I really liked BlazBlue, CS just came around at a bad time. I've always enjoyed getting my ass kicked by ahrez.

Thanks for posting in the MK thread, BishopRS. Unfortunately, at the time MK came out I only had a PS3. If anyone here also has that version, let me know and we'll setup a time. As long as MK Vita turns out good, I'll probably ditch my game for that version. Besides the story, and around 100 challenges, I never got as much into MK as I once would.

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.

Definitely some fun games last night. We noticed later, after everyone left, that you can play tag team matches. Might have to get some of those going on Saturday. I'm waffling on whether or not I'll be present.
My wife and her sister's family are going out of town and I have some work and won't be going with them. Debating if I want to go meet them afterwards.

Last night was fun, despite my poor performance. But given it was my first time playing MK online, it could have been worse. I also picked up SFxT and EXTEND at lunch today. I traded in some older games (including the two previous versions of BlazBlue), so it didn't cost too much. I'm enjoying watching the videos, learning the new games, but it is starting to feel like information overload. So far in a good way.

Ahrez, I would wager that rows 8 and 9 in the spreadsheet are mine. I tried to update when I got MK and SC5, but realized that it probably just created a new row.

Yeah, that's partly why I'm asking everyone to just fill it out again with their handles, then I'll erase the old lines. This avoids me thinking we have more players who have a game than actually do.

EDIT: Ah, so much cleaner now.

If you guys do the tag matches on Saturday, let me know how it goes. I never touched the tag mode in Mortal Kombat, so I'm curious how it plays and if it's as fleshed out as Tekken Tag Tournament or Street Fighter X Tekken.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Yeah, that's partly why I'm asking everyone to just fill it out again with their handles, then I'll erase the old lines. This avoids me thinking we have more players who have a game than actually do.

EDIT: Ah, so much cleaner now.

If you guys do the tag matches on Saturday, let me know how it goes. I never touched the tag mode in Mortal Kombat, so I'm curious how it plays and if it's as fleshed out as Tekken Tag Tournament or Street Fighter X Tekken.

Can't do it from what I understand... Tag is only available on same console play.

You can definitely create a Tag lobby, I saw it as an option...

According to forums on GameTrailers, Stylez is spot on. You can do 2 local players vs. 2 other local players, but you cannot do 4 separate players in a 2v2 lobby. This is interesting to me, because SF X Tekken allows 4 separate players in a 2v2 lobby, but not 2 local players vs 2 other local players (on 360). I'm beginning to wonder if this is some kind of limitation Microsoft put into Xbox Live, but then bypassed for their own games (you can most definitely do either or in the Halo games).

Oh well, I guess 2v2 tag lobbies will have to wait until next week with SF X Tekken.

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:

My quest to become good at fighters is moving along slowly. I've been able to pull off some inputs that I couldn't before. Learning combos, with Juri in SSFIV, is taking a lot of practice. In training mode I've learned a few but putting them to use in a match has not gone well. I'm finding that knowing combos is not as important as knowing when to use any attack whether normal, specials or combos. Admittedly, I've mostly just flailed about and hoped to hit something. It seems though that each move needs to be calculated with purpose...these games are much deeper than I realized.

- I've been victim in the corner to getting hit with Focus Attacks on wakeup. Is there a way to prevent getting hit?
- Does Dragon Punch beat everything? Should I just stay grounded again Ryu/Ken style characters?
- From playing MK, the combos are entered in a very quick manner. Is this how SF works too? Is that what I'm missing?

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.

BishopRS wrote:

- I've been victim in the corner to getting hit with Focus Attacks on wakeup. Is there a way to prevent getting hit?

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.

BishopRS wrote:

- Does Dragon Punch beat everything? Should I just stay grounded again Ryu/Ken style characters?

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.

BishopRS wrote:

- From playing MK, the combos are entered in a very quick manner. Is this how SF works too? Is that what I'm missing?

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.

Thanks for all that info, very helpful!

ahrezmendi wrote:

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.

Yes, absolutely yes. Any advice or training I can receive is more than welcome.

I hate how easy he makes Ryu's trials look.

OP says 3PST, but I think people are getting on at 7 PST?

If you log in tonight and don't see the party or get an invite, toss me a message and I'll get you in the lobby.

Sorry about that bishop. I had notifications turned off as I was trying to finish ME3.

How did Saturday go?

I ended up missing it. Had some company over and just couldn't make it to the 360.

Well, I was on for an hour or so at 7:30ET playing story mode and didn't see anyone else. I'm not sure if there were folks earlier (for the 3PM ET start) or later (for 7PT). I need to crack out SFxT tonight to get a bit of time under my belt before Wednesday.

I'll be on about 9PM EST tonight practicing SFxT. If anyone wants to start a private lobby to spar, gimme a holla (xbl: EKastel).

BishopRS wrote:

I'll be on about 9PM EST tonight practicing SFxT. If anyone wants to start a private lobby to spar, gimme a holla (xbl: EKastel).

This is happening now, if anybody wants to join.

EDIT: Good games tonight. Scramble mode was a blast, I look forward to more of that on Wednesday.

Remember to set up your gems before Wednesday everyone, the game does not come with preset layouts that fill all 3 gems slots. We'll do a mixture of endless battle and scramble mode.

Scramble was crazy, but I think 2v2 Tag could be more fun. Unfortunately, I can't make it on Wednesday because of a business obligation.

I forgot about 2v2 tag, which is rather silly because we were doing a ton of it in the briefing room. Thankfully that can be done adhoc in an Endless lobby, so there will definitely be some of that too.

Enjoy yourselves, you guys!

My gold account ran out and since I barely use it, I can now flake out guilt free =)

oilypenguin wrote:

Enjoy yourselves, you guys!

My gold account ran out and since I barely use it, I can now flake out guilt free =)

Boo!