Monthly Archives: June 2010

Why Travel to Tournaments?

For anyone who might have missed them, longtime SRK community veteran Koop has begun writing an excellent series of tournament survival guides. He explains in great detail how to travel for major tournaments. To complement his efforts, this article will explain why traveling to major tournaments is worthwhile.

First of all, Evo is simply an awesome event for people who care about fighting games. It’s hard to describe the unique atmosphere inside that hall. There’s a constant buzz in the air, like sitting in the stands at a pivotal playoff game, surrounded by other equally passionate fans. There’s always something going on – whether it’s a marquee matchup played on the big screen, or news about a recent upset, or floating rumors about certain underrated characters wrecking shop. There’s always someone to talk to and always something to look forward to.

Setting aside the sheer experience of attending Evo, let’s look at the value of participating in a major tournament on that scale. Being surrounded by competitive players for an entire weekend will improve your game, guaranteed.

There’s no question about it – you’ll walk away a better player. Even focusing solely on preliminary matches within your own entry pool, you’ll see things you’ve never seen before and face opponents you’ve never fought before. Every single victory will build your confidence and every loss will teach you something the hard way.

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Sonic Hurricane Combo DVD Update

It’s been roughly two months since the initial announcement, so a quick update is in order. As of SF4 TACV 12, i’ve gone through 17 of the game’s 25 characters. I still intend to record a small handful of extra combos for those early characters, but that shouldn’t take too long.

However, it no longer seems likely that i can finish this by Evo2k10 in July, which doesn’t necessarily feel like a bad thing. In all honesty, i had some serious reservations about trying to sell anything at Evo. I know it’s gotten huge and has all these major sponsors now, but to me Evo still feels like our main community gathering – by the players, for the players. It just wouldn’t feel right for me to try to make money there.

By the way, i happen to be working on a couple of projects for Evo itself, so i’ll need to focus my attention on those in the short term. I know you guys will love what we have in store, assuming we can manage to get everything done right.

Immediately after Evo, i’ll go back to work on wrapping up the remaining SF4 characters for the DVD, giving it the extra time it deserves. I’m sorry for making you guys wait, but my main goal is making sure nobody is dissatisfied with the end product. I want it to be as good as i can possibly make it.

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Weekly Screenshot: Shadaloo Uniform Inspection

Whoever comes up with the best title picks the game highlighted in the next few screenshots. As always, the rules are one entry per person and i’ll choose my favorite on Monday.

sfa3-victorypose-02

SFA3 A-Cammy summons M.Bison through her victory animation as V-Vega jumps over her and begins posing his Time Over loss animation. There’s nothing technically noteworthy about this scenario; i just thought it looked cool.

SF4 Combo System Exploration, Part 3

It’s been a while since the last one, so here are some more random notes i’ve gathered while working on combo videos and the like.

Akuma’s air Hurricane Kick seems to be a one-time juggle setup, even if it only hits once. You can test this with a lvl3 Focus Attack against Dhalsim’s j.LP, followed by a rising HK air Hurricane Kick. The first hit connects, but the second hit whiffs. If you trade Akuma’s lvl3 Focus Attack against Dhalsim j.LP, you’ll have enough time to connect a descending HK air Hurricane Kick, so that it only hits once. Following up with an HP Dragon Punch only juggles twice.

It’s a good bet that Akuma’s LK Hurricane Kick works the same way, but it’s difficult to test because it has so much recovery time. It’s hard to tell if follow-up attempts are passing through the opponent or simply aren’t connecting fast enough. The problem is LK Hurricane Kick seems to launch opponents much higher when it connects on the ground as opposed to when it connects during a juggle.

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CV Spotlight: tragic’s VF4:Evo Sarah Combo Film

This is going back a ways, to gamecombos.com days when i used to spend lots of time on IRC. Somehow tragic got into Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution and decided not only to make a Sarah Bryant combo video, but that it needed to be a masterpiece. After two continuous months of hard work, he ended up with this.

Sarah Bryant Evolution

I remember him spending something like two weeks on the intro logo alone. I’m sure some of you are looking at it now and saying you could replicate it within an hour, but this was seven years ago – before we had basically every program and preset you’re thinking of utilizing.

I’m not even sure how he managed to get all those individual combo hits to sync up with soundtrack beats, but the end result is simply astounding. I hate to focus so much on the editing, but it continues to impress me even after all this time. Of course the combo content is top-notch as well, but that’s hardly surprising considering the source.