Monthly Archives: October 2010

Suggested Reading, Vol. 4

Well, it’s been over three months, so it’s that time again. Let’s take a look at what players have been writing around the fighting game community lately.

The Game at Xenozip’s Notes

When you see it in videos it might not be entertaining, but so what — those players aren’t there to entertain you, they are there to entertain themselves. What that “cheap tactic” is doing is helping the community by forcing everyone to level up and fight harder. It’s all about setting a bar and having your opponent beat it, or finding some one else who raised the bar even higher so that you could try and beat it.

 
Five Questions with Jay “Viscant” Snyder at ComboVid

There’s always somebody better out there; there’s always another challenge. To me, Street Fighter is a game you can never truly master. It’s filled with a lot of mini-goals along the way with a semi-unattainable goal at the end. You keep chasing the goal of beating so-and-so, and then once you achieve it, there’s another person to beat, another goal to achieve, another tournament to win, no matter how good you are.

 
7 Street Fighter Pros Share Their Secrets to Winning at Shoryuken

Give us a week, and we’ll give you the secrets to winning by seven Street Fighter pros. With the help of Street Fighter veteran and SRK advisor John Choi, we’ve picked the minds of some of the best Street Fighter pros in the scene.

 
Once again, if you find these articles insightful and informative, leave them a polite comment to show your appreciation or better yet ask a question to further the discussion.

Ode to the 2-Hit Combo

Well, i finally got around to uploading a decent quality version of this old project to u2b, which probably means i should mention it here as well. It was premiered at Evo2k4 after two years of production. About half the clips were recorded by jchensor and about half by me, with a few contributions from MrWizard and zEvil. All the editing was done by jchensor over a six-month period – since he suggested the original premise and since he actually enjoys editing.

If there are any questions about specific combos, i’ll be happy to answer them as best i can, with as much detail as i can remember. Obviously this was before any of us obtained access to tool-assistance, so all of these clips were performed manually.

Enthusiasm vs Experience

If you’ve been playing Super Street Fighter IV since spring or summer, you’ve probably run into a few oldschool players with rock-solid fundamentals, who seem to adapt very quickly. These guys are seriously tough to beat, and it may seem like an uphill battle which only gets steeper the longer you play against them.

There’s a number of obvious reasons behind their immediate and continued success. They’ve gone up against just about every play style in existence. They’ve learned to use more characters than you’ve fought against. They’ve entered more tournaments than you’ve seen. Suffice it to say, experience is a major advantage.

However, if you’re a relative newcomer to the fighting game tournament scene, you shouldn’t worry about that gap too much. That’ll be there no matter what competitive arena you walk into. The people who have been around for a long time will always have the benefit of experience, but your motivation and your enthusiasm for the game can trump that.

When you hear old-timers talk about SF4, oftentimes they can seem grumpy – like they don’t enjoy it as much as their favorite game which nobody plays anymore. But that’s natural, right?

Everyone has the game that made them fall in love with fighting games, and that’s the one they played to death. Three or four releases later, they’ll certainly have experience, but they won’t have that same desire to explore every little detail. They won’t commit the slightest surprises to memory or cherish tiny innovations they see in combo videos.

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Scripting Shortcuts and Time-Saving Tricks

The first step to programming emulator combos is setting a convenient starting point. Lately i’ve been creating all my save states on the exact frame when the “Fight!” logo disappears. I’ve noticed this makes it easier to transplant combos from one save state to another, in case i ever need to change stages or costume colors. But i don’t quite recommend my approach.

If you don’t anticipate stage/color selection being a concern, it will save a lot of time to create your save state after you’ve maxed out both characters’ super bars, walked them into the corner, gotten rid of the “First Attack” message, and done every other little thing that you need to do before the combo begins.

Otherwise you’ll have to incorporate it all into your script and watch it play out every time you want to test the slightest alteration of your combo. Of course, the Fast Forward (aka Throttle) feature dramatically cuts down waiting periods, but they still add up.

By the way, it’s not a bad idea to copy all your save states into a backup folder in case you accidentally overwrite them. If your combo contains luck manipulation of any sort, losing your save state will often render your script obsolete.

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CV Spotlight: rock2no’s KoF95 CMV

Few combo makers “own” a game the way rock2no owns King of Fighters ’95. It doesn’t even matter if you play the game – his videos are always fun to watch, with countless surprises.

KoF95 Combo Music Video | KoF95/97/98 Throw Negation Bug

The video is split into three parts, with the first part featuring older combos, the second part containing bugs and other special occurrences, and the third part presenting new and exciting combos. The command grab glitches are demonstrated in greater detail in the accompanying video. The editing is plain throughout, so the content is presented without distractions.

There are too many highlights to list all of them, but my personal favorites were the Ralf and Clark tag-team at 2:56, Ryo’s dash-cancel air fireball combo at 5:00, the Athena whiff super cancels at 5:19, the Omega Rugal reverse reflect setup at 5:50, Andy’s triple ghettokick combo at 6:06, and the Clark side-switching jab death at 6:46.