Return from Evo 2012

Greetings everyone,


My apologies, it has been such a long time since I last posted on my blog but life has been nuts. I just got back from Evo yesterday and I am still recovering. I will be writing about my experiences there.


But I can give a quick summary of my thoughts. Despite not placing well due to some lack of sleep, I had a fantastic time and the experience has strengthened my resolve to get better. I'm not sure I'll be able to handle three games but we shall see.


A more detailed account is to come soon. Now back to work.

New Job and EVO Prep

So some good news people.

I found a new job. This means a couple of things, it means I can actually go to Evo "whew". Two it means it's crunch time.

So I will competing in Marvel, AE and KOF XIII.

Right now what I have is basically a routine where I dedicate a solid night to one game. But I practice my basics from each game for at least 45 min then move to the game of the night.

Right now for Marvel my team consists of Magneto (EM Disruptor)/ Dr. Doom (Missiles) / Strider (Vajra)

I may decide to swap out Strider for Vergil. We shall see.

In AE I made the move from Ryu to Akuma. It's a bit of a different beast but hes a fun character to play. The fundamentals that Air has helped me build have made my base really solid. I will take some time to work with him soon again.

So I'm even newer to KOF XIII but I really like the game. After playing around with a variety of characters I settled with K' / Hwa Jai / Mr.Karate

K' makes a great battery, both Hwa Jai and Mr. Karate can put out some significant damage.

I will try to go to ECT and take my Akuma to a major soon. In the meantime I will be doing local tournaments. Also another thing is that evidently I will be a judge at EVO, the details are being worked out but I'm really excited.

Job Hunting, Marvel and KOFXIII

Greetings people,

I apologize that I haven't posted much recently. But life has a way or getting in the way of one thing or another.

So to sum up that last month or so, my current job is ending (Lack of money) :( and I've been spending most of my spare time either job hunting or playing marvel.

I haven't had as much spare time to work on Street Fighter, don't get me wrong I love the game but I have more steady training partners for Marvel and KOFXIII so it's getting more of what spare time that I have. In the end playing more games I think makes you a better player since you just learn more stuff to add in your collective knowledge of fighting games. Try to learn general principles to any game system and it will help you in the long run.

Alright back to the job hunting,

Hope everyone is doing well out there.

SFXT? Tournament worthy game or scrub friendly?

So not sure what my feelings are on this game. I think it's kind of fun, but just the way it is seems like on some levels it's a very competitive game with a lot of aspects that I really like. But at the same time those elements also cater to the scrub.

Lets look at the footsies element to take for example. So normally in most games like CvS2, 3S and AE footsies were very important. You tried to punish bad buttons from your opponent and if you were on your game you could take a good chunk of someones life if you knew what you were doing..

In SFXT this element is there, a bad button can cost you somewhere between %30 and 60% of your life. Although this is dependent on team composition and somewhat on execution. The chain combos now make scoring that 30/40% punish much easier for your average player. When you face someone who knows what they are doing it's not just throwing out buttons hoping for a hit into a chain, it's a hit into a chain tag into a really damaging combo with a possibility of mixup on the wakeup.

But there is your difference between what I would call the scrub player and a more competent player. %30 damage vs %50 damage on a good tag.

So rather than guessing wrong 3 times, you only get 2 bad guesses. And lets face it even a broken clock is wright twice a day. Anyways, one other thing that I think kills this game is the stage length, lets be honest if you want to walk back blocking for most of the match you really can do that for quite a while before you are cornered, combined with a fast game clock it makes for some really irritating play.

I still have mixed feelings on the game right now, right now I'm playing Ryu/Lili. Ryu is very solid in the game with a great walk speed, good poking tools, cancelable sweep and solid damage. Easily hits 350 damage off a poke with one meter. Lili is a good up close pressure character with some solid frame traps, a number of overheads which can be linked into for big damage (300+) with no meter or close to 400 for one meter. I might consider Hwoarang due to his good overheads and pokes, we shall see.

I've been in the lab a lot with AE 2012 working on some stuff. I'll post more about it in the future. Take care people.

Crawling out of 1000pp

Wassup everyone,

So just a little update here on a slow day at work. I finally have my Xbox back and have been getting in some playtime online with 2012. I'm happy to say that there are some definite improvements. It's taking me a while to rise through the PP but that's just been due to a lack of time put in due to being sick. Right now I'm at about 1300pp and 3800 BP

But anyways, I'm handling most people under the 2000pp range rather well and can defeat most people at the 3000pp range.

Improvements:

My footsies and zoning have improved a lot due to Air's guidance and helping me build a solid foundation. I've started to implement more variety into my gameplay by including empty jumps, counter hit setups and some specific anti-crouch tech setups into my play. My AA has gotten way better but I still need to punish jump in attempts more, I lost a match the other night simply because I hesitated on a shoryuken. But my auto-correct DP has gotten loads better.

I've gotten much better at observing my opponent. I notice patterns and habits much more easily. I can also test and read the reactions to a degree now. Also I'm getting more observant of their meter and Ultra gauge. Overall my gameplay feels much more natural and thought out, rather than just kind of a flowchart and reactionary.


Needs work:

As far as what I need to work on, I need to work more on some of Ryu's punishes and links. I drop c.mp, c.fp too much. I need to start working on c.fp/s.fp xx lp srk FADC U1 and putting that into my gameplay.

There are some other trouble spots that I know I need to work on, one would be doing srk FADC U1 on the 1p side, it's just going to require me to take more time out in training mode to grind it out.

