Monthly Archives: November 2010

SF4 Attack Movement Classifications

The Street Fighter IV series combo system is highly movement-oriented. Most characters have rigid juggle flowcharts, which means it usually doesn’t take long to find all their best juggle combos. That doesn’t leave much room for improvement in the air, so we have to focus on the ground for further optimization.

The key to constructing advanced SF4 and SSF4 ground combos is understanding how each attack affects the distance between your character and the opponent. Generally speaking, all attacks are supposed to push the opponent away to prevent combos from becoming infinites. Your task is to find ways to minimize or negate that countermeasure.

The first thing you should look for are attacks that move your character forward automatically. For example, Cody’s F+MP glides ahead during startup and produces frame advantage, essentially eliminating its own pushback. If you can find a way to combo back into any such forward-moving attack, you’ll probably end up with a loop, as SF4 Akuma’s far s.HK proved.

Another method of creating forward movement is to simply walk forward between attacks. For instance, Ken’s s.LP provides +7 frame advantage and connects on the 4th frame, which gives him 3 frames to walk forward between each jab.

Of course, every character can also combo into EX Focus Attack or Focus Attack dash cancel to cover a ton of ground at the cost of two meter bars. Basically SF4’s FADC system allows you to glue together any three meterless ground combos of your choosing.* Thus the emphasis shifts toward optimizing each of those individual pieces.

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How Can You Help Content Authors?

Well, i think we can all agree – the reaction to my last two posts has been … outright chaotic. However the most common response by far has been genuine surprise. A lot of people simply didn’t know what was going on with these “news” hubs leeching content for profit.

Everyone’s been asking what they can do to help original content producers, and i’ve heard all sorts of elaborate, unrealistic suggestions. There’s no reason to make it so complicated.

As a matter of fact, it’s pretty simple. When you see something cool, take a moment to figure out where it actually came from, and support the original author by posting a link directly to the source webpage or channel. Post on your personal blog, or favorite forum, or social media site, or wherever. It takes five minutes and helps the author tremendously!

Aside from the obvious benefit of driving traffic straight to the source, those links also help the author’s webpage get a better search engine ranking. If we all link to real author websites instead of getting lazy and linking to news aggregators, it’ll help content producers a lot.

It’s common sense, really. When you enjoy something, just ask yourself, “Who deserves the credit for making this happen? How can i support them to encourage them to make more?” Basically you just have to make sure that you’re backing the content producer and not the middleman, because the middleman certainly isn’t going to create more of what you enjoy.

If you want to point out a combo video, then link to the author’s transcript or video webpage. If you’d like to share an article or interview, link to wherever the author originally published it. If you feel like discussing tournament results, try to find them on the organizer’s website first. You get the idea, right? That’s all there is to it.

A Clearer Picture

There seems to be some confusion regarding my choice to back away, and the motivations behind it. If ya’ll don’t mind, i’d like to explain my perspective one last time in depth.

I started making combo videos eight years ago and maintained a steady pace of 2-3 articles and 3-4 combovids per year for a long time. Anyone who’s ever made a decent combo video will tell you that it’s mentally and physically exhausting, especially towards the end of the process when you can see the finish line and all you want to do is get it over with.

Back in those days, i used to take three to six month breaks to recover between each project. That rhythm was more or less sustainable. From 2002-2008, i never had a single ad banner on my website and never made a single dime from Sonic Hurricane or any of my videos. And obviously it cost money to host them because this was before u2b existed.

Last year i decided to try a different approach. I installed this wordpress platform and began writing weekly technical and strategy articles, capturing weekly screenshots, and a lot more along those lines. I even borrowed a friend’s PS3 and started making SF4 combovids and preparing custom challenges every two weeks.

I thought if i went all-in with creating original content on a regular weekly basis, i could reach my arbitrary goal of earning minimum wage on the hours i invest here. That would enable me to continue treating it as sort of a part-time job for as long as people enjoyed my work. I gave myself six months to reach that objective.

It’s been fifteen months. Literally every minute of my free time has gone into this experiment, at a rate of 5-7 hours per day – more when i’m working on a video. So far it’s earning me barely $1 a day, most of which i’ve handed over to web hosts and the post office.

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I Give Up

I’m sorry. I tried everything i could think of, overextending myself to ridiculous extremes in the process; and i’m no closer to my goal of making any of this sustainable.

So i need to scale everything back, wrap up a few loose ends, and try to finish my Combo DVD for the handful of people who preordered it – while catching up on all the things i postponed or sacrificed along the way. I’ll try not to disappear completely, but no guarantees.

For those of you wondering what happened, here’s the problem. Anyone can do what i do for three months, maybe six months, maybe even a year. But it burns you out, like you wouldn’t believe. The 4-5 casual matches of MvC2 that i happened to play at SoCal Regionals were literally the only video games i’ve played in the past 2-3 months!

What can i say? Running these websites is a grind. Up until now i held onto hope that i could make something out of all this effort, but it’s just not happening and it’s time to face facts.

Our whole system of publishing content is broken beyond repair. If you look at any given video i’ve posted on u2b, roughly 2k views originate directly from Sonic Hurricane and roughly 10k views come from an embedded player on eventhubs.

That means “news” sites like eventhubs make at least five times as much ad revenue for every single video that i produce. Yes, we’re only talking about a few dollars here, but think of all the material that eventhubs leeches from external authors like me.

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Heading Out to SoCal Regionals

Mr. Street Fighter, Alex Valle himself, is hosting a major multi-game tournament by the name of SoCal Regionals this weekend near Los Angeles International Airport. He asked me to go and how can you say “No” to CaliPower? It can’t be done!

I’m heading out there today and tomorrow, mainly just to hang out, so there probably won’t be a strategy article this weekend. They’re also going to film a live Dogface Show broadcast featuring watts, ChoiBoy, and CaliPower. I can’t wait to see that.

Random Storytime Trivia: I happen to be one of the original founders of NorCal Regionals back in 2003. Although i have nothing to do with its long-term success because i never went back after the first year. You see, NCR was initially a VidOp sponsored tournament. I drove up there to meet up with tragic and helped with all the planning and setup. VidOp died out not too long after that, but i guess the NorCal crowd decided to continue running it.

I don’t talk about it much because it would be silly for me to try to take any credit whatsoever, but it was a pretty awesome experience and a fun tournament. I’m happy to see that it’s still going strong and better than ever.