Transitioning to doing the shoryuken from a crouching position more could use some more work. Also I need to be more aware of my meter and Ultra gauge, there have been a few circumstances where I could have done MP srk FADC U1 but simply did not because I wasn't aware I had the Ultra ready.

Overall:

I feel way better, I'm going to dedicate at least 30 min a day to links and combos and grinding out my trouble execution spots. The rest of my time will be online ranked matches.

On another note, I've been noticed certain matchups I have trouble with include Cammy and Balrog. I've read up on them but Cammy is pretty nasty, I would classify her as a counter-hit, mixup character. She is like Cody, you have to be careful when you push buttons or your going to eat a very damaging combo and be put in a bad position. Balrog is one of those matchups I'm going to talk to one of our local players about.

Anyways, have a great weekend everyone and feel free to hit me up on XBL: JBourne001.

P.S. Most likely will main Ryu Jin/Akuma in SFXT.

Return of the XBox, Winter Brawl 6 and KOFXIII

Sup people,

So I just got back from Winter Brawl 6 the other day. It was a great tournament except for a couple minor issues. My Xbox finally got back after being gone for a few weeks being fixed.

Unfortunately I went 0-2 in Street Fighter, and did not get to compete in Marvel. Both of these are related events.

There were a number of mistakes that went on with the running of brackets in the Marvel pool. Towards the end of the 1st day when all Marvel pools had been posted I noticed my name was not put into any bracket. So I pulled aside the TO and got my name on a list that was to be added to the brackets that were being run on the 2nd day. Myself and a number of other people were in this same position, so I figured it would be okay.

So come the 2nd day when I'm supposed to play both my pools in AE and Marvel it's getting toward my pool for AE and I haven't heard my name called yet for Marvel so I start to get worried. I go to check with the guys who are running the brackets......they completely forgot to put me in the bracket and the bracket is almost done at this point. So they throw me into loosers saying "I'll set it up so you have to loose twice in loosers to be out". So my first match is against someone from my local venue, who uses a gimmicky Haggar team. I loose badly. To top it off they never give me my second match.

For AE, I just played a Sakura player cold with no warmup which I realize is big mistake for me since it takes me a while to settle in to my play style. Not to mention he had three of his posse which were settled in directly behind my head yelling into my ear. I could tell this was definitely an online player in the way he played Sakura, no footsies and one of those people who just do things. I needed to focus more on my spacing and pay more attention to him.

My second AE match was against Dhalsim of all charcters, which I have no experience with as Ryu. After the first match I should have pulled out my pocket Gouken to deal with him but I didn't. Either way it was not a good showing for me.

Not having my xbox around to practice killed me, and not warming up adequately did not help at all.

That being said I played some good casuals and I felt more confident in my footsies and zoning, but with the circumstances I didn't get to show it. I will work harder in the future.


Also, I ended up winning a copy of KOFXIII which I had been planning to buy in the first place. Lucky me, I guess that sorta made up for the whole Marvel bracket thing. But I really like the game, I'm just looking for a point character now. I'm running X/Kula/K'.

You can't tell me K' is not stylish. Plus Kula normals are real nice. Anyways, I will be grabbing some more lessons from Air soon. Hopefully I'll start putting into practice things are my local tournaments. I think I'm going to make East Coast Throwdown before heading out to EVO in July. The Hotel is booked and I plan on entering AE, Marvel and now KOF.

Peace out people,

Feel free to add me on Xbl GT: Jbourne001 if you want to play some matches.

Continuing the learning process, breaking the 1000 pp wall

So to continue where I left off earlier, right now I'm kind of stuck around the 1000pp range on XBL. It's not that I'm not skilled I realized the other night, it's that I haven't learned how to read people and prepare for random stuff that you see online.

It's very difficult to advance past this group of people who are somewhere between the 1000pp to 2000pp range. It's not that they are bad, it's that they have learned a gimmick and that I don't learn what the gimmick is until it's too late or I get mindfucked too easily.

When I face people above 2000pp I don't get blown up at all, I stand toe to toe with some great players because I know what I should expect. I have a basic overall knowledge of certain matchups that gets me really far and I have solid play that has improved a lot due to guidance from Air. An example of this would be a match I had last night. It was against I think the #12 Abel on XBL. I teched 90% of his throws, beat all his mixups after seeing them once and was prepared for the rolls and threw him out of them about 80% of the time. I was within pixels of winning the match so I tried to chip him out with a nicely spaced jab fireball. However since I hadn't really played against an Abel I was unaware that he could on reaction punish me with U1 and pass through my fireball to end the match.

Even though I lost the match I felt good about it. But I also realized that online play while may be frustrating at times it serves as a really good opportunity to get information about matchups. Also the other major thing that you can get out of online play is it will force you if you want to advance to learn to test and read your opponent. Which is why I think I'm stuck at 1000pp. Not because I suck, but because I haven't learned to test and read people correctly, I've just been playing my game with Ryu and to really progress I have to learn to read and adapt my game to not only the matchup but the player as well.

So today is Jan 31, and I'm at about 1000PP and 3000BP. After I get back from Winter Brawl in Feb, I'll report back with how far I've made it. Hopefully I get to squeeze in some time for another lesson with Air. But for now I'm simply going to use online play to build a base of knowledge about the other characters and develop my reading/Yomi skills.

It seems tough but Evo is about 6 months away, there is still plenty of time to improve before I get there.

I'll see you all online, if you want to hit me up sometime for a match my GT is Jbourne001